Disrupting the metal detector industry?
Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
91–100 of 168 posts
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, airport security is nothing but security theater. I wish we could eliminate it.
There's a real need for security though, so while I would love to make it better (... by removing the theatre elements) that doesn't mean no security. We have lots of things that we know work but lack various wills to do so, ranging from the easy like "don't let anyone other than ticketed travellers anywhere near the terminal" to the crazy-sounding like "make flying 10x or 100x time more expensive".
> There's a real need for security though.
Why?
Do we need this level of security at a bus station or a train station? No? Why?
Because planes can be flown into things? Lock the cabin door.
Because there's lots of people on planes? Well, there's lots of people on trains, buses, or in random offices and hotels. Why are the plane people special? What about giant conventions or events?
We have all this security because of 9/11, but only 1 security measure (locking cabin doors) was needed to stop the next 9/11.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting knives past airport security seems not particularly difficult from the experience of my circle and other anecdotal sources. I've had friends and family accidentally get knives through security on many occasions, and I have also accidentally done it myself. To my knowledge none of them has ever been caught in the converse situation and had to give up a knife. I imagine if one were resourceful and deliberate ab…
> Getting knives past airport security seems not particularly difficult from the experience of my circle and other anecdotal sources. I've had friends and family accidentally get knives through security on many occasions, and I have also accidentally done it myself. To my knowledge none of them has ever been caught in the converse situation and had to give up a knife. May I ask what your race, and the race of your ci…
I am white but with black (and now slightly grey) hair and a beard with tan-ish skin. More pertinent to your implication I assume is that my middle name is of Muslim descent and can pass for being of middle-eastern descent, and I seem to get stopped for "random" checks and patdowns more frequently than my white-bread looking friends and colleagues. Observation bias perhaps on my part, but also maybe not.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#94Cutting cooked meat seems like about the worst possible demonstration they could have come up with because we already have disposable wood cutlery able to easily cut meat that you can readily buy by the hundreds at Target/Walmart/Amazon. The standard food demonstration for sharpness is slicing ripe tomatoes, and demonstrating toughness needs an uncooked winter squash. > "Surprisingly, our wooden knife is actually thr…
Just reminds me that paper moved fast enough can probably already cut meat
I got a papercut and I'm made out of meat!
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to see specific comparisons in physical properties versus steel and specifically which steel they are comparing to. Including in physical dimensions since their nail seems fairly thick. Steel is, as I understand it, hundreds of different variants each with their own physical properties. For example, they say 23 times harder in the article than regular wood. Wood has a Brinell scale of up to 7 although most i…
I had some questions about that too. It looks cool, to be sure, but I watched the video of the nail being hammered through some boards, and... let's just say I'm not so timid with steel nails! For what they were showing, if you were going for "equivalent to steel", I'd expect to see a tap to secure the nail and then probably only two strokes to sink it. They tap it a hundred times, which begs the question of what wou…
I was thinking "how would this do if fired from a nail gun" since as I understand it most commercial work is not done by hand nowadays anyways.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
They search people randomly anyway, and they search people if the human operator thinks they see something suspicious. If we can keep the number of searches constant and just increase the probability of finding a knife, it's a win for everyone. It's obviously not a win if there's too many false positives, but it's worth a try.
Is it a win for everyone though? If we have X cases where people brought knives onto planes, and no notable incidents of knife-enabled violence in the past few years, what's the motivation for reducing X by half? I'm sure that some would-be-criminals are dissuaded by the TSA, but that seems to already be working today. It seems like a very reasonable outcome would be no decrease in airline violence/crime, but an incr…
Great point! Although I'd think P(knife hijacking)*Cost(knife hijacking) would be much much larger than the cost of knives being confiscated, even if P(knife hijacking) is very small, just given how cheap knives are and how big that Cost is. I think the bigger point is how much the software would cost and whether the reduction in X justifies that expenditure. Also need to consider cost savings of being able to fire some TSA staff. That reduces the theatre aspect perhaps, but maybe not if it's done the right way (I can think of a few ideas)
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#97When I was a kid I used to launch Estes rockets. They came with mostly balsa wood fins that would frequently break on landing. The balsa wood also absorbed paint unless you hit it with a clear coat first. This for some reason gave me the idea of rubbing Elmer's glue on to it, letting it dry, then sanding it and then painting it. Not only did it paint easily but I never lost a single fin again. The closest I came to t…
Then you! I used to stick to the alpha 3 as a kid because of the plastic tri-fin base, now I’m looking at you Big Bertha version n!
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it were to take more energy it might still be a win since it would effectively lock up the carbon in a (basically) non-decomposing form. You’d have to look at the net emissions taking into account the amount of carbon dioxide that would have been released as that piece of wood decomposed (or you can look at it from the perspective of the CO2 removed from the atmosphere by that wood).
Careful. Plastics lock up carbon in "basically non-decomposable form" and that is proving problematic. And the problem isn't that we mined the carbon. Death (decomposition) is a critical part of the circle of life...
From an emissions perspective, the problem with plastics is that they lock up a tiny portion of the CO2 that was previously locked up as petroleum (the remainder is released into the atmosphere as byproduct).
If we had “mined” plastic directly out of the ground, it would be fine to use (again from an emissions perspective), though not a net win since it would have already been “locked up” whereas wood only temporarily locks up hydrocarbons until it is cut down, used, and then ultimately decomposed. This would break that cycle.
From a non-emissions perspective, wood doesn’t have the same “microplastics” problem (although who knows what this bastardized wood might end up having).
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#99Didn't the kiwamijapan youtube guy figure out how to do this years ago? Really even then, it's not a new concept. Inmates in prisons turn toilet paper into daggers and I'm sure there are antiquities of sharp objects made from wood and other materials. I don't really understand the significance or newsworthiness of this.
Re: Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
#100When I was a kid I used to launch Estes rockets. They came with mostly balsa wood fins that would frequently break on landing. The balsa wood also absorbed paint unless you hit it with a clear coat first. This for some reason gave me the idea of rubbing Elmer's glue on to it, letting it dry, then sanding it and then painting it. Not only did it paint easily but I never lost a single fin again. The closest I came to t…
I love tips like this. It's one reason why I watch those TV shows like "Detroit Muscle". They're full of things like that that make working on cars so much easier and more effective.
For example, the usual method for replacing the gasket in an automatic transmission, which is on the bottom of the car, is to remove the transmission. This is because it is impossible to hold all the balls and springs in place to put the cover on while it is upside down. The trick shown is to use a bit of vaseline to "glue" the parts in place. The vaseline will dissolve in the trans fluid and won't affect it. Voila! You save a lot of time.