No question about it

That is SO totally a camel!

Opening the floor

Well. As my regular readers (who are dwindling in number, understandably) have probably surmised, this quarter is yet another mildly-panic-inducing busy one. Somehow there have been fewer wacky stories to report from my latter days in MSE-land (besides the situation-specific Dr. Sahai brand of personalized zingers). Some ten of us metallurgy kids (plus Gary) did head over to Dublin for metal casting lab last week, though, and we watched from above the induction furnace as the professionals mixed up a batch of alloys for us. The pros wore these shiny silver spacesuit-type outfits to protect them from the intense heat, although really they looked like leftovers from one of those restaurants that wraps your food in fancy foil. One guy even took his ensemble up a notch by wearing Mork suspenders. Then, once we’d spent a sufficient amount of time inhaling magnesium oxide, I felt compelled to rattle off the theme songs to two of the best Nickelodeon shows from my childhood, “Hey Dude” and “Salute Your Shorts.” (The singing wasn’t entirely unprompted–the youngsters in my class were reminiscing about old Nick shows and couldn’t remember the words to the theme songs. I guess they never crammed their impressionable heads full of ridiculous lyrics like I did. The result: they do well on MSE tests, and I sing about man-eating jackrabbits and killer cacti.)

Anyway, I’m opening the floor to the few hardy souls who have made their way to this sparse little blog. What topic(s) or question(s) would you like to see covered in Caitlin’s Wide World of MSE? If I don’t know the answer to any questions you may have (which is highly likely), I will hunt down the answer and report back. Viva la fearless journalism!

Jokes for those of the materials science persuasion

Last week, Amanda and I were guilted into giving chosen to give a talk at the MSE department’s student awards night. We recycled some of my blog posts from 2008 and presented “How MSE Has Robbed Us of Life’s Simple Pleasures” to a room full of materials scientists. Our greatest fear going into the talk was that our jokes would be met with blank stares and lobbed tomatoes, but in actuality, that only would have happened with a room full of non-MSE folks. (Like my knitting group. True story.)

Anyway, for MSE-ers who just can’t get enough nerdy MSE humor, I present to you my introduction to our presentation:

In the 3 years that we’ve been studying Materials Science & Engineering, our perspectives on the world have changed considerably. For example, we once thought that “creep” was just another name for a jerk, but we know better now. And where we’d thought necking was something that creeps try to do, we now know – well, there can still be some creep involved in necking. You see, MSE has opened our eyes to a world where atoms do a better job of cooperatively interacting with each other than people do, and where things are not always what they appear to be at first glance.

I first noticed this last bit during my first summer as an intern at GE. It may have been the result of staring at steel microstructure for too many hours, but I swore the grains had arranged themselves into the shape of a duck. I asked a fellow intern to confirm whether or not I was hallucinating.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “And anyway, it’s a chicken.”

“Crazy” must have been contagious, then, because over that summer and the next, many of us interns were regularly “seeing things” in the microstructure of our samples. The phenomenon came full circle at the end of my last internship, when one of the students I hadn’t known during the duck incident capped his end-of-term report with a PowerPoint slide featuring a huge micrograph where the grains were arranged in the shape of a cartoon head with its mouth wide open – and he’d added a speech bubble with the word “Questions?”

Crazy may be catching…

When you don’t feel nerdy enough

For my process metallurgy class this quarter, I’m writing a term paper on the topic of “the recycling of used beverage containers.” While scrambling to find journal articles on the topic during the weekend before my abstract was due, I found two articles that looked promising, but sadly were not available electronically. OhioLink is a fabulous thing, though, because I was able to request the volume that contained those two articles–but I’d neglected to see how many pages the book had. Imagine my surprise when I strolled into the SEL earlier this week, expecting a light booklet and instead receiving this behemoth. It’s so gigantic that it didn’t fit in my bag, so I had the pleasure of spending the following seven hours hauling that thing around in the most conspicuous manner to all of my classes. Just so I could have access to those two articles.

They’d better be darn good articles.

Speaking of the University of Wisconsin…

I rarely purchase engineering textbooks from the campus bookstores anymore, because the copies they have for sale are usually painfully expensive. Online I can find copies of the books that are slightly less painfully expensive. I recently ordered an MSE textbook online, and on the printout tucked inside the front cover, the seller had written this note:

All I have to say to that is: we are the Buckeyes, we are killer nuts!

Um, yes.

Other MSE kids going the metalsmithing route

Turns out I’m not the only metallurgist dabbling in jewelry-making: MSE students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been making aluminum earrings and tie tacks for years to raise money for student programs. This year they brought their wares to the TMS conference (and I’m totally bummed that I missed their booth). A brief article about EnginEarrings can be found in March 2009’s issue of JOM.