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Chemistry Sets for Adults?
An Anonymous Coward asks "I've been pursuing a few different lines of study, to refresh myself in basic sciences before I return to school. Right now I am reading up on Chemistry, and thought it would be fun to acquire a chemistry set just to play around with and maybe learn a few things from. Do any science geeks here have any suggestions?" My childhood garage probably still has purple and black stains all over it (lucky I was wearing glasses). 300 in one electronics kits, anyone?
I hear those rolling methamphetamine labs are getting pretty popular.
So called "childrens" chemistry and electronics sets are perfectly good for adult too.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
When i was in Orgo chem the *best* and coolest thing we did was extract limoene (orange oil). But you need reflux glassware for it.. but i'll tell ya the stuff smells great. and the practical upshot is that you can use it and other essental oils as food flavorings
Carolina Biological Supply has a bunch of learning kits, books, and software that would probably help you out. We get most of our lab supplies through them.
Personally, I never learned any practical info in chemistry labs... Come to think of it, high school chemistry is all you're ever going to need unless you're going to be a chem engineer.
What fun would that be, I mean we all know bleach and amnonoia and bleach is the best chemistry set.
Just Joking...
Well a book and hands-on experimentation don't have to be exclusive of each other. Actually performing and validating guided experiments or coming up with your own to answer problems posed or your curiosity can be fulfilling.
why run from Vincenzo?
I think it's about time we added a "hydroponics" category. Honestly, most nerds will probably applaud it.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
She saw me reading the Radio Shack 'Getting Started In Electronic's book over and over again and (in between studies for various certifications) and decided to get me a kit.
:)
She gave me bookmarks after chrismas...
Good list of kits: http://www.hobbytron.net/electronickits.html
I have the 300-on-1 which is $70 and is solderless.
Also check out http://www.kitguy.com/ - seems to be a definitive resource...
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
but then i got high err heh
Well, if you wan't to have lots of fun, well kinda, try making some of the chemicals you self or using household goods.
Amonia isn't that hard to make,
Ethanol's quite easy too (just don't get caught!)
Acids are a bit trickier.... but not that hard.
It'll give you lots of practice nad help if WW3 breaks out(or if you need any 'added-extras' for a night out).
Things like the anarchists cook book should help point you in the right direction.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
ask your local meth lab if you can do some intern work.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Edmund Scientific
http://www.scientificsonline.com
My dad used to take me there when I was a kid, a very trippy place. It got me through all of my science classes with pre-made projects.
first, you buy a textbook, like the one you had in 11th grade. Then, you place it under your pillow and learn by osmosis.
or
you take a big ol' jar of gasoline, add styrofoam until you get a play-doh like mixture. what you have is napa----------
oops, you were asking for suggestions. I thought you wanted to know what I did.
It's actually a little bit of biology mixed in with a bit of chemistry; but it's really fun to play with.
:) I could entertain myself for hours with this thing.
It's a home-brew kit for making my own beer
Uh, limonene isn't a good thing to be eating.
It smells fantastic, but it's a pretty potent solvent and can irritate the hell out of your digestive tract.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Modern chemistry sets are crap; they have been gutted because of fear of lawsuits. So the materials and the experiments are bland and useless unless you're 8 years old.
It's obvious why this guy wants a chemistry set... The same reason we all wanted one:
To blow things up.
There is a solution, though.
A hand full of sodium + a large lake = very nice explosions.
You can learn the importance of keeping alkaline metals away from water, the amount of energy created with the mixing of H2Oand sodium, and why you should never stick sodium in someone's bathing suit.
Can you say, "Win Win."
-----.----.-------
I'll
I'd be real careful about buying 'chemistry' kits these days. If the war on drugs does not send the suits to your door, I'm sure the war on terror will.
Brewing - wine and beer are a good start. A fair amount of chemistry (and biology) involved when you think about it. Taking the alcohol content above 15% or so lets you play with even more toys.
