Slashdot Mirror
Sodium + Private Lake = Fun
travisbean writes "This should be enough to pique your interest. Add to the story that the guy has his own pond and I think we can all see where this is going... 'The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.'"
Too bad he couldn't afford Cesium or Francium!
...in a freshwater pond. Hope there weren't any fish living there ;)
Mmm. Now I'll have to get my own stockpile. Heh, heh, heh.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
duct taping this sodium to people who post "imagine a beowulf cluster of these" posts, and throwing them in a lake.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I've always wanted to do this. I have a lake behind my home and well, lots of free time. I was trying to find a way to extract the sodium from tablesalt but couldn't think of anything (anybody know?). I guess I should have checked eBay first :)
Why many of the fun toys are banned for sale on EBay... Quit making this stuf so public :D
I bet the Darwin awards have already written up his exploits and are now just waiting....
What's in a Sig?
explode in the similar fashion within 3 minutes featuring by /.
Sodium Party
Periodic Table home
I'd read about, and heard stories about, throwing sodium into water. It's a classic thing chemistry students do in college, and based on the reports I have been able to find on the internet, they are often drunk at the time.
While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why. The only videos I could find were of pathetic thumbnail-sized bits skidding about in a bowl. (Click here to see my version of this: It's really boring, trust me.)
(A note on videos: All the videos on this page are in QuickTime format, and most of them require QuickTime V5 or better. You can download the latest version of QuickTime for Macintosh or Windows from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download.)
To do better than that, I decided I should produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions. To do this, I held a Sodium Party. People brought chips and soda and we had a cookout.
The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.
Next I constructed a patented Sodium Release-o-tron:
It was designed to be constructed in less than an hour using only things I already had lying around the shop, be very unlikely to go off by accident, and be unable to fail when activated. So far so good.
Here's a picture of the first lump I loaded into it, in a preliminary experiment about a month before the party:
Click here for a video showing how this lump was cut off of the main block: A wood chisel and some pushing is all it takes, because this stuff is very, very soft.
And here's a picture of what happened when we pulled the string:
Click here to see a video of this first explosion. (But only if you've got a fast connection, because it's not the best video by far: See below for much better ones if loading these takes time for you.)
This chunk, about 50 grams, gave a surprisingly strong bang, especially considering that there was no containment and no intentional pre-mixing of reactive chemicals, at least one of which is normally a prerequisite for a sharp report.
My theory is that it's a fuel-air explosion caused by mixing of the hydrogen gas with air, ignited a second or two later (as you can see in the video) by the heat that builds up in the sodium. The heating of the sodium acts as the time fuse needed to make any fuel air bomb work. This theory would imply that only a minimal shock wave should be transmitted into the water, since the explosion would be happening well above the surface, as the picture seems to show. Unfortunately that theory is not supported by the fact that the metal bucket was split at the seams, even though less than an inch of rim extended over the level of the water.
Which brings me to a safety warning: Sodium is really rather dangerous. If we had been anywhere within 15 feet of this explosion, it would have sprayed us with molten sodium and sodium hydroxide. Even a tiny amount in the eyes would have been a serious medical emergency. That's why I built a device that let me release it in a very controlled way from a great distance: If you want to do anything even remotely like this, you should take similar precautions. While it's safe to drop a tiny piece, maybe a few millimeters on edge, into a bowl of water, if you are wearing safety glasses, the force of the explosion goes up non-linearly with size. A lot of people have hurt themselves by going to bigger and bigger pieces thinking it's just going to do more of the same. It doesn't: At some point it turns from a fizzle and flame into a real explosion, like a shotgun.
There's also the issue of smoke, of which a lot is produced. I'm not sure what the smoke is, but I suspect it's powdered soda lye (caustic soda, otherwise known as sodium hydroxide), which means you really, really don't want to get in the way of it. Or it could be powdered sodium oxide, which might react over time with carbon dioxide in the air to form sodium carbonate or bicarbonate. I really don't know. But if it is powdered soda lye it would severely burn your eyes, lungs, and skin, and no safety glasses would protect you. Be sure you are upwind.
We had wet down about a 15 foot radius all around, and true to expectations, there were a series of secondary explosions as balls of sodium ejected by the main explosion hit the ground. Unfortunately I was taken aback by the explosion and jerked the camera, so you can't see them. That's one reason the later videos came out better: I used a tripod.
I had planned to hose down and maybe neutralize the driveway the next morning, but in a fascinating display of nature, the driveway was full of little yellow butterflies the next morning.
I've read that male butterflies collect sodium as a present for their mates, and they sure seemed to like mine, so I decided to leave it. I'm surprised they liked what must be a fairly basic solution, but then maybe it's just neutralized decades of road acid.
According to the popular radio entomologist May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois, I was right about the butterflies. She writes:
"They're called sulfur butterflies (in the family Pieridae) and the general consensus is that they are indeed after sodium, which is transferred to females in the spermatophore or sperm package.
Here are some references about the phenomenon:
Adler, P. and D. Pearson, 1982. Why do male butterflies visit mud puddles? Can. J. Zool. 60: 322-325.
Arms, K., P. Feeny and R.C. Lederhouse, 1974. Sodium: stimulus for puddling behavior by tiger swallowtail butterflies, Papilio glaucus. Science 185: 372-374.
Smedley, S. R. and T. Eisner 1996. Sodium--a male moth's gift to its offspring. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93:809-13.
There's something intensely sad about this. These tiny creatures have nothing to give but a little package of sodium, but this they give with all their heart. It is their life, their hope, their future, and they give it, asking nothing in return, that their children might have a better start in life. I suppose it should be uplifting, but somehow it just seems terribly sad to me.
Moving on, I still needed to work out the details of my Sodium Party. The classic thing to do with sodium is to throw it in a lake. I own a lake. It's obvious what to do, right? Actually, it's not that simple. For one thing, I care a great deal about the fish and frogs in my lake, and don't wish to poison or shock them. Sodium certainly isn't poisonous, but it could raise the pH measurably, even in my acre and a half lake (I did the math). More of a problem would be intense shock waves. After all, fishing with dynamite is a redneck tradition, and I don't allow fishing in my lake, even by me.
There was also that phone call from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which somehow got wind of my idea. They believe that sodium is a caustic waste material which may not be dumped into the waters of the state in any quantity. I question that on two grounds, first I question that there is no lower reporting limit on sodium, and second I question that my lake is a water of the state. Having worked as a volunteer for an environmental water quality watchdog organization, and having spoken with several people there about this, I think I'm almost certainly right in believing that I have the legal right to dump a few ounces of sodium into my private lake if I so choose. The representative of the IEPA, however, disagreed with me on that conclusion.
Fortunately, no constitutional crisis developed out of this impasse, because by the time he put is foot down, I had already decided that I really didn't want to place my fish in harms way anyway.
The day before the party a few intrepid souls came out to test my ingenious workaround. I cleared a small floating deck, put a tarp over it with edges so I could flood the whole thing with about an inch of water, and put a small kids swimming pool full of water in the middle. Then I anchored the whole thing out in the middle of the lake with the sodium release-o-tron on it.
I loaded the machine with a 109.5 gram solid lump of sodium (about twice as big as the piece in my first experiment on land), rowed away, and started the cameras rolling.
The idea was that the sodium would explode in the pool, and at most a trivial amount would escape to the surrounding lake, where it would be instantly vaporized. I could then neutralize the pool water with a touch of hydrochloric acid ("Muriatic acid" at any hardware store), leaving only slightly salty water in the pool. (Sodium goes to hydrogen gas plus sodium and hydroxide ions in the water. Hydrochloric acid is chlorine and hydrogen ions: The hydrogen ions combine with the hydroxide ions to form water and neutralize the pH, while the sodium and chlorine ions are what is more commonly known as dissolved table salt. Not even the IEPA, I believe, has a regulation against dumping slightly salty water.)
But that's not quite how it worked out. There was an initial large explosion:
Then there were a series of secondary explosions obviously caused by a single fairly large chunk that was literally hopping across the lake. It was thrown high up into the air, came down to hit the water at a high rate of speed, and was then thrown back up into the air by the resulting explosion. This happened at least three, maybe four times, so far as I can tell from the video.
This is quite alarming: The longest time between impacts, timed on the videotape, was 3.12 seconds. If you do the math, this means the chunk was thrown almost 40 feet high. Fortunately it was going reasonably close to straight up and down, and we were quite far away (about 200 feet). But this skipping behavior, which so far as I know is documented here for the first time on the internet, clearly gives the whole thing far greater potential reach. It's easy to imagine a chunk skipping hundreds of feet.
I think this skipping behavior is one reason reports on what happens to sodium when you throw it in water are so varied and contradictory. As you will see in the videos below, it varies tremendously depending on the size of the chunk, how hard it hits the water, how deep the water is, and probably on the temperature of the air and water.
Very small pieces skid around and may or may not burn, but don't generally explode. Larger pieces explode and disintegrate themselves. Still larger pieces explode but stay intact, ejecting a solid chunk high into the air. Of course when the chunk comes back down, it's anyone's guess what happens next.
If someone were to throw a chunk like this (about three ounces) by hand into a lake, it could very easy come back and hit them. This video tape clearly demonstrates that sodium can throw itself farther than you can. And more ominously, you can clearly see on at least one of the jumps that it tends to come back at the direction it was thrown from. My theory is that when it hits the water it forms a cavity as it plunges down. This cavity acts like a cannon barrel to direct the chunk back in the direction it came from, when the steam and evolved hydrogen explode.
For this reason, I think a repeat of this method of deployment would be ill advised. It simply isn't predictable enough to be safe. When the pool is surrounded by wet driveway, there's no obvious way for chunks to skip long distances, and that's the way I decided to do it for the main party.
On the day of the party I set up the Release-O-Tron at one end of our parking lot, and laid out a pair of hoses connected to the well pump in the lake (which provides an endless supply of water). I ran the hoses for about an hour to get the whole gravel area wet down, and they were left running most of the time, to keep a good puddle about 40-50ft in diameter around the swimming pool.
Starting around 5:30 we set off a bunch of explosions, using a variety of different sizes and configurations of sodium, during daylight and night time. Some were solid chunks, others were cut up into sugar-cube sized bits:Sodium Party
Periodic Table home
I'd read about, and heard stories about, throwing sodium into water. It's a classic thing chemistry students do in college, and based on the reports I have been able to find on the internet, they are often drunk at the time.
While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why. The only videos I could find were of pathetic thumbnail-sized bits skidding about in a bowl. (Click here to see my version of this: It's really boring, trust me.)
(A note on videos: All the videos on this page are in QuickTime format, and most of them require QuickTime V5 or better. You can download the latest version of QuickTime for Macintosh or Windows from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download.)
To do better than that, I decided I should produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions. To do this, I held a Sodium Party. People brought chips and soda and we had a cookout.
The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.
Next I constructed a patented Sodium Release-o-tron:
It was designed to be constructed in less than an hour using only things I already had lying around the shop, be very unlikely to go off by accident, and be unable to fail when activated. So far so good.
Here's a picture of the first lump I loaded into it, in a preliminary experiment about a month before the party:
Click here for a video showing how this lump was cut off of the main block: A wood chisel and some pushing is all it takes, because this stuff is very, very soft.
And here's a picture of what happened when we pulled the string:
Click here to see a video of this first explosion. (But only if you've got a fast connection, because it's not the best video by far: See below for much better ones if loading these takes time for you.)
This chunk, about 50 grams, gave a surprisingly strong bang, especially considering that there was no containment and no intentional pre-mixing of reactive chemicals, at least one of which is normally a prerequisite for a sharp report.
My theory is that it's a fuel-air explosion caused by mixing of the hydrogen gas with air, ignited a second or two later (as you can see in the video) by the heat that builds up in the sodium. The heating of the sodium acts as the time fuse needed to make any fuel air bomb work. This theory would imply that only a minimal shock wave should be transmitted into the water, since the explosion would be happening well above the surface, as the picture seems to show. Unfortunately that theory is not supported by the fact that the metal bucket was split at the seams, even though less than an inch of rim extended over the level of the water.
Which brings me to a safety warning: Sodium is really rather dangerous. If we had been anywhere within 15 feet of this explosion, it would have sprayed us with molten sodium and sodium hydroxide. Even a tiny amount in the eyes would have been a serious medical emergency. That's why I built a device that let me release it in a very controlled way from a great distance: If you want to do anything even remotely like this, you should take similar precautions. While it's safe to drop a tiny piece, maybe a few millimeters on edge, into a bowl of water, if you are wearing safety glasses, the force of the explosion goes up non-linearly with size. A lot of people have hurt themselves by going to bigger and bigger pieces thinking it's just going to do more of the same. It doesn't: At some point it turns from a fizzle and flame into a real explosion, like a shotgun.
There's also the issue of smoke, of which a lot is produced. I'm not sure what the smoke is, but I suspect it's powdered soda lye (caustic soda, otherwise known as sodium hydroxide), which means you really, really don't want to get in the way of it. Or it could be powdered sodium oxide, which might react over time with carbon dioxide in the air to form sodium carbonate or bicarbonate. I really don't know. But if it is powdered soda lye it would severely burn your eyes, lungs, and skin, and no safety glasses would protect you. Be sure you are upwind.
We had wet down about a 15 foot radius all around, and true to expectations, there were a series of secondary explosions as balls of sodium ejected by the main explosion hit the ground. Unfortunately I was taken aback by the explosion and jerked the camera, so you can't see them. That's one reason the later videos came out better: I used a tripod.
I had planned to hose down and maybe neutralize the driveway the next morning, but in a fascinating display of nature, the driveway was full of little yellow butterflies the next morning.
