16 ms·

What This Here Compound Needs Is Some Hydrogen Peroxide

260 points by CarolineW 10y ago

redthrowaway 10y ago
Lowe's articles have the delightful quality of bringing in people who don't understand the chemistry, and making them feel like they're part of something. I never got into o-chem, and I certainly don't know anything about excited groups that want to blow off some steam and relax. But I can read Lowe's posts and feel like I'm in on the joke, and that's pretty rewarding in and of itself.
- andybak 10y ago
  That (and a touch of Breaking Bad) did that for me. Added chemist to the list of "things I could have done in an alternate universe". Anyone who liked this should Google for more ("Things I won't work with" is a good search term). As well as the 'things that blow up' category he writes delightfully on 'things that smell bad' and 'things that can kill you in miscellaneous ways'.
- gkafkg8y8 10y ago
  Explosions and threats of explosions bring many kids (middle/high school/freshmen) into it. If you have money, this is nice for the younger ones: https://melscience.com/ https://melscience.com/ Or one of the numerous chemistry sets available- preferably something with a lot of chemicals that are unsafe. I personally almost killed myself mixing things when I was an adolescent. And in the 80s there was this: https://archive.org/details/Chem_Lab_1985-Simon_and_Schuster_side_A https://archive.org/details/Chem_Lab_1985-Simon_and_Schuster... If kids aren't interested in chemistry, it's that the teacher/cirriculum/resources available to the students is just piss poor... and unfortunately that is the norm. It's so easy to keep kids engaged if you continue doing experiments that astound.
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    > Explosions and threats of explosions bring many kids (middle/high school/freshmen) into it. That was exactly why I was a chemistry nerd in high school and almost made a career out of it. Veered off in a different direction ultimately, but I still have what are to me fond memories (not so fond for everyone else around me subjected to "side effects" from the "experiments"). Still not clear how I avoided getting thrown in prison for all the crazy stuff. I'd be terrified if my kids attempted the same things.
- amelius 10y ago
  To be honest, the talking about explosions turned me off. Surely there are more interesting topics to get somebody excited about chemistry?
  - mikeash 10y ago
    This concept of "more interesting than explosions" confuses me greatly.
    - amelius 10y ago
      It's like trying to make somebody enthusiastic about computer science by having a long monologue about the wonders of the "rm -rf" command. :)
      - mikeash 10y ago
        A lot of my enthusiasm came from things like Core Wars and abusing C to crash my computer by overwriting code (hooray for old systems with no memory protection), so, yeah.
      - mercer 10y ago
        It sometimes depresses me a little that on the best ways I know to 'impress' (but only barely) friends of mine with my line of work is to do a 3D css transform/transition on whatever website they're currently looking at... Thankfully there's been the occasional friend who got really excited at the thought of being able to use their browser's devtools to change things on the page through css or javascript.
        mikeash 10y ago
        Maybe you could impress them by showing how you can use devtools to forge a tweet or bank balance or boarding pass.
        mercer 10y ago
- DogPawHat 10y ago
  That's what I was thinking, I don't quite know about "nito-groups" other then it has nitogen in it, but I get the feeling it blows up a lot, and that's good enough for me (to read about, not acually try this)
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    In chemical terms, nitro groups are -NO₂, which puts the nitrogen atom (which usually wants to attract electrons) at the oxidation state of +5. This makes nitro groups likely to be explosive, since nitrogen wants to return to a more neutral oxidation state (more specifically, elemental nitrogen, N₂ with its very stable triple bond), and will tend to do so exothermically and rapidly. The desire to return N₂ quickly also makes N-N and N=N single and double bonds very likely to make compounds explosive, because those bonds are already well on their way in the quest for stability and will happily release lots of heat as they do so. See the hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane mentioned in the article--it's full of -N-NO₂ groups! And, naturally, it blows up.
    - DogPawHat 10y ago
      My thanks :D
- kinkrtyavimoodh 10y ago
  His "Things I Won't Work With" series is absolutely delightful. Strongly recommended to everyone. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-with http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thing...
russellbeattie 10y ago
Nice! This is the first "Things I Won't Work With" in a couple years! If you haven't read Lowe's other posts in that category you're in for a treat: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-with http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thing...
- IanCal 10y ago
  This is an absolutely wonderful series, one I find myself re-reading in their entirety every time a link is posted. I should set up a script to automatically book off an afternoon at work if I open one of the links at lunch.
- IceyEC 10y ago
  I'm one of the lucky 10,000 today :)
dao- 10y ago
"What This Here Compound Needs Is..." I'm having a hard time reading this. Is this proper English? Serious question from a non-native speaker.