Best college experience was making moonshine from captain crunch in the dorms. A bit of enzymes to convert the starch to sugar, let bubble, then we pulled out the still. Nothing like a mass spectrometer to assure you don't go blind....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
The experimenters labs are good for starting out - having a structured set of experiments to build, and yes, you can even go beyond those simple experiments and build simple experiments which are not in the book. For the most fun, however, I like the prototype breadboards. One of those with appropriate power supplies and other test equipment is good for analog, digital or combination circuitry. Add a few experimenters parts kits from Jameco and you are in business.
As for Chemistry kits, I think just buying the labware you need and the various chemicals etc. is a better way to go than a pre-fabricated kit.
The real interesting stuff however would be a molecular biology lab. Slice and splice DNA and build your very own new and interesting critter! Yes, you too can build your own miltary grade anthrax, plague or even smallpox. Add the THC gene to corn! Create that perfect paisley rose! Be the envy of everyone on your block! hmmmm I better quit now. Seriously, it is probably not all that hard to build a DNA synthesizer. Why not convert an ink-jet printer ? DNA = 4 molecules, many printers have 4 ink tanks. How tiny of a drop can you print???
Z
enough is too much
I would recommend a molecular model kit though if you really want something to play with, or if you want to be more geeky, you can get some molecular modeling software.
Here's an idea.... Here in Toronto we have a great store downtown called Active Surplus. You can buy just about anything there. They have a pretty good glassware section where you can get most of the things you need... stopcocks (*snicker), flasks, beakers, pipettes, etc. I would think that most major metro areas have a similar store. Great place to get all the glassware you'd need. I would think another great source of info and leads would be the local highschool. Go in some day and have a chat with the Chem Teacher. I would think they'd have catalogues and suggestions for what you should have to get started!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, sig changes you!
and thought it would be fun to acquire a chemistry set just to play around with and maybe learn a few things from
If you want an adult-style chemistry set, try one of those home beer brew kits or a home winemaking kit. You get to monkey around with various ingredients and after its all done you reap the rewards. err.. "Reap Responsibly"..
Trolling is a art,
SODIUM !
I havn't seen serious chemistry sets in years, i figured they stopped making them cuzza people like me, same with real lawn darts.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
It's /.'s anti-horizontal scrolling thing...
EvanED is correct. The space is there so that "page-widening-trolls" cant mess up some browsers width setting. Browsers such as IE will make it very hard to read slashdot if its too wide.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I agree. Building your own chemistry set would be more fun, and you would learn more.
The best way to learn is to teach. Collecting a bunch of good chemistry experiments, and the sources for the materials, would make a great project.
And you aren't the only one who benefits...
Some places to start:
Delights of Chemistry
Demonstration Lab
Lecture Demonstrations
Chemistry Resources
Some Sources of chemicals:
CHEM Scientific
Fisher
Sagent Welch
Carolina
I am certain you will get lots more from other Slashdaughters...
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
For a while text url's were immune to the widening code. Trolls then went out and would put things like:
c v/ b/hg/ytrhytruj/gfhjn/ghjytjhg/nbv/jytr/jgfhnbv/wef rqw/rqegfdscbv/xcbtru/yghjhgnmbv/njht/edr/gxc/v/we rtg/dgfhcvb/nygf/uj/ytj/nb/cvb/gser/twer/g/xcf/bvr d/yh/fg/n/cbv/sdf/we/tyf/gj
http://www.asdasd.com/asd/asd/asdsd/gfdf/ger/gd
in their post... now those are broken up too
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I've seen that question asked a hundred bajillion times, so I thought I'd step in...
Doing actual experiments is important for chemistry in particular because otherwise learning the nomenclature is next to impossible. This is not the case as much for intro physics.
When I was learning all that stuff, we had all these tables with the IUPAC naming conventions and such, and none of it really connected togething into something coherent. But once you actually get working with a dozen chemicals at once, you have to catalogue your results some how and then the real relationships between anions, cations, acids, bases, etc are made clear to you. It's even better if you to chemistry experiments with a friend helping. (Joke not intended ;-) You have to coordinate your plans and communicate results to each other.
