Starve.Org White Noise Usenet Archive: "Re: OT: Science project fabrication ideas?"

On Sun, 17 Mar 2002 17:11:28 GMT, Mike W. <Outof...@emailbiz.com> wrote:

>It's that time again.. Time to kick some ass at the Science Fair. Mar
>wanted to do something with volcanos... they're pretty cool. Lots of
>mechanisms of destruction. We know there will be at least two other
>volcanos in the gym this year and why don't you try and guess really hard
>what they'll be... No... you're *totally* wrong!!! They're going to do the
>old baking soda fake eruption deal!! Oh... you guessed that? Well, good
>thing we picked something else then.

>At first, we were going to try and simulate the mayhem from the Krakatau
>"event". Man, that was cool... pyroclastic flows... blast... Lahars of
>raging mud and debris... tsunamis... the sound was heard 3000 miles
>away... and where once there stood a tall peak, there now stood a lagoon
>600' deep! (And someone is complaining about knobby patterns in the
>dirt!). We couldn't come up with anything sexy and repeatable on a 2x2
>plywood sheet though (sexy is what gets you the "best in show" tag...
>again:). So, we got thinking about other events that had to do with the
>impact of the event, and after a short while, it was clear that two key
>concepts emerged:

>1. Detection, and
>2. Evacuation

>Obviously key to getting your butt out of town. Looking into it further,
>we read about a town downstream of Ranier that at best only has minutes to
>detect and execute an evacuation. And looking at topo maps of it further,
>you can see how the randomness of the various mechanisms (event
>sequencing/amplitude, summer/winter, etc) can create a lot variation in
>the speed of the events and therefore on the detection time needed and the
>randomness of the circumstances of the population (night/day, rush
>hour/mid-day, winter/summer, etc) can have such a huge impact on
>evacuation time. Yet all the planning we read about was based upon
>"average events"... even though there are separate classifications of
>event amplitude: 10,000-yr eruptions, 1000-yr, 500-yr, 100-yr...

>So... we thought that showing the impact of this chaos would be a neat
>thing and what we came up with was a way to simply model the variation and
>show that sometimes you get out and sometimes you don't. Here's what we
>have. We will have 5 adjustable included planes with walls. They can be
>adjusted for angle and pegs can be placed along them to separately
>increase the chaos in each modeled mechanism. All five ramps will dump
>into a clear plastic trough at the end which itself is slightly inclined
>to flow down to the left to a place called "sanctuary". The four planes on
>the left will model various volcanic mechanisms and their widely varying
>speeds of propagation. We're going for:

>Lava
>Lahar
>Tsunami
>and one we'll move around a lot to represent blast, flood, ash, etc.

>We can put large or medium size ball bearings to represent further
>variation on the way the destruction mechanism reacts over time.

>The fifth ramp (far right) will model the evacuation process. We'll put a
>bunch of bb's at the top where each bb will represent say, 1000 people.
>There will be lots of pegs we can add to this and the incline will be
>strictly limited to real rates of propagation. In order to have a
>successful evacuation, you have to get all the bbs down the right side
>ramp AND then down the collection ramp at the bottom before the ball
>bearings which represent the events get there. We'll show how various
>scenarios would play out (night/day, etc) by varying the ramps,
>obstructions and bearing sizes.

>Here's what I'm looking for input on... Would like to have a two-stage
>start capability... First start off the threat events.. and when they get
>to a certain point, assume detection occurred then and begin the
>evacuation process by cutting the bbs loose. I can't think of a good way
>to do that at the moment (unless we run everything super-slow and do
>manual releases). Anyone have any ideas?

Variable temperature mediums in which the bb's and bearings are entrained.. say
motor oil or some other fluid that changes viscosity with temperature. By
heating or cooling spots on the slopes or walls you can shape the flows to
mimick actual events, evacuation time frames etc...and slowly enough to be
understood by the observers.

If you use mutually incompatible fluids of different densities you can separate
tthem in a column at the bottom no problem and reload in a minute or two.

You can die each fluid a different color, red magma. dark brown or black mud
flows. Water would be more difficult. but if you have dry ice embedded at
various points on your simulator,when a flow hits it, it will vaporize as water
would when hit my magma.

Phil Scott

>Our backup, which is what we're executing on now is that we'll cut them
>all loose at once, assuming we are modeling only from the detection point
>forward. Even then, a good way to release all the balls at once isn't on
>the board yet. Excluding any good eureka moments, we'll just try to pull
>them all out with pins attached to a common string, but that feels so
>weak... It's our last science fair and we want to go out KICKING ASS!
>Anyone have any good ideas on how to release all the bearings/bb's at
>once? Electro-magnets seemed unreliable... Thanks for any assistance.

>Mike

>--
>Mike W.
>96 XR400
>74 CZ250 Enduro
>BRC, AMA, NETRA, NOHVCC, NRA

>Suburban trail-riding best practices:
>http://www.crocker.com/~mwilliams/Suburban.htm