I've read that male butterflies collect sodium as a present for their mates, and they sure seemed to like mine, so I decided to leave it. I'm surprised they liked what must be a fairly basic solution, but then maybe it's just neutralized decades of road acid.
According to the popular radio entomologist May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois, I was right about the butterflies. She writes:
"They're called sulfur butterflies (in the family Pieridae) and the general consensus is that they are indeed after sodium, which is transferred to females in the spermatophore or sperm package.
Here are some references about the phenomenon:
Adler, P. and D. Pearson, 1982. Why do male butterflies visit mud puddles? Can. J. Zool. 60: 322-325.
Arms, K., P. Feeny and R.C. Lederhouse, 1974. Sodium: stimulus for puddling behavior by tiger swallowtail butterflies, Papilio glaucus. Science 185: 372-374.
Smedley, S. R. and T. Eisner 1996. Sodium--a male moth's gift to its offspring. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93:809-13.
There's something intensely sad about this. These tiny creatures have nothing to give but a little package of sodium, but this they give with all their heart. It is their life, their hope, their future, and they give it, asking nothing in return, that their children might have a better start in life. I suppose it should be uplifting, but somehow it just seems terribly sad to me.
Moving on, I still needed to work out the details of my Sodium Party. The classic thing to do with sodium is to throw it in a lake. I own a lake. It's obvious what to do, right? Actually, it's not that simple. For one thing, I care a great deal about the fish and frogs in my lake, and don't wish to poison or shock them. Sodium certainly isn't poisonous, but it could raise the pH measurably, even in my acre and a half lake (I did the math). More of a problem would be intense shock waves. After all, fishing with dynamite is a redneck tradition, and I don't allow fishing in my lake, even by me.
There was also that phone call from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which somehow got wind of my idea. They believe that sodium is a caustic waste material which may not be dumped into the waters of the state in any quantity. I question that on two grounds, first I question that there is no lower reporting limit on sodium, and second I question that my lake is a water of the state. Having worked as a volunteer for an environmental water quality watchdog organization, and having spoken with several people there about this, I think I'm almost certainly right in believing that I have the legal right to dump a few ounces of sodium into my private lake if I so choose. The representative of the IEPA, however, disagreed with me on that conclusion.
Fortunately, no constitutional crisis developed out of this impasse, because by the time he put is foot down, I had already decided that I really didn't want to place my fish in harms way anyway.
The day before the party a few intrepid souls came out to test my ingenious workaround. I cleared a small floating deck, put a tarp over it with edges so I could flood the whole thing with about an inch of water, and put a small kids swimming pool full of water in the middle. Then I anchored the whole thing out in the middle of the lake with the sodium release-o-tron on it.
I loaded the machine with a 109.5 gram solid lump of sodium (about twice as big as the piece in my first experiment on land), rowed away, and started the cameras rolling.
The idea was that the sodium would explode in the pool, and at most a trivial amount would escape to the surrounding lake, where it would be instantly vaporized. I could then neutralize the pool water with a touch of hydrochloric acid ("Muriatic acid" at any hardware store), leaving only slightly salty water in the pool. (Sodium goes to hydrogen gas plus sodium and hydroxide ions in the water. Hydrochloric acid is chlorine and hydrogen ions: The hydrogen ions combine with the hydroxide ions to form water and neutralize the pH, while the sodium and chlorine ions are what is more commonly known as dissolved table salt. Not even the IEPA, I believe, has a regulation against dumping slightly salty water.)
But that's not quite how it worked out. There was an initial large explosion:
Then there were a series of secondary explosions obviously caused by a single fairly large chunk that was literally hopping across the lake. It was thrown high up into the air, came down to hit the water at a high rate of speed, and was then thrown back up into the air by the resulting explosion. This happened at least three, maybe four times, so far as I can tell from the video.
This is quite alarming: The longest time between impacts, timed on the videotape, was 3.12 seconds. If you do the math, this means the chunk was thrown almost 40 feet high. Fortunately it was going reasonably close to straight up and down, and we were quite far away (about 200 feet). But this skipping behavior, which so far as I know is documented here for the first time on the internet, clearly gives the whole thing far greater potential reach. It's easy to imagine a chunk skipping hundreds of feet.
I think this skipping behavior is one reason reports on what happens to sodium when you throw it in water are so varied and contradictory. As you will see in the videos below, it varies tremendously depending on the size of the chunk, how hard it hits the water, how deep the water is, and probably on the temperature of the air and water.
Very small pieces skid around and may or may not burn, but don't generally explode. Larger pieces explode and disintegrate themselves. Still larger pieces explode but stay intact, ejecting a solid chunk high into the air. Of course when the chunk comes back down, it's anyone's guess what happens next.
If someone were to throw a chunk like this (about three ounces) by hand into a lake, it could very easy come back and hit them. This video tape clearly demonstrates that sodium can throw itself farther than you can. And more ominously, you can clearly see on at least one of the jumps that it tends to come back at the direction it was thrown from. My theory is that when it hits the water it forms a cavity as it plunges down. This cavity acts like a cannon barrel to direct the chunk back in the direction it came from, when the steam and evolved hydrogen explode.
For this reason, I think a repeat of this method of deployment would be ill advised. It simply isn't predictable enough to be safe. When the pool is surrounded by wet driveway, there's no obvious way for chunks to skip long distances, and that's the way I decided to do it for the main party.
On the day of the party I set up the Release-O-Tron at one end of our parking lot, and laid out a pair of hoses connected to the well pump in the lake (which provides an endless supply of water). I ran the hoses for about an hour to get the whole gravel area wet down, Sodium Party
Periodic Table home
I'd read about, and heard stories about, throwing sodium into water. It's a classic thing chemistry students do in college, and based on the reports I have been able to find on the internet, they are often drunk at the time.
While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why. The only videos I could find were of pathetic thumbnail-sized bits skidding about in a bowl. (Click here to see my version of this: It's really boring, trust me.)
(A note on videos: All the videos on this page are in QuickTime format, and most of them require QuickTime V5 or better. You can download the latest version of QuickTime for Macintosh or Windows from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download.)
To do better than that, I decided I should produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions. To do this, I held a Sodium Party. People brought chips and soda and we had a cookout.
The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.
Next I constructed a patented Sodium Release-o-tron:
It was designed to be constructed in less than an hour using only things I already had lying around the shop, be very unlikely to go off by accident, and be unable to fail when activated. So far so good.
Here's a picture of the first lump I loaded into it, in a preliminary experiment about a month before the party:
Click here for a video showing how this lump was cut off of the main block: A wood chisel and some pushing is all it takes, because this stuff is very, very soft.
And here's a picture of what happened when we pulled the string:
Click here to see a video of this first explosion. (But only if you've got a fast connection, because it's not the best video by far: See below for much better ones if loading these takes time for you.)
This chunk, about 50 grams, gave a surprisingly strong bang, especially considering that there was no containment and no intentional pre-mixing of reactive chemicals, at least one of which is normally a prerequisite for a sharp report.
My theory is that it's a fuel-air explosion caused by mixing of the hydrogen gas with air, ignited a second or two later (as you can see in the video) by the heat that builds up in the sodium. The heating of the sodium acts as the time fuse needed to make any fuel air bomb work. This theory would imply that only a minimal shock wave should be transmitted into the water, since the explosion would be happening well above the surface, as the picture seems to show. Unfortunately that theory is not supported by the fact that the metal bucket was split at the seams, even though less than an inch of rim extended over the level of the water.
Which brings me to a safety warning: Sodium is really rather dangerous. If we had been anywhere within 15 feet of this explosion, it would have sprayed us with molten sodium and sodium hydroxide. Even a tiny amount in the eyes would have been a serious medical emergency. That's why I built a device that let me release it in a very controlled way from a great distance: If you want to do anything even remotely like this, you should take similar precautions. While it's safe to drop a tiny piece, maybe a few millimeters on edge, into a bowl of water, if you are wearing safety glasses, the force of the explosion goes up non-linearly with size. A lot of people have hurt themselves by going to bigger and bigger pieces thinking it's just going to do more of the same. It doesn't: At some point it turns from a fizzle and flame into a real explosion, like a shotgun.
There's also the issue of smoke, of which a lot is produced. I'm not sure what the smoke is, but I suspect it's powdered soda lye (caustic soda, otherwise known as sodium hydroxide), which means you really, really don't want to get in the way of it. Or it could be powdered sodium oxide, which might react over time with carbon dioxide in the air to form sodium carbonate or bicarbonate. I really don't know. But if it is powdered soda lye it would severely burn your eyes, lungs, and skin, and no safety glasses would protect you. Be sure you are upwind.
We had wet down about a 15 foot radius all around, and true to expectations, there were a series of secondary explosions as balls of sodium ejected by the main explosion hit the ground. Unfortunately I was taken aback by the explosion and jerked the camera, so you can't see them. That's one reason the later videos came out better: I used a tripod.
I had planned to hose down and maybe neutralize the driveway the next morning, but in a fascinating display of nature, the driveway was full of little yellow butterflies the next morning.
I've read that male butterflies collect sodium as a present for their mates, and they sure seemed to like mine, so I decided to leave it. I'm surprised they liked what must be a fairly basic solution, but then maybe it's just neutralized decades of road acid.
According to the popular radio entomologist May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois, I was right about the butterflies. She writes:
"They're called sulfur butterflies (in the family Pieridae) and the general consensus is that they are indeed after sodium, which is transferred to females in the spermatophore or sperm package.
Here are some references about the phenomenon:
Adler, P. and D. Pearson, 1982. Why do male butterflies visit mud puddles? Can. J. Zool. 60: 322-325.
Arms, K., P. Feeny and R.C. Lederhouse, 1974. Sodium: stimulus for puddling behavior by tiger swallowtail butterflies, Papilio glaucus. Science 185: 372-374.
Smedley, S. R. and T. Eisner 1996. Sodium--a male moth's gift to its offspring. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93:809-13.
There's something intensely sad about this. These tiny creatures have nothing to give but a little package of sodium, but this they give with all their heart. It is their life, their hope, their future, and they give it, asking nothing in return, that their children might have a better start in life. I suppose it should be uplifting, but somehow it just seems terribly sad to me.
Moving on, I still needed to work out the details of my Sodium Party. The classic thing to do with sodium is to throw it in a lake. I own a lake. It's obvious what to do, right? Actually, it's not that simple. For one thing, I care a great deal about the fish and frogs in my lake, and don't wish to poison or shock them. Sodium certainly isn't poisonous, but it could raise the pH measurably, even in my acre and a half lake (I did the math). More of a problem would be intense shock waves. After all, fishing with dynamite is a redneck tradition, and I don't allow fishing in my lake, even by me.
There was also that phone call from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which somehow got wind of my idea. They believe that sodium is a caustic waste material which may not be dumped into the waters of the state in any quantity. I question that on two grounds, first I question that there is no lower reporting limit on sodium, and second I question that my lake is a water of the state. Having worked as a volunteer for an environmental water quality watchdog organization, and having spoken with several people there about this, I think I'm almost certainly right in believing that I have the legal right to dump a few ounces of sodium into my private lake if I so choose. The representative of the IEPA, however, disagreed with me on that conclusion.
Fortunately, no constitutional crisis developed out of this impasse, because by the time he put is foot down, I had already decided that I really didn't want to place my fish in harms way anyway.
The day before the party a few intrepid souls came out to test my ingenious workaround. I cleared a small floating deck, put a tarp over it with edges so I could flood the whole thing with about an inch of water, and put a small kids swimming pool full of water in the middle. Then I anchored the whole thing out in the middle of the lake with the sodium release-o-tron on it.
I loaded the machine with a 109.5 gram solid lump of sodium (about twice as big as the piece in my first experiment on land), rowed away, and started the cameras rolling.
The idea was that the sodium would explode in the pool, and at most a trivial amount would escape to the surrounding lake, where it would be instantly vaporized. I could then neutralize the pool water with a touch of hydrochloric acid ("Muriatic acid" at any hardware store), leaving only slightly salty water in the pool. (Sodium goes to hydrogen gas plus sodium and hydroxide ions in the water. Hydrochloric acid is chlorine and hydrogen ions: The hydrogen ions combine with the hydroxide ions to form water and neutralize the pH, while the sodium and chlorine ions are what is more commonly known as dissolved table salt. Not even the IEPA, I believe, has a regulation against dumping slightly salty water.)
But that's not quite how it worked out. There was an initial large explosion:
Then there were a series of secondary explosions obviously caused by a single fairly large chunk that was literally hopping across the lake. It was thrown high up into the air, came down to hit the water at a high rate of speed, and was then thrown back up into the air by the resulting explosion. This happened at least three, maybe four times, so far as I can tell from the video.
This is quite alarming: The longest time between impacts, timed on the videotape, was 3.12 seconds. If you do the math, this means the chunk was thrown almost 40 feet high. Fortunately it was going reasonably close to straight up and down, and we were quite far away (about 200 feet). But this skipping behavior, which so far as I know is documented here for the first time on the internet, clearly gives the whole thing far greater potential reach. It's easy to imagine a chunk skipping hundreds of feet.
I think this skipping behavior is one reason reports on what happens to sodium when you throw it in water are so varied and contradictory. As you will see in the videos below, it varies tremendously depending on the size of the chunk, how hard it hits the water, how deep the water is, and probably on the temperature of the air and water.
Very small pieces skid around and may or may not burn, but don't generally explode. Larger pieces explode and disintegrate themselves. Still larger pieces explode but stay intact, ejecting a solid chunk high into the air. Of course when the chunk comes back down, it's anyone's guess what happens next.
