I made up a Trebuchet Simulator for use in "Phun", a mechanics simulation package.


Right mouse click and save this text/phn file then run in Phun!

Trebuchet Attack.phn

My quick response to a story about home cooks dealing with Pyrex dishes that they exploded.

Years ago Pyrex was a brand name reserved for use on true borosilicate glass and items fabricated from borosilicate glass. Borosilicate glass is expensive laboratory grade stuff that is very, very strong.

Around 10 years ago Corning decided to cash in on the valuable Pyrex trademark name and use it to sell home products made out of soda-lime glass, a material that does not share all the desirable properties of the more expensive borosilicate glass that is still used in its industrial "Pyrex" products.

Funny, really, that the Pyrex website brags about the products industrial origins over 90 years ago, but today they are suffering from the same failings that led to the creation of their home products in the early 1900's. Pyrex products first came about because the wife of a Corning scientist asked her husband to make her a baking dish out of the industrial strength stuff he worked with at Corning. She was unhappy with a failed consumer glass baking dish and knew that one made by her husband would be a better product. He made her the first two Pyrex baking dishes by lopping off the bottom of some industrial grade Pyrex battery jars. These dishes, made out of the expensive grade glass proved to be of excellent quality.

Two years later and the concept was productized.

Fast forward to today.

"Pyrex" dishes are failing (reportedly "exploding"), quite possibly because they are no longer made out of "the good stuff."

Personally I blame this all on pure corporate greed. The name Pyrex had grown to represent products made out of a type of glass that was extremely useful, durable, tough and long lasting for home use.

Corning (and its spin off) co-opted this valuable trademark and transformed it to simply mean glass products made by them, regardless of whether or not the product was made out of the superior material that had taken 80+ years to develop the strength of the brand name.

Pyrex isn't Pyrex anymore, and it hasn't been for 10 years or so.

UPDATE(2/28) From another CBS2 report on the matter.

Pyrex originally was made of borosilicate glass, a Corning invention, that enabled it go from the oven to the refrigerator and vice-versa.

Pyrex in Europe is still made of this type of glass.

Around 1946, Corning began making some Pyrex out of tempered soda lime glass. World Kitchen tells the 2 Investigators most Pyrex sold in the U.S. has been made of soda lime glass since that time., and that the transition was completed by 2001.

I don't know where they got the 1946 date. I don't see it supported elsewhere online.

The article also references some professional opinions indicating that the soda-lime glass may not be properly tempered for use as material for fabricating cooking dishes.

Coward.

State Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford) called the old practice “frightening.”

The old practice?

Licensed state employees carrying firearms while transporting tolls collected on the Mass Pike. Amazing how the lack of certain kinds of paperwork can serve to scare bureaucrats at all levels.

I've really been enjoying a series of short, funny photoshop tutorials that Boing Boing has been posting for a few weeks now named "You Sujck at Photoshop".

It seems, though, based on some digging done by SpaceBass over at Despoiler that these funny videos may actually be a form of viral marketing.

I almost don't care if they are just sneaky advertising because they are so well done, funny as hell, and actually do teach people some good photoshop lessons while telling the story of hapless Donnie Hoyle, an "Associate Mgr., Dumping" at the fictional PhebCo. I wonder if his job is to assist in the illegal dumping of waste?

I've been trying to figure out what PHEBCO might mean, or if there is an anagram hiding in the company's slogan.

Here's my best guess so far: PHotoshop Education By COmedian, or maybe COmedy.