dylanstiles.com

post office, osmium

dylan — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 17:51:28 +0000

I was in the post office yesterday, and I noticed they have these flat-rate shipping boxes, advertised with the slogan “If it fits, it ships.” So you pay $13.95 to ship anything that will fit inside a 12″ x 12″ x 5 1/2″ box, for example. Wouldn’t it be funny to fill up one of these boxes with the densest element on the periodic table, then go to the post office and ship it?

Of course the element I speak of is osmium, which weighs in at a hefty 22.6 g/cm3. If my math is correct here, that 12″x12″x5.5″ box translates into 792 cubic inches, or 12.98 liters. Fill it up with a huge block of osmium and it would weigh 293 kilograms, or 646 pounds.

So you’d probably actually need like 6 people to lift the box. And the fact that osmium costs ~$30/gram, this little prank would cost $8.8 million to pull off. Depleted uranium might be a little more economical. It’s only 19.1g/cm3, so fill up that same box with DU and it would only weigh 546 pounds. Still pretty funny.

bad salad romance

dylan — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:38:56 +0000

I have been tortoise-sitting for my friend Andrew’s pet tortoise Woodward. Through a series of discussions it was decided that we needed to make a music video starring the beast, wherein a hacked Playstation webcam would be used to videograph the world through Woodward’s eyes. Jesse and Olivia and I spent Christmas day on the project. Olivia whipped up an awesome application to capture hi-res video from a USB webcam. Here is a rough cut using the footage that resulted.

bad salad romance from Dylan Stiles on Vimeo.

A picture showing the soundstage/studio:

doug

dylan — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:20:09 +0000

. . . . . . .

dylan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:21:54 +0000

MIT monster eats Boston/Back Bay

dylan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:06:06 +0000

these are my bricks

dylan — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:13:46 +0000

Back in 1886 some relatives of mine (I assume) founded the Stiles Brick Company in Bridgewater, MA. The industrial revolution demanded mountain piles of high-quality bricks, and the SBC cranked them out with maniacal fervor. Take a walk through Lowell, Waltham, etc… these towns are 99 and 44/100% pure Stiles brick. I have often dreamed of having a house built entirely out of Stiles bricks, obviously with the “STILES” side facing out, so as to passionately declare that it is MY HOUSE.

At some point, the SBC underwent a merger of some sort and became the Stiles and Hart Brick Company. This business move created an unstoppable juggernaut of brick production that is in full force to this day. However, it entailed a redesign of the logo on the bricks, and they now feature a more modest “S+H” insignia. These bricks are everywhere, but you might never know it since the plain side is usually facing out.

Well yesterday I was wandering around Central Square in Cambridge, MA, where most of the sidewalks are brick-lined. I happened upon a few bricks that were overturned, and was pleased as punch to see that familiar S+H shining up at me. Yes, this entire sidewalk is constructed out of Stiles + Hart Bricks, so as far as I’m concerned it belongs to me. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that much of the metro/Boston area is similarly paved with my bricks, and I would be entitled to claim ownership of all the sidewalks if it ever came down to that.

i like cold beverages

dylan — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:15:17 +0000

Some time ago I bought these silicone ice cube trays from Ikea. Ice cube tray a very serious misnomer, because the ice that comes out of these things is anything but cubes. But the ice is in fun shapes (I got the arrows and crosses), so it’s a little sad to see that the Ikea PLASTIS line of ice-making molds is no longer in stock (nb: you can still purchase a very similar item from Amazon).

So I’ve been making humorously-shaped ice for quite a while now, and the other day I was torn between using ice arrows or ice crosses to cool my tasty beverage. At this very moment I questioned which shape would cool my drink more quickly. That is, does the ice arrow or the ice cross have more surface area?

It’s a pretty simple problem to solve, and anyone who graduated from Jr. High geometry should be able to figure it out in less than 5 minutes. I present here the precise measurements that are necessary to get the answer. My solution is here (spoiler alert!). I hope you agree.

This train of thought led me to conclude that an ice shape that would cool your drink most quickly would be one with the maximal possible surface area in a given volume. If only someone could engineer a tray that makes ice in the shape of a high-order icosahedron. That would get your drink cold in no time flat. Or better yet, something approaching a fractional dimension, where you’d probably need advanced degrees in math to even predict the cooling effects of such a hypothetical ice shape on a beverage.

That is all.

this has awkward written all over it

dylan — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:33:21 +0000

Glad I’m not in high school any more…

driving conjunction

dylan — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 06:16:50 +0000

Normally you might consider an ambulance in the rear view mirror as something that will slow down your transit from A to B. Yesterday I found myself in an unusual driving situation where the presence of an ambulance actually saved me about 30 seconds of driving time.

It was a rare conjunction at a T intersection, where I wanted to make a right on red, but there was a constant stream of cars turning from the opposite direction blocking me. Suddenly I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw an ambulance coming from behind. The ambulance cut off the stream of cars that were preventing me from turning, effectively setting a pick.

This allowed me to execute my right-hand turn before the stream of cars would have otherwise allowed me to do so, saving ~30 seconds. Exploiting the path cleared by an ambulance is normally illegal (ie: stay 500 feet behind), but in this odd set of circumstances, I was actually distancing myself from the emergency vehicle more by turning as I did.

trousers

dylan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:20:52 +0000

I found a factual inaccuracy in this wikipedia entry for “pants” (or “trousers” if you prefer). It has since been corrected. Looking at the history of this page reveals an extensive amount of pants-related vandalism.

The desecration is extended to other articles of clothing as well. A quick check at the edit history of “shirt” shows similar activity, although I do have to say that this revision is particularly concise and accurate.