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Is there some link with geeks and explosives? In my youth, if a large bang was heard across the town or smoke was spotted, I was always asked if it was my faul
by meaty 14y ago
Is there some link with geeks and explosives?
In my youth, if a large bang was heard across the town or smoke was spotted, I was always asked if it was my fault :) (a lot of the time it was :)
- amalag 14y agoI hate to think of doing the stuff I used to do in high school 15 years ago now because of all the extra security and terrorism links.
- protomyth 14y agoTrue, but if you're a HS chemistry teacher with a vial of Na on display and no student has tried to steal it, then you haven't done your job.
- kragen 14y agoYes, everyone I've ever known who made explosives was a geek. Why is that?
- jwoah12 14y agoThey knew where to find a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
- davidtanner 14y agoA real geek would know the Anarchist's Cookbook is chock full of dangerous misinformation and avoid it.
- meaty 14y agoEspecially the picric acid recipe which our chemistry teacher decided to "do for us" to show how dangerous the JRCB was. Cracked the glass in the fume cupboard. Best chem teacher in the world: Mr Atkinson, I salute you for making it interesting and turning a blind eye when we were stealing chemicals (because he did it when he was younger) :)
- Florin_Andrei 14y agoPicric acid is pretty evil. Don't just store it wet, but store it under a layer of water. Even then I'd be wary of it. Heck, just avoid it, it's too dangerous. The damn thing blew up while being prodded with a stick by a friend, and I'm pretty sure the concoction was still quite wet. Well, at least nobody was badly hurt, and we accomplished what we set out to do - which was to detonate a small amount of PA somewhere on the outskirts of town. We just didn't envision exploding it anywhere near one of the members of our team. :/ > Mr Atkinson, I salute you for making it interesting and turning a blind eye Yeah, let's not mention "blind eyes" in this context.
- Spooky23 14y agoThe ones who liked their fingers found the army improvised munitions handbook.
- michaelt 14y agoCould be that you know an above-average number of geeks.
- kragen 14y agoThat seems likely.
- DanBC 14y agoThe non-geeks ignore the safety and die? Chemistry is sometimes tricky, and geeks have an interest in chemistry? Explosives involve an amount of "forbidden knowledge", and that's popular among geeks? Explosives is on a continuum with arson, at the "more knowledge needed" end. Geeks blow stuff up. Non-geeks burn it down? But, searching YouTube shows there are plenty of people who don't appear to be geeks who experiment with explosives and fire.
- speeder 14y agoI fiddled with explosives a bit. My father more than me. My father once tried to make a "rocket" by filling some canisters with "solid fuel", but it always exploded. Back then he thought that the canisters were being destroyed, but then he remembered that he never saw sharapnel... And concluded that what he made was a cannon, and he wonders if he ever hit something.
- nanidin 14y agoI made a lot of fireworks in my heyday. Mostly smokebombs, but sometimes improvisational stuff with other fireworks. I was 16 or 17 going into Home Depot looking for Potassium Nitrate aka Salt Petre aka stump killer :) And I built most of a Tesla coil. I stopped short when it came time to solder together the capacitor bank. I read too much that made me think I'd kill myself or blow up the house if I shorted something out on accident. Used the transformer for a nice Jacob's Ladder though!
- Florin_Andrei 14y agoYou can still buy real stump killer (potassium nitrate) if you look hard enough. I even found it at a brick-and-mortar store nearby, but only after a fairly extensive search.
- dugmartin 14y agoSounds like a well spent youth. I think any one of the many explosive devices I made with my cousins 30 years ago would probably provoke a SWAT team response these days. Things like a 3/4" BIP flying pipe bomb launched with a D engine, an acetylene/oxygen filled kids punching balloon airlifted by helium balloons connected to 10 feet of slow-burn fireworks fuse, balsa model rockets with their cones hollowed out and filled with black powder, etc. Good memories.
- Florin_Andrei 14y agoThis seems to be a recurring theme round these parts.
- matwood 14y agoGood stuff. One of my friends dads worked in an old Navy yard and had all sorts of random chemicals in the shed. We managed to make a few interesting explosions. Still, nothing beats the time after Christmas when we went around and gathered every tree we could find and stacked up in an empty lot and set them on fire. It went from night to day for about 45 seconds and then it was gone. Taught me a lot about how fast something like a Christmas tree can go up. I'm surprised there are not more fires every year.