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Over the summer I've been working in a building that contains 125 gallons of mercury as part of what it needs to function properly 
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Jul 17, 2018 05:58
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Luneshot posted:Over the summer I've been working in a building that contains 125 gallons of mercury as part of what it needs to function properly My first thought was the Large Zenith Telescope, but that is no longer in operation and I don’t think it used quite that much mercury.
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Jul 17, 2018 06:10
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Luneshot posted:Over the summer I've been working in a building that contains 125 gallons of mercury as part of what it needs to function properly oh so they're having another go at using mercury to increase thrust impulse
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Jul 17, 2018 06:19
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Isnt the liquid metal sort of Mercury mostly harmless unless you manage to get it into your bloodstream somehow? I've seen photos of of guy floating in a pool of it. Also read a few things about it being ingested as a laxative back in the old days. Also straight pumped up the dickhole as a treatment for syphilis. Not exactly harmless but not immediate death. I do know of that certain kind that causes a horrible prolonged death like that poor lady chemist that had a drop go through her glove and died an agonizing death. I once accidentally stepped on a thermometer and broke it. I could see a few little tiny beads of the Mercury on the carpet. I didn't know how to clean it up and it freaked me out so I put a little rug over that piece of carpet until I moved out. That little bit of Mercury is probably still in that carpet or maybe under the floor at that apartment.
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Jul 17, 2018 06:31
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Liquid mercury is fine-ish, even if you drink the stuff you're not going to get any significant uptake through your guts. Mercury vapor is what fucks you up, because it gets into your blood way easier through your lungs. The big hazard of having a big ol' pool of liquid mercury around is the mercury vapour that comes along with it. Hiding it away somewhere it can evaporate and continue poisoning the air is one of the worse things you can do with a mercury spill.
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Jul 17, 2018 06:48
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Platystemon posted:My first thought was the Large Zenith Telescope, but that is no longer in operation and I don’t think it used quite that much mercury. Not far off! It's the Dunn Solar Telescope. The entire telescope optical tube, which is ~300 feet long, plus the entire instrument setup (on a platform we can walk on), totals about 350 tons. All of that is supported by the mercury float bearing; when the "motors" are turned off I can rotate the entire multi-hundred ton structure with my foot. It's kind of a bizarre telescope, honestly. Nobody else ever built anything like this place (and probably with good reason). https://imgur.com/a/XwYw9eg for some pictures. (And yes, we are well aware of the hazard posed by mercury vapor; there are a LOT of safety systems and mercury vapor monitoring sensors in place. It may have been built in the 60s but we're much more modern when it comes to safety).
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Jul 17, 2018 06:53
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:I do know of that certain kind that causes a horrible prolonged death like that poor lady chemist that had a drop go through her glove and died an agonizing death. 
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Jul 17, 2018 07:50
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Karen Wetterhahn's name is pretty much permanently seared into my brain. What a horrific way to die. This thread has taught me that "methyl" very often means extremely bad news.
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Jul 17, 2018 07:59
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Luneshot posted:Not far off! Interesting. Thanks for sharing. It’s like a lighthouse’s bearing but on a grand scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNiWKD7VoBU http://uslhs.org/lens-rotation
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Jul 17, 2018 08:28
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Bertrand Hustle posted:Karen Wetterhahn's name is pretty much permanently seared into my brain. What a horrific way to die. Idunno methyl alkyls are a pretty good way to get lots of stuff into the brain amphetamine phenidate tryptamines
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Jul 17, 2018 09:21
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SENSUAL DAD KISS posted:Idunno methyl alkyls are a pretty good way to get lots of stuff into the brain mercury too apparently
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Jul 17, 2018 12:38
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Jabor posted:Liquid mercury is fine-ish, even if you drink the stuff you're not going to get any significant uptake through your guts. Mercury vapor is what fucks you up, because it gets into your blood way easier through your lungs. Mercury's got a pretty low vapor pressure, though, and doesn't readily vaporize at room temperature. The vapors are also heavier than air. So unless you were spending a lot of time in the basement of that building, or the building were unventilated, you'd probably be okay.
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Jul 17, 2018 12:52
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Phanatic posted:Mercury's got a pretty low vapor pressure, though, and doesn't readily vaporize at room temperature. The vapors are also heavier than air. So unless you were spending a lot of time in the basement of that building, or the building were unventilated, you'd probably be okay. Just a half-remembered factoid, but I heard that part of the problem with mercury vapor is that it gets taken up by microorganisms, and many of them deal with excess mercury by converting it into an organic molecule, like methylmercury, so they can excrete it. So the fumes themselves are bad enough, but when mercury gets into the local biome it turns into something much nastier. Wasn't this the worst thing about Paris Green? Arsenic-impregnated cloth and wallpaper were already bad enough, but mold and mildew excrete it as arsine, which was especially bad news to someone bedridden with age or illness. "Either this wallpaper goes, or..."
