SCALES #37: paper spray
Hello!
In lab I’ve been trying to get up and running (hopefully quickly!) a new set of systems to collect (hopefully quickly!) a good set of levitated droplet measurements. All kinds of different work happening in parallel, thankfully with expert help: working with a mechanical engineer to get parts designed and built by the machinists, asking the electrical engineer to design a circuit board, calling on the electrical technician to help spec out and build a high voltage cable that plugs into a fancy German-engineered connector. Writing out that list makes me realize how lucky I am to have all this expertise surrounding me, as well as to have another junior grad student starting to help out with the lab day-to-day.
And then there has been trying to get the paper spray ionization running. The problem is, how to convert the levitated droplet into individual charged molecules that can be detected by our analytical instrument of choice, a mass spectrometer. Previously we had been very quickly boiling the droplet on a coin-sized hot plate, and then charging up an acupuncture needle to a high voltage to transfer electric charge to the resulting vapors.
Paper spray involves a different sort of lab MacGyvering: the kind of crazy idea of clipping a high voltage onto a wet triangle of paper, which generates a continuous spray of tiny charged droplets at the triangle's tip that fragment into even smaller droplets as the solvent evaporates and the concentration of charge causes good ol’ Coulombic explosions, leaving you at the end with individually charged ions. A levitated droplet (much larger than the spray) can be deposited onto the paper, become part of the spray, and reveal its chemical composition. Or at least that’s the idea. Through a poorly thought-out electrical grounding scheme, I fried a (thankfully minor) part of the mass spectrometer on the first attempt, but the paper spray is now working!
Now we’re figuring out how to get the paper spray working at its best, which involves thinking about the materiality of paper a whole lot more than I ever have. Based on the literature, I’ve just tried out using chromatography paper instead of the filter paper we first had on hand. After trying the classic experiment of seeing how pen ink flows to the edge of the paper, it turns out for what is basically a chromatography experiment … the chromatography paper does in fact work a lot better! Now I do want to understand better how types of paper differ, since my current level of understanding is reflected by my discussions with the other grad student: “So it must be something with the paper’s … fibers. Yeah. Fibers. Cellulose.”
▢ ▢ ▢
Feverish image, a product of thinking about paper spray for too long: analyzing a printed text by paper spray. Seeing the ink of the individual characters dissolve and flow to the tip.
▢ ▢ ▢
So I was listening to this podcast…
Podcast serendipity: a pair of two-parters that, taken together, tell a story of the theory and praxis of modernist urban planning. First, About Building & Cities digging deep into Le Corbusier’s Urbanism (1925), “the kind of original sin of international modernism”. Second, 99% Invisible telling the story of the modernist conception of Amsterdam’s massive Bijlmermeer development, its failures and tragedy, and its postmodern afterlife.
Clearly I will consume any content about weird drop-shipping “companies” built entirely on deceptive online branding and social media ads. Reply All’s contribution: talking with the would-be drop-shipping moguls themselves and discovering the actual money in this gold rush is where it always is.
On the BBC podcast The Untold: The race to save one family-owned thatched cottage in Northern Ireland. Also BBC-produced: a Radio 3 documentary on the music of the postwar German electronic music avant garde, its politics, and its roots in Germany’s lavishly funded state radio infrastructure.
A towering Chana Joffe-Walt-hosted This American Life episode on #MeToo, “Five Women”, makes the most of the possibilities of the medium. (h/t Hot Pod)
Turns out the New Yorker publishes Good Fiction—who knew!?! Enjoyed listening to the respective authors read (1) the trickily postmodern, yet warm, blurring of movie and life of Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi” and (2) “The Poltroon Husband” by Joseph O’Neill, with its Beckett-indebted narrative voice—something I find darkly hilarious in its deadpan obsession with precision in an unknowable, uncontrollable external world—and bizarro mi ritrovai per una selva oscura close.
▢ ▢ ▢
Reading list
Long interview of British composer and musician Gavin Bryars, another piece of Ethan Iverson’s invaluable oral history work. First-person view into the transatlantic avant garde music scene of the 60s and 70s through today.
Stephen Hough on Debussy: “[T]his is music made as molded by playing, as dough is folded with yeast to create bread. As the fingers reach the keys, sound and touch seem to fuse into one. The keyboard has ceased to be a mere function for hammers to strike strings, and has become a precious horizontal artifact to caress. This is music of the piano as much as for the piano.”
Deeply reported, horrifying story by the Boston Globe on James Levine’s abuse of his musical acolytes.
John Herrman on app notification dots, "Bubble Wrap laid over your entire digital existence.” (Aggressively turning off the dots for non-critical apps is the best thing I’ve done with my phone for a while.) (h/t Sensor Readings)
Dead Housekeeping is a secret treasure in my RSS feed. A recent gem, “How to Make a Grocery List”: “7. If your son-in-law comes home with two cakes, a chocolate and a vanilla, instead of the two cukes you needed for the tomato salad, make a big fuss over the cakes. Pretend like they are the most beautiful cakes you’ve ever seen, like you didn’t even know Rouse’s made cakes at all.” (h/t Rebecca Onion in 2015, perhaps?)
▢ ▢ ▢
Science!
A particular class of electromagnetic emissions in the Earth’s magnetosheath (where the magnetic field from solar winds quickly decelerate to subsonic speeds) are known as “lion’s roars”, and scientists have now observed similar roars on Saturn!
“Fog holes” are visible in satellite images above cities in India and elsewhere: city air is warmer and drier.
▢ ▢ ▢
Paper spray testing.
Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam