Upcoming events

Thought I would bring you up-to-date on some events over the next few weeks.

Saturday, 9 February: Darwin Day
at Florida State (College of Medicine)

Among other things, Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel Laureate and FSU Professor of Chemistry will be speaking from 10 to 11 AM. He co-discovered fullerenes, more commonly known as Buckyballs. One variation of this, carbon nanotubes, are rapidly finding applications in engineering. One day they will be used in concrete. There will also be a hands-on bucky-ball building activity for children registered for it. Details are on the web.

Friday, 15 February: Club meeting

Wednesday, 20 February: ASME Town Hall meeting

This will be held in the evening in the TCC part of The Brogan Museum downtown. We plan to participate. Details at the club meeting on 2/15. See other entries in this blog.

Saturday, 23 February: Mag Lab Open House

This is a big deal, running from 10 AM to 3 PM. They will once again be using extremely high field (about 40 T) disposable (totally destroyed when used) pulsed magnets to compress a quarter. This is a must see.

Click here for details from the mag lab.

Other old standby demos (air powered potato cannon, diamagnetic properties of liquid oxygen) and tours will be done once again. You can talk one-on-one with members of the engineering faculty (mechanical, electrical, and civil) who work there building magnets and other devices.

They are also advertising a new feature, a musical tesla coil. I assume that they saw one of these videos from YouTube and said "we can do that!".



My brother told me about this "Lightning on the Lawn" show. Another one shows a guy in a mesh suit carrying a row of light bulbs around between the coils. Notice how the bulbs light up when struck by the electrical energy?



The mesh suit provides a "Faraday cage" effect that protects the wearer from AC high frequency "lightning" strikes.