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-Fish- posted:I'm honestly anticipating cable boxes being phased out in place of boxes which basically just operate the TV app, plus some sort of solid state storage for DVR function, or built in streaming services. Why would you use solid state storage for that? Hard drives will be obsolete some day, but DVRs might well be one of the last things to use them. They’re cheap and high in capacity, and their main disadvantages, non‐sequential access speed, energy consumption, and intolerance to vibration are non‐issues in this application. Some cable companies already offer DVR‐esque functionality with the storage on their end, though, and I can only imagine this becoming more popular. Everyone loves the cloud, and in this case it makes a lot of sense to only store each piece of programming once (well, several times for performance reasons, but it’s still better than every Tom, Dick, and Harry having to have their own copy).
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 02:07 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:17 |
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OttoVonBismarck posted:A film shot in 1919 can still be played back with modern equipment, while you might struggle to get digital software from just a few decades back to work at all. I also think that digitalization will on average improve any film's lifespan thanks to video websites and file sharing. There'll always be a copy around. Famous last words perhaps, but more likely than having one copy rotting in some archive.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 02:08 |
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Platystemon posted:Why would you use solid state storage for that? Hard drives will be obsolete some day, but DVRs might well be one of the last things to use them. They’re cheap and high in capacity, and their main disadvantages, non‐sequential access speed, energy consumption, and intolerance to vibration are non‐issues in this application. That's fair. I just stated Solid State since it's basically the hot thing out right now.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 02:11 |
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Monkey Fracas posted:
I like how it states that it causes an increased dopey feeling, because it acknowledges that everybody feels dopey all the time.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 02:21 |
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Mr. Squishy posted:I like how it states that it causes an increased dopey feeling, because it acknowledges that everybody feels dopey all the time. Also not coming from a place where hay is grown I have no idea what musty hay smells like, so I guess I'm hosed in case of a phosgene gas attack.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 02:22 |
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Pilsner posted:Thanks for the informative post, but I can assure you that data, which video and audio is, can always be parsed and read, even 1000 years from now, given that it's not corrupted of course. In this age of information spreading across the world like wildfire and being stored on thousands of servers, it's extremely unlikely that all knowledge about a video and audio encoding format will be lost forever, rendering the data unusable. Even if it did, people can work hard to code a program that can decipher an encoding format. Of course we should be able to reverse engineer all this stuff, but it is not really an optimal position to put yourself in. Archives are supposed to guarantee the survival of their collections - archival standards are high. Some rather new video formats are particularly fleeting in nature and are already starting to degrade/disappear. Archives are working against the clock here and will have to find safe (and hopefully proven) preservation standards to utilize. It's really quite complicated, but digital obsolescence is indeed a very real problem for archives. It all comes down to money, or, more often than not, the lack thereof. Preservation is non-commercial and non-profit in 99% of the time, while at the same time being both time consuming and costly. I'm sorry for being a bit general here, but the issue of the transition from analogue to digital is basically a whole field of its own in archiving. A relatively recent paper discussing some of the key issues in an introductory manner. The bit about data migration covers some interesting stuff. Archiving is basically a field dedicated to preserving originals, and we need to ask ourselves what is lost whenever we migrate data to new formats. (I only skimmed this one, but it was the first one I could find. I could probably dig up some better ones tomorrow if it's of any interest ) http://www.amiatechreview.org/V12-05/papers/tadic.pdf An example of digital obsolescence and the work needed to save the material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project An older (and probably somewhat dated) paper, touching on a lot of the same issues as Tadic (only skimmed this one as well): http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Papers/amia-longevity.html Finally, here's a "manifesto" by FIAF, highlighting some of the issues. While I personally find FIAF to be a bunch of backwards, film snob/elitist dinosaurs, they did touch on some key issues here.: http://www.fiafnet.org/uk/members/Manifestofulltext.html EDIT: added some stuff. EDIT2: added some more stuff. Truck Stop Daddy has a new favorite as of 03:09 on Jan 11, 2014 |
