7 ms·
Prince Rupert's Drop vs Molten Glass [video]
- carterschonwald 4y agoDustin’s high speed videos are an incredible treasure trove of science and engineering to learn from.
- ramraj07 4y agoDoes it all have to be 30 minutes though? Not just him to be sure but I’m not a fan of YouTube’s crusade to incentivize long form content which just seems to have made everyone pad out every topic as much as they can. Very rare have I seen 30 minute videos that truly deserve that time commitment.
- mikewarot 4y ago>YouTube’s crusade to incentivize long form content They're all about "YouTube Shorts" now, of course that will change soon enough.
- simondotau 4y agoShorts are mostly just “here’s a weird or unexpected thing, look how weird or unexpected it is”. There’s also regular, formulaic stuff like Half as Interesting which tend to be about one paragraph of information laboriously spread out over five minutes of generic stock footage and painfully tedious jokes. YouTube, at its best, are the videos where someone genuinely interested in a topic can show you why it’s interesting and hold your attention, allowing the content to dictate the length. CGP Grey probably being the most perfect prototypical example of this. Or it could come in the form of a Richard Feynman lecture, with absolutely no production value needed beyond reasonably intelligible audio.
- TRiG_Ireland 4y ago> allowing the content to dictate the length This is Tom Scott for me. His videos tend to range around the 5- to 10-minute mark, but are occasionally far far longer. And yet every one of them is exactly the length it should be.
- simondotau 4y agoI love love love Tom Scott, but some of his recent videos are getting an eeny weeny teeny tiny bit Half as interesting-y, but with Tom’s face to camera instead of incongruous stock footage.
- userbinator 4y agoI watched it at 2.25x to cut it down to ~13m, but even at that speed I agree a lot of videos are unnecessarily dragged out.
- smcl 4y agoIf I recall correctly there's a certain length videos need to be to get adverts or to be monetised - something like ~10 minutes. So while this one is a little bit played out (maybe this happens to get an extra set of ads in the middle) the worst are when you have 2-3 minutes of information streeeeeetched out to 10 minutes.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoIt's entertainment. People don't want to just look at the results for 10 seconds. What would they do with the next 29 minutes 50 seconds? They want to watch people and hear them talk, make jokes, work on setting up the experiment, etc. Same reason Mythbusters isn't 30 seconds per myth. You could just read scientific papers if you're looking to condense knowledge transfer per time.
- aequitas 4y agoHowever, 30 seconds and 30 minutes are at far ends of a spectrum with a sweet spot in between. Of course there is a market for 30 minutes of content and not everything should be optimised to fit as much content in every second of video. But I definitely do not get entertained by hollow filler and senseless suspense building. Even Mythbusters did this with constant flash forwards/backwards and recaps (which especially stood out to me because TV commercials where I'm from are about once per hour and not every 5 minutes), but back then it was the only format we got.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoPresumably you are able to understand that your preferences and your sweet spot is not the same as everybody else's, and would be open to considering that you might be significantly far from the middle of the spectrum. So I don't see the "however".
- forrestthewoods 4y agoSmarter Every Day is one of the only channels where it doesn’t feel dragged out. I agree that unnecessarily long videos are rampant on YouTube. SED hits the sweet spot for me. YMMV.
- phpisthebest 4y agoI love everyone that claims YT forcing X... Almost everyone that claims that is wrong... I prefer 15-45min videos, I hate both the Trend to 3-4hr "streams" and the "we gotta beat tiktok" vertical video shorts... //sidenote... Bring back the 00's where people were shamed for posting vertical video....
- hnbad 4y agoI have literally watched a 5 hour plus video essay (NOT just a stream VOD, an actual video essay without much filler) recently but I concur that a lot of times a shorter video would suffice to get the point across. I guess there's room for a happy middle ground between traditional TikTok and modern long-form YouTube.
- mrguyorama 4y agoI have rewatched, over and over and over, a 3 and a half hour long video essay on a video game I've never played, in a video game series I actively dislike. Honestly a long form video essay on youtube has gotten to the point, by most talented creators, that it is basically just a high quality book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93-_r0w7ykI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93-_r0w7ykI
- Rastonbury 4y agoThe creator himself has spoken out against YouTube's incentives, he said that he likes to produce longer than is optimum and does not want his videos to be influenced by the algorithm. YT pushes towards 8-15 min as sweet spot, I subscribe to a few who used to do 20+ min vids, and now they do around 10 min. LTT and their shorts for one.