- jstanley 10y ago
  It means "What this compound needs is..." "this here" is a colloquialism in some places in (I think) the US.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Best i can tell it shows up most often in westerns, or when a character is supposed to be from a remote rural area.
    - biehl 10y ago
      Sounds like the result of a "too-direct" translation from Danish (maybe German too?). "Hvad dette her stof behøver er noget hydrogenperoxid"
      - stevedonovan 10y ago
        There's a bit of German influence on American English, that's true, like 'how goes?'. Also Dutch, as in 'How come?'
  - qbrass 10y ago
    It's from Southern American English.
    - douche 10y ago
      It's really part of a sort of a generalized redneck/rural argot, at this point. I'm from the farthest northern stretch of the Appalachians, a stone's throw from Canada, and quite often flummox people when I tell them I'm not from West Virginia or Kentucky.
krige 10y ago
Lowe's writing is, as always, phenomenal, just the right mixture of hard facts and tongue-in-check humour. The part about grinding the second compound down for X-ray though - I second his thoughts: in just what state of mind you have to be to even consider that? Did they have to draw straws?
- athom 10y ago
  I loved that whole paragraph. I could just hear John de Lancie reciting it in the voice of Discord
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  My favorite bit of most of these articles his horrified read-through of the characterization. The list of drop tests and reaction descriptions that these lunatics are willing to try is always truly impressive.
pdkl95 10y ago
It expands your horizons while it expands your fume hood LOL! Derek Lowe's posts about crazy chemistry are always a joy to read.
- bambax 10y ago
  > But I have to admit, I’d never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? Indeed, why not? This is a general principle that can be extended to many other similar situations. Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three? Instead of having two liters of pyridine poured down your trousers, why not three? And so on – it’s a liberating thought. It’s true that adding more oxygen-oxygen bonds to a compound will eventually liberate the tiles from your floor and your windows from their frames, but that comes with the territory. From http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/things_i_wont_work_with_peroxide_peroxides http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/thi...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I could have sworn he has one about long chains of nitrogen as well. An eyeopener for me, as even though i grew up on a farm i never considered nitrogen to be so "lively". Edit: Ah, found it. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/10/14/whoa_time_to_clean_the_fishtank_uh_root_canal_appointment_look_at_the_time http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/10/14/who...
    - cr0sh 10y ago
      You grew up on a farm and never decided to make a bit of ANFO?
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Didn't have the right friends or reading material i suspect.
mattkevan 10y ago
Always happy when a Things I Won't Work With pops up on HN. Lowe's writing is a delight.
- bharath28 10y ago
  First time I am encountering his writing. I am hooked now. What delightful writing about an esoteric topic.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  It has all the morbid fascination of watching someone intentionally light themselves on fire, but without the guilt and horror of the certain death. "Wait, did you say azidoazide? Let me (very carefully) fetch my popcorn."
tener 10y ago
Serious question: why on Earth would someone want to produce such compounds? Are there any actual applications of this work?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Per the old Cave Johnson quote, "Science isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT." As for applications - military, civil engineering, maybe even rocketry.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Military and rockets goes hand in hand. They are always on the lookout for something that produce a bigger boom, but that is stable enough for grunts to handle right after basic.
- erikb 10y ago
  I have to agree with the previous commenter, but in a more serious fashion. It's not just about the fun. A lot of modern technology is possible not because someone did some directed research but because someone thought about if something could be done and how to achieve it. Sometimes it may even take generations before a small piece of knowledge suddenly finds an application, and then it can still lead to breakthroughs. Certainly not all, but some people need to be able to do things without apparent meaning, including artists and (theoretical) scientists.
  - marz0 10y ago
    One simple example is the invention of styrofoam, which was accidentally created [1] when the inventor was looking to produce a flexible electrical insulator. [1] http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/styrofoam_2.htm http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/styrofoam_2...
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Another, from physics, is the laser. It sat around for a decade or more before it was applied to telecom and such.
coldcode 10y ago
