# We made rock candy... in a laboratory

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Tech Ingredients
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG9YgcQOmp8
- **Дата:** 03.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 1:12:46
- **Просмотры:** 6,407
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52200

## Описание

We're going live at 6:00PM ET today Sunday 05/03/2026

Find us on Patreon our website and twitter/x:
https://www.patreon.com/techingredients
https://www.techingredients.com/
https://x.com/t_ingredients

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

Pop, pop. Uh, say something. You want me to say something? Yep. All right. Well, hello, everybody. Again, uh, hopefully you you're getting us. We're all messed up here. We'll see if we can — Yeah, that this is not the optimal, uh, situation. No, not at all. Okay. Uh, now, what about now? Can you hear me now? Louder and clearer now? Now you're talking. We can hear you now. Great. Okay. Let's not mess with anything Yeah. — The demons This video was, uh, somewhat challenging to produce, but far more difficult to upload. And I don't know if you heard any of the initial bring-in that I did, but, uh, just as a short summary If you can do it and do it again, if you want. — Yeah, I think I will, because one of the things a number of people commented on after the video we posted yesterday was that we had a long gap, and everybody was wondering what happened to us. Well, the content is still being produced, but, uh, we undertook a program or a plan to begin re- releasing all of our videos on Saturday mornings, and then doing a live stream the following Sunday, the next day. Giving people time to watch it, and then join us for the live stream to ask questions, comments, criticisms, that sort of thing. Well, one of the problems that introduces when you have very large videos like we do, which is long videos at 4K, you end up with a problem where if there's even a tiny little glitch in the upload, uh, YouTube will just shut it down uh, will just erase it and you have to start

### Segment 2 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

all over again. Well, that happened a fair number of times. I don't know if it was the internet here or it was YouTube's recent purging of a lot of AI systems or I don't know who's to blame but nevertheless as a consequence by limiting us to Saturday self limiting ourselves to Saturday releases what that meant is that we missed a couple of Saturdays because the video didn't go up in time. So that was the sort of major excuse and now we're having a little bit of a challenge with the live stream with the same sort of thing where it's kind of glitching and getting kind of a little funky. So we'll check into our computers and make sure it's not us and we can talk to YouTube to see if there's anything that we are doing that's introducing this but with that in mind we're starting a little bit late but I'm going to get on to the major topic. Now as Alex had said he'll read the comments and if you have any questions you want to make any comments they do roll past very fast and so it's not so much a money thing but if you do a super chat it pauses long enough for the moderator to look at it for Alex and hi Linda. And allows everybody to get their more important questions in front of me so that I can address them. So if you've got an important comment you want to make or something you really want an answer to put it in the super chats because that does bring it up more readily. Now one of the major sort of questions people had about the rock candy video was um because they have a lot of experience with this. This is not something we invented and there's a lot of YouTube videos out there about this. And the reason we decided to approach it like this was that a lot of the videos give you sort of an overview just a general heat some sugar and water up in a pot and throw a piece of string in there and you can grow a nice of rock candy. And I thought I had saw that when I was a kid and it didn't seem to me that it was that complicated but it never worked very well. So then obviously I thought I wonder if I could do that a little bit better. And once you get into it you start to look for ways that you can improve a project. You take an underlying principle and then you start applying it looking for the problems in the details and once you identify some of these things then you find the solutions. And because of that it became interesting enough I decided I'm going to make a video about this. So that was sort of the origin of the video and in the process a lot of the other principles that I covered like the principles of the triboluminescence and the principles of heating and cooling and super saturation all began to kind of rear their heads and I decided that would be a good opportunity to cover some of these interesting side issues in the context of doing the video. It makes it educational but it keeps it entertaining and also justifies some of the things that you do and the tricks that you use to make it work. So anyway the video was a lot of fun and we will be trying to mix and match a lot of the content that we give over time that includes both you know the big you see the big microwave dish behind me as well as the laser systems and you know the cooking and just to keep it interesting with the underlying theme being physics engineering technology how do things really work when you go down to the real base level so that it empowers you to be able to say okay I like what he did but I think he should have done it this way you know why I did it the way I did and you know that you're not sort of starting from scratch. You have a good working model that you can use to do other things. So in any case I don't know if there are any questions that people have specifically that I can address or — Well two things um I uh thanks um is it Rowo? I I don't know how to pronounce your name but thank thanks for the five and we do plan on doing the um uh any of those conversations that we have with Patreon uh we would like to do that. It's does take uh little bit of extra effort yeah. — Yeah exactly. Yeah. And but no that was a fun too because in the private conversations you can then spend more time on a person's question. You don't have thousands of people sharing and you dig into you know John's question for an hour and a half and then you know 14 other people don't get their — Exactly. questions answered. So that private forum is just like having a conversation around a laboratory or around a school right? Yeah I agree. Yeah we will. Yeah and then Cliff thanks for the 10 bucks. The candy episode was great. It proved you aren't locked down to lasers and rockets. Uh BTW