If someone were to throw a chunk like this (about three ounces) by hand into a lake, it could very easy come back and hit them. This video tape clearly demonstrates that sodium can throw itself farther than you can. And more ominously, you can clearly see on at least one of the jumps that it tends to come back at the direction it was thrown from. My theory is that when it hits the water it forms a cavity as it plunges down. This cavity acts like a cannon barrel to direct the chunk back in the direction it came from, when the steam and evolved hydrogen explode.
For this reason, I think a repeat of this method of deployment would be ill advised. It simply isn't predictable enough to be safe. When the pool is surrounded by wet driveway, there's no obvious way for chunks to skip long distances, and that's the way I decided to do it for the main party.
On the day of the party I set up the Release-O-Tron at one end of our parking lot, and laid out a pair of hoses connected to the well pump in the lake (which provides an endless supply of water). I ran the hoses for about an hour to get the whole gravel area wet down, and they were left running most of the time, to keep a good puddle about 40-50ft in diameter around the swimming pool.
Starting around 5:30 we set off a bunch of explosions, using a variety of different sizes and configurations of sodium, during daylight and night time. Some were solid chunks, others were cut up into sugar-cube sized bits:and they were left running most of the time, to keep a good puddle about 40-50ft in diameter around the swimming pool.
Starting around 5:30 we set off a bunch of explosions, using a variety of different sizes and configurations of sodium, during daylight and night time. Some were solid chunks, others were cut up into sugar-cube sized bits:
Yep. Instant slashdottage. Damn. Something's gotta be done about this silly Web we've saddled ourselves with. It's full of fun stuff, but the moment said fun stuff is "discovered," a modest server buckles under the load, or some poor bastard gets a bandwidth bill from his hosting service that's enough to make him spew root beer all over his monitor. This is not a sane system! What can be done?
How long before John Ashcroft has him arrested for creating bomb materials and prosecuting him as an Al-Qaeda terrorist?
Sodium + water = BOOM! http://bifrost.unl.edu/ehs/ChemicalInfo/h2oreact.h tml
When I was in university, my Chem professor (who attended the University of Kentucky) regaled us with the story of when she and four of her friends went down to Stores and checked out one kilogram of sodium. It was stored in a jar filled with some sort of oil (so it wouldn't react).
:-)
The kids headed out under deep cover of night to a local place called 'High Bridge', so called because it was, essentially, a very high bridge over a river, parked their car, and carefully removed the sodium from the jar. On the count of three, they tossed the chunk of sodium off the bridge, letting it fall to the river below.
She ended the story by saying, 'We sped away as fast as we could, but strangely didn't hear or really see anything unusual. We had resigned ourselves to the fact that our 'experiment' had failed until one of my friends turned back to look at the bridge and said 'Oh... my... God...'. The mushroom cloud and resulting explosion had lit the sky bright red in a remote area of Kentucky at 2am in the morning.
There was a report in the paper the next day but no explanation as to what had happened.
And that's why my bad-assed Chem professor will always have my utmost respect.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
conditions... but it appears his house is *still there*. What a let down.... The butterflies are cool though.
Don't go jumping in the pond immediately after doing this, at least not in the spot where you toss in the sodium. You'd have a pretty basic spot full of sodium hydroxide for a while until it spreads out at least. I don't think a pond of any decent size is going to be too affected by a mere 3.5 pounds though. But I could be wrong on that...
If not now, when?
I am more than happy to host a mirror of this if someone has a copy of it in their cache.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Well he probably spent all his money on the Sodium.
Does this work more-or-less along the lines of the same idea, except that instead of mass fizzing you get a big boom? Making a chambered container what combined sodium and water upon remote would be fun to play with. Much more interesting than those lameass science volcanos made in class.
*Note:I foresee at at least 1 or 2 references to "weapons" and terrorism. Don't be lame, people have been fascinated by big booms since long ago.
Why do I have the feeling sodium is going to become very valuable on ebay soon - phorm
After we had had some fun with some sodium and potassium in small quantities (less than 1g) my Chem teacher decided there wasn't any left and dumped the small amount left (Stored in hexane!) into the sink. The sink had a small amount of water in it. Small explosion occurred, and the hexane floating on the water caught fire. Thus, the sink appeared to be on fire. Completely unintentionally. This during his evaluation... Naturally, that was the most fun chem lab we ever did.
Don't go jumping in the pond immediately after doing this
No shit... it'll dissolve yer freakin' skin and hair off.
You might not want to buy any property from this guy! Who knows what the hell is in his soil/house/lake.
And for goodness sake, take cover if he moves into your neighborhood! This is like the story's my Dad told me about his "stupid friend who flunked out of his chemistry program". The one that grossly underestimated his own stupidity and blew his house off of his foundation.
I should say, it can't be larger than 60MB in total filesize...but I doubt that it is.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
for i in `seq -w 1 12`; do wget -b -t 0 http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/ 011.2/Videos/SodiumResearch$i.MOV; done
Yes, I must admit, I do that solely out of jealous of his private lake.
Reminds me of the old film "The Periodic Table" or something like that that I had to watch 3 times in chemistry. The one with the guy with the funny british accent and the odd elements with legs. They had a cool demonstration, reacting the diff metals like it one by one. Neat how it skipped. another great part, the diamond being disolved. especialy once you realized the background music was the theme to bonds "Diamonds are forever".
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
Bulk metallic sodium runs under a buck per pound (15 cents to a dollar), when you are buying a 300# drum. Prices in smaller lots and higher purity are slightly higher, ranging up to around $35/pound for analytical grade.
The higher purity metal makes little or no difference when you are tossing it into a highly impure natural lake.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
My dad worked for the space program on fuel cells for several years. They often had pounds and pounds of lithium to play with in the lake behind the company. They seemed to enjoy making little boats, packing them with as much lithium as they could hold, shiping them out, and throwing rocks at them until it exploded when the boat capsized. They had sodium too, but lithium made a much bigger and louder explosion.
I feel another Darwin Award coming on.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I remember sophmore year my chemistry teacher told us a story about sodium and why we couldn't use it. Apparently some years ago a student stole a whole log/rod of pure sodium and took it home with him, long story short he ended up in ICU for several weeks after shards of his toilet severd a few major arteries. He then proceded to tell us after a school board ruling all the sodium from all the schools was rounded up by the fire department to be disposed of. The fire department didn't know what to do with it. They went out to a small lake somewhere and tossed it out, the chunks of soduim skittered around the lake for quite a while and caused several thousand dollars of property damage to docks and docked boats. I'm not sure if this is true, he was a little off, but its plausible.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
This is the same guy that did the Periodic Table Table - see this story for how I got there.
Anyway, the video of the sodium lump dancing around the lake in a chaotic and totally uncontrolled manner was fair enough warning for me. I'd hate for pure Na to hit something made of flesh. *shudder*
So, our final reaction is:
Curiosity(++Chemistry) + 100(Bucks) + EBay - GreyMatter => hazard 2(health) + fireworks(neato)
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Ooooooooohhhhhh... pweedi budde'fwies!
---- *dog sitting next to a computer, with his beady eyes shifting left to right*
I remember watching a video with a guy doing this in my high school freshman physical science class four years ago. Not exactly new. Still very cool though. /me makes a note to himself to check current sodium prices on ebay.
Seriously though, it reminds me of Darwin Award where the guy had cesium...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
From personal experienced, i have discovered that "Nobody messes with Sodium". I was once i chem lab, holding a jar containing Sodium with oil(cant remember why), and managed to drop the jar spilling the sodium all over the floor and some very small amount on my legs. Now i am left with a very bad scars on both my legs. So if anyone asks me to handle sodium again, i go Na !
-- Reality is just an extended dream.
While I appreciate the addition of the 'popcorn products' line, I have to admit that I just don't get it. A little help?
From reading all these replies from people using, 'less than one gram' of sodium in Chem I have to feel sympathy. My chem teacher did an experiment with us using a big hunk of the stuff in a container full of water with an upturned bucket over it. The bucket blasted off about 5 metres into the air, although me, being in the front row, was showered with little bits of sodium.
Now that his lake is basic. (Assuming that the lake is small (like a pond), and he had enough sodium to make it notably basic (like PH 9 or 10+), I am not sure how much sodium that would take. (IANAC, amazingly)
:-) Maybe, put it in a container that will be slowly eaten away by the base of the lake. :-) Then, there should be a really exciting reaction (or nothing... not really sure actually. :-))
Then, it would be wild to see him pour a strong acid into the lake...
Personally, Sodium (and sometimes potassium) are fun when you can get your hands on it. Chief recommendation though... use it in small amounts, and if done properly it makes a nice "lake candle". Also, don't use potassium unless you have a very high speed vehicle, and a way to launch it far from where you are (Potassium explodes more then Sodium does.
Also, while that much sodium can "take out a house" under the right conditions. Those exact conditions are not likely to happen.
Sodium is stored under oil ( sometimes Hexane ) to stop it from coming into contact with air, and oxidising.
-- C.
We had fun experiments in High School with small bits of sodium (I'm fairly sure it was sodium) on a container of water, under he fume hood. The prof mentioned that at one time apparently one student tried to snitch some of the material to take home (and, presumably, apply with water). About partway through class he started getting paranoid and had the feeling that his pockets were getting hot (from his sweat?). He took a bathroom break and flushed the evidence.
There wasn't a whole lot of sodium, but apparently it blew up a certain amount of piping... I'd image that he spent a lot of time in detention after that.
Why are people getting so grumpy with this guy?
Isn't what he did funny, at worst? He didn't ruin anyone else's land... and maybe his next trick will be with sulfur or chlorine, or so... and then the lake won't be so basic.
Long live idiotic experiments! It's the unethical and moronic that make the best breakthroughs in science.. (not that I'm calling this experiment a 'breakthrough'.. I'm just saying, moronic is good when it comes to new 'experiments' or data gathering.)
---- *dog sitting next to a computer, with his beady eyes shifting left to right*
Last year, our Chemistry AP teacher showed us a video of some guy dumping a couple pounds of sodium into a polluted, acidic (basic? I don't remember any chem now) lake, also exhibiting the "cannon" effect. Quite cool.
*really* bad time to tip the boat!
I like fire and explosion as much as the next guy, but this is out and out criminal. If W.R. Grace was found dumping metallic sodium into a pond Slashdot readers would whip themselves into a rabid frenzy.
Ask this super genius to post some photos of the pond three months from now, esprecially those plants we see in the background.
If your liquified salt pool is deep enough the sodium should be able to collect without being exposed to air prematurely. Since sodium is a metal and thus conductive, it shouldnt cause problems when it collects on the negative probe in the pool.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
big deal. we drop twice that into the charles river for the naive freshmen each year at MIT... i'm sure you can find information about it on google site:mit.edu
I remember reading in an OSS history book about crude time bombs that were made using wine bottles filled with water and gelatin coated tablets of Na metal and/or Potassium. The method was simple: Pop a couple of tabs in the bottle, roll it under a truck or other igniteable item, and you have a half-hour to get away before the water dissolves the tablet casing. The USAAF dropped cases to the French resistance, who used them to little or no effectiveness- not entirely unexpected French-like bevaior.
My HS chem teacher does that for the 4th of July at his cabin. He was the kind of teacher that did any experiment that made something blow up. Now he is in college again to become a pharmacist. I am very afraid for the world now.
Sodium is the second lightest of the alkali earth metals. Interestingly, it is the cheapest metal money can buy. Light enough it would float on the water, if it weren't for the aforementioned explosiveness of such contact. Interestingly, the spontaneous reactivity of the alkali metals increases as a function of their weight ... cesium and francium are much more dangerous (or fun, depending on your PoV.)
so, how is this new or used for data gathering? Your opinion is a sham, me thinks.
Here's one that may prove useful, however.
Stick your head in the toilet and I'll run right over to pull it out...see how long you can last without breathing before I get there. Fun, no? Moronic, yes? Good, eh? Idiotic...of course!
I'm pretty sure they try to filter out the urban legends, but they do slip in. I had thought the one about strapping a JATO onto a car was true, but I understand that one was an urban legend. Or it maybe that the attribution of that story to the Darwin Awards was made up.
When I worked in the chemical industry, we had to cut up the 12 pound ingots into little peices in the 'sodium room'. It was hard work and it was hair rasing when a drop of sweat fell on the ingot and sizzled. There is nothing quite like sodium dissolved in liquid ammonia....
love is just extroverted narcissism
compared to the barrels of magnesium that I saw during a TLC/Discovery special on fires... This company had barrels filled with magnesium in oil, and something else caught fire. So the firemen, unaware of the Mg in barrels, start spraying water everywhere. Suddenly there's this TREMENDOUS white flash and defeaning boom, I mean we're talking lightning strike in daylight. See here for just a small amount of magnesium being sprayed with water.
Oh I don't know. Magnesium and aluminium when mixed as a powder is fun. How many people have done the cryogenically frozen bannana as a hammer trick? Selenium melting like butter?
Or he used it all up a little too close to the comp.
damnit, i really want to see this video. why must slashdot spoil everything. =(
"you sonofabitch i didn't know!"
Lithium was more reactive than sodium? It's the other way around. The reactivity of group 1A elements increases with period. Lithium is in period 2, sodium is in period 3. Cesium is the most electropositive element (i.e. the most entertaining/life-threatening when thrown into a lake) and occupies period 6. Francium (group 1A, period 7) would be more impressive, but it's so radioactive that even if you could scrape together a chunk of it, it would have decomposed into other elements before you got a chance to get it wet.
Here's a fun site with a periodic table and details on all the elements.