As a grad student I somehow turned my experiment under the hood into an evacuation of the entire building, by reducing DMSO to DMS and discovering that Dimethyl Sulfide makes a great building emptier, especially since the hood system sucked (or rather did not). Two Nobel winners and a host of professors and students abandoned the building post haste and they made me go back in to look up whether it was dangerous or not (this was before mobile devices). Thankfully it stinks something fierce but is not fatal likes its cousin, Hydrogen Sulfide. No wonder I decided programming was safer, code might blow up but it doesn't Blow Up. I also worked in the lab with a guy who worked with ether and smoked in the lab.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  At least until said code controls something that involves massive amounts of energy (mechanical or otherwise). Edit: Btw, stinky chemistry sounds like something right out of Max Gergel's memoirs. A book that Lowe mentioned: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/05/27/max_gergels_memoirs http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/05/27/max... And that i have been meaning to finish reading.
  - lostboys67 10y ago
    At my first job we had a computer controlled wave tank we had built. The guy I shared an office with said you had to be careful when programming it, as a divide by 0 error could have tried to send the paddle to its full travel in 0 seconds. Which would have created a wave so strong it would have flooded the entire lab - and that was using water as working fluid we hade some experiments that used molten metal or Freon
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    If you've been enjoying Gergel, definitely give Ignition! a read, also a Lowe recommendation. It's a first-hand account of early rocket fuel research, and it is hair-raising like no chemistry I have ever heard of. http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
EdwardCoffin 10y ago
Could anyone confirm for me my suspicion that the phrase repeat this paper (he said "if I had to repeat this paper") is standard jargon for a lab following the procedures described in a paper to replicate the results?
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  I believe so, yes.
Symmetry 10y ago
If any of you would like to experience something like that article but at book length here's a link to a PDF of "IGNITION ! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants". http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Oh yes, I can thoroughly recommend that book. The author's dry descriptions of things going horribly, horribly wrong are extremely amusing. I found the second half to be a lot more chemistry and a lot less accidents than the first half (which is definitely the more amusing one). It's long out of print, sadly, and used copies go for obscene amounts (there's one on Amazon for $2099, and no I didn't forget the decimal point), and it seems to be in the public domain anyway (at least the science madness library claims so), so you probably don't have to feel bad for just grabbing the pdf. Here's a nice teaser quote from Chapter 3, "The Hunting of the Hypergol": Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it—the acid valve is leaking!" "Go ahead—fire anyway!" Paul ordered. I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started back- ing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet. Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dogeating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink. I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, to collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff. When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    The book came up in what is likely the most shared article in the series. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/san... You know you are in for a interesting day when you are working with something that digests asbestos...
avmich 10y ago
I don't quite understand that aversion to handling concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Another opinion is here - http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html .
- fr0sty 10y ago
  His H2O2 link is to this: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/things_i_wont_work_with_peroxide_peroxides http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/thi... which talks about some more exciting peroxides.
mankyd 10y ago
I envy Shreeve’s and Matzger's groups. Not that I want to do what they're doing, but man I would love waking up to an article written about me like this. I can guarantee that their teams have a getting a huge kick out of this.
blauditore 10y ago
That was quite hard to read because commas look very similar to periods with that font, at least on my screen. Note to future self: Never use Benton Sans for a website.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Firefox at least has an option to force pages to use your selected fonts, which I highly recommend.
  - blauditore 10y ago
    Do you mean reader view (which removes all styling, background images etc.) or something else?
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      Options → Content → Advanced (under Fonts & Colors) → Uncheck ‘Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above’. This does break icon fonts, but icon fonts are IMO a bad idea and should use SVG instead.
      - blauditore 10y ago
        Thanks, found it. Actually, I like the possibilities of web fonts quite much, but there are always people who just do it badly. Also, icon fonts are great to get somewhere quickly, even though not really best practice.
CamperBob2 10y ago
What the people who designed this website need is a job at McDonald's.