# ? Jan 11, 2014 02:58 |
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Phanatic posted:One of the early ways of doing color photography used black and white film, but color filters. Others did it before him, but a Russian named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky is probably the most famous practitioner.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 06:23 |
-Fish- posted:about cable When we first got transitioned to digital cable here, we couldn't get the new digital box to work at all, mystifying even Comcast to the point that they sent out a technician. It wasn't until I happened to say something along the lines of "Would the old filter on the line be messing things up?" that they went out to check, and sure enough, that was the problem. We only had limited basic, so until the digital conversion, the filter on the line had been all that was necessary.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 08:57 |
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gvibes posted:Maybe this was common knowledge, but I didn't realize this until recently - color digital still photography still uses black and white sensors, overlaid with a multi-color filter - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter. Scientific photography often does something even closer. We have a couple of microscopes at work that we use for fluorescent antibody images (immunofluorescence) - basically, you decide what different things you want to see in the image (specific proteins and receptors, usually), buy antibodies that will stick to those, tag the antibodies with different fluorescent dyes, and pour the entire lot over your sample. After washing the excess off, put it in the microscope and blast it with UV. On the microscope is a magazine of narrowband filters that will each only pass the color matching a single dye, and a (2mpix, in our case) b/w camera. Play with the settings in the controlling computer for a while, press the button, wait for things to go *chunk-click* a few times, and you get a stack of b/w images that can be merged in false color. Here's a random image of a few cells, nabbed from Pierce antibodies after a trip to GIS: (Sadly, the only images we have in papers are kind of uninteresting, and I don't have any of the posters at hand.) The mars rovers and Hubble do something similar: High-res b/w camera, filters, and multiple exposures. It's not ideal for fast-moving subjects, but it gets you a higher resolution, and the option for studying emissions in specific wavelengths. While the mars rovers carries a red filter, most of the images taken are actually IR/G/B. The IR channel is apparently more interesting, and it's good enough for color photos (of mars, at least). Computer viking has a new favorite as of 09:47 on Jan 11, 2014 |
# ? Jan 11, 2014 09:36 |
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OttoVonBismarck posted:An example of digital obsolescence and the work needed to save the material:
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 14:58 |
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Captain Novolin posted:My favourite thing about fire grenades (because I will never need to use them) is that Carbon Tetrachloride decomposes into Phosgene when exposed to air at high temperatures. So when the contents of your fire grenade heat up after you, say, throw them at a fire, the room starts smelling like musty hay or freshly cut grass. Well, even modern halon-discharge fire suppression systems can produce hydrogen fluoride and hydrogen bromide if the fire's hot enough, and if those get into your lungs they're going to dissolve into the water there to form hydrobromic acid, which is a stronger acid than hydrochloric, and hydrofluoric acid, which is just terrifying. You accept a little toxic chemical release when you're trying to stop a building from burning down. CCl4's problem is that it's toxic even when it's just sitting around or getting spilled accidentally, if you're hanging out in a room that's on fire there's going to be all sorts of nasty poo poo in the air you don't want to breathe anyway.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 16:17 |
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Lost works are hardly an artefact of the digital age. Yeah, we’ll lose a lot stuff, but so did the ancients. It’s not as if many manuscripts were preserved, either. It’s all copies. At least copying is easy in the information era—too easy, if you ask the entertainment industry. BBC’s Domesday Project is a particularly bad example, and it’s their own fault. The BBC lost quite a lot of early television episodes, too, all on analogue tape. Leonardo and Van Gogh chose unstable pigments that caused their works to deteriorate, but in their cases we cared enough to spend millions restoring them. No one is willing to spend a fraction of that preserving the BBC’s project, and rightly so. The text of the Archimedes Palimpsest was recovered with multispectral imaging. Perhaps historians of the future will use magnetic force microscopes to recover the audio of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” from an overwritten hard disk. Maybe they’ll find a Rosetta Stone analogue in the form of the same song in MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis. More than likely, though, there will be many copies, and if the software is lost, they can write a new decoder from the original specifications.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 16:20 |
