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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!
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 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 /.
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)
Hope there weren't any fish living there ;)
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Give a man a block of sodium he can fish with, you feed him for life.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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."
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.
Hrmm... a larg enough block of Na tossed into a lake would essentially make a large pool of lye.
Na + H20 = Lye + stuff
Explosion + fish = dead fish
dead fish + lye = lutefisk
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Sure it's a DIY. I did this in high school:
:)
1. get a few cups of table salt from mom
2. borrow two propane torches from dad
3. rig the torches to point at the top of the pile of salt
4. cut off the end of an extension cord
5. blast the salt for 5 minutes or so until you have a small clear pool of liqued salt
6. plug extenstion cord in and stick leads into pool of salt
7. start all over again because there is now liqued copper in the salt
8. then remembering from high school chemistry that CL gas is probably not something you want to inhale, set up a fan
9. whoohoo! after two tanks of propane you now have ~2 grams of sodium
10. verify by thowing it in the garage sink
11. explain to dad why the driveway has heat blisters
easy
What are the odds this guy makes it into Bush's axis of evil? :)
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?!
CNN Headline tomorrow...
Breaking News!!!
Attouney General John Ashcroft has made a major announcement on the breakup of a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist cell in the US. Read more below.
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"Earlier today, we stopped an unfolding terrorist plot here in the United States. A group of individuals believed to be cells for Al Qaeda were arrested after several hundred anonymous TIPS. These cells seemed to have once again used the evil internet, source of all evil and the backbone of the "Axis of Evil(r)"; specifically a website going by the name 'slashdot' to come together and plan the destruction of my... I mean our great nation. About 250,000 "enemy combatants" were taken into custody and are currently being housed in an undisclosed location. All appear to be Muslim; extremest; terrorist; evil; doubleplus ungood. Do not let these terrorists win, you must go about your lives as usual, and... just please forget we have these people in custody. Thank you."
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In an unrelated story, the tech industry in the US came to a grinding halt today, as most of America's computer-elites were no-shows at work. No further information is available at this time, and we've been told by unnamed sources to "shut the hell up and quit asking questions" on the topic. We don't expect to bring you more on this topic later in the day... or... ever.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Lutefisk? Is that something like this?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.
Feed a man for life and he'll go out throw a big block of Sodium in the lake and kill all the fish just to watch is go fiiizzzzzzzzz.......
Moral: Men like things that go fizzzzzz more than fish.