I know from experience that it is at least 10X easier to learn chemistry in terms of the nomenclature, methods, and overall properties of different structures by lab work than by reading.
And it works. It's been two years since I've had to take a chemistry course and I still know all my common anions (formula, charge, name) including the names for versions with up to one extra or two less oxygens off my heart.
My childhood garage probably still has purple and black stains all over it
Usually those stains are kind of yellowish. What the hell are you?
Why bother.
I would definitely recommend the Anarchist's Cookbook. Full of fun stuff, ie thermite and other stuff I can't remember. Just don't get caught with it, though. If you do, I never posted this (uh, well, you know what I mean :)
Couldn't the original
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Exactly - that was the experience I had with my old 300-in-1 chemistry set about 27 years ago.
I did 30 pages of book/guided stuff. E.g. filtering a sand and salt solution, then spending 2 hours getting the salt out of the solution... at the end, guess what? I had salt again!!! Gee, that was fun.
I switched to my own guided experiments soon after that: KnO3 is cool, magnesium burns pretty well, sulfur smells bad, but hydrogen sulphide is even better! My father (a chemist) banished my experiments to the garage.
Next month, I told my parents I needed a pound of sodium chlorate as a desiccant. My father managed to keep a straight face, but bought it for me anyway.
Many more self-directed experiments were performed, and I found myself learning in leaps and bounds: I learned about the surface area of reactants when I thoughtlessly substituted powdered charcoal for granulated sugar in a simple propulsion experiment. Haha, skin and hair grow back.
Chemistry is cool, but make sure your set has fun compounds... I mean, what the hell fun is copper sulphate, etc?
Also, keep a lab book: it makes for pretty fun reading later in life ("4oz nitrocellulose," what was I thinking?) and is helpful if you screw up and the doctor/bomb-disposal unit needs to figure out what was going on.
Sure was fun to have my own 10mw-ish AM station, though.
Frankly if I were to do it all over again I'd just go buy a bunch of components, a soldering iron and a few prototyping boards. They still make those prototyping boards, don't they?
--
There is no hatred more pure and true than that expressed by children.
If you are serious about doing synthetic work, I
would see about taking several lab courses at a
local college. They are already set up with
sources for the reagents, safty equipment (ie,
hoods, glove boxes, safe storage for the reagents,
safe disposal of the reagents, plus more
analytical instrumentation so that you will be
able to confirm that what you made is what you
intended to make.
If you really insist on seting up a lab at home,
make sure that you set up a safe lab. Please do
the following:
1) Ensure that you can safely store, handle and dispose of any reagents.
2)Be sure to join an amateur scientist oganization, and find some help, if only to double check that you are doing #1 correctly.
3) consider the legal difficulties
-in the state of texas it is a felony to own
certain common glassware without a permit.
Just to be safe, check your local laws along
with the fire codes.
4) If you can legally own glassware, consider
buying the microscale equipment. It should
be the same price or less for it, however
you'll use smaller volumn of reagent.
Paranoia is what prompts many laws to be passed that should never have even been contrived. That, and an overwhelming desire for power. It's not so much a matter or paranoia as a genuine mistrust for federal law enforcement. There are countless examples of abuses and after hearing enough of them, it becomes deafening.
Other areas that involve chemistry and makes a good hobby are geology and mineralogy. You can collect samples, characterize them, learn about crystallography, and also analyze the samples chemically.
And if you get seriously involved, you can actually accomplish new science in areas like those, even with fairly modest resources. There are lots of publications dedicated to both the hobbyist and the professionals in those areas; look at them at your local university library to get some ideas.
By all means, check out the Student Science Service (http://www.tri-esssciences.com) in Burbank, California. They sell a few high-end chemistry sets of their own design (these are not kiddie sets). Ira Katz and his daughter, Kim, are the owners and are easilly accessable via e-mail. They're also one of the largest suppliers of pyrotechnic special effects to the local movie studios. Can't recommend 'em enough. -Kevin
Keeping proper care of a --bound-- lab logbook is something I'll carry with me always, regardless of my career path. I still hand-number RH pages in ink; TOC in front; notes on left page; --dated-- documentation on the right. My only backslide is the occasional use of pencil. (I no longer wrangle instruments, now sysadmin.)