260 points by CarolineW 10y ago

Lowe's articles have the delightful quality of bringing in people who don't understand the chemistry, and making them feel like they're part of something. I never got into o-chem, and I certainly don't know anything about excited groups that want to blow off some steam and relax. But I can read Lowe's posts and feel like I'm in on the joke, and that's pretty rewarding in and of itself.

andybak 10y ago
That (and a touch of Breaking Bad) did that for me. Added chemist to the list of "things I could have done in an alternate universe". Anyone who liked this should Google for more ("Things I won't work with" is a good search term). As well as the 'things that blow up' category he writes delightfully on 'things that smell bad' and 'things that can kill you in miscellaneous ways'.
gkafkg8y8 10y ago
Explosions and threats of explosions bring many kids (middle/high school/freshmen) into it. If you have money, this is nice for the younger ones: https://melscience.com/ https://melscience.com/ Or one of the numerous chemistry sets available- preferably something with a lot of chemicals that are unsafe. I personally almost killed myself mixing things when I was an adolescent. And in the 80s there was this: https://archive.org/details/Chem_Lab_1985-Simon_and_Schuster_side_A https://archive.org/details/Chem_Lab_1985-Simon_and_Schuster... If kids aren't interested in chemistry, it's that the teacher/cirriculum/resources available to the students is just piss poor... and unfortunately that is the norm. It's so easy to keep kids engaged if you continue doing experiments that astound.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > Explosions and threats of explosions bring many kids (middle/high school/freshmen) into it. That was exactly why I was a chemistry nerd in high school and almost made a career out of it. Veered off in a different direction ultimately, but I still have what are to me fond memories (not so fond for everyone else around me subjected to "side effects" from the "experiments"). Still not clear how I avoided getting thrown in prison for all the crazy stuff. I'd be terrified if my kids attempted the same things.
amelius 10y ago
To be honest, the talking about explosions turned me off. Surely there are more interesting topics to get somebody excited about chemistry?
- mikeash 10y ago
  This concept of "more interesting than explosions" confuses me greatly.
  - amelius 10y ago
    It's like trying to make somebody enthusiastic about computer science by having a long monologue about the wonders of the "rm -rf" command. :)
    - mikeash 10y ago
      A lot of my enthusiasm came from things like Core Wars and abusing C to crash my computer by overwriting code (hooray for old systems with no memory protection), so, yeah.
    - mercer 10y ago
      It sometimes depresses me a little that on the best ways I know to 'impress' (but only barely) friends of mine with my line of work is to do a 3D css transform/transition on whatever website they're currently looking at... Thankfully there's been the occasional friend who got really excited at the thought of being able to use their browser's devtools to change things on the page through css or javascript.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        Maybe you could impress them by showing how you can use devtools to forge a tweet or bank balance or boarding pass.
        mercer 10y ago
DogPawHat 10y ago
That's what I was thinking, I don't quite know about "nito-groups" other then it has nitogen in it, but I get the feeling it blows up a lot, and that's good enough for me (to read about, not acually try this)
- jcranmer 10y ago
  In chemical terms, nitro groups are -NO₂, which puts the nitrogen atom (which usually wants to attract electrons) at the oxidation state of +5. This makes nitro groups likely to be explosive, since nitrogen wants to return to a more neutral oxidation state (more specifically, elemental nitrogen, N₂ with its very stable triple bond), and will tend to do so exothermically and rapidly. The desire to return N₂ quickly also makes N-N and N=N single and double bonds very likely to make compounds explosive, because those bonds are already well on their way in the quest for stability and will happily release lots of heat as they do so. See the hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane mentioned in the article--it's full of -N-NO₂ groups! And, naturally, it blows up.
  - DogPawHat 10y ago
    My thanks :D
kinkrtyavimoodh 10y ago
His "Things I Won't Work With" series is absolutely delightful. Strongly recommended to everyone. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-with http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thing...

russellbeattie 10y ago

Nice! This is the first "Things I Won't Work With" in a couple years! If you haven't read Lowe's other posts in that category you're in for a treat: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-with http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thing...