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Jul 17, 2018 14:58
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Syd Midnight posted:Just a half-remembered factoid, but I heard that part of the problem with mercury vapor is that it gets taken up by microorganisms, and many of them deal with excess mercury by converting it into an organic molecule, like methylmercury, so they can excrete it. So the fumes themselves are bad enough, but when mercury gets into the local biome it turns into something much nastier. Yes, that's correct. Aquatic bacteria metabolize mercury to methymercury, and then that bioaccumulates and makes people sick. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5289874/ Not going to happen in a basement, though.
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Jul 17, 2018 15:07
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Syd Midnight posted:Wasn't this the worst thing about Paris Green? Arsenic-impregnated cloth and wallpaper were already bad enough, but mold and mildew excrete it as arsine, which was especially bad news to someone bedridden with age or illness. "Either this wallpaper goes, or..." I thought someone debunked that? I mean, yes fungi do metabolise it into arsine, but didn't someone do the math and work out that the quantities produced would never be enough to poison anyone?
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Jul 17, 2018 15:39
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Yea - don't heat mercury (because it vaporizes and gets inside you) and don't dump mercury into the water supply (because bacteria turn it into methylmercury), and you'll be fine. It's pretty inert, as long as you don't disturb it mercury won't gently caress you up.
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Jul 17, 2018 16:00
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The_White_Crane posted:I thought someone debunked that? I mean, yes fungi do metabolise it into arsine, but didn't someone do the math and work out that the quantities produced would never be enough to poison anyone? At least according to Wikipedia. Poisoning symptoms can occur after long term exposure at 0.5 PPM If you're already sick and in a Victorian ish era house with not a lot of air circulation? Intuition is telling me that it wouldn't take much arsenic munching fungi to hit that level of toxicity. (especially if you're already sick from BLA)
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Jul 17, 2018 16:30
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What is BLA and why did the acronym get picked to make a noise you make when you're not feeling well (slash are a Dracula)?
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Jul 17, 2018 16:39
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Phy posted:What is BLA and why did the acronym get picked to make a noise you make when you're not feeling well (slash are a Dracula)? quote:Adjective quote:bleah To be more specific on the Dracula front: http://www.maximumfun.org/2011/10/31/history-and-origin-draculas-use-bizarre-expletive-bleh http://www.maximumfun.org/2011/10/31/additional-bleh-pop-culture ulmont has a new favorite as of 18:15 on Jul 17, 2018 |
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Jul 17, 2018 18:13
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:Isnt the liquid metal sort of Mercury mostly harmless unless you manage to get it into your bloodstream somehow?
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Jul 19, 2018 18:14
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Phy posted:What is BLA and why did the acronym get picked to make a noise you make when you're not feeling well (slash are a Dracula)? My guess would be Blood Loss Anemia, also appropriate to Draculas.
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Jul 19, 2018 18:52
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GWBBQ posted:It's inert enough if swallowed that in the past it has been used as a laxative, working purely through mechanical action. The Elements of Murder is full of interesting stories about mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead, and thallium, but one of my favorites was the 19th century laxative (which is a scary enough phrase) that was simply a little ball of pure antimony. One was enough for a whole family and would last them for many years because it was meant to be reused, even handed down through the generations. Yeah.
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Jul 20, 2018 04:39
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This is reminding me of a list of some North American traditional herbal remedies I read once. Something like 80% of them were used to promote pooping. Was constipation a major problem back in the day?
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Jul 20, 2018 05:04
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At a certain point, pooping is one of the first things we've gotten to a science. Easy to tell you're constipated and eastly to tell when something fixed it.
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Jul 20, 2018 05:07
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It's beyond just fixing constipation. People have been obsessed with pooping more/better for the entirety of human history. There's the obvious (real or imagined) implications about getting rid of poisons and evil and such, and pooping regularly and powerfully does genuinely help reduce the extent of the parasitic infections that are common anywhere people are drinking untreated water. I have a book of old medieval woodcuts and in one of them there's a guy being given an enema with a gourd hanging in a tree Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 05:13 on Jul 20, 2018 |
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Jul 20, 2018 05:08
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Traditional as in Native American, or like European-centric stuff? Between humor theory and puritanical SIN EXCRETION RARAGH I could see a disproportionate concern with digestive health.
