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!
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 /.
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:
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)
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?
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...
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 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
If you melt salt then apply a voltage to the liquified sodium it will split into sodium and chlorine.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
1) Take your table salt, about 100 lbs of it.
2) Break the ionic bonding between the Cl and the Na (heat of formation being 395.5 kJ/mol) by heating it (2650907.2831789 moles) with 10.48E8 kJ.
3) You then end up with Na+ + Cl- (ish), and can use electolysis to combine them back together.
In conclussion, buy it off eBay, extracting sodium from salt is not a DIY project.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
For the curious, the melting point of NaCl is 804 degrees centigrade. Here's a link describing the process of procuring sodium from table salt.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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 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.
Sigh.
First of all, thanks for being the one millionth customer with the same post. Yes, yes... three pounds of sodium. Indeed, a worldwide ecological disaster. I only hope people like you can save us.
Do you have the slightest idea what the effects of 3 pounds of sodium would be? Actually, lemme be more clear. Do you have the slightest idea what the effects of 3 pounds of sodium would be on 23,550 cubic feet of water would be? (I'm assuming 100 foot diameter lake, 3 feet deep. It's probably bigger.)
Hint: A cubic foot of water weighs 62.4 lbs.
3 pounds.
1469520 pounds.
Why, for the record, you'd have a 2 ppm solution of sodium. Assuming the lake was distilled water. Very likely it wasn't. Change in PH?
0.
NADA! NONE! ZEEEEERRRRROOOOO.
And that 0 change assumes that the lake is somehow a sealed system, and this sodium would somehow stay there forever. Where do you think the sodium came from, anyway? We imported it from Mars to cause danger to our planet?
It's all over the place! Honestly, he could have caused more damage to the long term health of that lake with three pounds of milk. Or even dead fish.
Frigging super genius.
RFTA idiot
RFTA? Really Fucked The Acronym?!
Prices for "Sodium metal" on e-bay sky rocket!
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?
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
Change in PH?
0.
NADA! NONE! ZEEEEERRRRROOOOO.
Do you really believe this, or are you trolling? There is a noticeable effect on the pH. Assuming you're serious, one can calculate it.
Consider a 30m diameter lake 1m deep on average. That's 707m^3 of water, weighing 707e6 grams. Water is 10g/mol, so 707e5 mol of water.
Sodium ionizes into Na+, freeing an electron. So one mole of electrons are freed for each mole of sodium. 3lb=1364g=124mol OH-.
That's a ratio of 1.75e-6 OH-/H2O. Normal water has a concentration of 1e-7 OH-/H20, so add the two to get the total concentration C, and -log C = pOH = 5.73, so pH = 14-pOH = 8.26.
The ideal range for aquatic life tilts toward the basic: 6.5 to 8.5, so he should be OK. Ten pounds would probably have some undesirable effects, however. He is right about the stupidity of no lower limit on reportable releases of sodium - hell, salting the roads in winter is a release of hundreds of tons (though excess salinity has its bad effects as well).
look here for more information.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
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.
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.
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.
Since they didn't have any space to set up lab equipment for us in a regular classroom, we ended up having our "classroom" in the chemical stockroom that adjoined two of the science classrooms. One of my friends got a hold of the anarchist cookbook, and we tried making all kinds of stuff from it, not realizing that a lot of the recipes in there were inaccurate. We made everything from simple gunpowder to nitroglycerine. At one point we had a little mishap where one of the bowls of gunpowder ingnited while both classrooms had students in them. Since we were all honor students, we got a slap on the wrist and continued on as if we never got caught.
Eventually, we progressed to reading old chemistry teaching manuals and looking for experiments that were discontinued. Many were discontinued because the components were carcinogenic, but some were because they were deemed too dangerous. Thermite was one of them, Triiodide was another. If I remember right, NI3 is amazingly simple to make, I think you just mix Potassium Nitrate with crystallized iodine in a water (or was it alcohol?) solution, then filter out the precitpitate. As you mention, it's incredibly sensitive when dry, but if I remember correctly, is a fairly low power explosive. It doesn't put off the huge vapor ratios of your more common bomb ingredients, so aside from the surprise of setting it off, it's mostly harmless in small quantities. It is fun when it pops though, as it gives off a little *crack* sound and a little cloud of purple smoke from the iodine (probably semi-poisonous iodine gas, but unless you're deliberately sniffing it, it dilutes itself quickly enough to not be a real problem).
Anyway, one day after playing around with it a couple times, we made a batch of this stuff after school had let out and while it was still wet smeared it in little patches all over the floor and chairs of the chem classroom that we had for our first period. The next day as people walked in the room, the were random cracks and pops as these tiny puffs of purple kept showing up on all around the classroom. Everyone was quite amused, but aside from the four of us, nobody knew what it was or where it came from. Eventually, at the end of the year right after we graduated we came back and told our chem teacher about all the crap we had done and explained the triiodide on the floors. He gave us a knowing little smirk and surprisingly didn't chastise us at all. 'Course he then proceeded to regale us with all his stories of college chemistry adventures...
All in all, it was a pretty unique confluence of circumstances and provided far more consequence-free fun than I ever would have expected a bio class could.
Lutefisk? Is that something like this?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Since your calculations were pretty much the best (though an AC did correct your final molar results), I'll reply to yours, rather than one of the other 8 people yelling at me. ;p
.13 ppm.) So yeah, even less. I can't think of a single freshwater fish that can't acclimate (easily) to a teaspoon of salt per gallon.
The thing is, you're assuming distilled water. I admit to saying distilled water, but I wasn't really assuming his lake was distilled (for obvious reasons) but I meant that if you combined x sodium with y distilled water, you would end up with a z ppm solution.
A real lake, however, ain't.
I really do believe with the concentration of tannic acid, decaying organic material, and soil interaction of any normal lake, a PH measurement of a lake before throwing in a nice sodium rock and another PH measurement the day after would show a change of 0. It's amazingly hard to change the PH of organic rich water. I don't really have math to back this up, but I do have extensive fishkeeping experience. PH up and PH down are pretty much bunk as products, unless used *very* regularly, as the PH will find its way back to where it started really, really fast. And that's only in 30-100 gallons of water.
And yeesh, as far as excess salinity... I have to dump 7 pounds of salt into 25 gallons of water to recreate the ocean. That's a little bit more than 2 ppm. (though someone with the actual dimensions of his lake worked out
Do you really believe a PH of 8.26 would result? Because... that's just wacky.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
1. Nothing
2. ???
3. CREATION!!!
Thomas Galvin
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
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.