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Gabriel Levine's avatar

Good morning, Anne. An arresting but somehow pleasant depiction of the spine being removed. Once its place between the hips is "settled," it seems more natural to move it around a little.

Talk of laffy taffy snapp(y)ing and high wires calls to mind a recent conversation I had at work about the micron-scale dynamics of slurry preparation as part of the battery manufacturing process. Even slurries have internal structure. Strands of polymer and carbon several hundreds of times thinner than a human hair wrapping their way around particles that are merely ten times thinner, all while being agitated furiously or not so furiously. The key is to stretch the strands and flail them about with much energy, without whipping so aggressively that they break into pieces.

Some terrifically cool pictures in Figures 2, 3, 5, and 6, visible in the right hand Figures tab here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ente.202100367

The lithium is moving in and out of that, whenever the phone or car is charging or discharging.

But the method for control of this microscale behavior is, effectively, identical to the mixing settings on a household stand mixer.

Apropos, consider this famous poem by a fluid dynamicist, describing the essential insight of the field:

"Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity."

Also, you can be sure that laffy taffy manufacturers and wire manufacturers pay a great deal of attention to stress-strain behavior: https://www.linearmotiontips.com/mechanical-properties-of-materials-stress-and-strain/

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