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Web Videos Show Off the Wonders of Chemistry
Timmy writes "Wired Science has picked ten of the best videos from YouTube and their own show on PBS to highlight the wonderful things chemistry can do. Only four of them involve fire or explosions. The rest range from music videos about the polymerase chain reaction to reactions that repeatedly change color. One shows how to pour sodium acetate stalagmites. Another shows Chris Hardwick giving instructions for building a glow stick while making absurd comments."
.... tells you right out how many include fire and/or explosions. That's the sort of data a geek REALLY needs.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Too bad the youtube version of this video requires you to log in and be over 18...
My high school chemistry teacher did the gummy bear combustion thing. Filled the entire room with smoke.
He also did the color-change chemical thing. Its freaky to see in real life.
Ever see the mythbusters about the coke and Mentos? At the end they make giant exploding bubble foam. We did that too.
Man, I loved my chemistry teacher. He probably only got away with all that shit is because he retired that year.
...a clear victory for thermite... May the gods smile upon whoever decided to combine aluminum and rust. But, this was posted on Sunday so I have to wait all the way until next weekend to spark anything up... =(He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
From TFV:
"Adding something cold to thermite doesn't cancel it out, it just makes it angry."
Wow, just wow. We've talked about this kind of thing before in the context of CSI and Mythbusters.
I really wish that popular science shows would at least attempt to bring some education into the mix. I am not against blurring of education and entertainment, but the videos presented are simply bad entertainment. Why not give an elementary discussion of 'heat capacity' or energy that is associated with phase transitions, etc? It would still give the explosion of thermite and provide a small education.
Does anybody remember the old PBS series "3-2-1 contact" or "Square One?" It had education plus entertainment in a nice combination IMHO. What I would like to see is a Mythbusters-type show where they try to predict things *first* with introduction to physics / chemistry concepts, and then test their findings (with explosions and the hilarious consequences.) They do this a bit with their *Warning Science Content* segments, but it could be made a bit more rigorous.
Yes, I know the arguments that this is making kids "interested in science," but true research / science is very little about explosions, and these shows are, in my experience, not making kids interested in the rigor or reality of scientific reasoning. The question regarding thermite was proposed by a 30+ year old man!
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
...about how chemistry-as-a-hobby is increasingly a victim of the War on Terror (TM).
Most things are accessible if you're creative enough. The benign stuff you can just buy outright from a chemical supply store. Now that the interwebs are available to the unwashed masses, the nasty stuff can be improvised.
My friends' 10-year old daughter was complaining recently about inaccessible chemicals interfering with her science fair project. (She wanted sulphuric acid - Her mom insisted on lemon juice because she "didn't want to be put on a list"). Her mom complained (half-heartedly - mostly in fun) after I told the girl that hydrochloric acid could be purchased without ID under the name muriatic acid and that sulphuric acid was readily available from car batteries and could be concentrated by boiling it until white smoke appeared. I even took the extra precaution of pointing out the need for proper ventilation.
I'm straying off-topic, but when on a roll...
Seems to me that using dangerous chemicals along with kids is preferable to what I did as a youth - Swiping them off-hours from the school chem-locker, stashing them in the closet, and experimenting unsupervised. On a related note, the first time I tried to swipe gasoline by storing it in a Styrofoam Sonic cup was messy, but an open door into a whole new kind of fun.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Dear Slashdot,
More this and less Microsoft/RIAA/FSF crap.
Sincerely,
BadAnalogyGuy
Chemistry isn't as nearly as 'cool' as these pretty make-fire videos lead one to believe. Every explosion a young chemist commits brings them closer and closer the sad reality of their career later in life, performing volumetric titrations day in day out in labs with limited ventilation and no capacity to do dumb shit with metal sodium. Chemists are nothing more than glorified, poor cooks who use class 'A' glassware.
Does this mean we can cast fire, acid, cold, and lightning spells now?
-Aegis Runestone-
i've really been enjoying Breaking Bad on amc
high school chemistry teacher gets lung cancer, decides to leave the world without saddling his family with debt, so he begins to make meth
in the episode i just saw tonight
***SPOILER***
he goes into a drug lord's den with a bag of meth. said drug lord isn't very impressed with the man and has put his partner in the hospital. so said mild mannered chemistry teacher, now unafraid of death, takes the "meth" he brought with him and throws it on the floor, hard
it's really fulminated mercury
BOOM
meth drug lord meets fulminated mercury beats any youtube chemistry video i've seen
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Eh, big deal.
Web videos have been showing off the wonders of biology for years.