8 ms·
Stench gas
- cobbzilla 9y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanethiol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanethiol And if you want to buy some: http://www.zacon.ca/stench-gas.asp http://www.zacon.ca/stench-gas.asp
- krallja 9y ago"Employees of the Union Oil Company of California reported first in 1938 that turkey vultures would gather at the site of any gas leak. After finding that this was caused by traces of ethanethiol in the gas it was decided to boost the amount of ethanethiol in the gas, to make detections of leaks easier"
- thomk 9y agoEverything2 is still around?!?! Awesome.
- ilovecomputers 9y agoI know right? Sites like these used to be linked so often. Now that this is no longer the case, I've easily forgotten about these old sites.
- jordigh 9y agoYeah, Jay Bonci is still running the damn thing. And people still log in. And nobody seems to have any plans to shut it down. Dude even still writes root logs: https://everything2.com/title/What+is+the+plan%253F+-+March+2017 https://everything2.com/title/What+is+the+plan%253F+-+March+... https://everything2.com/user/jaybonci/writeups/root+log%253A+May+2017 https://everything2.com/user/jaybonci/writeups/root+log%253A... Whenever a big event happens, like some big e2 celebrity dies, there's a surge of people logging into the site to pay their respects. Weddings and funerals, they say, but for e2 it seems to be only funerals.
- kevinspencer 9y agoIt fills my heart with glee when I see sites o' yesteryear still around. Love Everything2. Glad perlmonks isn't the only site still running that code.
- hammock 9y agoSame compound that is added to propane
- Herodotus38 9y agoJust reading about that article triggered an olfactory memory of the related compound 2-mercaptoethanol (or beta-mercaptoethanol as it was labeled in the lab). Used to reduce disulfide links in proteins (edit: see more correct response below) so that they would unravel a bit and separate by size more as they travel through the western blot matrix. Unlike carbon monoxide this compound had a very "this will kill you" smell to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Mercaptoethanol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Mercaptoethanol
- cynicalbastard 9y agois that the nasty sour smelling chemical? sort of like sulfur, vinegar, burnt gunpowder, and vodka, mixed together? i used to get a whiff of it at my dad's bench at his workplace.
- dnautics 9y agothat sounds like thiolacetic acid, or posibly triflic acid (trifluoromethanesulfonic acid).
- Herodotus38 9y agoMaybe. To me it had a very "industrial-fish" smell is the best way I can put it. Not fishy like Thai fish oil, but maybe like an ocean oil spill site puréed, baked in the sun and concentrated? I remember it provoked a visceral reaction to not smell it more.
- cornchips 9y agoAcetic acid and Butyric acid. Used for those clear tool handles. [1][2] It gets nastier once you realize you are smelling the odor of vomit with hints of vinegar. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butyric_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butyric_acid [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate
- XorNot 9y agoNo worse then a Hershey's chocolate bar...
- __s 9y agoI think my family went to that exhibit while I was pre adolescent. I got scared so only my mother & sister went, while I stayed topside with my father. We window shopped the souvenir shop Nowadays my sister suffers claustrophobia & I feel most comfortable shoved into small crooks. But I think I was mostly offset by anxiety related to ventilation Visited Timmins this May, another northern Ontario city. It was snowing
- quadstick 9y ago100 years ago, yesterday, was the worst hard rock mining disaster in the US, in Butte, Montana. They didn't have this way of warning the miners back then and 168 miners died due to a fire in one of the shafts. Most died from asphyxia. Michael Punke, the author of the Revenant, wrote an excellent non-fiction book about it called "Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917".
- abalone 9y ago> air allows mines to use a very interesting way to communicate This is a very important point to remember about subterranean tunnel systems. It is exactly what came to my mind when I watched the Boring Company video about a huge network of 3D tunnels.[1] The tech press, which had probably never even covered a construction project yet alone tunnels, was basically like "what about earthquakes"? But tunnel collapse is not the primary safety issue. It's fires. Smoke and toxic gases from fires spread very quickly through tunnels. I am a huge fan of the concept, by the way, but I want to emphasize that most fatalities from traffic tunnels have been from fires (apart from ordinary traffic accidents).[2][3][4][5] And Elon Musk has stated that what makes this vision feasible from a cost perspective is smaller tunnel diameters. Which makes air "communication" all the more accelerated and safety critical. Thus any vision of tunneling without detailing fire safety, evacuation systems and firefighter access is significantly incomplete, as these can add significant cost and fundamentally constrain designs. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel_fire [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Road_Tunnel#2001_collision_and_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Road_Tunnel#2001_coll... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel#1999_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel#1999_fire
- zkms 9y ago> Smoke and toxic gases from fires spread very quickly through tunnels It's not just the confined-space aspect that causes the fire gases to have such high lethality (although it's certainly extremely significant), it's also the rate of gas production. Most solids and liquids don't actually burn; they emit flammable gases when exposed to heat, and it's those gases which actually undergo combustion. These gases are created by endothermic processes (pyrolysis and evaporation), and the more heat is available to convert unreactive solid/liquid combustibles into reactive gases, the faster the fire will burn. Therefore, less heat loss (to the outside environment or to non-combustibles) will enable a higher combustion rate and the fire will produce more heat. Tunnels are quite good at retaining heat, so most of the heat produced by a fire will feed back right into heating combustibles -- enabling devastating heat release rates in the tens to hundreds of megawatts. The heat release rate is roughly proportional to the fire's fuel consumption rate; which will be roughly proportional to the rate of lethal gas (CO/HCN/CO2) production and oxygen depletion. The radiant heat flux alone can make the fire unapproachable by even appropriately-equipped firefighters -- the massive production of superheated, oxygen depleted, CO/HCN-containing gases can kill -- far beyond the range that the heat flux is deadly.