### Segment 3 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

I Thank you very much. — Yeah my wife was a little bit shocked when I came home and she said my God did you sign up for the Marines? Um but no I like it too because it's less likely that it get caught up in [snorts] machinery um but at the same time yeah we're definitely going to continue with the high energy stuff because it's all fundamentally the same kind of concept is like how does it work? And then you just apply you know those principles and you can scale them up to huge energies or at the you know nano scale but it's the same basic principles of electromagnetic radiation electronic interaction between particles between sugar molecules and how can you use these things? So like the air conditioning system how do you make it more efficient? Like the laser system how do you defend yourself against you know weapons and that sort of thing. And then the sugar how do you get kids and students and people maybe with a little less experience here introduced to a topic but at the same time you got to make it fun and tasty enough that people want to you know pursue it and at the same time they start to learn some of these things. So it's education it's entertainment it's just us sharing fun projects that we do because I like what I'm doing. This isn't being done just because you know it's a way to have a channel. The channel is secondary to the projects. Well and that was something that I always found interesting is like when you first started doing the you know YouTube videos you got some people that were like I guess you could say people that wouldn't normally watch YouTube videos but they found your YouTube videos and then used that and applied it to their daily life. Yeah I think one of the things is that when we first started the channel it wasn't started sort of like let's start a YouTube channel. What it was there's a group here in New England. Um it was a laser show group and I've given this story before so I'll try to you know make it succinct. But it was called Photon Lexicon. It was a bunch of people involved with low energy amateur kinds of lasers and we had forums. And when we would get together and say okay what kind of little laser projector are you doing or where did you purchase that laser that you have for your display laser or your little cutting um table uh we would communicate frequently but when people would do projects what would happen is that you know you can't always get together with 15 people that are you know hundreds of miles apart. So we started putting on YouTube little shorts for each other. Uh so that we could see the project and the progress so that when we got together everybody was sort of up to date. Because we put it on YouTube it started to draw in a whole bunch of people that were not involved specifically in that group that had been set up independently. That was a working group. And so that's what started or stimulated the whole idea of doing the videos and then as we moved out I still have the love of the lasers and you know a lot of the background skills and everything like that. So the origin of the channel was mostly uh incidental it was accidental and the growth was big enough and the feedback was so positive that it seemed like it would be a good idea to continue to do it. So we're going to do more videos like this which are the lightweight educational fun you can do it yourself you don't need to spend thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours to build something. And the same big projects that we're doing where we need to do collaborations in order to be able to handle all the different technical aspects. So we're going to keep it up and down mix and match just to keep you wondering what's going to be coming next. And I can tell you a little bit about what's coming next when people are interested. Uh something interesting cuz I think this could be a fun one. — Okay. — Um so 50 caliber guy uh taking grains It gives us a little bit of a hint okay. — Well it isn't but um hey guys in your video poor man's clean room you remember? Yep yep. — had a laser behind you in the intro. Was that a new dye laser and are you going to make a video about it? Well I don't know if um I did any follow up. Do you remember this is probably nine years ago or so we did the large dye laser that is located still located in the major part of the shop outside of our house. And I haven't used it for a couple of years, actually. I'm storing multimeters on it and power supplies and everything like that. You

### Segment 4 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

know what I'm talking about. You have an old mill or a drill press, and that's where you put your coffee. But nevertheless, um the reason I've sort of moved away from the dye laser projects, there's some relationship to this some of this stuff, and we could get into that. But it's with the rapid increase in the solid-state lasers, the laser diodes, the frequency-doubled laser diodes, you know, where you can go from red to green, blue. Um it gives you enough wavelength selectivity. The efficiency is far higher. Uh they can be continuous wave, and there's no toxic dyes that have to be pumped and circulated. And it's just a much easier way to be able to use the lasers, not just prove it can work. And I think that's another issue with a lot of projects is that when you build something to demonstrate a principle, you don't worry about robustness or convenience or um you know, what are you going to do with it afterward? You just can I make it work? Can I make the rocket actually fly? It doesn't matter that it, you know, doesn't land right. But once you get into using the lasers for another application, now it has to become a tool, not the focus, but just the support for another project. And that's part of the reason why uh the dye laser is probably something I'm not going to revisit because I've got two fiber lasers behind here that are far more powerful, and they're literally hit the switches, and everybody put on their goggles, and now let's, you know, start taking drones out of the air. As opposed to me spending 2 days changing dye solutions and checking, you know, energy levels and replacing flash lamps and that sort of thing. So, no, I don't think I am going to revisit that. But if people are interested in the principle that actually is similar to what we did when we did the triboluminescence with the crystals, uh we could revisit that because there are a lot of other um materials and substances that can generate light. Uh remember the video we did where I had the falling water droplets? — Yes. Remember that? And uh in addition to that, somebody commented, it was probably just an hour or two ago, that uh if you've ever done sandblasting, you take a sandblaster and you're going to blast some metal. If the room gets dark enough, you can actually see a blue glow appearing in the stream of sand that's being captured by the high-pressure air and jetted out and abrading the surface. You can actually see a blue glow. The blue glow comes from the friction between the different crystals as they're being rocketed toward the surface. In addition, if you take a regular shop vac and you have plastic particles, even do it with little pieces of Styrofoam, and you suck them up into the vacuum, you can get sparks, you can get shocks. Because again, these insulating particles are rubbing past each other and generating a charge, just like your feet do on a carpet in dry air in the winter when you've got socks on. And so, there are a number of different um uh common uh experience um methods that can be used to generate high voltages, sparks, and therefore light because they stimulate the nitrogen in the atmosphere. So, we might visit some of those other alternatives because they are kind of impressive, and they make everybody sort of scratch their head and say, "How did that happen? Like, what is Why am I getting all these static shocks? Or, you know, why is it glowing blue? " So, we will get into that, and I can get back into some of the fluorescent dyes. There's a huge variety that we could have used for the dye candy, but I wanted to stay with things that were obviously food safe. I don't want to put some toxic rhodamine dyes in here that would be absolutely beautiful, uh but would make everybody sick, even though I could demonstrate the colors. It's not something you're going to want to do or certainly share with anybody. But there are some other dyes that are, you know, possibilities. One person brought up um quinine sulfate, tonic water. Put a UV light on a gin and tonic, and it glows bright. Um so, there are other com- chemicals we could use, but I picked the two that I thought were the leading contenders when we did this simply because I know people can get them, and I know they're safe. Uh of video that What would you say would be the most likely video that you would try to recreate, though? Recreate? Um — you had to pick one. Oh, that actually is a pretty good question. Um the rocket motors uh were pretty interesting, but again, we got to the scale where there's no way to test them. Uh they were getting too powerful, and we live in a fairly, you know, um mountainous area, and, you know, it's rural, and there aren't sort of areas that we could find that would be safe to do this. — I but I'm going to make it hard for you. You have to pick one. All right. Let's see. —

