Intro to the Mind of the Bob

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

Welcome to the twisted, dark mind of the Bob. While I endeavor to entertain and educate simultaneously, and I believe that this can be done, endeavor and achieve are very different animals—so bear with me.

Some of my articles may digress now and then (OK, always), and somehow poop gets in most every one. That’s because my career as a chemical engineer has always involved sewers somehow. I know, I know, but its bread and butter to me; or as my Amish friends used to say about manure when I was a kid, “It smells like money to me.”

For example, let us look at semiregular solids. No, it’s not time to stand back from the monkey cage yet; I don’t mean that kind of solid, nor that kind of regular.

Archimedes was the absolute great, great granddaddy of all engineers. He lived around 200 years before Christ. He’s dead now. So is Archimedes, for that matter, but Archimedes doesn’t have plans of coming back.

Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier (despite the fact that the soldier was told to leave him unharmed) because he refused an order to come out and meet the General. He was working on a geometrical theorem involving circles and told the soldier to, “leave his circles alone” because he was too busy. These were more or less his last words, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an, “OW!” or two after that.

Kids, don’t take this to school as an excuse unless you can bring a note from a Roman soldier that actually wanted to kill you if you finished your homework.

Archimedes was killed during the Punic wars. Punic means Phoenician in Latin. Since I live in Phoenix, maybe I should refer to myself as Punic. I won’t because, after the Sicilian and Punic Wars, Punic also became a Latin adjective meaning treacherous. Punic treachery is no more an accurate statement than, “Manhattan clam chowder.” That name was actually coined by New Englanders, who thought that the addition of tomato to clam chowder was a stupid idea, so they blamed it on the New Yorkers. It never really originated in Manhattan, but I’m fine with this–I hate tomatoes.

Back to semiregular solids: Platonic solids have the same shape on all faces and all edges are the same length, like the tetrahedron and the cube. The largest that Plato (he’s dead now) discussed was the icosahedron. It consisted of 20 triangular faces. If you are a Dungeons and Dragons fan and have a 20-sided die, you are probably familiar with this shape.

Semiregular solids, however, have more than one shape of face, but the edges still all have the same length. Knock all twelve corners off of an icosahedron so that all edges now have the same (but shorter) length and you will have changed those triangular faces to hexagons. The cut off corners will all become new pentagonal faces.

You now have what Archimedes described as a truncated icosahedron. We know this shape as a soccer ball. If you Dungeons and Dragons fans are still with me, you probably don’t get outside enough to have seen a soccer ball.

If there is a carbon atom at all 60 corners of a truncated icosahedron, you have buckminsterfullerene. This is one of a series of fullerene molecules. They are not named for a chemist, but rather, an architect. R Buckminster Fuller, who pioneered the geodesic dome building. That would be like having a candy bar named after me just because I am always associated somehow with poop (obscure Caddyshack reference–think, “DOODY!”).

Another useful, but tragic, application for the truncated icosahedron was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. It requires a very carefully engineered, shaped charge to detonate the nuclear material. In this case, each face of a truncated icosahedron carried an explosive charge and were all detonated simultaneously, aimed at a center of nuclear material.

Yes, a soccer ball defeated Japan in World War II.

I warned you that this ride might have some bumps and sharp curves.