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Jul 20, 2018 05:09
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Also if life sucks a good poo poo can make your day.
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Jul 20, 2018 05:09
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:This is reminding me of a list of some North American traditional herbal remedies I read once. Something like 80% of them were used to promote pooping. Was constipation a major problem back in the day? People have just always been obsessed with pooping.
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Jul 20, 2018 05:17
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Sagebrush posted:It's beyond just fixing constipation. People have been obsessed with pooping more/better for the entirety of human history. There's the obvious (real or imagined) implications about getting rid of poisons and evil and such, and pooping regularly and powerfully does genuinely help reduce the extent of the parasitic infections that are common anywhere people are drinking untreated water. Don't forget that you could be told to drink mercury for constipation.
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Jul 20, 2018 05:29
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Zil posted:Don't forget that you could be told to drink mercury for constipation. I'd imagine drinking mercury would be a terrible idea. Given its propensity for getting *everywhere* there's a nook and cranny, letting it anywhere near a gumline or the sublingual region seems stupid. If you absolutely *had* to, a funnel directly into the throat would likely be the 'safest' way.
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Jul 20, 2018 06:03
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BIG HEADLINE posted:I'd imagine drinking mercury would be a terrible idea. Given its propensity for getting *everywhere* there's a nook and cranny, letting it anywhere near a gumline or the sublingual region seems stupid. If you absolutely *had* to, a funnel directly into the throat would likely be the 'safest' way. That's probably why it works. Pushed through every nook and cranny on its way out.
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Jul 20, 2018 06:16
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BIG HEADLINE posted:I'd imagine drinking mercury would be a terrible idea. Given its propensity for getting *everywhere* there's a nook and cranny, letting it anywhere near a gumline or the sublingual region seems stupid. If you absolutely *had* to, a funnel directly into the throat would likely be the 'safest' way. Mercury has a really high surface tension and doesn't "wet" most objects, so it's not like it's going to just seep into cracks and stay there. Like others have mentioned, it's an effective laxitive. If you drank a cup of it (~250ml, ~3.5kg!) it would just move into your GI tract and then try to find the center of the earth, forming an approximate sphere as it moved downward, pushing everything else out of its way. Since it's pretty inert in its raw metallic form, you could then collect it as it came out the other end, wash everything off, and use it again, almost completely unharmed (both you and the mercury). TooMuchAbstraction posted:This is reminding me of a list of some North American traditional herbal remedies I read once. Something like 80% of them were used to promote pooping. Was constipation a major problem back in the day? Lots of places those were written had very high-fiber, high-protein, low-water diets.
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Jul 20, 2018 11:14
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Pooping is one of those things where, if it stops, you are about to loving die.
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Jul 20, 2018 11:55
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:Mercury has a really high surface tension and doesn't "wet" most objects, so it's not like it's going to just seep into cracks and stay there. Doesn't the lower GI tract involve lots of moving laterally? Seems like you could get your Mercury stuck in a small intestine hammock
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Jul 20, 2018 13:02
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aphid_licker posted:Doesn't the lower GI tract involve lots of moving laterally? Seems like you could get your Mercury stuck in a small intestine hammock One assumes peristalsis plus the movement of your body would take care of that.
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Jul 20, 2018 14:28
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:Mercury has a really high surface tension and doesn't "wet" most objects, so it's not like it's going to just seep into cracks and stay there. ... and in some other places where mercury wasn't available or was hilariously expensive, there used to be "pooping pills" which were more or less iron/bronze/other metal pellets people swallowed to act as an battering ram to cut thru intestinal blockages. After they came out, they were washed and stored away for the next case. Sometimes they were even ornamental and given as an inheritance.
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Jul 20, 2018 16:36
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VanSandman posted:Pooping is one of those things where, if it stops, you are about to loving die. There's a sweet thread in the goon doctor about health care stories. Lots of lack of poop.
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Jul 20, 2018 16:50
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The_White_Crane posted:One assumes peristalsis plus the movement of your body would take care of that. Peristalsis is strong enough that if you get a long enough fibre stuck inside you (or more typically your cat) your intestines will pull themselves out of your mouth, I don't think they're gonna have issues with a couple pounds of mercury.
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Jul 20, 2018 18:14
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Mustached Demon posted:There's a sweet thread in the goon doctor about health care stories. Lots of lack of poop. Either due to illness or people stuffing things up there with non flared bases.
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Jul 20, 2018 18:47
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Zil posted:Either due to illness or people stuffing things up there with non flared bases. And just keep acids away from your butt altogether.
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Jul 20, 2018 19:56
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