- sixothree 4y agoI have a hard time know he works in weapons of war for a living.
- ctechbob 4y agoHe retired from that to pursue an engineering PHD several years back.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI'm curious why. Are you thinking that it's wrong / evil for a country to maintain an effective military?
- shagie 4y agoSome asides... --- The purple glasses they wear are didymium. Photographers use a less intense version of that material as a "red enhancer filter." The spectra of the glasses ( https://www.colby.edu/chemistry/CH332/laboratory/didym-spec.pdf https://www.colby.edu/chemistry/CH332/laboratory/didym-spec.... ) have a very low transmission from 572 nm to 585 nm. That's a yellowish color. The sodium vapor lights (those yellow street lights) are 589 nm. For photography, if you block the yellow out of a muddy brownish-red you get a more vibrant red. For glass blowers, the yellow flame around the glass is the sodium in the material ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_test - look at the sodium line). By blocking that yellow light, a glass blower is able to more clearly see through the flame to glass. --- For people who are interested an intersection of STEM and art... there is a demand for scientific glassblowers. ( https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/10/21172370/scientific-glassblowing-how-to-chemistry-fire-verge-science-video https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/10/21172370/scientific-glass... - the woman in the article is https://www.phoenixmag.com/2017/10/01/christine-roeger/ https://www.phoenixmag.com/2017/10/01/christine-roeger/ who is a third generation glass blower - my father learned to fix a few items in the chemistry lab from her grandfather). > She’s one of about 650 scientific glassblowers in the U.S., one of only a dozen or so women in the field, and one of even fewer third-generation scientific glassblowers. Running Arizona State University’s Glassblowing Facility as a one-woman operation, she’s carrying on a long but unheralded tradition that goes back to the makers of Galileo’s thermometer and Thomas Edison’s light bulb. https://youtu.be/YLHl8wmZKbw https://youtu.be/YLHl8wmZKbw
- kragen 4y agoit's funny that glassblowers still call their sodium-blocking glass 'didymium glass' 138 years after von welsbach discovered that didymium doesn't actually exist, isn't it
- whoisburbansky 4y agoCool call-out there, I hadn't realized praseodymium and neodymium are actually short for praseodidyium and neodidymium ("green" and "new" didymium, respectively). Having all three of those words multiple times writing out this comment, I totally understand why the extra "id" was eventually dropped for the elements' formal names.
- dtolnay 4y agoHere is the gallery of finished pieces in the artist's shop: https://orbixhotglass.com/product-category/prince-ruperts-drops/ https://orbixhotglass.com/product-category/prince-ruperts-dr... I am quite sure I saw #01 at $10k earlier today and it's now higher, so I suspect he found out he initially misjudged what Destin's advice of "priced not to sell" would need to mean.
- tslater2006 4y agoYep! Can confirm I saw it at $10k earlier today as well.
- Magi604 4y agoNow it's at $100k!!!!!
- esperent 4y agoAt that price you could put someone through a glass blowing course and then have them work for a few months making thousands of these for you.
- Maxion 4y agoThere's a reason early Model T's are collectibles, and why 1980s Ford Escorts are in junkyards.
- abainbridge 4y agoI think Ford Escort means something different here in the UK. They've gone up in value hugely in the last 20 years and are generally worth a lot more than Model T Fords now. (Annoyingly they're worth much more than a contemporary Porsche 944, which was much more desirable when new. Annoyingly because I own a 944 and not an Escort). https://www.silverstoneauctions.com/1980-ford-escort-rec03517-3-nec-1119?el=11595&pn=1&pp=50 https://www.silverstoneauctions.com/1980-ford-escort-rec0351... https://www.evoke-classics.com/auction/1922-ford-model-t/ https://www.evoke-classics.com/auction/1922-ford-model-t/
- aaron695 4y agoI grabbed some form Aliexpress https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-prince-Ruperts-Drop.html https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-prince-Ruperts-Drop.h... Ebay Etsy Amazon also have stores with them. But kinda stuck what to do with them / check they are real. I feel like they are too dangerous as presents for young kids to keep. Hit the tail and get glass in the eye. It'd be cool if they came in a cage for kids. But not sure what to do other then explode them? Everyone shoots them or has a hydraulic press - https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=Prince%20Rupert%27s%20Drop https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=Prince%20Rupert%27s%20Drop
- MengerSponge 4y agoEye and lung protection are absolutely critical when you're playing with glass (or pottery). Silicosis is incurable, so I highly recommend that you play with them indoors only if you have a great ventilation/filtration system. Otherwise, go outside and wear safety goggles. You can look at them under crossed polarizers.