Good logbook habits avoid the WTF syndrome.
"Remember, any tool can be the right tool." -- Red Green
1. Make nitroglycerin from a recipe written by someone who can't spell the names of the chemicals ("sulferic acid") required.
2. Light fuse.
3. Get away.
4. (Your heirs) profit!
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
YES! My uncle had a friend buy what he called a "nautical generator" for his boat on ebay (he's not very computer inclined). And a few months later the FBI came to the guys house and they wanted to know what he wanted it for and where it was etc ... Kind of weird because its difficult to think of any nefarious uses for a generator.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
If you get a chemistry set, expect intrusions from nosy and thuggish bastards in ninja suits, who are operating on the assumption that you are making drugs, of which for some daft reason they disapprove.
Stillman writes:
...we do, and we are.
"Do you honestly think "suits" would turn up at someone's door over such a thing?"
Buying hummus and charcoal can get the suits at your door, man, much less a chemistry set.
Besides, do you realize that 7,600 people died last year from non-steroidal painkillers (eg, asprin)? Do you realize that between deaths resulting from cirrhosis of the liver and drunk driving fatalities there are about 48,000 deaths a year in the U.S.? Have you seen the hysteria over ecstacy?
Yes, ordering things from chemistry supply companies can get a suit at your door.
And if they did, would it be a problem if you had nothing to hide?
If we have to resort to this logic we're already screwed
My
Limekiller
I see nothing wrong with doing what you say other than the fact if i was going to fix my sig there would be much more to do. There are more erros in my sig than many people notice and i think its funny when i get flamed for it. People think they are smart by pointnig things out when they are proving that they actually know less than me.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Aside from that, whether or not buying chemicals will get the Feds at your door depends strongly on what you buy. If you buy potassium chloride, probably not. If you buy sulfuric and picric acid, you should probably expect to be hearing the pitter pat of little feet on your doorstep.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
Warning: prepare to spend at least an hour looking at this site.
The best way to learn is to teach
:)
I guess you never went to public school
but ordering a bunch of chemicals makes you look like a terrorist.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Get into developing and printing your own photos. You know, the old analog kind. Even better, study some old antique photo processes like Cyanotype or Platinography. I make my own photo papers using these antique methods, and it is satisfying enough to keep me interested, and I was an Honors Chem major until I switched to art, majoring in photography).
Making your own printing papers and photochems is a ton of fun, and yields tangible results (unlike most things you could do with a chemistry set).
One of the most interesting and rewarding reactions you can study as an amateur is mirror silvering using Tollens' reagent. I had an arc lamp reflector that needed resilvering, and decided to do it myself.
h tm l
After a lot of web research, I found that this website had the best directions (and the best safety warnings!):
http://lerch.no-ip.com/atm/Silver.htm
The only chemicals I had any trouble finding were silver nitrate crystals, which can be purchased from photography supply stores, such as:
http://www.photoformulary.com/
or ebay, and concentrated nitric acid, which can be purchased from lithography supply stores, such as:
http://www.rembrandtgraphicarts.com/13_rga_cat.
The hazmat shipping charge for the nitric acid will exceed the cost of the chemical.
The process is somewhat complex, involves a number of stages, but isn't too difficult to do. It's an interesting reaction to watch, and the result is cool and useful. I created a perfect mirror coating on the inside of a bottle on the second try, and successfully coated my reflector mirror immediately thereafter.
Everything worked for me, except that I found that I had to heat the muriatic acid in order to make the solder dissolve when creating the sensitizing solution.
That's my recommended interesting experiment.
I've got one. Mine has extasy, lube, body oil, edible paint, and all kinds of stuff that adults like to play with.
I thought about working through the kitchen cabinet. My only worry is, "What about all that other stuff they put in there?" Bleach isn't just Sodium Hypochlorite (or whatever it's supposed to be- it's been ages), it also has a bunch of other stuff in it. I always worry about the unknown additions reacting with other unknown additions and making something terribly wrong.
