Anna and I went site seeing around Berlin. Too much stuff to see, not enough time! We went to Alexanderplatz, did the normal Brandenburger Tor touristy stuff, then headed to the DDR museum.
Tag: video
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Crashing out Rubens Barrichello
I’ve done some dumb arse shit in my time. Last night I added to that by causing Rubens Barrichello, the most experienced Formula 1 driver of all time to crash into me with his racing car.
Okay, it’s a virtual racing car, but it was actually the real Rubens Barrichello driving it! Thankfully he didn’t seem to be grumpy at me 🙂 -
Bike trip to Schwedt
We cycled from Strausberg to Schwedt in Germany, stopping off at a small border town in Poland along the way. A good time had by all 🙂
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Jelly coworking does Timisoara
I’m a member of an awesome coworking group in Berlin called the Jelly coworking group. Check out my other post for pretty photos of the trip.
We realised that a subway ticket across town was about the same price as a ticket to Romania via my airline (Ryan Air), so we hopped on a plane to the beautiful city of Timisoara. Whilst there, we met up with the friendly folk at the Timisoara Startup Hub who kindly helped out with office space during our visit.
I recorded our adventure with my trusty GoPro strapped to a dildo 🙂
Starring: Cheerful team leader Craig, official translator Nadia, super pancake girl Madhvi, skippy Francisco and dildo operator Ryan.
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Bush Flying Basics
I am now famous in the area of “plane landing in dodgy places photography”. The following snapshots are from a DVD called “Bush Flying Basics“, an instructional video for teaching pilots how to land in places where they probably shouldn’t be trying. They used a photo from here on my blog of Poolburn reservoir as an example of smooth ice you can land on. If you happen to have the DVD, you can see it at the 28 mins and 50 second mark 🙂
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Falling through ice
I can still feel the sensation of my shoulder popping out every time I watch this. It makes me feel queasy! Quite cool to have caught it on camera though 🙂 Thanks to Dave for recording and uploading it 🙂
The video was recorded at Poolburn reservoir in New Zealand. The ice was about 15 mm thick, and we were recording it as a demonstration of what happens to ice just before you fall through it. I wasn’t meant to actually fall through it, I was just trying to push it far enough to make the ice buckle and creak a lot, but then my foot went straight through 😛 I was wearing a wetsuit and life preserver in case I did fall through, but what I didn’t factor in was that my shoulder would dislocate on slamming into the ice. My shoulder was very sensitive at the time and was scheduled to have surgery on it later that year.
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Green ice?
Apparently the correct term for ice which looks like glass, is “green ice”.
Whilst skating over some incredibly smooth “green ice”, Dave Young decided to poke a hole in it to see how good the visibility was. It then dawned on me that he could attach my ATC2k camera to the end of the pole and record upwards through the ice, so I pulled it out, handed it over, and the video below was the result!
Dave Young poking a hole through the ice with his pole 
Alan Knowles standing on perfect ‘green ice’ 
Dave Young standing on some super clear ‘green ice’ 
Rocks as seen through the ice -
Louis Pasteur: The Space of Life
A photo of mine from the Heidelberg Castle has been used in the documentary “Louis Pasteur: The Space of life“. The image used is from the chemistry laboratory at the castle and was used as the background for the laboratory of Jean Baptiste Biot, the man who discovered the chiral nature of tartaric acid.
As you can see below, they’ve zoomed in, then shrunk it, flipped it horizontally and used it as a background for scenes showing Louis Pasteur and Jean Baptiste Biot. It seems ironic to me that they used a mirror image for the background of a documentary about chirality :p
Louis Pasteur and Jean Baptiste Biot 
Jean Baptiste Biot 
Jean Baptiste Biot 
My original photo from Heidelberg Castle The documentary can be viewed on the LaRouche website:
My photo can be seen in the background between 6:20 – 7:46 and 19:58 and 22:02.
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Manorburn dam videos with Sarah and Jane
Videos from an awesome trip to the Manorburn dam.
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NMR Quench
Our 500 MHz NMR machine quenched itself today 🙁 Here is an awful quality photo I took of the aftermath.
To make things worse, our other machine (300 MHz one) has been out of action since late last year, so we now have no NMR access whatsoever … for any non-chemists out there, this is bad, VERY bad!
MRI Quenching
I did some YouTubing and found this video of an MRI machine quenching itself (MRI and NMR are very similar instruments).
[youtube width=”350″ height=”292″]http://youtube.com/watch?v=1R7KsfosV-o[/youtube]
Liquid Helium
The NMR machine was full of liquid helium. The quenching involved the liquid helium evaporating very rapidly. Here’s a video about the properties of liquid helium and a video of a liquid helium fountain.