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Platystemon posted:Lost works are hardly an artefact of the digital age. Of course they're not, but it's also not something you avoid just by saying "Digitize it!" quote:Yeah, we’ll lose a lot stuff, but so did the ancients. Oh, well, that's okay then. Huh? The point of archiving is so that you *don't* lose stuff. So you say "It's easy, just go digital!" and when confronted with the problems that arise from it being just...not that easy, your response is "Yeah, we'll lose a lot of stuff." Not losing stuff is the point. quote:BBC’s Domesday Project is a particularly bad example, and it’s their own fault. BBC's Domesday Project is a perfect example. *Yes*, it's their own fault. That's why it's a good example: their approach was cursory and not fully-considered and they ignored legitimate criticisms of their techniques because they thought it was an easy solution. quote:The text of the Archimedes Palimpsest was recovered with multispectral imaging. In *2007*. The original data was destroyed in the 1200s by the Christians. It wasn't until another 400 years had passed that Newton and Leibniz figured out ways to do the stuff Archimedes was doing in the Method. What would the development of human society have looked like if, instead of being consigned to obscurity, we'd developed *calculus* 400 years earlier than we did? What if Archimedes went on to develop it but the work was lost? The point is to archive stuff in such a fashion that it doesn't take heroic efforts and brand-new technologies and a whole lot of money to recover, so that you *don't* have staggeringly important discoveries and valuable data lost to mankind for centuries.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 16:56 |
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Phanatic posted:Well, even modern halon-discharge fire suppression systems Nowadays fire suppression systems use alternative extinguishing agents, usually Argonite, Inergen or Novec-1230 which are far less dangerous to health and environment. FM-200 (heptafluoropropane) is another Halon replacement which is popular in marine installations because it's a drop-in replacement for Halon, meaning you don't have to take the ship into dock to rebuild the suppression system, you just switch the gas bottles. While it's safe for the environment, at high temperatures it can decompose into hydrogen flouride (just like Halon) and carbon monoxide which means a room flooded with FM-200 needs to be properly vented before you can go back inside. Collateral Damage has a new favorite as of 17:48 on Jan 11, 2014 |
# ? Jan 11, 2014 17:45 |
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Collateral Damage posted:Nowadays fire suppression systems use alternative extinguishing agents, usually Argonite, Inergen or Novec-1230 which are far less dangerous to health and environment. Yeah, I remember working in the server room at my old job, it had 12 or 16 big Inergen bottles sitting the corner, big overpressure vents in the walls, big "N2ArCO2" warning signs on the doors. The really fun thing is that activation of the system would be loud as gently caress, and would probably startle most people into running full-speed straight for the door. At which point they would probably pass out due to lack of oxygen KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 19:39 on Jan 11, 2014 |
# ? Jan 11, 2014 19:34 |
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There's an inergen system in the server room - and there's one detail about it I've wondered about for a while. Outside the door, there's a yellow "break glass, push button" box marked simply "inergen". Is that the "oh poo poo the firewall is a wall of fire" button, or the "oh poo poo, there's people trapped in there and no fire, stop the gas dump" button?
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 19:43 |
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It activates the system. You can still breathe when it's active, is just a bit like being on a mountain.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 19:48 |
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You always have a delay between fire alarms going off and gas release, to give people time to evacuate. I've run live tests on our Novec setup at work, and the alarm is so loud and nauseating you can't stay in the room without hearing protection even if you wanted to. e: All gas suppressant systems are designed to leave the air in the room breathable. The human body is a lot less picky about the O2 concentration than an air-breathing fire is. (Although if there's another source of oxidizer it's a whole different story). Humans can survive on oxygen levels as low as 6% although you risk passing out under 10%. Most common materials don't burn in atmospheres with less than 15% O2. Collateral Damage has a new favorite as of 20:03 on Jan 11, 2014 |
# ? Jan 11, 2014 19:54 |
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KozmoNaut posted:It activates the system. You can still breathe when it's active, is just a bit like being on a mountain. Our FM200 system has a button that will delay the dump as long as the button is held. It's right by the door, presumably so you can wait to see that everyone is out
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 20:23 |
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also what triggers breathing/gasping reflex is an abundance of CO2, not a lack of Oxygen. So it would literally be like being high up on a mountain. (also the startling realization that you can potentially asphyxiate if you open enough bags of chips in a closed space.)
