Gizmo Quiz

Sorry it's late

[inbound]

Hi everyone,

Sorry the gizmo quiz is late, I had a hard drive failure and a real panic about data I had not backup up recently. Thankfully I retrieved the data.

It should be ready in 5 minutes.

[inbound]

The hand blown bit is correct too

[jecasc]

Makes holes into the glass.

[httpwebwitch]

it also measures the size of a glass bulb

[inbound]

not for holes or measuring

[Key_Master]

Rod optic?

[cowtown.net...]

[Key_Master]

By the way, glass is ceramic (as is porcelain).

[inbound]

Winner!

It's a rod optic (a primitive glass blowing mould):

See [users.ticnet.com...]

[D_Blackwell]

Slumping?

[httpwebwitch]

arrrrgh! I was looking for a picture of that.

congrats

[inbound]

Glass is a ceramic.. Oops. Sorry if that put people off

When that was asked I had to consult Google and it seems that glass and ceramics are seen as different by some high PR sites.

[inbound]

Congratulations, there wasn't much to go on when looking at the picture. I had some more obscure things too, but I thought that was bad enough.

[httpwebwitch]

that was one of the best gizmos yet

very challenging. my first guess (that I didn't post) was a worm attractor, because it looked like there was an electric cord running into it in one of the pictures

[Key_Master]

Haha, yep it shows that PR isn't everything. Such a technical name for such a simple and primitive tool.

I'll host the next gizmo quiz Saturday or Monday depending on my schedule (with 24 hours notice of course).

[D_Blackwell]

Excellent! Almost impossible to make the gizmo too hard. Look at how quickly the sharks move in for the kill. The poor gizmo never had a chance:((

[lawman]

>>By the way, glass is ceramic (as is porcelain).

The term ceramic comes from the Greek word for pottery. It is used to describe a broad range of materials that include glass, enamel, concrete, cement, pottery, brick, porcelain, and chinaware. This class of materials is so broad that it is often easier to define ceramics as all solid materials except metals and their alloys that are made by the high-temperature processing of inorganic raw materials.

Ceramics can be either crystalline or glass-like. They can be either pure, single-phase materials or mixtures of two or more discrete substances. Most ceramics are polycrystalline materials, with abrupt changes in crystal orientation or composition across each grain in the structure. Ceramics can have electrical conductivities that resemble metals, such as ReO3 and CrO2.

[chemed.chem.purdue.edu...]

BTW, I don't know what all of the above means, but it sounds like if it's solid and not a metal, it's ceramic. :)

[Key_Master]

Too bad we can sweeten the deal for winners of the Gizmo Quiz. Maybe a 30 minute q&a session with Matt Cutts could be offered as a prize.

Wishful thinking. :)

[D_Blackwell]

LOL. I see that I wasn't the only one curious about the parsing of 'ceramic' and 'glass', though way slower to go and take a look.

Ceramics are produced by heating natural earth until it changes form (without melting -- glasses are formed by earth heated until it melts and then cools).

Answers.com [answers.com]

Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org]

Looks like purists and/or parsers could go to town with the nuances between these, and other, related (some more than others) substances.