- smsm42 9y agoSame principle in fire alarm for the deaf: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080310/020944491.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080310/020944491.shtml They use wasabi.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoI remember seeing this for sale on BOC's website when looking for CO2 a while back (https://www.boc.co.nz/shop/en/nz/stench-gas https://www.boc.co.nz/shop/en/nz/stench-gas). I briefly considered buying some for nefarious purposes, but I think I figured that they probably wouldn't just sell it to any random person.
- userbinator 9y agoThey remain there until an all-clear is given, which may include a distinct all-clear scent such as wintergreen. If you search for "stench gas" you will find some... interesting photos of the control panel for these systems: http://c1.staticflickr.com/2/1686/24201183892_c8a2dffc3b_h.jpg http://c1.staticflickr.com/2/1686/24201183892_c8a2dffc3b_h.j... (Something about buttons marked "release stench gas" and "release anti-stench gas" seem amusing in a rather comical fashion.)
- dmsnell 9y agoNot pictured, but right next to this machine is the "garry gum" and "anti-garry gum" dispenser.
- dwringer 9y agoSomething OCD in me is rather disturbed by the "release stench gas" being located to the right of the "anti-stench gas".
- mickronome 9y agoIt should clearly (or likely) be the other way around, at least in any country with a left-to-right reading order, OCD or not :) We scan information faster in the preferred reading direction, and flipping the warning gas on half a second earlier will likely, sooner or later save somebody from harm. Not that there aren't other ways to improve safety in mines, but each small part counts, I guess?
- rabboRubble 9y agoReminds me of the Friends' episode where Ross goes on and on with the (bored and weirded out) pizza delivery girl about the smelly chemical added to natural gas in order to make it olfactible & safer to use. Found it... https://youtu.be/kH5JhYsfNMA?t=1m10s https://youtu.be/kH5JhYsfNMA?t=1m10s
- dredmorbius 9y agoAnd if you've ever wondered whose blood those regulations arose from, it's the 300 souls lost in the New London School Explosion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion
- rabboRubble 9y agoYeah, we lose the collective memory of the "why" behind many of our regulations. Thanks for telling me about this. I certainly did not know!
- rcarmo 9y agoI wonder if we could tie this to Jenkins for when a build breaks. Would make for a nicer alternative than sirens and flashing lights, although I suspect people would tend to clear the office...
- rmm 9y agoIt smells absolutely wretched, and is totally unmistakable. Had it go off on a couple sites I've been on, and it's remarkable how it reaches every corner of the mine.
- jessriedel 9y agoWould love to hear more. What prompted it, and how did everyone respond? Was the wintergreen "all clear" signal used after the problem was resolved?
- hitekker 9y agoIf our noses were "sharper", i.e., able to distinguish on a deeper more meaningful level like a dog, could we transmit complex information with olfactory encoding? Right now the smells are simple signals; I'm curious if a scent could be engineered to contain a language. Like paper and writing. I'm asking for my story, in which sapient rats struggle against two-legged monsters with opposable thumbs.
- bglazer 9y agoI've wondered if one could build a device that outputs different combinations of distinct scents for training dogs. Like condition the dog to understand "sit" = "bacon smell" and "shake" = "cat". My theory was that dogs have more cognitive resources dedicated to processing olfactory information and so they could also be trained to understand and perform more complex tasks. Like, "bacon + cat + shoe smell" = "bark while running left"
- hitekker 9y agoFor those still curious, I found something of answer here: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45769/pheromone-based-language/45836#45836 https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/45769/pher...
- pjs_ 9y agoI instinctively hovered my mouse over the link to wintergreen, my brain fully expecting to click and experience the smell - as I would with any image, video, or sound. Took me a few seconds to manage expectations!