I guess the guy from this story has found a better way to blind cameras!
it's called load balancing...it needs mirrors. Do you want to offer him some bandwidth?...if not, don't complain!...just be patient
3.5 pounds of sodium metal would not have that drastic of a long term effect on a pond. If the pond was 1000 liters in volume and had a pH of 7 (unlikely) the pH would rise to approximately 12 (1000 liters ~= 275 gallons.) A larger pond lets say 10000 (again not a very large pond/lake) gallons, with an initial pH of 7, would experience a rise in the pH of approximately 4 units. Now lets consider the fact that the water in the pond is probably buffered to some degree, the result of the sodium metal reaction would have even less effect. If the water has any metal in it to speak of, like something uncommon like calcium, or iron, or magnesium, the hydroxide ions produced by the sodium metal reaction would precipitate the metals in the water and the pH would be even less effected.
...for I cannot look at the site and story!...
nuff said.
If we don't end war, War will end us. - H.G. Wells
Let me guess, the germans didn't wait for half an hour after seeing a bottle being thrown under their trucks...
actually, the French probably got so lit from drinking the wine to empty bottle that they lost all desire to win the war and just went back to surrendering.
I shudder to think of the danger of my middle school science teacher leaving a jar of sodium in oil around the room for the better part of the year. It just sat there, and we didn't really know anything about it until she put some in a tray filled with water then put that on an overhead projector. Anyone else curious as to how this guy managed to find an auction for sodium on eBay, the site that has a list of banned items longer than the entire list of auctions for "Star Wars" displayed on one page?
What are the odds this guy makes it into Bush's axis of evil? :)
Sink a 5 gallon bucket of sodium to the bottom of the pond. Devise a way to rupture the buck when it reaches the bottom...I'd pay premium to see that on pay-per-view.
I'm sure we're gonna get a lot of creative stories about sodium that aren't true, but this one is...
First year of college, we had an explosion rock the entire dorm I was in. No one had any idea what the hell happened until someone ran through the hallway telling everyone they had to come upstairs.
Well, I went up and saw an entire restroom covered in a fine white powder with even more powder floating in the air. There was an empty stall -- no toilet. Just a pipe (which amazingly enough was not pouring water everywhere...still can't figure that one out). There were no large chunks of ceramic (or whatever toilets are made of) or anything to be found anywhere.
As far as I know, they never caught the guys who did it, but what happened was they flushed a good bit of sodium down the toilet. It was unbelievable to just see the pipe sitting there with no toilet attached. Even funnier was seeing the guys on the floor get rounded up and all of them saying they didn't know what happened. Somehow "I dunno, it just, like, blew up." didn't quite cut it.
I have no idea of the actual legal standing.. but I believe the state should have a right to determine what you can put in your own lake, as that water eventually ends up in other lakes in the country, and is ultimately part of the water supply.
Isn't this incredibly old? I remember watching a movie of this in highschool.
The server's slashdotted so I can't take a look, but if I remember the guy threw the brick of sodium in the lake and it blew itself up in the air since it was a solid object only the exposed portions of sodium reacted and continued "jumping" until all the brick was used up.
I had to take chemistry during summer school one year (Yeah, I'm a geek who failed high school chemistry. Sue me. I married a chemist to make up for it. :) ) and ended up with one of the most interesting teachers I ever had.
Mr. B (I'll refrain from using his full name, but so that he recogizes himself if he's reading this he was an ex-cop who'd become a teacher after getting shot in the back. He taught summer school in Tampa in `87.) made otherwise boring subject matter interesting by peppering his lectures with personal anecdotes about how he'd utilized the chemistry we were being taught to raise hell in one form or another. They'd faked a gas leak in a chem lab and had the whole class pretend to be passed out (the teacher threw a chair through a window to try to ventilate the room faster), used miniature hot air balloons to drop m-80s into neighborhoods a few blocks down at 2am, and once wrapped a chunk of sodium in vaseline and flushed it down the school toilet, blowing out a good bit of the building's plumbing.
I don't know how many of his stories were true or not (they sure seemed convincing at the time), but the class was a riot.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
See, they gave us mercury to play with, we were just told we'd have to spend a week cleaning it out of every crack in the floor if we spilled it.
catgirls and fairies
If you are green peace, then the answer is :
:
.... FUCK OFF and go tell it somebody who cares.
:
My god, you are dieing. You are heavily contaminaed and need to be buried in a lead container. Give me money.
If you are a democrat, then the answer is
You poor person. We will look for the answer right away. We will create 100 new jobs to find the answer right away. 10 of those will be with janitors in my district.
If you a republican, the answer is:
If you are rich, then we will create 100 new jobs to find out why you are dieing. We will have to divert 70 researchers from SIDS, but we will find the answer.
If you are from texas, wyoming, missouri, or utah, then we can divert money from elsewhere and hire another 100 just in these states.
If you are poor, well, then
If you are a libertarian, then
You have insurance, they will pay for it. If not, then it is your fault.
If you are just a normal US person, well, you are simply fucked and no better off than what you were prior to reading this (or any number of other posts here).
enjoy the next elections.
Actually, I saw something about this not long ago on the History Channel. IIRC, they actually used condoms and dropped it into the fuel tank. Since the fuel will disolve the condom over time (some number of minutes), they had time to get away.
Later, the US started dropping something else like a condom but provided for more reliable means and timing mechanisms. I just don't recall what it was that we started suppling exactly. Nonetheless, I am sure it was dropped into the fuel tank.
Prices for "Sodium metal" on e-bay sky rocket!
I live by the Mississipi. Now I'm thinking up plans. Would it be safe enough if you just threw it from the bridge? (or probably away from it too) The bank on one side of the river is rather steep... Blowing up the university might not be a horrible idea.
catgirls and fairies
ifconfig on a FreeBSD box with a dead ethernet link will give you status: no carrier
Your mileage will undoubtedly vary on another os.
--
pants ahoy
Anyway, he was the chem head at a little high school at the time the story took place. I think it was in Kentucky but that hardly matters. They were doing the little bits of sodium in water thing and all the kids were greatly amused. One so much that he decided to lift a small stick of sodium, maybe half a pencil sized, from the oil filled jar. Apparently this story was used to get locks on the chemical cabinets at this school afterwards, and without locks the kid had fairly easy access.
So the kid, not sure what to do with his treasure, puts the oil logged piece of sodium in a paper towel and puts it in his pocket. He wanders to the library as such to study hall. He's getting nervous because he just stole it and starts to sweat a little, and notices his pocket getting a little warm. After a while his pocket is getting really hot and he pulls out the sodium and tosses it on the floor, apparently allowing it to react a little with muggy air. It starts to flame and flare a bit and the kid, brilliantly, steps on it to try and put it out, like one might a small bit of campfire that fell out of the fire pit. So, you guessed it, his shoe now has putty-like sodium metal molded to it and he's kicking bits of it around the library, trying to get it off as it flares a little here and there. Another student sees the small fire flickering on his shoes, calmly goes to janitor's closet and gets the mop water. He then pours it on the sodium and sets it off really well, displaying why kids shouldn't have ready access to things like sodium.
The bit I'm not sure about is why it started sputtering flame when he removed it from his pocket. Enough of the oil may have been absorbed into the poor fellow's pants and his sweat may have started it a bit, but I'm not sure if dry sodium metal would sputter in humid air. Nor have I had the chance to find out. The way he told the story though was quite funny, and none of us questioned it, so who knows.
If not now, when?
legs. Which are, by the way, always exuding water. . . containing small amounts of sodium chloride.
This is not a sane system! What can be done?
P2P...but it's gonna be one hell of a paradigm quake.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
you could have just anylized that white powder. You certainly had a few "chemists" available to you to do the work.
KFG
Poor guy (not too bright) put the stuff in his trouser pockets... a few minutes later his pants were on fire!
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
I saw a science teacher at the middle school do this when i went there. He was also fond of displaying how any powder if ground fine enough will burn or explode. Like blowing a cloud of fine dust into a flame and having it explode.
Back to the sodium. Sodium reacts with water very easily. Its a silver metal but just by the water in the air it turns a purplish color. This is the metal rusitng before your eyes.
This sciene teacher put a chunk about as big as a shugar cube in water
it kind of reacts and looks likeit boiling untill he threw a rock in the bucket. It make a huge "BOOM" and threw water around. He had us get very far away first.
The funny thing baout sodium is because reaction with almost anything makes it burn its hard to store. Oddly enough karasin will not react with it so this teacher had a chunk as big as a small loaf of bread in a karasin filled jar.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
"I want to be just like this guy when I grow up. :D "
Don't you mean "Blow Up"?
jesus, give slashdoters high school level chemsitry topics and they suddenly become grande chemists and physicists.
How about touchpowder? Touchpowder is nitrogen triiodide. You can make it using NH3 and I2. Make sure you make it in a solution, as the water prevents it from exploding. When the water dries, merely touching the powder gives it enough energy to explode. Neat stuff. Make sure you make only a little of the stuff however. Really dangerous (and loud!) stuff.
he is stupid.
He owns his own lake!
Looks like he dropped some in his watercooled server as well...
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
MIRROR HERE Its got graphics and video! Give it a second to load. If any one else has videos I can host.
Send to s1394119(AT)cedarville.edu and I'll gladly post them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When I was 11 my teacher in primary school told us about some of the stunts he and his friends had pulled in high school. One day they were shown the experiment with a sliver of sodium and some water. Not content with the small sliver and the small effect that it caused, they stole some of it from the classroom. The needed a place to do the experiment and figured a toilet bowl was a great place to try out. The effect was as many of us expected: explosion, toilet bowl wrecked, water bursting out of all the adjacent toilets. Unfortunately on the other side of the wall there were the teachers toilets. Ofcourse a teacher was sitting on the bowl when the explosion happened. :-) You can imagine what happened. They apparantly didn't get caught.
Use Adsense for Charity
And you still get to play with things you shouldn't, if you have the right teacher. I've got a couple good stories from AP Chem at my high school, in 1996 and 1997.
A favourite activity of kids in that class was filling balloons with oxygen, hydrogen and something else flamable, methane I think but I can't remember for sure. At any rate in 1996, year before I took it, the kids were doing this I believe as a prep for the magic show we put on for the elementry kids (we did it in 1997 too). Well they happened to set it up right under a sprinkler and it set it off, drenching them and setting off the fire alarm. The video of it (they were taping) was quite amusing.
So in 1997 when I was there we did a few different things. One related to this whole sodium discussion. Allt he metals from that group were placed, in a very small quantity, in water to show the increase in reactivity. All were stored as small chunks in oil. Lithium just fizzed a little, sodium kind of half burned and exploded and so on up. However the Cesium was rather more reactive than the teacher expected, or perhaps she just grabbed too big a lump. IT ended up blowing the whole 2 litre beaker apart and scaring the shit out of everyone, her espically.
She also told us that her son managed to make himself nice and sick to his stomach by drinking some fairly concentrated (like 6 molar) hydrochloric acid. See she used the little plastic chem bottles for water bottles in her house. For some reason, she had some HCl there one day, in the same bottle (storing acid was a common use for them in the lab). He didn't look at the lable and took a nice swig. Now HCl won't burn you like some, it's stomach acid, but that concentrated will cause a fair amount of dsicomfort.
http://members.tripod.com/~oldboard/assembly/hayes _modem_info.html
,1=even
|7|6|5|4|3|2|1|0| S13 power up async data format
| | | | | | | `---- unused
| | | | | | `----- result code, 0=basic, 1=extended
| | | | | `------ parity, 0=disabled, 1=enabled
| | | | `------- parity, 0=odd
| | | `-------- data bits, 0=7 bits, 1=8 bits
| | `--------- undefined
| `---------- buffer ovfw flag, 0=disabled,1=enabled
`----------- 8th bit, 0=space,1=mark (8 bit only)
Mileage may vary with non Hayes 1200 baud modems.
A solution to the problem with music today
Having said that, the shock waves and removal of oxygen can kill or traumatise a lot of fish and any birds near the surface. Which makes this a somewhat redneck experiment: I have no problem with people letting off big bangs, but not when they carelessly kill things in the neighborhood.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Has anybody accused Iraq of mass-producing Sodium yet?
After all, don't they call that mad leader "Sodium Hussein" or something like it?
Table-ized A.I.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
I know a guy, who once when he was a boy, stole some sodium at school. At recess he threw it into a puddle of water. Eventually a teacher approached, and the boy covered the puddle with a piece of paer to hide the stolen sodium. Under the paper the rection went on and the concentration of hydrogen gas increased until the level of detonating gas was reched. The burning sodium made it explode, and the poor boy got his face burned by squirting Caustic soda solution. he got seriously injured and almost left one eye.
Sodium is not a metal.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
His lake is an acre and a half -- over 6,000 square meters, if two meters deep on average, that's over 12,000 cubic meters of water
.13ppm if I did my math right.
= 12,000,000 liters
= 12,000,000 kilograms
The guy had 1.6 kilos of Na, giving us
Make that 11 videos (3 more on the way), and all but 1 picture and 1 graphic.
I can't get to the link. Their cervix ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H server must have been near the lake when it exploded. As such, I'll explain why the lake blew up. You see, Sodium is a noble gas, making it highly reactive. Get it near water, midgets, or antique furniture and Bang-Woo! Just like eatin' beans!
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Water is (nigh) incompressible -- so a small shock wave goes a long way. Since air has such a small bulk modulus (large compressibility) lots of energy can be stored in compressing the air and in adiabatically heating it. Since the water has a huge bulk modulus, there is no opportunity for the downward portion of the shock wave to dissipate -- that is, until it reaches the seams of the bucket and causes it to bust (dissipating energy as plastic deformation of the metal).
This is also why lighting and flushing a cherry bomb is so enjoyable for non-janitors: the shock wave goes into plumes of water and wrecking the sewer system, not harmlessly into the air.
flip
Gee, that's an explosive way to counteract the effects of acid rain! You'd get sodium sulfate in the water, but I imagine it's not nearly as bad as sulfuric acid.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I noticed that comment about those who do this being drunk at the time, and couldn't help but remember this.