### Segment 5 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

— You have to pick one. — Okay. Probably one that I think we could revisit that I think would be pretty interesting uh is some of the jet engines. Uh I think the jet engines were fun because um I'm currently working on a couple of them, and uh they are at extreme limits of the scale. One that you could do uh run on your dining room table safely, and one that we can't safely test in this warehouse or even near it. And I'm working on both. And so, I like the idea because it brings in a whole bunch of technology. It brings in obviously all the aerodynamics involved. It brings in some of the thermodynamics involved. And they're fun. They just that whine of the engine, you know, revving up is a lot of fun. And potentially, there's something you can put on a go-kart or something else, and that would be fun, too. So, I would say the jet engine. Okay. Um now, would you ever do anything um besides that the jet engine? Because that's something that, you know, you can test inside of a place, but not apply to something. So, — What Well, some of them I can test inside of a place, like we did with some of the smaller jets. Right. Sure. — Um but the thing is, if I think what we should try to focus on a little bit more, and maybe people can give us some feedback. Some of the projects that we do are expensive enough, complicated enough, and the scale is large enough that it's interesting to see it, like when um what's-his-name? Um I'll I'll bring it up. No, um I'll bring it up in just a sec. But when you do something where it's just sort of a visual uh entertainment, and it's great to watch it and see, you know, how they were able to manage it. But it isn't something you could ever do. I think those kinds of videos are fun for me, but I think they're probably little a little bit less entertaining because it's just like watching an event, something you couldn't do or you wouldn't want to, you know, put in the effort. So, I think I want to focus on doing more frequent, easier videos like this that people can then apply. I think that would be a good um way to direct some of the future videos that we do, but not solely. Yeah, okay. And that might be actually a good thing that I could do right now. Um — Okay. So, uh I'm guessing mo- most of you preferred to see uh very like scientific videos and things like that versus, you know, like the rock candy is interesting, but it's not very scientific. Well, I think what it is you can take anything, and you can make it um scientific if you look at the underlying principles because that's the underlying theme of any of the videos we do. It's revealing and demonstrating the underlying principles that make the thing happen. That I think is key, and that's why I just didn't stop with the end of the rock candy saying it's delicious. But there are certain topics that become so technical and so scientific that there really is no sort of, you know, visual candy, so to speak, that can be used as an entertainment. And so, therefore, you have to have technically inclined people to watch the video in order to appreciate some of what we're doing, and also not to get bogged down in what is a What is a transistor? You know, that sort of thing because you don't want to leave them out in the cold, but if you go into that much detail, the video is going to be 2 days long if you have to get everybody up to sort of a graduate level before you even begin to understand what we're doing. So, I think it is important to mix and match it because, you know, you might not like all of our videos, and certain videos are, you know, ones that you want to watch. I think we should continue to produce everything. I'm mostly looking at uh whether or not we should vary the emphasis toward videos that are more easily done by, you know, somebody who's got a few bucks and a few hours, or if we should pursue these large videos that are going to involve collaborations with um you know, other YouTube providers in order to be able to, you know, accomplish them. Does anybody have a suggestion or a preference, I should say? And then that might influence some of the types of videos that we produce. The other thing, too, is that with a number of our videos, I always have to remember safety. You know, bring up the safety issues because some of these things, they get pretty dangerous. And so, you don't want people to think, "Oh, well, he made it seem so easy. I'll go ahead and plug this in and see what happens. Uh not a good idea, especially if you've got younger viewers or maybe people with a little bit, you know, a little overestimating their capabilities. So, I always want to include safety. And

