
Folding Paper with a Hydraulic Press - SapphireSun
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/folding-paper-with-a-hydraulic-press-c858f3d12a58#.avsqgrswc
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vanderZwan
> Paper is made by bleaching wood pulp to remove everything but the cellulose,
> then pressing and drying it into sheets.

Nitpicking: my book on paper-making talks about fiber, "filler" and "glue" as
the main components in any paper or cardboard sheet.

The type of fiber results in different qualities based on source material
(types of wood, cotton, etc) and fibre _length_ \- every time paper is
recycled the fibers get shorter, and less "fluffy". This is why toilet paper
from recycled paper is coarser; it's also why toilet paper inherently wastes
good fibers: the good stuff is made from fresh fibers. On the other end we
have stuff like the paper used in newspapers. Eventually, the fibers get so
short they can only be used for the type of brittle cardboard pulp you see in
egg carton.

Combined with fiber length, filler materials determine characteristics like
how porous paper is, or how stiff. Glue.. well, should be obvious what that
does, and how different types and quantities affect paper.

None of this matters for Gallivan’s Theorem, other than perhaps the variation
in compressibility that different paper types have. It might have an influence
on the whole fusing-into-a-slab thing though.

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ynniv
This seems like an excellent context to provide a link to that book.

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vanderZwan
_The Complete Book of Papermaking_ by Josep Asuncion[0]. It lives up to its
name, and includes many of the paper/cardboard types it discusses.

[0] [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2665596-the-complete-
book...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2665596-the-complete-book-of-
papermaking)

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crikli
Same "explosion" happens when he crushes a book with the press. Wrecks a
camera. "Mayhem" as he says:
[https://youtu.be/PmvKlnhMjUw?t=1m55s](https://youtu.be/PmvKlnhMjUw?t=1m55s)

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tomerico
I'm not convinced that the same thing is happening here. If you look at the
aftermath, it seems that the press has curved a hole through the book. The
"explosion" seems to be the aftershock of the press hitting the table with
force after forcing itself through the book.

~~~
crikli
You see a lot of paper debris in the air that looks similar to the striated
but crumbly paper in the OP video.

You make a good point and I think it's both things, actually. 1) The bonds in
the paper fracture 2) The elastic energy in the press causes the cylinder to
drive downward, splattering the malformed paper in all directions 3) Which
makes room for the cylinder to make it most of the way through the book.

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mtreis86
Video has an interesting ending
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w)

That whole channel is full of interesting things being flattened.

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asadlionpk
The guy has pretty awesome sense of humor!

~~~
masklinn
The clay animal crushings are especially hilarious, the million-subscribers
video is 14 minutes of clay animals getting crushed.

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ajuc
These youtube canals (also Cody's Lab, Red Hot Nickel Ball, Thunderfoot's
science stuff, etc) are how I think education and science could work in the
future. People are willing to pay and watch ads to support such content, it's
much more interactive than TV shows thanks to comments, and there's very small
barrier to entry. It's exciting to see how these channels will develop.

There were even already real discoveries made thanks to youtube and patreon
(for example [http://www.nature.com/news/sodium-s-explosive-secrets-
reveal...](http://www.nature.com/news/sodium-s-explosive-secrets-
revealed-1.16771) ).

~~~
garrettgrimsley
Just looked up the channels you mentioned as well as the hydraulic press one
from the article and they don't look like viable sources of education to me.
The Hydraulic Press and Red Hot Nickel Ball channels are purely entertainment
along the same lines of "Will It Blend?" The other two are more in depth, but
are still low (Thunderfoot seems to be a feminism/politics/atheism channel?)
in educational value. They might serve to get people interested in science,
but they're unsuitable for learning.

Is this the same as video games getting children interested in programming? Is
that how it works, or do kids turn to programming because they want to make
video games? If the latter then there's not much value at all in these
channels. No one learns computer science from watching Call of Duty videos.

~~~
ajuc
I meant the science stuff, not the feminism/atheism/mythbusting rants.

Thunderfoot made some videos on youtube sponsored by patreon. He was
experimenting with alkalic metals, and discovered that the reaction can't be
driven by the hydrogen reacting as it was usually explained. He went on to
work on that in lab with coleagues, wrote a paper and got published in Nature.
It seems like science to me, and it was crowdfunded, that's what got me
excited, because it could be used to fund research that's hard to get funded
by traditional means ("is cool" is a different motivation than "is useful", so
there may be many low hanging fruits). The more angles the better.

As for education - it won't replace theorethical lessons, but I think it's
useful to see real experiments to develop intuition about how the theories
play out in real life, how the quantities look like, what's realistic and
what's not. Even with the RHNB which I agree is mostly entertainment - school
physic lessons often don't allow me to predict the result of a given video.
Yes it's most probably useless for my life, but so are most of the lessons I
had in school. I like having the intuition about how everyday stuff behaves in
extreme conditions. It's the difference between knowing that water can freeze,
and seeing winter for yourself.

It's that part that was the most jarring hole in physic and chemistry lessons
I had (we almost never got our hands dirty, and even if we did - it was done
so fast that usually nobody got the experiments right, and there was no time
to work out why for everybody, so teachers just moved on). And the stuff used
in school experiments were "magical" ingredients that you wouldn't know where
to get, and how to handle.

I envy the kids today that they can just look up "how to make sugar+saltpeter
rocket". When I was a kid I tried it many times and it never flied (no
textbook mentioned you have to have fresh dry saltpeter, or that you can dry
old saltpeter in electric owen - it was just a formula and warning that could
as well mean "burning 1 gram will destroy your home" or "burning 1 kg will be
slightly inconvenient").

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emeraldd
It's interesting when he try's this with aluminum foil:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SY6PlbJz0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SY6PlbJz0Q)

My guess, he's not so much folding it as reshaping and mixing the metal under
intense pressure in much the same way you might work dough ... (yeah, bad
analogy... )

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baldfat
> much the same way you might work dough

No its a good one. Reminds me of how they made "Damascus" Steele by pounding
different layers together.

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te_platt
Funny. He actually calls it Damascus Foil in the video.

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baldfat
I missed that! Maybe it was subconscious.

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exDM69
> What happened here? To be certain, I would need to repeat the experiment
> myself with a few more tools, like a thermocouple and an electron
> microscope. But I have a guess.

Someone please give this guy access to a hydraulic press, a thermocouple and
an electron microscope. I want to see the evidence!

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k__
Interesting. I didn't know that the energy we can create with such a simple
tool was enough to tear apart chemical bonds. In my head these bonds are
somehow a few magnitudes stronger.

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adrianN
When you cut something with a knife or rip it apart with your hands you're
also breaking chemical bonds. Some chemical bonds are weak enough that just
normal light can break them apart. Stuff like Nitrogen triiodide decomposes
whenever it feels like.

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TeMPOraL
Stuff that has "nitrogen" in its name usually decomposes whenever it feels
like, and humans generally don't like the results of that process - especially
if they're standing nearby.

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chopin
Fertilizer contains a considerable amount of it and can be handled fairly
safely... Unless you get careless:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion)