Of course, if you want to prepare it in the more traditional manner, the way I have heard it is:
burn wood --> ashes
ashes+water---heat--->dilute NaOH (boil down to desired concentration, I have no idea what.)
NaOH+lard --> good yellow soap.
Needless to say, you want to be careful that the lard you use is not your own. I know some people say you can't be too clean in the lab, but I think that in this case we could agree that one would be overdoing the cleanliness.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The JATO story was in WIRED magazine about two years ago as an interview/narrative by the alleged creator of the vehicle. Check WIRED.com in the archives. Was in print and in web edition too. I really do not buy this version either, but to each their own.
/., as I am sure zillions of others did, but I never saw a refrence to the WIRED story here :(
BTW, I did submit the story to
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Back home whe I was in grade 4 (i can actualy rember that far back) we where rushed out of school to a fire alarm in the afternoon. What did we see but the science teacher walking back from a small pond behind the school looking loke he had taken a dip in.
It turned out earler that day he was cleaning out the chemistary lab (this school went from 1 to 12, big place) and found a semi rustey can leaking oil in the back. Now most chemestry teachers would realize things like Sodium and other things are stored in oil to prevent them from exploding if they come in contact with water. Wel this teacher not having a chemestery background thought nothing of it. Later that day he took this can of oil back to the pond and tossed it in. He started to walk away when the can did a mini depth charge scean you see in a WW2 movie, compleatealy soking him and cassing people int he school to beleave it happened in the school and pull the alarm. I don't rember all the details like exactaly what chemical was but I rember he was not there for grade 5
to kill the snakeheads in that Maryland pond.
When I was in high school, many decades ago, a friend of mine aquired a large quantity of sodium in a rather ilicit way. He cut it up into several gram lumps, and sold them to our fellow students, who would then get the restroom pass, and throw the lump into the toilet, with predictable results.
One fool bought several lumps, and managed to destroy a toilet!
By the way, this was one of our nation's leading science high schools, again proving that smart does not insure common sense.
Some guys in my high school class stole a substantial quantity of sodium from the school labs. They decanted this, oil and all, into several freezer bags. Leaving the bags unsealed, just wrapping the open end very tightly around the sodium, they then proceeded to flush all these down the toilet - and to run.
These guys were hoping to spark off the methane in the cesspit. I think they got a bit more than they bargained for!
What a mess. Put it this way: One, if you must do this, use someone else's toilet. Two, for heaven's sake make sure the other stalls are empty!!!
I read some chemistry teacher stories in this thread, and most do not show the teacher from a bad angle.
Mine decided to demonstrate that sodium reaction in a glass aquarium filled with water. After one guy recalled from the year before that there would be a reaction, we decided to get some distance from the teacher as he grabbed a piece that seemed just "too big" to not do anything stupid.
He told us to approach to see better, and we got away and prepared to duck for cover.
He then decided it was maybe unsafe and put a glass cover on top of the aquarium.
And that's when the aquarium exploded shattering glass across the whole classroom and doing quite some damage to him.
But then again, it's the same teacher who told us one morning he blew up his garage door with his car because he forgot to open it.
He also told us one liquid was very dangerous for the eyes only after one smart kid threw it with a pipette in the face of a girl who ended up evacuated at the hospital.
-- x
I took about a gram of sodium from the chemistry lab, dropped it in the toilet, and turned it into a fountain.
Ah... The good old days. Sometimes I'm amazed that I lived through High School.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Reading this story and these posts remind me of a book I read a few months ago:
Uncle Tungsten.
Excellent autobiography of a chemist, and an in depth introduction to chemistry. I do not have more than a passing knowledge of chemistry, but this was just a fun, and interesting book. It basically deals with every piece of the periodic table, and the chemists and elements that built it and helped fill it in. Go to your library and take a look!
To the tune of "Sixteen tons":
You buy three and half pounds
And what do you get
A little bit poorer
And blown to shit
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
The USAAF dropped cases to the French resistance, who used them to little or no effectiveness- not entirely unexpected French-like bevaior.
Enough already!
Everyone knows the French are cowards, yada yada yada. Did you read that bit in the newspaper a few days ago where the French rescued all the Westerners (including several Americans) from the Ivory Coast? (And, by the way, the article fails to point out that the French had been there for several days before the American forces turned up.) Would it surprise you to learn that the French, prior to WWII, had one of the proudest and most effective resistance records in the world? Drop it, for crying out loud.
And no, I have no affinity to France. For what it's worth, I'm from one of the few countries which has felt the effects of official state-sponsored French terrorism in the past few decades. (The bombing of the ship "Rainbow Warrior" in Auckland, New Zealand, 7 July 1985, ordered by the French Secret Service to dissuade Greenpeace from protesting continued nuclear bomb testing at Mururoa Atoll.)
But enough with the xenophobic hatred. Considering the real wars and battles currently being fought by more than half the nations in the world, don't you think that leaving off these snide and childish insults might be rather a good idea?
Some people fish with a hook, line, and cut bait. Others use a net. Others still shock the water with electroded and wait for the stunned fish to float to the surface. And there's the minority who throw sodium into the water. I don't fish in any of these ways. I do a different kind of fishing - fishing for the common moronfish. It's known in some regions as /. readers more l33t than joo. But sometimes I catch a slightly different breed, the king moronfish, also known as the /. moderator. See, I post a comment where the first sentence is redundant, but the rest is new. The new part is completely inaccurate, acting as bait to catch the smart /. readers, so that they'll attack me for being dumb, or they'll be quick to point out my spelling errors, as that is, afterall, the ultamate way to judge one's intelligince. But by sheer luck, I catch a king moronfish who mods my commend down as redundant, because it was too lazy to read beyond the first punctuation mark.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Videos are mirrored:
videos
When I was in high school (back in the 80s), our chemistry teacher and biology teacher decided to clean out the back store room (which hadn't been cleaned in at least a decade at that point). They ended up finding a bunch of sticks of Lithium, and several unmarked jars.
On jar in particular looked dangerous. Basicly, it was a small (~1/2 gallon) jar filled with an unknown liquid. Unfortunately, It had been sitting on top of another, larger jar (partly filled with something else). The lid of the larger jar had given way, dropping the smaller jar inside. The labels of both jars had long since fallen off, so no one had any idea what was in there.
So, these 2 teachers get the bright idea of disposing of the Lithium and the large jar over a long weekend, and decide to video tape themselves doing so (we got to watch the tape later). They tried throwing the lithium in a large puddle out in the courty somewhere, but their aim was so bad, the lithium fell onto wet patches of ground and just sizzled.
The funniest bit of the tape was when they decided to do something about the jar. Neither one of them owned a gun, but they wanted to shoot the jar and see what happened (I think they were hoping for an explosion). So, the biology teacher got his bow and started shooting arrows at the jar, hoping to puncture it, but couldn;t hit the damned thing.
By this point, most of the kids watching the tape were laughing because of the inneptness of the teachers. Eventually, the teacher did hit tha jar....and nothing happend. To this day, no one knows what was in that jar, but it wasn't explosive.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
11. explain to dad why the driveway has heat blisters
That reminds me of the time a friend and I made napalm and lit a large glob of it on dad's driveway. It burned for like three hours and we ended up having to put it out with the hose before he got home. I have no idea how long it would have kept burning.
Here's the funny thing: we did this back in 1989 or so (9th grade) and there's still a large, black, un-removable circle of charred napalm permanently affixed to dad's driveway. I think he's still pissed at us.
When I was in high school, the (possibly urban legend) story told by our chemistry teacher was that a former student had stolen a small chunk of sodium from chem lab. He stuck it in his pocket, probably figuring he'd blow the toilet right out of his double-wide after school. Anyways, he goes to P.E. later in the day. Next period, he's sitting in history class or shop or whatever and he starts sweating in his jeans. Next thing he knows, he's on fire.
Wow. A lot of cool stories on here from highschool chem classes. :)
:) He definitely made chemistry fun. (although, ended up panicing a few students in the process... hehehehe)
Although, one of my my highschool chemistry teachers never did anything crazy with cesium, but he played around with liquid methane for a week. (Submerging methane in a testtube into a liquid nitrogen bath, he'd get some liquid methane.) He would douse his hand with it (the methane, not the nitrogen) and light it on fire... He'd dump it on the floor of the classroom and ignite it so we could watch little balls of fire rolling around under everyone's desk. Cool guy.
Karma: NaN
Mel??? is that you?
No sig for the moment.
My high school chemistry professor had a video of this other professor doing the exact same thing.
The professor in the video had a friend how was in chemical industry who gave him a free barrel/crate/how ever it's shipped or Sodium.
The professor would goto this lake every year and throw several large cylindar shapped pieces into the lake. Sadly the tape was the professor's last year of doing this because he went though his whole stock of sodium. He tried getting more but it was too expensive and the company accidently sent him a stick of potasium. That thing made a nice explosion.
in Highschool I had a chemistry teacher, who was pretty much obsessed with making sodium explode. And our class always thought it was fun (we, the pupils were mad too, it was a class with guys only).
I remember one day we had an extra class scheduled (inofficially of course), just for the purpose of making sodium explode. The teacher (who shall remain unnamed, thank you very much) had set up a little glass jar with water on his desk. He started out with really small pieces. They sparked, hissed and even flamed up a little. It was nice. Almost cosey. Then he proceeded to take a piece that was a little bigger.
*KABOOM*
The whole bazaar exploded. The moment afterwards, everyone just sat there absolutely still. A little shocked. The teacher, standing right at the glass jar that now had splittered all across the room, stood there absolutely still, in the same position he had when he dropped the piece into the jar. It was as if nobody actuelly couldn't belive that just had happend. Luckily, nobody got hurt from the glass pieces that were moving in a high velocity. We decided that was enough for the day. Oh goodness how we laughed about that. It was a fun story to tell to people from other classes.
You'd think it would be over now, would you? WRONG! Like I said, we were all mad, so a few weeks before graduation, we convinced him into scheduling an extra lecture outdoors, by the river near the school. The purpose of this was of course to blow up some more sodium, this time in the river.
We threw some pretty large chunks in there (by hand of course, despite the earlier incident, we were no wussies...). And boy was it fun. It was almost in the middle of town, so people must have been terrified (wonder the bloody police didn't show up).
Reading all this I'm starting to wonder if we actually are really lucky that we're still alive...
(DISCLAIMER: I saw no copyright notice on the article, and I think the guy just wants people to know about his hobby and be in awe of him (which this page accomplished for me), so think this cut n' paste will only help his cause. If you can't reach his site, read below; but BE SURE to go back to his site at a lower traffic time to check out the presumably sweet videos (which I have yet to check out:-)). And now, so more geeks can understand just how cool this chemistry is:)
/. to remove this post, I completely agree with his request.)
____________________________
Sodium Party
Periodic Table home
I'd read about, and heard stories about, throwing sodium into water. It's a classic thing chemistry students do in college, and based on the reports I have been able to find on the internet, they are often drunk at the time.
While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why. The only videos I could find were of pathetic thumbnail-sized bits skidding about in a bowl. (Click here to see my version of this: It's really boring, trust me.)
(A note on videos: All the videos on this page are in QuickTime format, and most of them require QuickTime V5 or better. You can download the latest version of QuickTime for Macintosh or Windows from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download.)
To do better than that, I decided I should produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions. To do this, I held a Sodium Party. People brought chips and soda and we had a cookout.
The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.
Next I constructed a patented Sodium Release-o-tron:
It was designed to be constructed in less than an hour using only things I already had lying around the shop, be very unlikely to go off by accident, and be unable to fail when activated. So far so good.
Here's a picture of the first lump I loaded into it, in a preliminary experiment about a month before the party:
Click here for a video showing how this lump was cut off of the main block: A wood chisel and some pushing is all it takes, because this stuff is very, very soft.
And here's a picture of what happened when we pulled the string:
Click here to see a video of this first explosion. (But only if you've got a fast connection, because it's not the best video by far: See below for much better ones if loading these takes time for you.)
This chunk, about 50 grams, gave a surprisingly strong bang, especially considering that there was no containment and no intentional pre-mixing of reactive chemicals, at least one of which is normally a prerequisite for a sharp report.
My theory is that it's a fuel-air explosion caused by mixing of the hydrogen gas with air, ignited a second or two later (as you can see in the video) by the heat that builds up in the sodium. The heating of the sodium acts as the time fuse needed to make any fuel air bomb work. This theory would imply that only a minimal shock wave should be transmitted into the water, since the explosion would be happening well above the surface, as the picture seems to show. Unfortunately that theory is not supported by the fact that the metal bucket was split at the seams, even though less than an inch of rim extended over the level of the water.
Which brings me to a safety warning: Sodium is really rather dangerous. If we had been anywhere within 15 feet of this explosion, it would have sprayed us with molten sodium and sodium hydroxide. Even a tiny amount in the eyes would have been a serious medical emergency. That's why I built a device that let me release it in a very controlled way from a great distance: If you want to do anything even remotely like this, you should take similar precautions. While it's safe to drop a tiny piece, maybe a few millimeters on edge, into a bowl of water, if you are wearing safety glasses, the force of the explosion goes up non-linearly with size. A lot of people have hurt themselves by going to bigger and bigger pieces thinking it's just going to do more of the same. It doesn't: At some point it turns from a fizzle and flame into a real explosion, like a shotgun.