### Segment 6 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

when you do the larger projects, they almost always involve enough different aspects that there's going to be safety issues that have to be brought out. And that's part of what I have to get a little bit better at because uh you know, you don't want to bore people with another safety warning, but at the same time you don't want to avoid it and somebody gets hurt. That'd be the worst thing. I would not want that to happen. Now, one of the um issues that I sort of saw in the comments, too, about the rock candy, was uh my failed attempt to use the uh thermoelectric coolers in order to try to induce the faster growth. And a lot of people uh sort of said, wait, wait, maybe you could, you know, do this or modify it this way. Well, I did it as a larf a larp for laughs. Larp is as a larp. Uh to see if I could um you know, do something really different and see if I could all of a sudden produce rock candy in an hour and make it a lot more rewarding for somebody to do because they don't have to wait a week. But so therefore, what I did is I showed you the fact that it didn't work in one example, but I tried it about a dozen times. And I tried it at low levels, medium levels, high levels, different sugar concentrations, different absolute temperatures in the surrounding environment, and nothing really made a difference. It was really fundamentally you had to spend time. And I shared that uh because I thought it was important to see that not everything that I do, I think it through and I have this vision, but it doesn't always, you know, pan out. But sometimes you can't know that until you launch the rocket. You know, you have to do it in order to find out where you got it wrong. And then afterwards, you look back and you said, huh, how naive, you know, that it wouldn't work. You should have known that. But you don't know what ahead of time. And if you avoid ever trying, then you never occasionally develop something really neat or something that is unique. Nobody's ever done it before. So, I shared that just because I think it's important not to get discouraged when you're doing some of these things and say the first time you do this, it doesn't look anything like what I achieved. Trust me, what I first started out with doesn't look like anything that I showed you. Uh it started out pretty rough and it ended up getting better with, you know, more practice. And uh it was fun because a lot of them end up getting eaten. So. And the other thing I do like is some of the application to cooking. You know, some of the um stuff we did like, you know, with the brewing and the sake and the this, uh cooking I think is attractive because the science of cooking is sort of like extremely applied chemistry. You know, you have to know how things interact, oils, waters, temperatures, you know, that sort of thing. And um using different techniques and applying them to cooking aspects or aspects of cooking, I think is a very um interesting um way to get across some of the technology, but also something that maybe allows somebody to improve their recipes. Um and I like cooking. So, it would be a lot of fun, I think, to maybe do a few of these videos uh in interspersed with some of our bigger, you know, larger projects that we're involved in. So, cooking, um maybe more frequent videos that uh have educational value, not just, you know, entertainment value. And at the same time, not changing the fact that we're still going to do big projects because I love them and you know, that's what motivates me to get back in the shop in the morning. Now, one of the um things that I thought I would uh mention here is that when we were doing the rock candy video, uh the one of the issues or one of the sort of interesting um errors I made is that I had said at one point, you just need granulated sugar. And at some other point, I think I was just rushing through, you know, my explanation, I said powdered sugar. Uh you definitely don't want to use powdered sugar. Uh the reason is that it contains cornstarch and those particles are just like dirt or dust or any other potential seed that will rapidly increase the parasitic crystallization. So, that's one correction I want to make. I have another correction and that was when I was explaining the triboluminescent effect, I misspoke. When I said that the bonds between the sugar molecules are covalent bonds. They actually aren't. Um there are basically three categories of bonds between um molecules or excuse me, yeah