You can get all the chemicals you need at hardware stores, etc.
Examples: ammonia (cleaning), potassium nitrate (fertilizer), calcium cloride (road salt), ammonium nitrate (fertilizer), various petroleum distillates (everything), all sorts of metals, various exotic metal oxides (dry paint powders and ceramic glazes), sodium hypoclorite (bleach), hydrofluoric acid (for glass etching), hydrochloric acid, calcium sulfate (gypsum), etc... you can get almost any chemical you need for any purpose from common products, or manufacture it from common products. You just have to know what you're doing.
Repeal the DMCA!
Alfa Aesar sells chemicals en masse. They'll even send you a catalog for free. I'm not sure, but you probably have to have a license to buy anything from them.
You of course will need chemicals and chemistry equipment. I expect that you could call the local high school and find out where to get them -- and the high school teacher could suggest where you might get a nice sampling. I can't help a lot there.
a il/-/0030 32906X/qid=1041495102/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-128032 3-3723057?v=glance&s=books
But perhaps I could suggest a book, instead:
Laboratory Experiments for General Chemistry, 4ed
by Hunt, Block, and McKelvy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/det
This one is extremely useful in that it:
(1) Lists the equipment needed for each (so you can go through, find the experiments that you can do)
(2) Lists tons of safety and first-aid information, with standardized icons for each item
(3) provides lab reports to fill out, which will help you understand the experiments
(4) The experiments are actually rather standard; not all of them require special equipment.
One word of caution: After produced the book, my brother noted that one of the experiments, standard to most College Chemistry Lab courses, is wrong:
Experiment 13, the Burning of a Candle.
My brother claims that the experiment purports to demonstrate the stoichiometry of combustion; in reality, it demonstrates the heat given off by candles, and the ideal gas law PV=NRT. He said that he demonstrated this by attempting the experiment in several different ways, one with 3 candles close together (burning hotter), one with three candles farther apart (burning cooler).
I haven't done that experiment myself in his way. But I thought I should mention that.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Just some advice from CmdrTaco's web site. (it's one of his cartoons.)
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Another good source of chemicals are some of the fertilizers you can get at a local nursery. If you have a good local nursery you can find things like ammonium nitrate, phosphoric acid, sulfur, etc. Professional growers often need to mix specific fertilizer "recipes" with these ingredients, which happen to have lots of other uses besides growing plants.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
You need ammonium hydroxide (amonia cleaner from the store) and iodine crystals (used for swimming pools, and cleaning horses, but also for making meth, so sometimes hard to get). Put the iodine in a coffee filter and pour ammonium all over it for a while. When it dries you get ammonium triiodide. Highly unstable, keep in separate small amounts, don't look at it funny.
Ahh home chemistry is great
--
grep "xercist"
I agree. With a chemistry set you can do 19th century chemistry. It will be of no use whatsoever to prepare for a return to school.
A much better preparation for a chemistry course would be brushing up your statistical mathematics and linear algebra, mixing chemicals is engineering, not chemistry nowadays.
That's why you need to do this with Potassium, which reacts even better. That gives you the real cool explosions.
Of course, as moderation of this post shows, both of them are unfortunately also rather useful for trolling, so I'm not sure how long you'll be able to use these.
Yes, of course. As we all know, science isn't about trying to find out about the world. It is about being able to recite formulas.
Chemistry, Engineering only imitate simple formulas of physics.
Sure. As a matter of fact, it turns out even social scientists uses "formulas" to describe the world. What a bunch of loosers they are, who try to copy this from physicists.
But, to really understand atoms, molecules etc, you really need to understand quantum physics (the way it is taught to physicists).
Yes, physicists usually have a much better understanding of the fundamental forces involved in single-body problems. The fact that this becomes largely irrelevant due to the computational difficulties involved in calculating anything useful for chemistry is something we can ignore for now. Actually measuring phenomena that is too hard to calculate is only for lesser beings.