IanCal 10y ago
This is an absolutely wonderful series, one I find myself re-reading in their entirety every time a link is posted. I should set up a script to automatically book off an afternoon at work if I open one of the links at lunch.
IceyEC 10y ago
I'm one of the lucky 10,000 today :)

dao- 10y ago

"What This Here Compound Needs Is..." I'm having a hard time reading this. Is this proper English? Serious question from a non-native speaker.

jstanley 10y ago
It means "What this compound needs is..." "this here" is a colloquialism in some places in (I think) the US.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Best i can tell it shows up most often in westerns, or when a character is supposed to be from a remote rural area.
  - biehl 10y ago
    Sounds like the result of a "too-direct" translation from Danish (maybe German too?). "Hvad dette her stof behøver er noget hydrogenperoxid"
    - stevedonovan 10y ago
      There's a bit of German influence on American English, that's true, like 'how goes?'. Also Dutch, as in 'How come?'
- qbrass 10y ago
  It's from Southern American English.
  - douche 10y ago
    It's really part of a sort of a generalized redneck/rural argot, at this point. I'm from the farthest northern stretch of the Appalachians, a stone's throw from Canada, and quite often flummox people when I tell them I'm not from West Virginia or Kentucky.

krige 10y ago

Lowe's writing is, as always, phenomenal, just the right mixture of hard facts and tongue-in-check humour. The part about grinding the second compound down for X-ray though - I second his thoughts: in just what state of mind you have to be to even consider that? Did they have to draw straws?

athom 10y ago
I loved that whole paragraph. I could just hear John de Lancie reciting it in the voice of Discord
Bartweiss 10y ago
My favorite bit of most of these articles his horrified read-through of the characterization. The list of drop tests and reaction descriptions that these lunatics are willing to try is always truly impressive.

pdkl95 10y ago

It expands your horizons while it expands your fume hood LOL! Derek Lowe's posts about crazy chemistry are always a joy to read.

bambax 10y ago
> But I have to admit, I’d never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? Indeed, why not? This is a general principle that can be extended to many other similar situations. Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three? Instead of having two liters of pyridine poured down your trousers, why not three? And so on – it’s a liberating thought. It’s true that adding more oxygen-oxygen bonds to a compound will eventually liberate the tiles from your floor and your windows from their frames, but that comes with the territory. From http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/things_i_wont_work_with_peroxide_peroxides http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/thi...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I could have sworn he has one about long chains of nitrogen as well. An eyeopener for me, as even though i grew up on a farm i never considered nitrogen to be so "lively". Edit: Ah, found it. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/10/14/whoa_time_to_clean_the_fishtank_uh_root_canal_appointment_look_at_the_time http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/10/14/who...
  - cr0sh 10y ago
    You grew up on a farm and never decided to make a bit of ANFO?
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Didn't have the right friends or reading material i suspect.

mattkevan 10y ago

Always happy when a Things I Won't Work With pops up on HN. Lowe's writing is a delight.

bharath28 10y ago
First time I am encountering his writing. I am hooked now. What delightful writing about an esoteric topic.
logfromblammo 10y ago
It has all the morbid fascination of watching someone intentionally light themselves on fire, but without the guilt and horror of the certain death. "Wait, did you say azidoazide? Let me (very carefully) fetch my popcorn."

tener 10y ago

Serious question: why on Earth would someone want to produce such compounds? Are there any actual applications of this work?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Per the old Cave Johnson quote, "Science isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT." As for applications - military, civil engineering, maybe even rocketry.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Military and rockets goes hand in hand. They are always on the lookout for something that produce a bigger boom, but that is stable enough for grunts to handle right after basic.
erikb 10y ago
I have to agree with the previous commenter, but in a more serious fashion. It's not just about the fun. A lot of modern technology is possible not because someone did some directed research but because someone thought about if something could be done and how to achieve it. Sometimes it may even take generations before a small piece of knowledge suddenly finds an application, and then it can still lead to breakthroughs. Certainly not all, but some people need to be able to do things without apparent meaning, including artists and (theoretical) scientists.
- marz0 10y ago
  One simple example is the invention of styrofoam, which was accidentally created [1] when the inventor was looking to produce a flexible electrical insulator. [1] http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/styrofoam_2.htm http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/styrofoam_2...
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Another, from physics, is the laser. It sat around for a decade or more before it was applied to telecom and such.

