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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 :)
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 /.
How long before John Ashcroft has him arrested for creating bomb materials and prosecuting him as an Al-Qaeda terrorist?
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?
Well he probably spent all his money on the Sodium.
"I've read that male butterflies collect sodium as a present for their mates"
Strange, I thought collecting explosive stuff was the plight of the 13year before metamorphisis.
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
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.
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.
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.
Or he used it all up a little too close to the comp.
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.
RFTA idiot
RFTA? Really Fucked The Acronym?!
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.
Why not? Could you imaging a car made out of Na running into a river? You wouldn't have to worry about drowning in it. On the other hand there might not be anything left in said car to recover....
Prices for "Sodium metal" on e-bay sky rocket!
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.