Beyond the pigskin:
In exploring the details of NCR, I found an entire area of learning with a hugely productive worldview.
Everything from weather to electrotyping to cooking to neurology involves colloids, yet nobody ever talks about colloids. My high school chemistry teacher never talked about colloids or gave us any experiments with colloids. (Which could have been edible!) Electronics teachers (including me!!!!) never talked about colloids.
Oddly enough, most of the readable discussion of the topic is in petroleum geology, where the properties of small particles included in rock masses are economically important. Colloids are discussed in other contexts, but usually in abstract papers packed with vast arrays of inscrutable LaTeX symbols.
This 1919 book is the definitive text, infused with the view that nearly everything is colloidal.
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What we commonly call “weather conditions” are largely dependent upon the degree of dispersion of water in the atmosphere, and this dispersion is mainly effected and maintained by solar heat and electrical energy. When air carrying water vapor is chilled by rising to a higher level, meeting a colder mass of air, or even by the alternation of night and day, the moisture it contains assumes the colloidal state as cloud, fog or mist; and as the coagulation of the dispersed water proceeds, these in turn may condense still further into dew, rain, snow or hail, depending upon conditions. When the dispersed water aggregates, there is naturally set free the energy originally used in its dispersion, and this may appear as electricity (lightning) especially if the aggregation occurs suddenly as is the case in thunder and hailstorms. We have all noticed how a nearby lightning flash is promptly followed by an increased fall of raindrops.
= = = = = END QUOTE.
I can observe this right now, with dense fog hiding the nearest house. All the tiny vapor droplets have the same charge, so they repel each other and stay suspended in the emulsion. A strong applied charge or an acoustical shock would bash the droplets together so they agglomerate into drops heavy enough to fall. The coal pollution project that I worked on at Penn State used a strong acoustic wave to bash coal dust into clinkers that could be collected.
In 2020 I featured the remarkable Hail Cannon:
The cannon exploded an acetylene charge in a resonant chamber and sent the resulting vortex up into the cloud, where it broke up the suspended particles that were marching together, and reduced them to a chaotic tangle with no average motion.
Closing with a bit more from the 1919 book:
When freshly mixed, cement and mortar contain colloidal sols or gels, which gradually coagulate or set and bind the crystalline elements of the plaster into a coherent whole. The setting of plaster is delayed by glues, gums and other colloidal substances.
It is well known to practical ice cream makers, and amply proven by experience, that ice cream made without eggs, gelatin or some similar colloidal ingredient is gritty, grainy or sandy, or else soon becomes so upon standing. Whereas ice cream made with small quantities of colloids possesses that rich, mellow, velvety texture so much in demand. Here the added colloid acts as an inhibitor of crystallization.
Polistra's Mill 