Saturday, February 27, 2016

Things that naturally look photoshopped – photoshopped to look less photoshopped.

Usually on the blog we like to call out photos that are badly - photoshopped, or things that look photoshoped, but aren't photoshopped at all. But now we have a whole new category:
Things that naturally look photoshopped, and then photoshopped to look less photoshopped.

The ad looks pretty similar to these photos of an f-18 Hornit (and other flying vehicles) travelling near the speed of sound. These kinds of pictures look totally fake the observer uneducated about shock-waves, so it appears that the Navy photoshopped an (f-18?) awkwardly escaping a random smoke puff instead of using a real image.
[update from alert reader/blogger/aerospace engineer Aryeh: the shock-waves here are part of a Prandtl–Meyer_expansion_fan, and the actual plane needs only be near to, not faster than the speed of sound]




Sunday, February 14, 2016

When you don't eat ice cream for 2 years

After Eli left his Tropicana orange juice in the fridge for 2.5 years and shared the results, I decided to do my own experiment and left a box of ice cream in the freezer for 2.5 years...

Actually it happened much more organically. See when I first noticed awesome ice crystals forming in the container probably sometime last winter I thought I would wait for a nice cold day so I could go outside and photograph it with my smartphone microscope, as I had been doing ... a lot. Of course I procrastinated for about a year until today when I could not hope for a better ice-cream-sublimation-crystal-photography day (-8 degrees in Boston).

Sadly it was clear that the crazy ice crystals had partially melted at some point leaving stubs so blunt they didn't look like much under the microscope.





And now for the record, the sell by date was 4/2014, and this is what it looked like on the inside, definitely see some evidence of warmer times in the freezer, very sad.


It tasted just like chocolate ice cream, but the consistency was crazy interesting. Almost like eating a cool sponge. Presumably the holes were gaps left by the sublimating water content. Because it was so dry it also didn't feel particularly cold. There was the occasional sharp ice crystal though embedded in the former ice cream though which made it still more interesting.

Thursday, February 11, 2016