Ph. D. level Chemists and maybe Chemical Enginners, study quantum mechanics but it's at the level of undergraduate junior/senior level physics majors.
Yes, and physics majors study chemistry, but only as chemistry 101. So what's your point?
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but it is true that Chemistry or most of Engineering degree require very minimum level of math.
Actually, that is true. But not because the math isn't there. It's because the math is too fucking complex to be able to do at all. But if you like math, I'm sure a course in physical chemistry would satisfy you.
I've always felt Chemistry boring for this reason.
So do I, but that doesn't make it any less of a science.
True science is understanding nature from quantitatively, no vague, but exact; anything qualitative in nature is vague and waste of time.
True science is about understanding nature. If things are too complex to study quantitatively at the moment, we must do a first approximation to it, and study qualitatively first. Just because something is difficult, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
From a Doctorate level physics graduate student.
I seriously doubt that. Most physicists I've met have a sound modesty about the importance of their subject, and a better understanding of science than you.
Go to the drug store and get some Saltpeter. You will also need carbon and sulfer.
Use outdoors.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
My dad (a chemist) had got me this book ages ago. I believe its in its 4th edition now! A great read
Agreed. If you've never seen the Anarchist's Cookbook, it's rather like a long "Overrated" Slashdot post printed on paper with pictures and a handsome black cover. The guy doesn't really understand most of the things he discusses and is on the firmest ground when he sticks with safe topics (guns and knives). It was written during the Vietnam era by a pissed-off draft age guy. Now he's turned to Jesus and says he wishes he hadn't written the book at all. Another mind lost to religion.
The best explosive recipe in the book is one that the author discounts in passing- nitrogen triiodide, or NI3. (Actually, the structure is NI3-NH3, where the NH3 is bound to the NI3 electrostatically by what resemble hydrogen bonds.) According to the Cookbook a fly landing on it will set it off (which is probably true, although I never succeeded in getting a fly to cooperate). It claims it's too useless for any serious consideration when planning your anarchy. It might not be good for that, but it's great for pranks. I've had so much fun with that stuff. The secret to NI3 is DO NOT MAKE TOO MUCH OF IT. That way you can keep your fingers. A gram is way too much. Just take a few iodine crystals and put them under ammonia, and presto, it turns into this black powder. If you keep it under the ammonia, it's actually quite stable. When not under ammonia (even when under pure water) it might go off at any moment. Pick it up from the ammonia with a plastic eyedropper, and deposit the black sludge on some surface. Once dry it rapidly loses its NH3 adduct and becomes extremely sensitive to shock, decomposing explosively producing N2 and I2. Don't get traces of it on your clothes or skin, or you'll be treated to a continuous snap-crackle-pop of microscopic explosions (quite annoying).
Finding references on it is difficult- it's almost like people don't want to do research on it. It's probably unstable because the iodine atoms are huge compared to the nitrogen. Congestion around the central N forces the molecule into a planar shape, with repulsive interactions among the three iodines, so it's unhappy for steric reasons. One thing I did find out was that the stuff turns bright orange if you leave it under the ammonia for a long time (like a month). This is probably because it picks up additional NH3 adducts.
- Calc 1 & 2 (decent book, 3rd ed. is cheap and plentiful)
- Physics 1
- Chem 1 (Chem for scientists & engineers)
That's the college level stuff that I've found most useful. Review Algebra & Trig if you're not too sure about your skills. Good luck.Differentiation & Integration
Newtonian mechanics. Make sure you get a physics book, not an Engineering mechanics book.
Find a syllabus for a Mechanical Engineering major. It should be mostly physical chemistry (thermodynamics, stoichiometry, etc.)
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
http://nscp.upenn.edu/aix4.3html/cmds/aixcmds5/umo unt.htm works fine for me
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
But then you've been told wrong. Math is not a science. It is a study of entirely human constructs. As it turns out, some of these constructs has proven themselves useful in science, but that doesn't make math itself a science. Neither is logic a science. Nobody does experiments in either math or logic.
