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How Regulations Hamper Chemical Hobbyists
An anonymous reader writes "Chemical & Engineering News just ran this story that relates how government regulations create a terribly restrictive atmosphere for people who do chemistry as a hobby. (A related story was previously posted.)" The article gives some examples of why hamfisted regulations are harmful even to those who aren't doing the chemistry themselves: "Hobby chemists will tell you that home labs have been the source of some of chemistry's greatest contributions. Charles Goodyear figured out how to vulcanize rubber with the same stove that his wife used to bake the family's bread. Charles Martin Hall discovered the economical electrochemical process for refining aluminum from its ore in a woodshed laboratory near his family home. A plaque outside Sir William Henry Perkin's Cable Street residence in London notes that the chemist 'discovered the first aniline dyestuff, March 1856, while working in his home laboratory on this site and went on to found science-based industry.'"
When your bureacratic reactant
Is but a silly distractant
Try the anionic surfactant:
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I am a hobby chemist. I make things like pies, cakes and coconut cookies. Tonight the kitchen, tomorrow the world!
Chemical Hobbyist? Is that like a drug user?
Today the mad scientist can't get hazardous chemicals, tomorrow it's the mad grad student! Where will it end?!
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
Remember, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate!
P.S. The irresponsible ones will blow themselves up anyway. Good for keeping full fire department employment.
Now all the tinkering is just done in labs that have access to "controlled" substances. It has the same effect. We have regulations to stop people who are a few neurons shy of a full brain (probably from playing with too many chemicals) harming themselves or others. There are many responsible people who can tinker with chemicals but there are many irresponsible ones who would end up seriously harming themselves or others, accidentally or on purpose.
If you are really home on the range, you can cook anything anywhere.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
You should never use the same equipment for your chemistry as for your other household things.
Too true. With some of the additives they use these days, the risk of your food contaminating your delicate experiments is just too great. If, say, you got some of that melamine-adulterated Chinese milk mixed up with your reactants, it could really screw up the results!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
What kind of search engine kills people when you do a search?
- Raynet --> .
Hey, we said it was Beta. -- Google
You know it is people like you that have created this scarcity of mutant superheroes.
It's true, you raise an important point about the mad scientists. How is one supposed to perform mad science without the requisite chemicals? I suppose next they'll ban the use of decorative Tesla coils...
But there's another angle: we have to consider how this kind of legislation impacts the upstanding, college-educated, pipe-smoking benevolent scientist. How is Small-Town-Plagued-By-Bizarre-Monsters to be saved if their local College-Educated Scientist can't perform the experiments necessary to find the one chemical which will defeat the evil fiends? How will the comrades of said scientist defeat the monsters if they can't travel to a nearby chemical supply warehouse to get the chemical they need in sufficient quantity?
Now, not all monster scenarios require a chemist, it's true. From time to time a monster will appear whose one weakness is something as simple as Sodium Chloride ("Ordinary table salt!") - but what about the monsters who are vulnerable to sodium in its pure form? Or what if defeating the monsters requires large quantities of hydrochloric acid, or Potassium Iodide, or any one of a number of other sciency-sounding things?
Yep, before you know it we'll be overrun by superintelligent ants or fish-men or mole people or giant lobsters and then we'll just wish we hadn't cracked down on all this science!
Bow-ties are cool.
Or around here: "you've got questions, we've got blank stares"
Won't the bread come out a bit smelly though?
Tom...
My regime proposes that, if elected in to power, the following regulations will be put in to place:
1) All citizens will be reversibly sterilized at puberty.
2) Reproduction will be licensed. The license can be obtained upon successfully passing IQ and parental competency tests. A credit check will also be required to insure that only citizens financially able to care for offspring will be able to reproduce.
3) In the event that parents later prove to be incapable of raising a child, their offspring will be confiscated and raised in a sanitary state-run facility. In this event the parents' breeding license will be permanently revoked.
My regime feels that these policies are reasonable, will end all issues with teen pregnancy and abortion and should be viewed favorably by the population at large.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's a Dutch oven, not a French one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."