You see some pretty strange things sometimes

Every now and then I get a bit of a creative "itch" that needs scratching. I was strolling through the hardware store last month and they had plastic lawn flamingos on sale. I already had some other items like black and glow-in-the-dark spray paint, and a few plastic skulls. The nucleus of a project began to form in my head.







Together with my pal Kelly, we just installed them and are currently waiting for them to be noticed.

Cool, there are some photos of me at TED Youth

There are some pretty awesome pictures of me giving my talk about sand to the kids attending TED Youth in New Orleans a few weeks ago. I'm hoping a separate video of my talk will go up in a few weeks.





I hope all of you in the US had a grand Turkey day yesterday. I'm thankful for the opportunities to share how amazing the world is through this blog.

Some dancing water droplet slo-mo

Inertia. I has it. You has it. A drop of water has it. If, say the floor were to suddenly drop out from under you, it would take time for you to start falling downward. Once the floor disappeared, the force of gravity would start accelerating you, but you would start moving slowly, then continue to move faster. Inertia is the tendency of an object to keep doing what they were doing (motion, rest, etc.) unless acted upon by another force. The water drops in this video are sitting on a hydrophobic material, so when the fabric is pushed down, the water drops stay where they were until gravity starts accelerating them downwards.

The effect is pretty cool, because normally water's surface tension tends to allow water to adhere to the surface it's on and the force of the surface tension keeps the water drops moving along with the material. This is why those cool "shaking wet dog" videos show the water flinging out in every direction - the water adhered to the animal's hair is moving with the animal - and gets flung out in whatever direction it's headed when the shear stress exceeds the water's surface tension.

Water Drop Dance from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
Nano-coated fabric stretched over the mouth of a bucket provides a flexible surface on which drops of water are able to bounce around easily.

TED Youth 2013: Talk Archive

If you're interested in seeing what I had to say - or what any of the other speakers talked about, go on over to the TED Youth streaming video page. My talk is at about 48:07 of Session 1. But there are enough awesome talks that it might be cool to let them just play through.

Whew! My post-TED-Youth recap.

Wow, what a weekend. It started with me getting a really bad head cold in the middle of last week. I stayed home Wednesday and Thursday in part because I needed to save my voice for the weekend, but also because I was so fatigued, I wouldn't have been able to do much those days anyway. But I was getting a little nervous, because I was going to be talking to 400 kids as part of the TED Youth 2013 event and if my voice wasn't going to be working...

So Friday morning rolls around and I'm getting ready to leave for New Orleans, my voice works reasonably well, but not for prolonged talking. So I didn't contact the TED people to try and revise the side-show and other events I was planning on doing. But I wanted to talk as little as possible. Fortunately, most of Friday was spent flying down to the Big Easy. But I didn't account for the cabin pressurization messing with my head, so that when I got in to New Orleans, I felt like I was talking to everyone through the other side of a diving helmet filled with water. Aside from feeling disoriented from the trip and the congestion, the Friday evening rehearsal went fine, then it was straight to bed.

Up early Saturday morning and my voice was strong enough that I knew it would last for six minutes. Fortunately, I was in the first session of speakers, so my big, important talk would be done before I would need to do some smaller side-show demos and activities. Spent six all-too-short minutes talking to kids about sand - what it is, where it comes from, why it's important, and how can geo-engineer things with it.

The collective "whoa" from the crowd when the reinforced sandcastle didn't budge when a bowling ball was dropped on it was fun to hear. As a presenter, you're usually not able to get detailed feedback about the audience since the lights are dimmed. But getting the whole theater to gasp is a good sign you've hooked 'em.

I spent time in between sessions demonstrating a fun water drop maze and talking to kids about sand. This pretty much destroyed what was left of my voice, however. So the after-party I spent nodding and smiling and not saying a whole lot.

Now I've flown back home and I'm recovering/prepping for the upcoming week.

An ode to silica/silicon

I just set up this photo as part of my talk about sand. One of my friends said that this was a very "meta and recursive" photo. I think he's probably right.