20130705

Oobleck-icious

I'd heard about oobleck quite a while ago, but never experienced it for myself.  Well, a couple of weeks ago, for reasons neither of us can remember, it came up in conversation with a friend of mine.  That might have been it, but a friend of his visited last weekend, and mentioned it to him when they were visiting the Air & Space Museum downtown.

I wasn't there, but they did a small experiment with it that weekend.

But when he came over for our annual barbecue, he cleaned out the corn starch from a local Safeway, and brought all of it over.  We found a decent-sized rubbermaid tub to put it in (18"x24", maybe, and ended up with a depth of four inches or so), and mixed it up on the back patio.

That was amazingly cool, and started being that way while we were still mixing it.  You can put your hand into it easily, but have trouble pulling it out (this was actually a bigger problem when I was trying to step in it).  Or you can punch it, and, if you do it right, end up with a hand still dry.

You can grab a handful, make a ball out of that handful, and it will just drip back between your hands as soon as you try to stop shaping it.  You can run on top of it (and again, keep your feet dry if you're fast enough), then sink into it as soon as you stop moving.

I need to get the video from another friend; I was too busy playing to even take pictures, let alone video.

But he and I will need to try again; I've got some interesting ideas for pictures/videos to get from it.

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