### Segment 7 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

between molecules. One is a covalent bond. Like in a diamond, it is where literally electrons are shared between one molecule and another one. They're literally being shared. The on the other extreme are ionic bonds where uh like in sodium chloride, this is an ionic bond. The sodium readily loses an electron and a chloride uh atom readily gains an electron. They each have a different affinity for the electrons. When they approach each other, the chloride grabs onto an electron and becomes electronegative. The sodium that lost it becomes electropositive. And they are electrically attracted to each other. That's an ionic bond. The bond that occurs when you crystallize sugar is called a hydra- hydrogen uh bond and the way it works is it's somewhere in between, which is no electrons are literally shared between the molecules like in uh a covalent bond or in an ionic bond. But what happens is because the molecules have a lot of hydrogen or hydroxyl groups on them, they are easily polarized and so the electrons will shift to one side of the molecule toward its neighbor and be pushed away uh because of the orientation of the neighbor to the other side of that molecule and they will be attracted electrically attracted, but no electrons are actually transferred. When you fracture or separate these things very quickly, what ends up happening is that field that has been established in the stable crystal is disrupted. And that field that field change is what causes the electron transfer from one molecule to the other one. That's how you get the spark. That's how you generate the nitrogen glow. And so, it's not a covalent bond, it is not an ionic bond, it's a hydrogen polar hydrogen bond that's actually involved with the triboluminescent effect in sucrose. So, little error on my part, but you know, at least I figured it out eventually. So, I just wanted to share that with you so that, you know, you got that one straight. And uh another I think interesting thing about the uh triboluminescence, people had commented on this, is that it is so dim and because we're not using an image intensifier or something other than our standard cameras, which are quite good and quite sensitive to low light, but we had to push them to their limits. And when you do so, they will generate some artifacts that can occur in the screen. And if you take a look, a careful look at the image, uh you'll see these flashes that appear to occur around the larger sparks that are being generated by the crushing of the crystals. Those little color dots or pixels that are glowing also are multicolored. You'll notice like some are blue, some are green, some are red. That's not from the triboluminescent effect. That is a camera artifact effect by pushing the Lumix cameras to their limit. And we could probably have tried to filter that out, but we wanted to give you the raw images because we didn't want to mess too much with uh you know, the images and make it seem like it was AI or artificial. So, we left the artifacts in there, but those are artifacts that I didn't even notice until we actually had put the video up. So, I apologize for not having put a little note there about that. Yeah, and I I was doing the all of the video editing and I didn't fake anything. Um but when I looked at it, it did take a long time for me to make sure that you could see the actual uh artifacts, but be able to see any of the flashes that you normally wouldn't be able to see and that's why we also um sped it up. And so, it was going at I think 140 frames per second. Okay. — if I had to guess, I th- I think that's what I set it to. — And I think there's a there's another uh like issue in there, but let because that pertains. And that is that the effect, the triboluminescent effect is fast, really fast, like in the picosecond range. — Yeah. Your eyes are slow. They sort of accumulate light as, you know, your retina is sensitive. So, a flash that happens in a picosecond, a microsecond, a nanosecond, or a millisecond to your eyes looks the same. You can't tell the difference because whether it's coming in a very small fraction of the time or a very large fraction of the time

### Segment 8 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00]

it's still applying a certain amount of light to your retina. So, you see the flash. Not so with the camera. And so, a lot of the flashes that we were producing don't actually get into the camera because it's sort of downloading its frame. Yeah. And so, it's brighter to my eyes when I'm crushing them than it is on the camera, which made it doubly challenging because we're only catching maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of every one of the sparks that were coming out. — Yeah. So, I was kind of disappointed when I saw it on the film because I thought, "Huh, it doesn't seem as bright as it looked like to me. " But, I think that would be the fair explanation is it would the camera just simply missed the flash. Yeah, and that's also why I uh I split every time that I saw a flash, I deleted all of the frames between those The dead frames. — Yeah, exactly. So, it wasn't really so much sped up as it was compressed if that kind of makes sense. — yeah. So, uh those were kind of interesting questions that people had asked, and some people were thinking, "Are you producing x-rays? You know, are you producing these high-energy, you know, particles? " You may be producing some other wavelengths other than the 3 to 400 nm that is the primary wavelength produced by the spark um as it interacts with nitrogen. But, a spark has a very broad bandwidth, and depending on the intensity of the spark, it can cover a very large um frequency range. But, it isn't so much that uh it gets into the visible, so you can't really see it without the dye assisting you. As a result, I think the likelihood of going way, way, way higher energy into the x-rays or something like that, not likely. You're probably going to get a photon every couple of hours at those kinds of frequencies simply because of the distribution around the main energy output, which is at about 3 to 400 nm, which is what um the nitrogen responds to. So, interesting. It would be also interesting to see if we didn't include the nitrogen. Say we flushed the entire inside of the chamber with uh say just oxygen, so I obviously don't black out. But, um if we didn't have any nitrogen there, we probably wouldn't have seen the flashes because the nitrogen responds very well to that wavelength range. And uh it produces light that is very energetic and therefore uh can stimulate the dyes. Different um gases will probably have different effects. And that might be something interesting to do. We've got a lot of this stuff, so I might try uh some safe gases. You know, I'm not going to use propane. hydrogen or something just in case the sparks are big enough. I don't think it's a problem. Uh but, famous last words. I'm not going to put a flammable gas all around my head and try to generate sparks just because it would be interesting if you know what I mean. — why not? Yeah. Well, maybe what I'll do is I'll get a volunteer and then I'll tell — Uh never mind. — Okay, you're right. So, uh in any case, um I'm if we aren't getting any kind of like sort of people have a strong opinion one way or another, we're probably going to proceed with our videos in the same way that we have been running them in the past, which is try to mix and match topics, mix and match scale of projects. And the next project that we're going to be videoing is an upgrade to the microwave defense system. Um the reason if you see that big dish behind me uh we're doing that is because — Well, you want to point to it? Uh let's see. Can you see it? Let's see. You see me on the screen? Uh wait a minute. Are we delayed a little bit? — Yeah, you are delayed, but Okay. Yeah, yeah. — Got it. All right, so I'll point to it, and then we'll wait for the delay. Okay. So, you see the dish behind me right now? That is an upgrade to the microwave system uh that we demonstrated a few months ago when we used it to take down drones. And I probably would have just sat with that video thinking, "That was pretty cool. It works, and we can defend against that. " When we followed up on our um uh the next video on making uh radar-absorbing, microwave-absorbing protective shielding using epoxy, carbonyl iron, and graphite. And the shielding does work. It's very effective. But, one of the things that sort of stimulated this was the fact that uh I'm sure you're aware of the conflicts that are going on around the world, specifically in Iran and in the Ukraine. And I'm not going to get into the politics or wherever anybody stands with respect to that. But, it does highlight some of the military tactics and the development in these uh

