Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that really lights your fire.

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me are:

I'm Aaron, and as I lose my hearing and am forced to start learning sign language, which I am in fact terrible at, I’ve realized that a hand job from a deaf person technically counts as oral…

I'm Steve, and I was exposed to covid again last weekend, but this time I did not get it, so yea for vaccines MFr’s.

Round Table

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This Week’s Beer

I dunno about you lot but I’m drinking a Guinness-Bodington’s black and tan in honor of one of my headlines… kind of. - 10

Steve: Tommyknocker’s Blood Orange IPA Idaho Springs, CO at 6% 55 IBU -7

Shea: Alaskan Midnight Hazy IPA Juneau, Alaska, 6% -8

Headlines

HL1: Found The Jedi

I’m willing to bet that everyone who listens to this show has not only seen Star Wars but at some point in your life had an epic lightsaber battle when the wrapping paper roll ran out.

Because the real gift of the season is an empty cardboard tube and someone to whack with it.

One YouTuber, Alex Lab, has taken things to the next level, winning a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating the world’s first, properly “retractable” lightsaber.

Now, before we get all mired in the physics of it, no, it’s not a “light” saber in the literal sense, it uses hydrogen. But it does do a lot of lightsaber-y things, including really looking the part! It’s based on Starkiller’s saber from The Force Unleashed — and he did a hell of a job, it looks screen-ready.

Using an electrolyzer, a device that generates and compresses hydrogen and oxygen without a mechanical compressor, he was able to pack 30 seconds of hydrogen into the handle. The saber generates a three-ish-foot plasma stream of roughly 2,800°C (5,072°F) which is hot enough to cut steel - albeit not as quickly as in the films. And, per Alex, “plasma is a stream of high ironized particles so this lightsaber can also attract lightning and other high voltage charges,” which he demos in the video with a small arc of electricity.

It’s not perfect yet though, only running for 30 seconds, not cutting as cleanly as a real lightsaber — or even the much hotter Hacksmith version — and there’s that little drawback of, as Alex explains “sometimes the lightsaber just blows up in your hand because of hydrogen flashback.”

So, other than that, lightsaber. Done. Check out the video in the show notes, it’s pretty impressive.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAL6BUl6-rM&list=PLWDlqkmKieaqgtG0Oc8EoC5TmTUoxPOa3* https://www.iflscience.com/technology/youtuber-wins-world-record-for-worlds-first-retractable-lightsaber/?fbclid=IwAR0GjhtnVQiZIyuSNxSjcEYwXYB4NteNBxLILuSpzjg2Ui7oD3ARr6KVBb0

HL2: Rarities.

Flash is fast, so fast that he, “can perceive events that last for less than an attosecond,” or roughly the time it takes light to traverse a water molecule. The shortest time we can measure. Though his top speed is measured in The Human Race as something like 23.8 tredecillion times the speed of light. Dr. Manhattan has “witnessed events so tiny and so fast they can hardly be said to have occurred at all.”