coldcode 10y ago

As a grad student I somehow turned my experiment under the hood into an evacuation of the entire building, by reducing DMSO to DMS and discovering that Dimethyl Sulfide makes a great building emptier, especially since the hood system sucked (or rather did not). Two Nobel winners and a host of professors and students abandoned the building post haste and they made me go back in to look up whether it was dangerous or not (this was before mobile devices). Thankfully it stinks something fierce but is not fatal likes its cousin, Hydrogen Sulfide. No wonder I decided programming was safer, code might blow up but it doesn't Blow Up. I also worked in the lab with a guy who worked with ether and smoked in the lab.

digi_owl 10y ago
At least until said code controls something that involves massive amounts of energy (mechanical or otherwise). Edit: Btw, stinky chemistry sounds like something right out of Max Gergel's memoirs. A book that Lowe mentioned: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/05/27/max_gergels_memoirs http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/05/27/max... And that i have been meaning to finish reading.
- lostboys67 10y ago
  At my first job we had a computer controlled wave tank we had built. The guy I shared an office with said you had to be careful when programming it, as a divide by 0 error could have tried to send the paddle to its full travel in 0 seconds. Which would have created a wave so strong it would have flooded the entire lab - and that was using water as working fluid we hade some experiments that used molten metal or Freon
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  If you've been enjoying Gergel, definitely give Ignition! a read, also a Lowe recommendation. It's a first-hand account of early rocket fuel research, and it is hair-raising like no chemistry I have ever heard of. http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf

EdwardCoffin 10y ago

Could anyone confirm for me my suspicion that the phrase repeat this paper (he said "if I had to repeat this paper") is standard jargon for a lab following the procedures described in a paper to replicate the results?

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
I believe so, yes.

Symmetry 10y ago

If any of you would like to experience something like that article but at book length here's a link to a PDF of "IGNITION ! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants". http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf

lorenzhs 10y ago
Oh yes, I can thoroughly recommend that book. The author's dry descriptions of things going horribly, horribly wrong are extremely amusing. I found the second half to be a lot more chemistry and a lot less accidents than the first half (which is definitely the more amusing one). It's long out of print, sadly, and used copies go for obscene amounts (there's one on Amazon for $2099, and no I didn't forget the decimal point), and it seems to be in the public domain anyway (at least the science madness library claims so), so you probably don't have to feel bad for just grabbing the pdf. Here's a nice teaser quote from Chapter 3, "The Hunting of the Hypergol": Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it—the acid valve is leaking!" "Go ahead—fire anyway!" Paul ordered. I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started back- ing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet. Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dogeating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink. I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, to collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff. When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The book came up in what is likely the most shared article in the series. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/san... You know you are in for a interesting day when you are working with something that digests asbestos...

avmich 10y ago

I don't quite understand that aversion to handling concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Another opinion is here - http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html http://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/peroxide.html .

fr0sty 10y ago
His H2O2 link is to this: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/things_i_wont_work_with_peroxide_peroxides http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/10/10/thi... which talks about some more exciting peroxides.

mankyd 10y ago

I envy Shreeve’s and Matzger's groups. Not that I want to do what they're doing, but man I would love waking up to an article written about me like this. I can guarantee that their teams have a getting a huge kick out of this.

blauditore 10y ago

That was quite hard to read because commas look very similar to periods with that font, at least on my screen. Note to future self: Never use Benton Sans for a website.

PeCaN 10y ago
Firefox at least has an option to force pages to use your selected fonts, which I highly recommend.
- blauditore 10y ago
  Do you mean reader view (which removes all styling, background images etc.) or something else?
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Options → Content → Advanced (under Fonts & Colors) → Uncheck ‘Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above’. This does break icon fonts, but icon fonts are IMO a bad idea and should use SVG instead.
    - blauditore 10y ago
      Thanks, found it. Actually, I like the possibilities of web fonts quite much, but there are always people who just do it badly. Also, icon fonts are great to get somewhere quickly, even though not really best practice.

CamperBob2 10y ago

What the people who designed this website need is a job at McDonald's.