- gnicholas 4y agoHe also did a bunch of super slow-motion videos about shooting a Prince Rupert's drop with various firearms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24q80ReMyq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24q80ReMyq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3FkAUbetWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3FkAUbetWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaYq9sX4zLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaYq9sX4zLs
- contradictioned 4y agoFunfact, the German term for this drop is Bologneser Träne (tear of Bologna).
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoHis previous experiments with epoxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3o71W4uNHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3o71W4uNHc It's still a little disappointing that the molten glass doesn't really capture the full moment of the explosion as it both dampens the movement of the fragments and the heat melts them so the drop slightly reforms. My guess is that a suitable concentration of epoxy that's neither too runny or too viscous would probably work.
- pas 4y agocan they make the drop explosion more powerful by making the drop bigger?
- freetime2 4y agoDestin has a knack for taking relatively mundane topics and making them interesting. I’ve had low expectations going into his videos on coast guard search patterns, center-pivot irrigators, and a film factory tour, but ended up enjoying them because of his emphasis on the little optimizations that are inherent in all human endeavors, and the people who carry them out. It’s like Dirty Jobs (which I also liked) but for engineers. In this case I groaned a bit when I saw the title (“another Rupert’s Drop video?”), but it was fascinating to watch that team working together, and learn a bit about the process of glass blowing. I found the result a little underwhelming to be honest - at least in its attempt to capture the violence of a Rupert’s Drop exploding - though it was still a cool piece of glass. But the journey to get there kept me captivated the whole way through.
- karlshea 4y agoThe Kodak factory series is especially fantastic.
- raverbashing 4y agoTrue, very underrated But in general I think Destin's latest videos have been a bit "trying too hard" and everything is "genius" etc It's all "Prince Rupert's drop" or "Non-newtonian fluid" (and Oobleck is the only one they know about) or "Air cannon" or "shooting slow motion". It's the same topics going in a circle. (But do watch the coast guard videos if you want to know how to whistle)
- pdpi 4y agoThey always use shear-thickening fluids because they're so counterintuitive, but shear-thinning fluids are a fun example of a mixed blessing — the same property that keeps paint from dripping off a brush/roller until you apply it is also what makes it so hard to pour the right amount of ketchup.
- raverbashing 4y agoYeah, true. The ketchup one I don't think it's "on purpose" (hence why it's annoying)
- 0wis 4y agoReally interesting dive on an experiment. The part on failure has a lot of value. Everyone approach it differently but I felt like Cal has finely tuned its mindset around it. He makes it a happy moment, which is a hard thing to do even if celebration of failure is common in startup/HN world. Even more interesting is that he is using failure to learn, not by boringly doing a post-mortem, but by playing with the seemingly wasted ressources and time to have fun and develop his intuition. At first, I thought this was distracting, now I totally see the value for HN (and me). I have to find a way to dive deeper in this topic of mindset around failure.
- tyyyyqqq 4y ago[flagged]
- capableweb 4y ago> So it would be interesting to see what price he chooses. https://orbixhotglass.com/product-category/prince-ruperts-drops/?orderby=price https://orbixhotglass.com/product-category/prince-ruperts-dr... Least expensive: 500 USD Most expensive: 100,000 USD Most of them are below 3,500 USD, but damn, pretty high prices for something like that, although I guess it makes sense considering how long time they probably spent on making them and coming up with the process.
- elaus 4y agoFor those who didn't watch the full video: the 100,000 USD are an intentionally high price because the creator does not want to sell that specific glass block ("priced not to sell").
- GaryNumanVevo 4y agoIt's kind of funny to be talking about expensive pieces of art when jpegs were regularly selling for $100k+ regularly less than a year ago.