There's also the issue of smoke, of which a lot is produced. I'm not sure what the smoke is, but I suspect it's powdered soda lye (caustic soda, otherwise known as sodium hydroxide), which means you really, really don't want to get in the way of it. Or it could be powdered sodium oxide, which might react over time with carbon dioxide in the air to form sodium carbonate or bicarbonate. I really don't know. But if it is powdered soda lye it would severely burn your eyes, lungs, and skin, and no safety glasses would protect you. Be sure you are upwind.
We had wet down about a 15 foot radius all around, and true to expectations, there were a series of secondary explosions as balls of sodium ejected by the main explosion hit the ground. Unfortunately I was taken aback by the explosion and jerked the camera, so you can't see them. That's one reason the later videos came out better: I used a tripod.
I had planned to hose down and maybe neutralize the driveway the next morning, but in a fascinating display of nature, the driveway was full of little yellow butterflies the next morning.
I've read that male butterflies collect sodium as a present for their mates, and they sure seemed to like mine, so I decided to leave it. I'm surprised they liked what must be a fairly basic solution, but then maybe it's just neutralized decades of road acid.
According to the popular radio entomologist May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois, I was right about the butterflies. She writes:
"They're called sulfur butterflies (in the family Pieridae) and the general consensus is that they are indeed after sodium, which is transferred to females in the spermatophore or sperm package.
Here are some references about the phenomenon:
Adler, P. and D. Pearson, 1982. Why do male butterflies visit mud puddles? Can. J. Zool. 60: 322-325.
Arms, K., P. Feeny and R.C. Lederhouse, 1974. Sodium: stimulus for puddling behavior by tiger swallowtail butterflies, Papilio glaucus. Science 185: 372-374.
Smedley, S. R. and T. Eisner 1996. Sodium--a male moth's gift to its offspring. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93:809-13.
There's something intensely sad about this. These tiny creatures have nothing to give but a little package of sodium, but this they give with all their heart. It is their life, their hope, their future, and they give it, asking nothing in return, that their children might have a better start in life. I suppose it should be uplifting, but somehow it just seems terribly sad to me.
Moving on, I still needed to work out the details of my Sodium Party. The classic thing to do with sodium is to throw it in a lake. I own a lake. It's obvious what to do, right? Actually, it's not that simple. For one thing, I care a great deal about the fish and frogs in my lake, and don't wish to poison or shock them. Sodium certainly isn't poisonous, but it could raise the pH measurably, even in my acre and a half lake (I did the math). More of a problem would be intense shock waves. After all, fishing with dynamite is a redneck tradition, and I don't allow fishing in my lake, even by me.
There was also that phone call from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which somehow got wind of my idea. They believe that sodium is a caustic waste material which may not be dumped into the waters of the state in any quantity. I question that on two grounds, first I question that there is no lower reporting limit on sodium, and second I question that my lake is a water of the state. Having worked as a volunteer for an environmental water quality watchdog organization, and having spoken with several people there about this, I think I'm almost certainly right in believing that I have the legal right to dump a few ounces of sodium into my private lake if I so choose. The representative of the IEPA, however, disagreed with me on that conclusion.
Fortunately, no constitutional crisis developed out of this impasse, because by the time he put is foot down, I had already decided that I really didn't want to place my fish in harms way anyway.
The day before the party a few intrepid souls came out to test my ingenious workaround. I cleared a small floating deck, put a tarp over it with edges so I could flood the whole thing with about an inch of water, and put a small kids swimming pool full of water in the middle. Then I anchored the whole thing out in the middle of the lake with the sodium release-o-tron on it.
I loaded the machine with a 109.5 gram solid lump of sodium (about twice as big as the piece in my first experiment on land), rowed away, and started the cameras rolling.
The idea was that the sodium would explode in the pool, and at most a trivial amount would escape to the surrounding lake, where it would be instantly vaporized. I could then neutralize the pool water with a touch of hydrochloric acid ("Muriatic acid" at any hardware store), leaving only slightly salty water in the pool. (Sodium goes to hydrogen gas plus sodium and hydroxide ions in the water. Hydrochloric acid is chlorine and hydrogen ions: The hydrogen ions combine with the hydroxide ions to form water and neutralize the pH, while the sodium and chlorine ions are what is more commonly known as dissolved table salt. Not even the IEPA, I believe, has a regulation against dumping slightly salty water.)
But that's not quite how it worked out. There was an initial large explosion:
Then there were a series of secondary explosions obviously caused by a single fairly large chunk that was literally hopping across the lake. It was thrown high up into the air, came down to hit the water at a high rate of speed, and was then thrown back up into the air by the resulting explosion. This happened at least three, maybe four times, so far as I can tell from the video.
This is quite alarming: The longest time between impacts, timed on the videotape, was 3.12 seconds. If you do the math, this means the chunk was thrown almost 40 feet high. Fortunately it was going reasonably close to straight up and down, and we were quite far away (about 200 feet). But this skipping behavior, which so far as I know is documented here for the first time on the internet, clearly gives the whole thing far greater potential reach. It's easy to imagine a chunk skipping hundreds of feet.
I think this skipping behavior is one reason reports on what happens to sodium when you throw it in water are so varied and contradictory. As you will see in the videos below, it varies tremendously depending on the size of the chunk, how hard it hits the water, how deep the water is, and probably on the temperature of the air and water.
Very small pieces skid around and may or may not burn, but don't generally explode. Larger pieces explode and disintegrate themselves. Still larger pieces explode but stay intact, ejecting a solid chunk high into the air. Of course when the chunk comes back down, it's anyone's guess what happens next.
If someone were to throw a chunk like this (about three ounces) by hand into a lake, it could very easy come back and hit them. This video tape clearly demonstrates that sodium can throw itself farther than you can. And more ominously, you can clearly see on at least one of the jumps that it tends to come back at the direction it was thrown from. My theory is that when it hits the water it forms a cavity as it plunges down. This cavity acts like a cannon barrel to direct the chunk back in the direction it came from, when the steam and evolved hydrogen explode.
For this reason, I think a repeat of this method of deployment would be ill advised. It simply isn't predictable enough to be safe. When the pool is surrounded by wet driveway, there's no obvious way for chunks to skip long distances, and that's the way I decided to do it for the main party.
On the day of the party I set up the Release-O-Tron at one end of our parking lot, and laid out a pair of hoses connected to the well pump in the lake (which provides an endless supply of water). I ran the hoses for about an hour to get the whole gravel area wet down, and they were left running most of the time, to keep a good puddle about 40-50ft in diameter around the swimming pool.
Starting around 5:30 we set off a bunch of explosions, using a variety of different sizes and configurations of sodium, during daylight and night time. Some were solid chunks, others were cut up into sugar-cube sized bits:
Here are all the videos together in one place, in chronological order. Click on the picture to see the corresponding movie.
Sample Image Movie Size Description
452KB About one gram chip in a bowl. Boring. This is the experiment that makes a lot of people try bigger pieces, thinking that they will get more of the same. Instead they get an explosion they weren't expecting. Unless, of course, they've visited this web page.
4.6MB How to cut up sodium with a chisel. Wear gloves and safety glasses.
2.5MB Our first explosion, about 50 grams in one piece. I jerked the camera. Very Blair Witch.
4.7MB Our second explosion, in a tub floated on the lake. 109.5 gram single piece.
3.7MB First explosion of the party, done during daylight because some people had to leave early. A small 18.5 gram solid piece.
3.9MB In this explosion we cut up 59.0 grams into sugar-cube-sized chunks to see if it made a difference. I think this configuration gives the most pleasing explosions.
10.4MB 151.5 grams cut into cubes. This is one of the best videos.
1.2MB 70.8 grams in one piece. This video is included for documentary completeness only: It's out of focus and not really worth watching.
1.8MB 83.5 grams in one piece. This video is included for documentary completeness only: It's out of focus and not really worth watching.
7.5MB 145.0 grams cut into cubes. This is probably the best video of the lot.
2.2MB 119.5 grams in one piece. This video is somewhat out of focus, but it's a huge explosion to somewhat worthwhile to watch.
21.4MB In this video we used a propane torch to light about 10 grams of it in a bowl, to see how it would burn. It burns sort of like magnesium, but easier to light. Sodium burning in air is very gentle, slow, controlled. Try to put it out with water and you're in big trouble.
13.8MB More burning in air, about 50 grams this time. We used a stick to stir it, and the stick started burning like a fuse, probably because of moisture in it.
2.3MB 87.5 grams in one piece.
1.0MB Our biggest chunk ever: 175.0 grams in one piece, dropped in a bucket in the pool. It shot up like a rocket and landed on the driveway largely intact.
12.7MB This video shows us tracking down and detonating the stray chunk from the last explosion. Ed and I sprayed it from a distance with water hoses. The video starts slow, but gets more interesting as it goes on.
______________________
(Sorry if this pissed you off...if the author asks
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Being from Oklahoma I wish she were my age!
.22 Cal Rifle
.45 instead).
Guns, Women, Lake, Explosion, Priceless...
Scientific knowledge
Female
Explosive experiment
Delicious!
Damn, where have all the good ladies gone. My wife is afraid of my 9mm (glad I didn't get a
Posting as AC for obvious reason.
I have been to many parties where we throw sodium in the lake. It's pretty. We generally use a surgical-tubing sling, a large one held by two people and run by a 3rd. Always wear gloves.
We chop the stuff up into blocks from sugar cube to maybe 1.5" squares, depending on our mood. Launch 50 to 100 feet out into the water. You get something between a POP and a BLAM! and a white explosion of sparks flying up. NOT a "BOOOM!" I do NOT believe it would kill a fish; it's not that heavy of an explosion. If you threw out a much larger piece at once maybe, but the thing is that the water can't really get to it all at once to make a huge explosion. What happens when you throw in big pieces is that you get a bang as the piece breaks up, then lots of little secondary pops.
The stuff we were using was somewhat oxidized, or something, on the surface (in storage a long time). The reaction was better after cutting so a fresh surface was exposed.
Oh, BTW, neither liquid oxygen nor hydrogen are nearly as dangerous as the general population thinks they are, either. All of these things must be treated with respect, but once you figure out the parameters they're all fun.
Even Mussolini didn't sell out the Jews. The French did, willingly. In the Algerian war of 1954, they killed hundreds of thousands of rebels and displaced millions of civilians. The French, currently selling nuclear tech to Iraq and aiding and abetting other known terrorist states, are threatening to veto any UN resolutions unless we ensure that they will get lucrative oil contracts with the new regime. They are a craven and pathetic people, beneath contempt.
Not to mention that the French special forces are some unbelievably bad-ass motherfuckers.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
This is the metal rusitng before your eyes ... This sciene teacher ... a shugar cube ... looks likeit boiling ... It make a huge "BOOM" ... funny thing baout sodium ... karasin will not react ...
I saw a science teacher at the middle school do this when i went there.
I'm guessing that you shouldn't have dropped out then. Please go back, it's not too late.
You said these were the chemistry & biology teachers and not, say, the janitor? It should not have been hard for the chemistry teacher to find out in a few minutes what is in the jar. Most things you can imagine in a school lab can be analysed by a few simple reactions. But to simply throw away this stuff like that - it could have been a hazard to the environment or the health - is entirely pathetic and would have been illegal at least in my country.
The only reasons I can think of are:
because he's bored and can't think of something, anything better to do (watching paint dry springs immediately to mind)
because he stocked the pond and doesn't have the patience to fish for real (throw the sodium into the water, wait, then cruise out in your dory with a net and scoop the fish off the remaining water), or
because he can, which doesn't really answer the "why" question.
What is it with most geeks and things that go kaboom anyway? Do you guys all want to be Marvin the Martian or something?
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Waaay more fun!!
50 Gallon Garbage bags, 3 100 yard extention cords, paper clips, H2 and O2 (make your own from water or use the torch tanks)
No, Mel is very very clever. I just had a lot of time on my hands.
One pound of sodium that my dad and I threw into
a 5 gallon bucket of water in the back yard.
I wish that I had video of that to show you all.
the bucket blew into hundreds of pieces and the grass was flattened....
then we heard a thud in the garden nearby.
What was left of the bar was sitting there burning
and melting in the wet garden. It was quite an experience.
this sig is deprecated
Ok, while we are waaaay of topic, you might want to note that they sent mostly foreign legion troops. Which, apart from the officers, don't accept any French citizens.
But, having been in the German army, I cross trained with French troops and the longer serving soldiers and NCOs in their elite forces were really good. Pity they treated their conscripts so badly.
Before moving on to my current career, I worked for about 6 months at a secondary lead refinery, where we recycled car batteries back into lead.
The batteries were brought into what was called the breaker room, where they were smashed, the plastic case pieces would float to the top of the mix and removed for recycling, the liquid was drained off and sold, and then what was left was run through a drying kiln and then into a reverbatory furnace with molten lead coming out the other end.
The lead was then treated with a variety of processes to either soften or harden it. This was the part that was a pyromaniac's wet dream. Imagine a refinery floor with 4 kettles of 250-300,000 pounds of molten lead each, set into the floor so that the top of the kettle is just above waist high. Then imagine that the processing of these kettles full of molten lead uses powdered sulfur, red phosphorous, a calcium-aluminum-magnesium alloy and SODIUM. That's right, they paid union steel workers to stand there and throw paper lunch sacks full of powdered red phosphorous into a swirling kettle of molten lead. Oh yeah...
I was a Q.C. technician, so it was my job to sample the lead, test it's content and then write orders for the union guys to follow as to how much of each material to add.
Now, back to the sodium story... remember the breaker room where they smashed the batteries? That room was as big as a medium-sized airplane hanger, all metal construction with a cement floor. The floor was usually covered by up to an inch of a weak sulfuric acid solution that leaked from the battery crushing equipment. Less than a hundred yards away was a storage room containing 25 gallon drums of large chunks of metallic sodium. One day one of the guys called me over, pulled out a large knife and sliced off a chunk of sodium about the size of a baseball, and I then followed him to the entrance of the battery crusher room. He wiggled his eyebrows, which was about all the expression you can display behind a respirator, safety glasses and a face shield, and then threw that chunk of sodium into the middle of the room.