### Segment 9 (45:00 - 50:00) [45:00]

offensive and defensive systems. And the two things that I think stand out uh beyond anything else is the rapid increase in the amount of dependency on AI. Artificial intelligence being used to augment human or even supplant human intelligence in controlling some of these systems. It makes them more efficient, and it makes them faster. The other development, I'm sure you're aware of this, is the huge proliferation of drones. These things can be built inexpensively uh and in large numbers, and they don't risk uh pilots or human beings. And so, they can be placed into very high-risk environments, and you're not going to get any mutinies. And so, as a result, I thought it might be make sense to see if we could uh improve the performance of a system like the one that we've got behind uh the one that we demonstrated by increasing its range. And so, what I've done is I've replaced the old antenna that we've got uh in the previous video that's used sort of as a beam limiter. It's not really an optical system. effective antenna. It's more like an aperture that just let the microwaves travel to the other side of the building where we weren't and was able to take down the drones at maybe 7, 8 m away. Now, we couldn't test the absolute range of this because we would have had to go outside. And for safety, we decided that it would be a bad idea to try to do this outside. I moved it over to another location where I could safely test it at a longer distance, and it did have a limited range of about mm 10 to I would call it maybe 15 to 25 m. So, yeah, it goes farther, but at that point, you might be just about as effective with a baseball if you want to take down a drone. What you really need is a range of hundreds of meters to maybe a couple of kilometers. And you're not going to do that with a beam that's spreading out so quickly that the intensity at 10 or 20 m is detectable, but not effective. And so, we're going to get into using optical systems uh to actually draw the beam down, collimate it, and even focus it at a long range, giving us the capability of doing something literally practical to defend against some of these systems. And it introduces a whole other idea of like, "Well, then how do you protect the systems? " And you know, what do you do? How do you test this? That's what we're going to be showing you in the next video. It's almost ready to film, and so, that's why I'm pretty much up to speed on all the aspects of it. And we're just sort of fine-tuning some of the adjustments and making sure that it will work fine. But, that's going to be the next video. And I'm really looking forward to it because I think you're going to enjoy some of the neat little tweaks and um modifications I made. And still ended up spending a total of about $70. So, I think you'll find it interesting, and that's what we're going to be doing next. And then, we've got another video that we're going to be doing on cooking. Uh we're going to be uh comparing the effects or the uh qualities of different foods as they are cooked by different popular methods, some of which I believe are overrated, some of which are surprisingly underappreciated. And it might again uh be an easy way for you to improve some of your cooking if you know really what's going on when you use these different devices. So, I think that's going to be an interesting, you know, comeback from the uh World of Warcraft and uh get back into the kitchen. So, I got some stuff on the uh horizon. I think you're going to like them. And I don't think we're going to have the same kind of gaps that we had between uh our last video and this video simply because I think uh we've troubleshooted enough of the problems — It's getting better. It's Yeah, it's getting better. Yeah. And YouTube, I'm not going to complain about them because they have been Uh well, I'll complain a little bit. Uh so, you YouTube um obviously we're on YouTube, but we've had issues uh with them, and I I'm guessing that any of you guys that watch YouTube, you realize that it's like you get either too many ads or something like that where uh you don't appreciate what YouTube does. And we don't either, but it is sort of the the way that we monetize everything that we do. Right. Because if we were to just do this for free, we couldn't afford the warehouse, equipment. We need Every dollar we get goes into the

