Erick Blomberg Breathing Fire

Dustin and I did some more fire breathing. We used the same process using coffee creamer powder, but used a Cannon Rebel EOS to take the photos instead of grabbing frames from my HD camcorder.

Photos were taking at 400 ISO using shutter speeds ranging from 1/800 sec to 1/1600 sec.

Dustin Ewers Breathing Fire

Erick Blomberg Breathing Fire: Part Two

My first shot at fire breathing.

Over Christmas Vacation, my undergraduate roommate and long time friend Dustin came to visit. Normally when I get together with people and do something stupid like this, it’s my idea. This time however, it was Dustin who had the idea. He had been reading about fire breathing and wanted to give it a try. After a few tries we got it to work great and I thought I’d share my experiences with it.

Now let me start by telling you what you DON’T want to do when fire breathing. You don’t want to try blowing gasoline or high proof alcohol at a fire. In both cases, these liquids have extremely flammable vapors. The danger here is that the flame can travel back into your mouth and if you accidentally take a breath in and the vapors are still burning, you might fry your lungs which will almost certainly kill you.

There are basically two safe materials for fire breathing. The one you would most likely see people using is kerosene. Now this is not simply the kind of kerosene you can buy at some gas stations or in camping supply stores. You need highly purified kerosene. Fire breathing web sites will have links to places you can buy this stuff.

The other option is probably the safest and most readily available….non-dairy coffee creamer. Hot chocolate powder and powdered sugar also work, but creamer seems to work best. Since this is what Dustin and I used, I’m going to explain this process.

You’re going to need a flaming stick for fire breathing. In our experience, a match or cigarette lighter will just blow out. We used a stick about 18 inches long and poured lighter fluid on one end of it. Now the trick is to pour a bunch of creamer in your mouth and quickly give it a hard blow towards the fire. You need to use a lot of creamer, because some of it will be wet by your saliva and won’t burn much less come out of your mouth. A shot glass full of creamer seems to be a reliable amount. When you are fire breathing the idea is to make a fine powder of creamer suspended in the air.

Use come common sense. Don’t try this inside and don’t try fire breathing in anyone’s direction. Also becareful about the wind, you don’t want to have creamer blow back into your face and burn off your eyebrows (or anyone else’s for that matter.) Also try not to breath the powder as you can get pneumonia if you inhale a lot of it.

The photos of me above are using creamer. I’ll take some more soon with a better camera and post them. If I get my hands on the proper fire breathing liquids, I’ll make a separate post about it.

Sam and Adam Climbing the "High Dune"

Ever wanted to be in the extreme desert? Did you know that there are 750 tall sand dunes in Colorado?

A year ago my buddies, Sam and Adam, and I decided to take a trip to Colorado on a whim. After making a stop a Casa Bonita in Denver, we decided to head south and spend some time at Great Sand Dunes National Monument. We didn’t really know what to expect, but once we got there it was breath taking. People looking at the photos afterwards, immediately assumed I must have been out in the Sahara. If you’re around Colorado and want to do some awesome hiking or take some eye-popping photos, stop by the sand dunes.

Me on top of the "High Dune" which is the highest sand dune in North America.

The Sand Dunes continue for miles.

Bacteria, probably vibrio phosphorum, cause the shrimp to glow in the dark. This is a 10 min bulb exposure I took with a Rebel EOS.

It was a typical Friday and I was nearly done for the day when one of my former students arrived, with an “Urgent physics question!” Her shortness of breath made it clear that she had ran to my office.

I asked, “What’s going on?”
“I’m worried I’m gonna die!” she quickly replied.
A little startled, I asked, “Why what’s wrong?”
“Today when I got home from class, I opened up my refrigerator and the light bulb had burnt out—I could see that my crab salad was….was….glowing!”
“Glowing….Really?!” I exclaimed with excitement.
Approaching tears she said, “I ate some of that crab salad for dinner last night! It must be radioactive! Oh God, my hair is going to fall out and I’m going to die!”…..

Read the rest of my story at Associated Content.com: Glowing Bacteria: Bioluminescence

Homemade X-ray of a screw in a block of wood.

In Season 2 of Burn Notice, Michael is blackmailed by another spy to help him steal and transport a crate. Michael builds an X-ray machine out of an old TV and a taser and hides it in the spare tire well of his car. He hides a piece of veterinary X-ray film in the rear hood of the car. Michael uses the improvised X-ray during their get away and finds out that the enemy spy was transporting and SVD Dragunov-a Soviet era sniper rifle.

After mentioning this to some of the people at school, we got into an argument about whether this was really possible or not. I figured it should work although I was skeptical about the exposure length. My reasoning was simple….put a high enough electric potential across any vacuum tube and electrons should bombard into a filament or the gettering and produce bremsstrahlung radiation as X-rays.

Some of my peers vehemently disagreed. I took a quick gander online and found several people in the Mythbusters Forum who arrogantly said it simply wasn’t possible.

So I decided to put it to the test. I found an old vacuum tube lying around and wrapped the top with foil. Set it next to a Geiger counter behind some lead bricks and connected the foil to ground and all the pins to a 30,000 volt neon test source.

As soon as I turned it on I was glad I had piled lead bricks around it. The Geiger counter was reading 40,000 counts per minute (that’s 10,000 times the normal background radiation level in Iowa.) Clearly it worked so the next step was to try exposing film with the X-rays.

I wrapped some 35mm (800 ISO) film in aluminum foil in a dark closet. I placed the film below the tube and placed various metal objects on top of the film running the tube from exposures from 30 sec to 3 minutes. The first run was almost a complete failure save for a very faint shadow of a key during a 3 min exposure.

That was enough to get me excited though. I prepared another roll of film and tried exposures from 5-30 minutes. The picture of the screw above was my truly exciting image. It was a 10 minute exposure.

I ordered some super high 3200 ISO 120mm format film and obtained some good results, but I will save that for another post as I still have to get the negatives scanned to digital images.

If you try this yourself, make sure you have some radiation shielding. Since my accelerating potential is 30 kV, the X-rays can’t have an energy higher than 30 keV. The lead bricks are overkill. At this potential a 1mm thick piece of stainless steel sheet is enough to block the x-rays.