KABLOOIE!
Sodium reacts when it contacts water, because it disassociates a Hydrogen and an Oxygen atom from the water molecule leaving one free Hydrogen atom which then ignites from the heat generated by the reaction. Now, imagine if instead of water (H2O) you instead used a mixture of H2O and H2S04. More hydrogen! More oxygen! Bigger boom! Heck, you can throw just about any metal into Sulfuric Acid and start liberating small amounts of Hydrogen, so something like Sodium is just overkill.
Luckily we were wearing those big ear-muff style hearing protectors, or we would have been deafened. The explosion was unbelievable and nearly knocked us over from 20+ feet away, and we weren't even in the same room where it happened.
The most amazing part of the story is that no one even noticed. There were so many loud noises and other distractions that a deafeningly loud bang was no reason for people to even look up.
If it hadn't been for the fact that the company was an environmental disgrace (the president and several managers were indicted a year or so after I left for dumping water with lead dust in it into the local sewer system) and a safety nightmare (I've never seen a place with so many 'first aid incidents' before, and I hope to never again), it was a great job for $21,000 a year... of course that was 1998, so $21,000 seemed like a lot of money at the time...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
You want to see a major reaction from placing an object into a body of water? Forget sodium or more unstable elements. Here's what you do:
2. Locate a crowded public pool
3. Covertly drop one Twix bar into the pool
4. Observe the CATASTROPHIC reaction!
SODIUM DROP -- Huge chunks of solid sodium thrown off the Longfellow Bridge explode in the Charles River.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V117/N39/
Oliver Sack's recent memoir "Uncle Tungsten", goes into great detail about his and his friends experients with various metals and gasses. Apparently dangerous chemicals were easy to come by for a boy in 1950's England.
Sorry, the obfuscated perl in your sig made me think that maybe Mel had finally given in and exchanged Hex for perl's "expressiveness"
</tounge>
No sig for the moment.
My High school chemistry teacher once told us in class that his freinds and himself used to steal pieces of sodium from the labs at college for pratical jokes. They would take a piece of paper and some tape and make a small pocket on the underside of a toilet seat lid where they would insert piece of sodium. They would then close the lid. When some poor sap came along to "take care of business" he would get an unpleasant surprise upon lifting the lid. Boom! Once the sodium accidently fell into the toilet while my teacher was rigging the joke and the joke blew up in his face...literally
> What else has a pH of 12? We're still in
...
> the range of common household cleaners.
Nair. So if you fancy jumping into a vat of Nair,
(No, I'm not making this up. I have some of my students measure the pH of various shampoos and skin care products. Nair weighs in in the 10-12 range, usually.)
-- Rick
1000 liters is just a cubic meter. I wouldn't call it a "pond"
<p>
The Raven
The Raven
I'm guessing you're from the USA. Ever taken a look at the history of your own country over the past 50 years...? Guilty on all charges.
They are a craven and pathetic people, beneath contempt.
That may apply to their government, but not the people. Same with the USA.
I'm thinking you were joking, or completely obvious to history that isn't taught in your schools or made into movies.
Now we know why he never gets invited to Bill Gates' lake parties...
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
I'll save you the trouble.
It was porcelain.
When I was in highschool, we had a cool chemistry teacher who did that demonstration of the burning sodium in water. One of the kids thought that it was way too cool and stole a bar of it from the oil-filled jug whereinwhich it was kept, putting the bar of sodium in his back pocket. Very shortly thereafter, the sodium began to reach with moisture from the air and got very hot in his back pocket, so he pulled it out and, in a frenzy and a panic, ran into the bathroom and threw it into the toilet. Needless to say, the bathroom looked like something out of the gulf war (which was going on at the time) and the kid was lucky to not have dispersed himself throughout the school. At least he wasn't near the swimming pool at the time.
Friends in my dorms tried to order sodium from the chem lab on campus. A few minutes later the cops showed up to the class wondering who was trying to get ahold of sodium. That plan fell through but we did manage to get jars of 14 molar nitric acid - which works much better than liquid plummer.
Where is the mirror?! I want to read!
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
I've got mirrors up at Earlham College and UW-Madison. No movies, but pictures are in.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Sodium Party
Periodic Table home
I'd read about, and heard stories about, throwing sodium into water. It's a classic thing chemistry students do in college, and based on the reports I have been able to find on the internet, they are often drunk at the time.
While anecdotal evidence would suggest that many people have thrown sodium into the lakes and streams of the world, they have been reprehensibly lax in documenting the results. I could find no reliable, and I stress the word reliable, reports on what actually happens. What reports I did find were contradictory: As you will see, I now know why. The only videos I could find were of pathetic thumbnail-sized bits skidding about in a bowl. (Click here to see my version of this: It's really boring, trust me.)
(A note on videos: All the videos on this page are in QuickTime format, and most of them require QuickTime V5 or better. You can download the latest version of QuickTime for Macintosh or Windows from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download.)
To do better than that, I decided I should produce a comprehensive online reference on sodium dropping, with documentation on the size and shape of the chunks, how thrown, and most importantly with videos of the resulting explosions. To do this, I held a Sodium Party. People brought chips and soda and we had a cookout.
The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.
Next I constructed a patented Sodium Release-o-tron:
It was designed to be constructed in less than an hour using only things I already had lying around the shop, be very unlikely to go off by accident, and be unable to fail when activated. So far so good.
Here's a picture of the first lump I loaded into it, in a preliminary experiment about a month before the party:
Click here for a video showing how this lump was cut off of the main block: A wood chisel and some pushing is all it takes, because this stuff is very, very soft.
And here's a picture of what happened when we pulled the string:
Click here to see a video of this first explosion. (But only if you've got a fast connection, because it's not the best video by far: See below for much better ones if loading these takes time for you.)
This chunk, about 50 grams, gave a surprisingly strong bang, especially considering that there was no containment and no intentional pre-mixing of reactive chemicals, at least one of which is normally a prerequisite for a sharp report.
My theory is that it's a fuel-air explosion caused by mixing of the hydrogen gas with air, ignited a second or two later (as you can see in the video) by the heat that builds up in the sodium. The heating of the sodium acts as the time fuse needed to make any fuel air bomb work. This theory would imply that only a minimal shock wave should be transmitted into the water, since the explosion would be happening well above the surface, as the picture seems to show. Unfortunately that theory is not supported by the fact that the metal bucket was split at the seams, even though less than an inch of rim extended over the level of the water.
Which brings me to a safety warning: Sodium is really rather dangerous. If we had been anywhere within 15 feet of this explosion, it would have sprayed us with molten sodium and sodium hydroxide. Even a tiny amount in the eyes would have been a serious medical emergency. That's why I built a device that let me release it in a very controlled way from a great distance: If you want to do anything even remotely like this, you should take similar precautions. While it's safe to drop a tiny piece, maybe a few millimeters on edge, into a bowl of water, if you are wearing safety glasses, the force of the explosion goes up non-linearly with size. A lot of people have hurt themselves by going to bigger and bigger pieces thinking it's just going to do more of the same. It doesn't: At some point it turns from a fizzle and flame into a real explosion, like a shotgun.
There's also the issue of smoke, of which a lot is produced. I'm not sure what the smoke is, but I suspect it's powdered soda lye (caustic soda, otherwise known as sodium hydroxide), which means you really, really don't want to get in the way of it. Or it could be powdered sodium oxide, which might react over time with carbon dioxide in the air to form sodium carbonate or bicarbonate. I really don't know. But if it is powdered soda lye it would severely burn your eyes, lungs, and skin, and no safety glasses would protect you. Be sure you are upwind.
We had wet down about a 15 foot radius all around, and true to expectations, there were a series of secondary explosions as balls of sodium ejected by the main explosion hit the ground. Unfortunately I was taken aback by the explosion and jerked the camera, so you can't see them. That's one reason the later videos came out better: I used a tripod.
I had planned to hose down and maybe neutralize the driveway the next morning, but in a fascinating display of nature, the driveway was full of little yellow butterflies the next morning.
I've read that male butterflies collect sodium as a present for their mates, and they sure seemed to like mine, so I decided to leave it. I'm surprised they liked what must be a fairly basic solution, but then maybe it's just neutralized decades of road acid.
According to the popular radio entomologist May Berenbaum from the University of Illinois, I was right about the butterflies. She writes:
"They're called sulfur butterflies (in the family Pieridae) and the general consensus is that they are indeed after sodium, which is transferred to females in the spermatophore or sperm package.
Here are some references about the phenomenon:
Adler, P. and D. Pearson, 1982. Why do male butterflies visit mud puddles? Can. J. Zool. 60: 322-325.
Arms, K., P. Feeny and R.C. Lederhouse, 1974. Sodium: stimulus for puddling behavior by tiger swallowtail butterflies, Papilio glaucus. Science 185: 372-374.
Smedley, S. R. and T. Eisner 1996. Sodium--a male moth's gift to its offspring. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93:809-13.
There's something intensely sad about this. These tiny creatures have nothing to give but a little package of sodium, but this they give with all their heart. It is their life, their hope, their future, and they give it, asking nothing in return, that their children might have a better start in life. I suppose it should be uplifting, but somehow it just seems terribly sad to me.
Moving on, I still needed to work out the details of my Sodium Party. The classic thing to do with sodium is to throw it in a lake. I own a lake. It's obvious what to do, right? Actually, it's not that simple. For one thing, I care a great deal about the fish and frogs in my lake, and don't wish to poison or shock them. Sodium certainly isn't poisonous, but it could raise the pH measurably, even in my acre and a half lake (I did the math). More of a problem would be intense shock waves. After all, fishing with dynamite is a redneck tradition, and I don't allow fishing in my lake, even by me.
There was also that phone call from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which somehow got wind of my idea. They believe that sodium is a caustic waste material which may not be dumped into the waters of the state in any quantity. I question that on two grounds, first I question that there is no lower reporting limit on sodium, and second I question that my lake is a water of the state. Having worked as a volunteer for an environmental water quality watchdog organization, and having spoken with several people there about this, I think I'm almost certainly right in believing that I have the legal right to dump a few ounces of sodium into my private lake if I so choose. The representative of the IEPA, however, disagreed with me on that conclusion.
Fortunately, no constitutional crisis developed out of this impasse, because by the time he put is foot down, I had already decided that I really didn't want to place my fish in harms way anyway.
The day before the party a few intrepid souls came out to test my ingenious workaround. I cleared a small floating deck, put a tarp over it with edges so I could flood the whole thing with about an inch of water, and put a small kids swimming pool full of water in the middle. Then I anchored the whole thing out in the middle of the lake with the sodium release-o-tron on it.
I loaded the machine with a 109.5 gram solid lump of sodium (about twice as big as the piece in my first experiment on land), rowed away, and started the cameras rolling.
The idea was that the sodium would explode in the pool, and at most a trivial amount would escape to the surrounding lake, where it would be instantly vaporized. I could then neutralize the pool water with a touch of hydrochloric acid ("Muriatic acid" at any hardware store), leaving only slightly salty water in the pool. (Sodium goes to hydrogen gas plus sodium and hydroxide ions in the water. Hydrochloric acid is chlorine and hydrogen ions: The hydrogen ions combine with the hydroxide ions to form water and neutralize the pH, while the sodium and chlorine ions are what is more commonly known as dissolved table salt. Not even the IEPA, I believe, has a regulation against dumping slightly salty water.)
But that's not quite how it worked out. There was an initial large explosion:
Then there were a series of secondary explosions obviously caused by a single fairly large chunk that was literally hopping across the lake. It was thrown high up into the air, came down to hit the water at a high rate of speed, and was then thrown back up into the air by the resulting explosion. This happened at least three, maybe four times, so far as I can tell from the video.
This is quite alarming: The longest time between impacts, timed on the videotape, was 3.12 seconds. If you do the math, this means the chunk was thrown almost 40 feet high. Fortunately it was going reasonably close to straight up and down, and we were quite far away (about 200 feet). But this skipping behavior, which so far as I know is documented here for the first time on the internet, clearly gives the whole thing far greater potential reach. It's easy to imagine a chunk skipping hundreds of feet.
I think this skipping behavior is one reason reports on what happens to sodium when you throw it in water are so varied and contradictory. As you will see in the videos below, it varies tremendously depending on the size of the chunk, how hard it hits the water, how deep the water is, and probably on the temperature of the air and water.
Very small pieces skid around and may or may not burn, but don't generally explode. Larger pieces explode and disintegrate themselves. Still larger pieces explode but stay intact, ejecting a solid chunk high into the air. Of course when the chunk comes back down, it's anyone's guess what happens next.
If someone were to throw a chunk like this (about three ounces) by hand into a lake, it could very easy come back and hit them. This video tape clearly demonstrates that sodium can throw itself farther than you can. And more ominously, you can clearly see on at least one of the jumps that it tends to come back at the direction it was thrown from. My theory is that when it hits the water it forms a cavity as it plunges down. This cavity acts like a cannon barrel to direct the chunk back in the direction it came from, when the steam and evolved hydrogen explode.
For this reason, I think a repeat of this method of deployment would be ill advised. It simply isn't predictable enough to be safe. When the pool is surrounded by wet driveway, there's no obvious way for chunks to skip long distances, and that's the way I decided to do it for the main party.
