The Blob vs. Magneto: Final, Final Smackdown

My video of Crazy Aaron's Strange Attractor Thinking Putty swallowing a cube of Buckyballs that I featured in an earlier post is my most-watched YouTube video. It's had more than 260,000 views as I write this. It just went through a period of getting more than its usual number of views. One day it had 9,245 views. I was hoping to break 10,000 views in a day but the interest subsided. It gets a lot of comments.

Some of the comments suggest that I make another version of the video and let the putty fully engulf the magnets. I thought that that is a good idea so I tried it again. This time I kept shooting the putty vs. magnets for a full week. There's no way that the very stiff putty will completely wrap itself around my magnets.

I started with just three cubes of Buckyballs being surrounded by the putty. I realized that the action was slowing to a crawl so I added some more magnets. Then some more.

A bug makes a cameo appearance in the Blue Cube about 30 seconds into the video.

I went from taking a shot every two seconds at the beginning of the video to a shot every 45 minutes by the end. I play them back at a rate of 30 frames per second.

I added a timestamp on each frame so we can see how the action proceeds. It really gets slow by the end.



This probably will be my last video featuring Buckyballs and the Thinking Putty. It is a major effort to get them all out of the putty.

Flower Drum Song

Several years ago I showed some pictures of our giant squills in bloom. I mentioned that the flowers sway and twist when they're cut and put in a vase. Ever since I got my intervalometer I've been wanting to make a video of the flowers. But, alas, they took a couple of years off.

They finally bloomed again this year. They were sending up their flower stalks just before we took a week-long vacation. I was afraid that they would have all gotten too far along before we got back to make a video. Fortunately one stalk had not yet started opening and another had just started.

I cut those two flowers, put them in a vase in the living room, set my desk lights on the floor in front of them and set up the camera.

I set the intervalometer to take a picture of the squills every five minutes. The camera snapped away for just over seven days. The camera's battery finally died the eighth night. It had taken more than 2100 shots. The pictures are played at a rate of 30 frames per second. We see two and a half hours of action every second. The week flies by in just 70 seconds.

I hope that the video below fits in your screen. You might need to change it to one of the HD resolutions and play it in full screen mode to see the full glory of all the flowers opening, shutting and waving about.


The stalks didn't wave around as much as I remembered they did all those years ago. Perhaps the constant light on them stopped the waving. I don't know. There was some at the beginning so I'm happy with what I ended up with. Maybe I'll try again next time they bloom and put dimmer light on them during the nights.