As for whether the rest of the argument is true, depends on your own sillyness. Biology is no more applied chemistry than enjoying dinner is applied thermodynamics. While it is true that microbiologists worry a lot about chemistry, there are also other biologists who couldn't care less, and work with entirely other things.
In the same vein, one could argue for the same hierarchy in computer scientists/engineers. At the top, we have the hardware engineers, then microcode developers, people who write device-drivers, etc, system-level programmers, application-level programmers, scripters, and end-users.
In reality, the tasks that end-users perform at a computer needs be no more easy than what hardware-engineers do when constructing one (and in doing that, most hardware engineers are also end-users...). The only difference is that it requires a different kind of knowledge.
While it is true that physics concerns itself more with "fundamental principles" than chemistry, and logic is more "fundamental" than math, this does in no way imply that math is worthless because logic is more "fundamental", or that people should stop studying chemistry, because physics is more "fundamental".
We cannot, and probably never will, be able to easily and automatically derive all important principles of math from logic, all of chemistry from physics, all of biology from chemistry, all of medicine from biology, all of psychology from medicine, all of social science from psychology, and so on. The value of science is not in it's "fundamentalness". It's in its usefulness (either direct usefullness for applied science, or in it's potential for understanding nature better in the long term for pure science).
you can grow coper sulphate crystals with a seed crystal and a solution, they look pretty neat
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm not currently in America -- but yeah, paranoia is getting bad there... or .. I dunno. Some of it's paranoia, and some of it's justified.
For example, evidence does show that Vicki Weaver was targeted (read crosshairs, murder) because she was the outspoken racist in the Ruby Ridge incident.
Donald P. Scott (LA Times, 1991/2) really was murdered for his land.
A guy named Lamplugh really did have ATF agents burst in in jackboots, crush his kitten to death to make a point, terrorize his family, and he was innocent of anything, just a gun dealer who wouldn't help them set up someone else on false charges, yada yada yada. The list goes on.
That was *before* Bush. Now, they really are hauling people away to Cuba, in the dead of night, and torturing them there, just like the Argentinan "disappearance squads". How many it is, the government refuses to say. But it *is* happening.
Is it paranoia? It's hard to tell.
Considering the flap about the child-abuse cases in the Catholic Church in Boston, I have to wonder how far down the line we Catholics are. I'm not too sure. But when you get to a police state, it does tend to extend its grip.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Some people have posted on blowing things up with various mixtures. A Doctor (Demratologist) I once volunteered for had a large 1000mm whitelight laserscalpel in one of his operating rooms. You could shoot paper on fire or slice it into pieces from across the room. That was cool.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
U.C. Davis has some nice information on the subject. You get to play with pH meters, refractometers, measure specific gravity, titrate total acidity, figure out how much K2CO3 to counter high acidity, etc.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
I would envision Ted being all frustrated about how hard it is to get kits these days and resorting to /. to help him out.
At least this poster wasn't ranting on about how technology is ruining the modern world and then inquired about various troll's addresses.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Which is exactly what it was. I bet the guys in the bunker who run Echelon print this out and tape it up in the lunchroom for laughs.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm not trying to troll, or seem naive here, but is paranoia in the US seriously that high?
Yes, and then some. Even before 9/11 it was getting silly. After the bomb went off at the Olympics in Atlanta, the FBI indicated that we should be suspicious of anyone who had any sort of black powder, pipes, alarm clocks, and/or wire in their basement. IMPORTANT NOTE: Here in the southeast, it is fairly common to load one's own shotgun shells and other ammo, or at least it was until it became too much of a pain to keep the powder around. Of course, pipe, wire, and an old alarm clock is not that unlikely in a basement/junk room either.
It is now necessary to get a low explosives permit in order to purchace model rocket engines larger than F.
Most chemicals that could be used for drugs are either 'denatured' (that is poisoned, apparently it's better that you die rather than get high) or no longer available. You can (and will) be investigated if you buy large amounts of fertilizer.
The really annoying part about all of the above is that they make perfectly legal activities impossible or at least a pain in the ass, but do little to prevent the crimes (or 'crimes' in the case of drugs).