On the day of the party I set up the Release-O-Tron at one end of our parking lot, and laid out a pair of hoses connected to the well pump in the lake (which provides an endless supply of water). I ran the hoses for about an hour to get the whole gravel area wet down, and they were left running most of the time, to keep a good puddle about 40-50ft in diameter around the swimming pool.
Starting around 5:30 we set off a bunch of explosions, using a variety of different sizes and configurations of sodium, during daylight and night time. Some were solid chunks, others were cut up into sugar-cube sized bits:
the French, prior to WWII, had one of the proudest and most effective resistance records in the world?
That's not really saying great things about their military, though, is it?
that story's getting close to an urban legend (doesn't mean it didn't happen) - I was told a varient in high schoiol in New Zealand 30 years ago
I can vouch for the skittering effect.
In high school my chem teacher placed a bowl of water on his desk at the front of the room. He then proceded to place a large plexiglass/plastic shield (about 3.5 or 4 feet high, three feet wide and curved) in front of the bowl to separate the fragile students from the harmless water.
Well, then he takes out a small container with oil and a chunk of something (yes, sodium) in it. Opens it up, cuts off a chunk, tosses it in the bowl and joins the class on the proper side of the shield.
What happened was that the chunk of sodium turned into a small, burning speedboat that sped around the surface of the water on the bowl. It shot of a whole lot of sparks and balls of fire. One of those balls of fire hit the sheild and started burning a hole in it. Another made the leap over the shield and onto a student's desk, who then just kinda stared at it in amazement and then backed his chair away.
I think he left the classroom with a little less trust for our teacher that day. At least it didn't land in his lap, or on his head.
But, my point is, I've often wondered if that kind of behavior could be duplicated on a grander scale with a large chunk of sodium and a nice calm lake.
If only there were video footage of it...
Gabriel Ricard
On a related note, the Evanston Fire department isn't not a big fan of the Northwestern University's Engineering department. Reason? In the chem labs we have stored the largest concentration (of any university in the US) of substances that are flammable upon contact with water . Oh yea, and the building that the chem labs are in happens to be the third largest low rise office building in the world (behind the pentagon and the KGB headquarters). Seven miles of hallways :).
Back in college, a ChemE friend of mine called me down to his dorm room to show me the sodium trick. His setup consisted of a ceramic bowl filled with water into which he dropped small pellet-sticks of sodium (removed from a separate oil filled jar). ..err... "experiments" we had conducted before. So I offered my suggestion to pour some magnesium granules into the water and see what happens.. and so he did.
.. which in turn vaporized the water .. ejecting 1000 DEGREE BALLS OF FIRE upward and in every direction. These meteors bounced off the walls, ceiling, and floor leaving holes + scorch marks in everything... the stereo, mattress, monitor, and his roomate's rare collectible $5 bill from 1891.
The reaction was someone impressive but not nearly as some of the other explosives
To our surprise, what followed involved more physics than chemistry...
He dropped in the sodium, which fizzed around for a few seconds, burst into bright flames.. igniting the magnesium granules
Luckily my body was protected by the door and my face with a plastic report cover.. heh heh heh.
Kids don't try this at home.
Red or white phosphorous is stored under water because they burn when they dry out and come into contact with air. If the story is correct, that may be what the substance was.
Actually, neither RTFA or RFTA are acronyms. ... An acronym is an abbreviation that is "pronounced as a word".
;-) You use SCSI as an example as prnouncable, and that's no more pronouncable than RTFA in my opinion. (ie, they both have too many consonants in a row, so we shove invisible vowels between them to pronounce them.)
No, they're both acronyms. I've always pronounced RTFM as "rutfum" (approximately), and so have many colleagues I know. So there's no reason why RFTA or RTFA can't be "pronounced as a word" also.
Don't tell me what I can and can't pronounce!
As an aside, I had a discussion once about RTFM being pronounced (someone said it was stupid). I explained that the point of RTFM in the first place is to make it short and convenient instead of saying "read the fscking manual". They agreed. I asked them to say it their way. It took them 4 syllables ("are-tee-eff-em") and slightly more time than it takes me to say "rut-fum" in 2 syllables. Think about it.
The same could be proof that Greek mythology is the correct stance on "creation". Everything proves that Zeus and Hera and Mercury and Athena exist. No, wait, everything proves that Hindus have the right answer. Wait a minute, it was the Apache Indians that had it all right. Or, was that the Egyptians? "Everything" proves the Bible right no more than it proves any other religion's creation story.
Click here or here.
Why not use Potassium, it is readily avaibale from electrolysing aquaous potassium permangante. Potassum forms at the negative eletode (CATHODE). Great Fun Physman
Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
An ion is simply a charged atom OR molecule, thus just about every ion is a molecules.
Here are some other molecules that are ions is solution:
DNA
Protien
Acetate
Real non-funny story from high school chemistry (okay, so maybe it's funny now):
...and that is how I (and my parents) learned the word amalgam.
I had detention in chemistry class and was asked to clean up. Part of the clean up was some spilled mercury a portion of which I appropriated for later "study" at home.
During this "study" I discovered that the mercury would stick to my gold crucifix that I wore on a gold chain. Intrigued I removed the chain and drug the crucifix through the tiny puddle of mercury.... and then I tried to remove the blobs of mercury from the crucifx and chain when I discovered the mercury would only smear and not detach. What was worse the gold seemed to be absorbing the mercury! Frantic I intended to boil the chain and crucifix when it began to crumble...
Ever taken a look at the history of your own country over the past 50 years...? Guilty on all charges.
Too bad you can't actually defend France, instead you have to try to imply that the USA is "just as bad". You didn't bother quoting the *fact* that the French willingly sacrificed the Jews to Hitler. (And they've been burning synagouges again, how charming!) The USA never did anything on the scale of Algeria that wasn't in self defense. We, led by Ronald Reagan, defeated the Communists through a sane policy of containment when the Eurotrash wanted "arms-control" and the insane "Mutually Assured Destruction." France, on the other hand, was the birth place of that ideology, one which killed 100 billion people, an ideology they still worship.
That may apply to their government, but not the people. Same with the USA.
Nope. The French culture glorifies laziness, hedonism, sexism, apathy and pseudo-intellectual fads. All it has left is an effete obsolete language that they cling to. Moreover, we can be proud of our government. Our culture elects fair and just leaders. Neither our culture nor our government are perfect, but they are a beacon of freedom and democracy even today.
All cultures like the French care about is the fact that history has left them on the wayside. A pity, they make such nice pastries.
Yeah, dude, that would be stuff that matters!
Don't let Mr. Jobs get a hold of this story. He might try and make some computer cases out of the stuff!
"Explosive computing power, now even more explosive than the magnesium NExT!"
Not sure why this keeps getting modded up in every single thread..
Moderators, I think its time we declared this the new All Your Base/Hot Grits/Natalie Portman/etc "Slashdot catch phrase" (TM). It should be modded down as such. After all, its only funny the first couple hundred times.
Please check the following link for information on how Slashdot catch phrases (TM) and other Memes work: http://totl.net/Cool/
You may now continue your regularly scheduled productivity draining activity.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
Ever since the French killed all the intelligent people in their revolution, their society has just gone down hill.
SIGFAULT
A couple years back I was just finishing up a batch of spaghetti -- I dumped the cooked spaghetti + boiling water into a strainer in the sink, served it up and proceeded to eat it.
... I look into my pasta and see lots of these tiny blobs throughout my dinner. It turns out that someone put a thermometer on a shelf above the sink, and it somehow fell and shattered into it -- right underneath where I put the strainer.
About halfway through the meal, as the fork was on its way to my mouth, I noticed a metallic looking blob slide down a noodle. Naturally I'm like WTF
I have no idea how much I ate.
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
It's just stupid
If you haven't figured it out yet, the stuff that was made in the 50s' is still so radioactive that One is being stored in it's own cast-lead bowl.
On the other hand stuff made since they realized that they were killing their customers is no longer radioactive -- because they stopped using radioactive elements in the creation!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Actually in still in high school so chill out man.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
"It took fire instantly and sped around and around on the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame about it. We all exulted - this was chemistry with a vengeance!" (p.123)
Sacks also played around with throwing all of the alkali metals (up to Cesium) into water:
" ... cesium, I found, exploded when it hit the water, shattering its glass container. One never forgot the properties of the alkali metals after this." (ibid)
1. Get a welding torch and fill up a baggie with oxygen and acetylene. Tie it shut.
2. Make a trail of gasoline out to the middle of the parking lot with nothing around.
3. Set the baggie there. Go to the other end and light the gas trail.
Great for lots of laughs, but this is a pretty serious prank and is very likely to bring police, fire trucks, and lots of unwanted attention. It creates a humongous explosion which is ridiculously loud. I've only heard about this one, never seen it in real life.
Clickety Click
There is therefore no reason to ascend to the concept of god(s) in this explanation.
The Universe is self-existant, it requires nothing else to exist.
The Universe simply *is*.
Pure metalic mercury is not very bioabsorbable in mamillian digestive tracts, unless it had been significantly oxidized. Most of it probably went right through you, and apparently what you did absorb wasn't enough to damage your nervous system enough to keep you from posting to Slashdot. Although mercury accumulates, it is also slowly flushed by the kidneys and liver, so if it was more than a couple years ago you're probably clean, too.
Tycho: Did you eat a lot of paint as a child?
Gabe: You mean wall candy?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There's a tradition at MIT known as the sodium drop. If it's safe enough for them... :)
that's why they hire people from other countries to fight their battles for them. French Foreign
Legion
No todo lo que es oro brilla
OK, the French in question that sold the Jews were the Vichy regime, an extreme right, fascist government put together after France's defeat in 1940. That governement was never elected. De Gaulle's governement in exile in London can't be accused of what the Vichy people did, most of whom fell on hard time after 1945.
> And they've been burning synagouges again, how
> charming!
You are talking about the exact same people: extreme right minority facists who unfortunately still exist in Europe. Go watch American History X or read about the KKK to find out that the US are not immune from these kind of people either.
> The USA never did anything on the scale of
> Algeria that wasn't in self defense.
Let's see: Korea?, Vietnam? the others are too small to count: El Salvador? Nicaragua? With all due respect you are full of **it.
> We, led by Ronald Reagan, defeated the
> Communists through a sane policy of containment
> when the Eurotrash wanted "arms-control" and
> the insane "Mutually Assured Destruction."
Reagan, the Hero of the Right, is the one who restarted the arms race with star wars I, and gave
nice Mr Hussein his weapons of mass destruction, in particular the chemicals and the delivery means (helicopters) with which Hussein took out the Kurds in 1988. In 1989 it took a special vote of Congress to stop the arms sales to Hussein, over Reagan's opinion!
> France, on the other hand, was the birth place
> of that ideology, one which killed 100 billion
> people, an ideology they still worship.
First MAD has killed exactly 0 people, if it had you would not be here to talk about it by definition, second if any policy has killed 100 BILLION people I wonder where you found them (sure it's not ants?) and third the US is the originator of the idea, being the one who came up with WMD in the first place and are the only country which actually has used them in anger: Hiroshima? Nagasaki?
> The French culture glorifies laziness, hedonism, > sexism, apathy and pseudo-intellectual fads.
Really? I thought the Greek were supposed to be lazy, the Italian hedonists, the Arabs of all description sexists, and the Spaniards somnolent.
For pseudo-intellectual fads you can't beat the Americans: tree hugging Californians? new age aromatherapy? anybody?
> Our culture elects fair and just leaders.
> Neither our culture nor our government are
> perfect, but they are a beacon of freedom and
> democracy even today.
Your very own Noam Chomsky writes that if every US president were to be judged against the criteria of the Nuremberg Trial (where the Nazis were judged in 1945) every single one of them would have been hanged. Freedom and democracy for yourself, who cares about everybody else! can you remember Chile? Indonesia? The US governement is a bunch of control freaks who don't give a damn about either their own people (they are selling off their liberties as we speak) or anybody outside the border of their own beloved country.
In case you don't know, most of the world except possibly a minority of Israeli don't think much of the US, at the moment.
> A pity, they make such nice pastries.
Most French pastries are actually Austrian (at least the croissant).
This last bit proves beyond a single doubt that you don't know what you are talking about.
Good day to you.
My high school chemistry teacher worked for a big chemical company in texas before he retired into teaching. They had weekly contests where the winner got to take a 55 gallon drum full of sodium, throw it out into the river attached to some bouyant material, go back to shore, and shoot it with a rifle. of course, this was back before the EPA.
My brother ( confirmed Physics / Music geek ) sent me this: This is a subject which I am very familiar with, having procured a couple of pounds of sodium from the lab in Argonne IL. As some of the discussions point out, the main thing that happens when you throw sodium into water is that it skips around on the surface, spewing out little fireballs. I decided to overcome this in two ways. The first, which you may have witnessed when we were in high school, was to put a small nugget of sodium into a puddle and then step on it, forcing it to mingle with the water, whereupon it would explode with a bang, spraying blobs of burning molten sodium everywhere (which luckily tended to go away from you as your foot was between you and the sodium).
I took this further and further until I was going out with my heavy old style hiking boots (as the blast was hurting the soles of my feet) and then holding my leg out in front of me and gingerly lowering my foot onto the sodium, in preparation for the blast, which would blow my foot upwards. Then in Argonne I developed the sodium cannon(tm), where I stuck a blob of sodium onto the bottom of a c-cell battery, and dropped that into a steel tube which had water in the bottom. The stupid thing is, I wasn't thinking about building a cannon, I just wanted the battery to force the sodium to mingle with the water and create a bang. What happened is that the sodium went off with a bang and launched the battery into low earth orbit! I swear the battery was up in the air for something like 8 to 10 seconds before it came down again, looking all weird and shrunken from being imploded by the pressure inside the tube as it was launched. Buwahaha!!!