Hey look, it’s the first day of NaBloPoMo! Instead of writing a whole new post for the occasion, I’ll publish this old draft I’ve been saving in the hopes I’d someday fill it with more content. That counts, right?

For one of my three part-time jobs, I translate engineering reports into documents that managers and the IRS can read. The firm I work for has many clients, so I get to skip around and see reports from all kinds of industries. Usually I have to Google a few terms of art per report to understand what’s going on; this is the best part of my job. So far I’ve learned a tiny bit about molding plastic parts for car interiors, packaging peanut butter, assembling wooden doors, and a bunch of other fun-sounding things. I try not to burrow too far into Wikipedia, but, you know. Here are some crumbs of knowledge I’ve picked up along the way.

There exists an instrument called a swellometer*, whose name reveals a difference between engineers and physicists, I think. Physicists will go full-on Greek or Latin when they make up names for things; engineers, being more practical, I suppose, aren’t afraid to throw a little Anglo-Saxon into the mix.

An individual stalk of bamboo is called a culm.

There is an engineering unit called pound-force. My physicist’s eye first read this as pounds multiplied by force, which makes little sense because pounds already measure force (weight is the force of gravity pulling you towards the earth). But Wikipedia tells me that no, in engineering-speak, this unit should be read as “pound (the force kind, not the mass kind).” Apparently pounds are sometimes used to measure mass—who knew? Also, how confusing.

Related Wikipedia knowledge: When you use pound to mean force, the preferred unit of mass is the slug. At least it’s consistent: a slug is the mass that a pound of force will accelerate at 1 ft/s^2.

Oh wait it gets better: There’s also an version of the slug that uses inches instead of feet, called . . . wait for it . . . a slinch. Or slugette. I prefer slinch.

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* Upon further research, the swellometer appears not to be a measuring instrument at all, in spite of its name. It’s more like an apparatus that causes wood to swell, after which the swelling is measured by an ordinary micrometer. I’d call that a swellifier. Swellator?

Anyway, you can see why a job like mine exists. Engineers, however rigorous they may be in their measurements and spreadsheets and 3D models, can be a bit imprecise with language.

A chat conversation with the husband (a physicist turned seismic data analyst):

John: I’ve just been reading about pulsars.

Me: Haha, drilling for oil is way more complicated than I thought.

John: Totally. How can you possibly measure depths without an accurate stellar clock?

Me: Or forget about this dumb fossil fuel stuff, just mine hydrogen.

John: Sigh, it’s a good thing you went into law. Pulsars are neutron stars.

Me: This “Physics degree” on my resume becomes more and more of a lie every day.

For the last few weeks, John and his friend Roy have been working in their spare time on a neat physics demonstration to show off at the Texas A&M Physics Festival this coming weekend.

If you know what a standing wave is, you’ve probably seen the classic demonstration with a vibrating string. But did you know you can also trace out a standing wave in FIRE? True story.

The apparatus is called a Rubens Tube, after its kind-of inventor. It’s a long metal tube with small holes drilled along its length, filled with a flammable gas and set alight. When you pipe music into one end of the tube, the flames jump into different wave patterns.

Last night I got to stop by campus and videotape their progress. With a little pretending and a little video editing, we almost made it look like they built this contraption in a single evening.

Pretty neat, eh?

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