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Feb. 25th, 2003 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ghiniA from high school was a mechanical engineering major who was at Tech the same time I was. One of his student assistant jobs involved liquid monkey.
Apparently, the super strong sounds waves produced by a submarine's sonar array are bad for the human body. Like real bad. A Navy diver was swimming in front of a sub when the sonar accidentally went off. It set up some kind of resonance in his lungs and totally screwed them up. He didn't die, but was never the same again.
So the Navy decided to set up a study to determine the effects of high power sonar on humans. They gave the grant to some Professor at Tech. Since you can't blast people with sonar all day, the prof got the next best thing: monkeys.
The plan was simple: get a tank of water, put a monkey in it, blast a sonar wave through tank and monkey, remove monkey and analyze it. My friend was one of the student assistants who got to build the tank. They built the tank. They put the monkey in the tank. They turned the sonar on the monkey... SPLAT! Due to various differences in monkeys vs humans, tanks vs oceans, and so forth, the monkey was instantly liquefied. Instead of a monkey in a tank, they had 3000 gallons of very weak monkey soup.
This was not good. For one thing, they now had 3000 gallons of bio-waste to dispose of. The tank is emptied and cleaned. Now the question is, how do they get this to work? Various suggestions and options were tried and shot down. Using oil instead of water was suggested. That way oil would float on liquid monkey which could be drained off. The concept of putting monkeys in wetsuits was tried, but the difficulty of finding monkey sized wetsuits was compounded with the difficulty of getting a monkey into a skintight rubber suit. I think another idea involved making the tank heatable, so 3000 gallons of monkey-broth could be boiled down to a more manageable amount of monkey-bullion.
My friend left the project at the end of the quarter, so I don't know how the liquid monkeys ended up. I always think of it when I see a baptism though.
Apparently, the super strong sounds waves produced by a submarine's sonar array are bad for the human body. Like real bad. A Navy diver was swimming in front of a sub when the sonar accidentally went off. It set up some kind of resonance in his lungs and totally screwed them up. He didn't die, but was never the same again.
So the Navy decided to set up a study to determine the effects of high power sonar on humans. They gave the grant to some Professor at Tech. Since you can't blast people with sonar all day, the prof got the next best thing: monkeys.
The plan was simple: get a tank of water, put a monkey in it, blast a sonar wave through tank and monkey, remove monkey and analyze it. My friend was one of the student assistants who got to build the tank. They built the tank. They put the monkey in the tank. They turned the sonar on the monkey... SPLAT! Due to various differences in monkeys vs humans, tanks vs oceans, and so forth, the monkey was instantly liquefied. Instead of a monkey in a tank, they had 3000 gallons of very weak monkey soup.
This was not good. For one thing, they now had 3000 gallons of bio-waste to dispose of. The tank is emptied and cleaned. Now the question is, how do they get this to work? Various suggestions and options were tried and shot down. Using oil instead of water was suggested. That way oil would float on liquid monkey which could be drained off. The concept of putting monkeys in wetsuits was tried, but the difficulty of finding monkey sized wetsuits was compounded with the difficulty of getting a monkey into a skintight rubber suit. I think another idea involved making the tank heatable, so 3000 gallons of monkey-broth could be boiled down to a more manageable amount of monkey-bullion.
My friend left the project at the end of the quarter, so I don't know how the liquid monkeys ended up. I always think of it when I see a baptism though.
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Date: 2003-02-25 12:35 pm (UTC)wonderful distraction today. ::mwah!::