### Segment 10 (50:00 - 55:00) [50:00]

projects. We don't take anything out of this. But at the same time, it would be too expensive without that support to be able to do this. Yeah. In addition, the reason I said I don't blame YouTube for this is because when we address when we send them request or we have a problem, they're pretty fast to respond. We even have a rep there that Jennifer is the one that helps us out there. And we do get pretty good service from them, but what happens is they help us with a problem and then another one comes up and then another one. And so that creates a lot of delays, but at the same time, we then have more notes on our screen about don't do this, remember what happened when you do this. So I don't think we're going to have quite as many difficulties as we had with this particular video, but there is something that I'm going to I think I'm going to announce this about the Saturdays. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, what we decided was that because of the fact that we will often have to upload several times and if it impacts the ability to meet a scheduled distribution, Saturday mornings, you know, 11:00 or 10:00, if we do that, it can delay the video another week or 2 weeks when your video is already. So for many years we used to just release when we could. We would release them generally in the afternoon or in the evening in the United States and we would then be able to follow up if there was a problem the next day with a re-upload or fix it so there wouldn't be any induced delays caused by our artificial scheduling. But we will stick with the live streams on Sunday nights. That will be fixed simply because it's a day that the warehouse in the industrial park where we're located is quiet. We're not at work. We don't have any other obligations and I think most of you too would be available to listen to the live stream. So we're going to keep doing them. I love doing them, but we're going to do them on Sundays. The videos will come out when they're ready and that also should minimize some of the delays and I think the Saturday was worth it to see if it would make sense, but it really didn't seem to make that much of a difference and it imposed a lot of burdens on us. So that's another change we're going to be making. — Yeah. And one of the things that we're planning to do is I'm hopefully going to visit Miters in the near future. Alex and I will go down there. Yeah. And touch base with some of the people that we've met in the past and see if there are any people that at MIT that might be interested not necessarily in collaborating, but even producing some of the content for a video and having a platform where you can get input from people that have more knowledge than certainly than I do about certain areas of technology and science. And at the same time give people an opportunity to sort of interact with them and get to know them. And then we also may do some road trips, do some tours of not just companies, but you know, even locations just to see if there would be some interesting potential collaborations that involve visiting other YouTubers as well as visiting sites that might be interesting. You might want to see a tour of a technology group like we did with the lasers couple of months ago. Not real popular video, but it was a niche market. And so as a consequence, I think it was fun to do. I think it's valuable to do it. And we can certainly try to combine those things with the other mix. So got a lot on our plate and a lot of potential. So we're going to be at this for a long time and we're going to stick with YouTube and we're just going to try to improve both our upload frequency, try to minimize some of the glitches that we're having and then, you know, share some of our thoughts when we do it on the live streams. Also, we may have some guests here, too. Yeah, more guests and I think it'll be more fun, you know, just being able to randomly like upload, you know, [clears throat] not trying to upload at a certain frequency or anything like that. It's like you have a good video, just put it out there. — Right. If you try to meet a schedule, then you've got another constraint and that might impact, you know, Alex rushes through an editing job and then it doesn't look good or something like that. And plus it something Well, and I just wanted to say if you look back to some of our old videos, I was doing that recently and they looked really good and I was like surprised at how good they looked and I was like, oh, I should do that again. Yeah. Okay. You

### Segment 11 (55:00 - 60:00) [55:00]

know, that sort of thing. Yeah, it's like they say with chefs, you know, the difference between a home cook and a chef is that a chef tastes all the way along the cooking process, you know, like is it enough salt, you know, is you know, whatever. But one of the um interesting things about doing the uploads when we do them is that I always focus on the fact that we're here in New England and so we're doing this live stream starting at 6:00 p. m. Eastern time. Half of our audience is not in the United States. Right. And the United States itself is big. So in California, we're releasing this at 6:00, I mean at 3:00 local time. And in Europe and Asia and the Middle East, these things are coming in at 2:00 in the morning and you know, whatever. So I think focusing on that Saturday release is a bit of a problem because it doesn't really add anything. With the live streams a predictable time I think is useful because that is something that people can watch after the fact. They it's it has to be at a time when we're awake, you know, because we're doing this live. So we are kind of constrained to do this on our local time that works, but not with the release of videos. Whenever they come out, they can come out 24 hours a day and ultimately they're going to have the same number of views and exposure and you're not going to be delayed if you're asleep and you wake up and there's a video that was released 5 hours ago or 8 hours ago or an hour ago, you're not missing anything. So that I think it's a logical approach and no one else seems to be doing this in this field of like projects and technology where they're releasing videos almost as if you've got, you know, a podcast or a news program. They're not doing that. It's just we were wrong, but that's the way you learn as you try it and fail and then admit it. So we're going to get away from the Saturday. Yeah. Is there anything else that people are interested in or should we just call it a night and I think call it um upload No, we're not using a VPN. Uh — I thought about that. We're not using a VPN. No. — So that isn't the issue. Why don't you just check see if there's any other questions before I say so long. Chef's tongue Australia thanks from there. Um candles Well, that was — These aren't. — Yeah. We could put a wick, but it wouldn't burn well. Hey Taking Reigns, love your channel. Love you, too. Thank you. Yeah, love when you Hello from Tennessee. Talking about your Patreon. Well, thanks for the the 10. Yeah, if you can you know, I um post or uh a gift on Patreon, it definitely helps. Yeah, it does because one of the things, I don't know if you've noticed this, but almost every channel now is doing sponsorships. Almost every YouTube channel and I really don't like it as a viewer of YouTube. Part of it is even if you assume that the person themselves really loves the product, it's not related to what they're talking about. So, you know, you're talking about, you know, a nuclear reactor and then all of a sudden you're talking about your favorite coffee. It's disruptive. It's The person might actually like the coffee, but they're not there to hear about coffee. They're here about to hear about nuclear reactors. So that's part of it and then I think a fair number of them are disingenuous. You know, somebody is being encouraged financially to say they like something or this is a wonderful product or something like that. So it it gives a kind of dishonesty to the whole video. Like you wonder, okay, if they're willing to say they like a product that they don't use or they don't like, what are they willing to tell me about like are they faking something or are they doing something that's like dishonest? So I think it has that ramification, too. And it's also unlike an ad where it's sometimes difficult to say speed through them or get past them because um you can't identify it. So, you know, you can't just sort of click, click, click and you know, move on. Right. I don't like the sponsorships, but I think unlike us, we have one advantage and that is we I'm retired, but I've saved up enough money and Alex has a job, but it's kind of like this is a part-time thing. We don't absolutely need the money in order to eat and live. We take whatever financial support you