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 20:50 |
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Collateral Damage posted:Halon systems are pretty far from modern. In fact they probably deserve a post of their own in this thread. Halon fire suppression systems were banned in the US and europe in 1994, largely due to environmental issues. Halon variants are very powerful contributors to ozone depletion and global warming. In the US systems that were installed pre 1994 are allowed to stay in opertion for now. In Europe they were allowed to stay until the end of 2003.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 20:56 |
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Collateral Damage posted:an air-breathing fire This is a question so silly that it may sound facetious, but I assure you it isn't : is there a kind of fire that doesn't burn oxygen? I know nuclear things like the sun are technically "burning", but I personally don't equate them with fire in the traditional sense. Is that wrong? I've always been taught that, to snuff a fire, deprive it of oxygen, which is why the chems that burn underwater seem mystifying to me (always figured maybe it was because there is oxygen in water). So, do these things just not need good ol' O2 or what? Sorry if that's mind numbingly stupid, chemistry and physics are most certainly not my strong suit.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 20:59 |
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Never mind; forgot something extremely basic.
Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 22:16 on Jan 11, 2014 |
# ? Jan 11, 2014 21:00 |
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OttoVonBismarck posted:
So all the work I did when I was 10 is on it's way to being lost? How depressing.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 21:10 |
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DicktheCat posted:This is a question so silly that it may sound facetious, but I assure you it isn't : is there a kind of fire that doesn't burn oxygen? I know nuclear things like the sun are technically "burning", but I personally don't equate them with fire in the traditional sense. Is that wrong? Oxygen isn't the only oxidizing chemical. Something like Chlorine trifluoride can make just about anything burn, can't be extinguished and reacts violently with water. Some other things that burn under water are a mixture of fuel and oxidizer, like gunpowder.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 21:28 |
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DicktheCat posted:This is a question so silly that it may sound facetious, but I assure you it isn't : is there a kind of fire that doesn't burn oxygen? I know nuclear things like the sun are technically "burning", but I personally don't equate them with fire in the traditional sense. Is that wrong? Yes, there are fires that don’t involve oxygen. In chemistry terminology, oxidation isn’t something that only oxygen can do. Oxygen isn’t even the best oxidiser. Anything will burn in normal air will burn better in an atmosphere of pure oxygen and excellently in a fluorine atmosphere. Fluorine is like oxygen’s big brother. You don’t need an atmosphere at all to have “burning”, though. Some things contain their own oxidisers. Gunpowder, for instance. You could fire a gun on the Moon if you wanted because the reaction doesn’t require outside oxygen—it couldn’t, because then the reaction couldn’t happen fast enough. In gunpowder’s case, it happens to contain actual oxygen, but there are plenty of explosives that do not. Silver azide come to mind, it just comes apart into pure nitrogen gas and silver dust. The Sun, by the way, isn’t burning. It’s undergoing a nuclear reaction. Burning is just an analogy used in school.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 21:47 |
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Moly B. Denum posted:Oxygen isn't the only oxidizing chemical. Something like Chlorine trifluoride can make just about anything burn, can't be extinguished and reacts violently with water. Some other things that burn under water are a mixture of fuel and oxidizer, like gunpowder.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 21:50 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Oh, duh. Doesn't potassium do that too? Potassium is on the opposite side of the spectrum. It reacts with water because the oxygen from the water molecules breaks with the hydrogen and bonds with the potassium instead.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 21:56 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Oh, duh. Doesn't potassium do that too? Potassium (any of the alkali group, really) reacts so violently with water that it breaks the water molecules down into hydrogen and oxygen. It can't maintain a reaction by itself (say, in a vacuum) but its so reactive to everything else that it explodes unless contained in a very inert substance or a vacuum.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 21:57 |