As a chemist who has had the misfortune of experiencing chemical burns due to my boss' stupidity, I can't stress the importance of protecting yourself enough!
As I've stated before, I used to work in a secondary lead refinery. There were massive air filtration units to remove part of the lead dust from the air - we still had to wear respirators - and collect it in large canvas bags that were repeatedly shaken by the collection equipment to get the dust to fall to the bottom of the bags.
The dust collected in these bags was very fine (large lead particles don't traditionally remain airborne for very long at 1G). Fine metallic dusts are highly flammable when mixed with an oxidant.
One of the methods we used for determining various elemental levels was to combine a fixed amount of a sample with an equal amount of Sodium Peroxide (which is a highly reactive oxidizer), heat the sample mixture until it became molten and then drop the crucible full of molten reactive material into a beaker containing a fixed amount of de-ionized water. After the rapid reaction of the very hot oxidizer coming into contact with the water, we would fish out the crucible and run the water through an atomic adsorption spectrophotometer which would tell us how much of which element were present. In addition to being a very cool reaction to watch, it would take almost any material and convert it into a water soluble salt so it could be read on the spec.
Because of the reactivity of Sodium Peroxide (which all by itself will burst into flames when mixed with water) we would only use this method on material that was traditionally non-flammable such as the slag from the various furnaces.
The person who was promoted to lab manager when the original manager left was not a chemist, and had never taken a chemistry class in his life and didn't understand the basic rules of chemistry (i.e., hot glassware looks exactly the same as cold glassware) and was often times caught doing something stupid.
One day when the floor supervisor brought in a sample of lead dust from the shaker bags to be tested, Tom (the new manager) got a hold of the sample and volunteered to do the analysis. I watched him weigh out equal amounts of dust and Sodium Peroxide, but before he could combine them in the zirconium crucible I pointed out to him that you really shouldn't mix highly flammable materials with a highly reactive oxidizer.
He politely told me to mind my own business and that he was the lab manager and he knew what he was doing. I then proceeded to move quickly away from him and watched carefully from across the lab as he not only proceeded to mix the two materials together (luckily without incident) but then proceeded to pick up a pestle and try to grind the two materials together in the crucible.
For those who have never worked with potentially explosive materials, they can be set off by a variety of sources including, but not limited to, heat, pressure and shock. When you combine two reactive materials in a metal crucible and then proceed to grind them together with a heavy porcelain pestle, you introduce heat, pressure and shock. Needless to say within about two seconds the materials combined together in a very impressively large flash, severely burning the hand holding the pestle and burning off just the upper part of his eyebrows that extended beyond the top of his safety glasses.
I have never had to bite my tongue so hard before or since in my life to keep from laughing directly in his face.
This was almost as funny as the time when he got red phosphorous on his asbestos gloves which were already contaminated with sulfur and potassium nitrate and then proceeded to try and dust off his gloves by rubbing them on the front of his (luckily) flame-retardent shirt. He apparently didn't know that sulfur, phosphorous and potassium nitrate is the basic recipe for strike-anywhere matches...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
I remember reading about such things as keeping the inmates standing for long periods, sleep deprivation torture, recently. At the time of capture, there was stuff about hauling them in unventilated tractor trailers and leaving them to roast (that from www.rawa.org). To be honest, I have not been there in either location, and do not know for sure whether this is true.
However, I also read about Jose Padilla -- and I have no reason to believe that is false, either.
In the end, I go back to my first paragraph: Yeah, there is paranoia. Some of it may be justified; I'm not sure which is and which isn't.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
...suspended in air will make a nice little flash too. My mother was heard to wonder how all the burn marks got into the kitchen table cloth - paper bag, put small amount powdered sugar in bag, shake well and immediately toss in fire place. Lucky we didn't burn the house down actually.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
You have to know what you're doing to do it safely. And I do. Pyrotechnics is fun.
Repeal the DMCA!
The best way to learn IS to teach, because in preparing for a class you have to do the labs themselves and make/anticipate the mistakes. That's all that was meant, I think.