### Segment 12 (60:00 - 65:00) [1:00:00]

give us and throw it into the projects. So, if we don't get enough financial support, we just have to spread out the projects a little bit or we can't quite take it to the level that we want to. As it should be. Yeah. Yeah, as it should be because it's kind of like that's what YouTube is about. YouTube isn't a replacement for television or cable TV. Yeah. YouTube is a video sharing platform where people interact and they can watch, you know, whatever kind of content they want. And so I don't think it should become like commercial again, broadcast media or anything else where it's commercial driven. Uh and so that's why the Patreon is so important because the Patreon is a means for you to give directly to us rather than YouTube taking a fair fraction of the ad revenue that is inevitable whenever it's done. And it also is a small group that can give feedback. For example, I'll just tell this, I'll admit this. We released this video in a slightly less refined form to the Patreon community that follows us about a week before you saw the video. And we got feedback. And one of the feedbacks that we got was that when we were I was talking about the temperature as the liquid was boiling, remember that? — Oh, I yes. But can I interrupt? — Sure. Yeah. So I want to interrupt because Andrew thanks a bunch for the 10. Did you test the effects of the agitating the sugar water solution while it crystallizes into rock candy? I didn't. Might that help form larger crystals while using the actively cooled sticks? Yeah, that was actually I don't know if you might have actually just I might be responding when I responded about I had done a lot of tests that you never saw and couldn't figure out how to do it better. Um I'll I'll get to that in 1 second. I just wanted to let me finish — Sure, sure. the thought I had about the um Patreon. the Patreon. And that was if you saw the part of the video where the temperature was going up as I was heating the liquid to dissolve it. And because of the nature of the cameras that are set up, Alex is on one camera and we got another camera that's sort of running on its own. I we thought that there would be a very clear image of the temperature reading on the hot plate. And in fact, it was not very clear. I was saying the numbers, but it was just a little flashing red light. You couldn't see it. We get a number of complaints, suggestions from the Patreon community saying we can't see the numbers. It's kind of annoying. So, Alex went back and inserted those boxes where we lifted the numbers out and put them on the screen so that you could see them. And so that's another value of the Patreon community because it's not like members only, which I don't like. It is the idea that we can get some feedback on some of our videos and then improve them when we release them. And then everybody can enjoy that benefit. So, with respect to the agitation um I think there may be some benefit to trying to maintain a very even concentration of the sugar crystals in the liquid. There may be some stratification and that would be the major argument to continuing to mix it because if there was no stratification there's no reason to agitate it or mix it. But as you notice on a number of these different crystal sticks they have a pretty similar diameter all the way [clears throat] along. This is one example where I didn't put a very good coating on the stick. It was very lumpy. I just jammed the stick into the sugar and came out with this big ball of sugar at one end. And as a result, it grew faster at the bottom. Once I discovered the good way to seed the crystals, you'll see how cylindrical these are. That means there's probably not a higher concentration of sugar at the bottom of the container compared to the top. So, I don't think we have stratification. The one problem that you may have with the agitation is there is a possibility that one or two of the crystals that are very delicate and forming on the stick could break away into the surrounding liquid and become a new source of generating parasitic crystallization. A one method that might be used to try to, you know, get good uh crystallization might be to do something with the temperature of the surrounding environment. In other words not cool the

### Segment 13 (65:00 - 70:00) [1:05:00]

stick but warm the liquid and maintain the stick. Maybe it may turn out that the importance of the differential might be different at a higher level versus a lower level. I'm creating a differential that doesn't exist in any of these standard sticks. I'm creating that with the refrigerated stick. But if we were to find out that maybe very near 0° C that small differential gave us bigger crystals versus we run the thing up at body temperature, say 38° C it may turn out that same differential has a different effect. So, it's a two-level thing. You need the differential, that's what the stick's for. Maybe the position of that differential can affect the rapidity. One of the issues though is are you really going to build a refrigerated stick to save some time when this works very well? I don't know that it's probably worth that amount of investigation but now that you've given me the idea, I will probably do some more of that investigation just because now you've got me thinking about it and now I'm like It doesn't hurt. — Darn, I should have tried it. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt, you know, and worst thing that happens is I end up having to eat another piece of rock candy. And I've [clears throat] I've actually I'm starting to get a little sick of them, but you know, you're watching a YouTube video and you're licking your rock candy, it's better than smoking a cigarette. So. Yeah, okay. — Okay. All right. Thanks for everybody for watching. Um I thought it was a good live stream and we had so many issues and all that, but hopefully it'll be better next time. Yeah. Maybe a little smoother and we won't be so stressed out from the uploads and everything like that so we can have a little bit you know, more fun with everything else. Yeah. And if you have any comments that you want to put in not with the live stream, but even about the live stream um time of the day, um format, should we have guests? Should we not? Just put it as a regular comment. I read them all even if they're not live like this and so, you know, we'll follow advice if we think we can and it's good advice. So Sounds good. — Have a great Sunday night and uh we'll see you on the next video. Yeah, you guys too. Okay. So long. —

### Segment 14 (70:00 - 72:00) [1:10:00]

— Shh.