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Platystemon posted:Silver azide come to mind, it just comes apart into pure nitrogen gas and silver dust. quote:[...] several sections of this blog category could just as accurately be called Things That Suddenly Want To Turn Back Into Elemental Nitrogen. And thermodynamically, there aren't many gently sloping paths down to nitrogen gas, unfortunately. And yeah, by air-breathing fire I meant a fire that relies on oxygen from the air, as opposed to all the other delightful kinds of fire you can get when chemists with a poor sense of self preservation get their hands in the toy box.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 22:07 |
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Man, I love that blog. When people think of dangerous chemicals, they think of simple acids and explosive compounds. But there are things out there that are orders of magnitude worse than that. Things that literally explode when you look at them wrong. Things will burn through every piece of "safety equipment" in a lab (including the concrete foundation of the building). Things that will kill you painfully if so much as a drop falls on your gloved hand.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 22:53 |
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In a fluorine-rich environment, you can even burn water.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 23:03 |
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Also, magnesium, once set alight, will burn in just about anything that isn't a noble gas. In oxygen: 2Mg(s) + O₂(g) → 2MgO(s) In water: Mg(s) + H₂O(aq) → MgO(s) + H₂(g) In carbon dioxide: 2Mg(s) + CO₂(g) -> 2MgO(s) + C(s) In nitrogen: 3Mg(s) + N₂(g) → Mg₃N₂ Burning magnesium will even pull the halogens off halon gas. The most effective way to stop a magnesium fire is with dry powders, like sodium chloride, sodium carbonate, and graphite.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 23:36 |
I forget if it was in Things I Won't Work With or Ignition! but someone developed a compound so sensitive it exploded if you shone a bright light on it.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 23:45 |
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Rigged Death Trap posted:also what triggers breathing/gasping reflex is an abundance of CO2, not a lack of Oxygen.
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# ? Jan 11, 2014 23:46 |
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Smiling Jack posted:I forget if it was in Things I Won't Work With or Ignition! but someone developed a compound so sensitive it exploded if you shone a bright light on it. http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/01/09/things_i_wont_work_with_azidoazide_azides_more_or_less.php On a related note, silver fulminate can't be stored in a pure form because it will detonate under its own weight.
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# ? Jan 12, 2014 00:11 |
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Collateral Damage posted:Which is why Inergen contains 8% carbon dioxide. If you're trapped in a room flooded with Inergen it's designed to make you breathe harder so you get more of the remaining oxygen. I didn't know that. Neat!
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# ? Jan 12, 2014 00:46 |
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Moly B. Denum posted:Oxygen isn't the only oxidizing chemical. Something like Chlorine trifluoride can make just about anything burn, can't be extinguished and reacts violently with water. Some other things that burn under water are a mixture of fuel and oxidizer, like gunpowder. Hah! This lovely Stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4l56AfUTnQ in order posted:'Plexiglas, a rubber glove, clean leather, not-so-clean leather, a gas mask, a piece of wood, and a wet glove' Also from The amazing blog: Crazy rear end Chemists (can't believe I wanted to be one) posted:There’s a report from the early 1950s (in this PDF) of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks. So yes. There are things which cannot exist in nature because their own existence causes them to violently cease existing as a whole. Humans have crazy levels of Hubris. [e]:VVVV Rail guns are of much superior utility. Not much way to get rid of heat in space unfortunately. Rigged Death Trap has a new favorite as of 01:13 on Jan 12, 2014 |
# ? Jan 12, 2014 01:05 |
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Platystemon posted:You don’t need an atmosphere at all to have “burning”, though. Some things contain their own oxidisers. Gunpowder, for instance. You could fire a gun on the Moon if you wanted because the reaction doesn’t require outside oxygen—it couldn’t, because then the reaction couldn’t happen fast enough. In gunpowder’s case, it happens to contain actual oxygen, but there are plenty of explosives that do not. Silver azide come to mind, it just comes apart into pure nitrogen gas and silver dust. drat! So you are saying that spaceships could fight each other by using muzzleloaded black powder cannons ?
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# ? Jan 12, 2014 01:06 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:17 |
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This has been a fun enough derail that I think it deserves its own thread. Let's take the talk of non-obsolete chemicals to Things that go FOOF in the night
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# ? Jan 12, 2014 01:31 |