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My Lovely Horse posted:This, for many reasons, is the best. quote:An hour later, my brother found him in front of a frying pan, with the stove on high. It contained a loaf of bread still in the bag. My brother called 911 after my dad asked him if he wanted any eggs.
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Jul 27, 2016 13:31
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Lincoln posted:I know the formula was changed to something that doesn't accumulate in the body near as much, but is it still dangerous? I go through a lot of ScotchGard on a pretty regular basis (we use it on a product we manufacture). Should I be using a respirator? Gloves? I'm in a room filled with ScotchGard fumes for a couple of hours about once a week. Ventilated room, but still. This random crazy person on the internet would at least wear gloves cause acetone and IPA will dry the poo poo out of skin, and maybe think about asking for a paper mask even though its ventilated just as a first line defense against overspray. Long term effects? Who knows, there isn't a lot of oversight on end products unless they conform to a specific category of chemicals. Its mostly handled through civil liability instead of regulation, which can be reactive instead of proactive.
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Jul 27, 2016 13:53
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A White Guy posted:Can't be that explosive. Wouldn't the worst be that the bottle would just spontaneously combust in his hand? Doesn't work like that, the crystals being crushed by the screw thread can absolutely detonate.
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Jul 27, 2016 14:13
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A White Guy posted:Can't be that explosive. Wouldn't the worst be that the bottle would just spontaneously combust in his hand? Oh gently caress yes it can be that explosive. Picric acid has an RE of 1.2 (TNT is 1.0 for comparison). When it dries it's ridiculously shock and friction sensitive and jostling the bottle can set it off easily.(C6H3N3O7, only three Nitrogens but they work really hard). It's an evil little bastard.
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Jul 27, 2016 15:54
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For reference, here's the chemical structure of TNT: And here's the structure of picric acid (also known as trinitrophenol, or TNP):  As you can see, they have quite a lot in common. They both explode really well once you set them off, for example. They're also both stable enough that you can fire them out of an artillery piece without them blowing up in the barrel. TNT has the advantage that it stays really stable, instead of turning into a shock-sensitive monster once it dries out or reacts with metal.
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Jul 27, 2016 17:09
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OH NOO NOO NOO
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Jul 27, 2016 18:33
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Isn't picric acid the reason that battleships would randomly explode while sinking?
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Jul 27, 2016 20:03
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The talk of lax safety standards in Colleges has reminded me of a thing from school that I'm really not sure how we were ever allowed to do. So in yr12 at my (very posh) school we got to pick "options", which were four periods a week we filled with effectively minor-interest classes designed to let people dip their toes into things (some pretty academic like trying out a language not on the standard syllabus, some more nebulous and fun). For the ultra-geeks interested in doing a science degree, one of the things you could pick for this, filling the double slot of these on one weekday, was chemistry research. For reasons I've never even been entirely clear on, in addition to the teaching staff the school had on its payroll a tired chemistry professor, whom they provided with a lab, equipment and supplies and let him get on with doing whatever the hell he wanted. He helped out with internal exam setting/marking and more challenging practicals, but I'm assuming his overall presence might have been due to some weird rider in an endowment to the school in the past or whatever. The important thing is that for 2 hours a week he got four willing minions to assist in his research. Me and my work partner got a fairly pedestrian thing involving measuring permitivities over the course of a reaction with nothing more esoteric than heavy-oxygen water. The other group, however, were testing out mechanisms for synthesising ionic liquids. Methods that I can only assume from the results were sometimes relatively untested methods, with insufficient safety training. At various points during our six month tenure the following happened:
I do not think this selection of things should have passed with as little comment as it did.
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Jul 27, 2016 23:19
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wdarkk posted:Isn't picric acid the reason that battleships would randomly explode while sinking? Assuming you mean battlecruisers just randomly detonating from a hit, e.g. "There's something wrong with our bloody ships today", no. The British battlecruisers blowing up at Jutland was because of poor ammo-handling practices -- the powder elevators had blast doors on both ends, but the Brits in WWI were pretty fond of leaving them open so they could load the guns faster, so a penetrating hit to a turret would set off the powder bags that were in the process of being loaded, and then because they'd left the elevator doors open, would flash to the magazine and, well, earth-shattering kaboom. As opposed to, say, USS Arizona, which took a 2000-pound bomb to the relatively unarmored deck that penetrated into the magazine, same result, or Bismarck getting a lucky magazine-penetrating shot on the lightly-armored HMS Hood. The majority of big-gun battleships that sunk died slow and hard, eventually capsizing because they couldn't flood the other side fast enough to keep the ship level with one side taking shots at the waterline. The ones that blew up took hits directly to the magazines (the ones that blew up while sinking generally had raging fires elsewhere that spread to the magazines), and at that point it doesn't much matter what filler you're using in your shells, it's the propellant burning in the enclosed armored space that fucks you, acting as a giant pipe bomb. And also setting off the HE in the stored shells, but there's not much boom in an AP shell, something like 75 pounds TNT in a 2700-pound shell. Compare the "jack in the box effect" of Russian tanks. Same principle -- ammo stored in the hull, penetrating hit sets off the propellant charges, it blows the turret off..
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Jul 28, 2016 02:24
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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I believe he means stuff like the Barham and possibly Kongo blowing up as they sank.
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Jul 28, 2016 02:56
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xthetenth posted:I believe he means stuff like the Barham and possibly Kongo blowing up as they sank. Yeah, I was specifically thinking of the Kirishima which did explode after sinking with the involvement of picric acid.
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Jul 28, 2016 03:16
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shelley posted:AFAIK, one dumb dude in a phenazepam thread posted something like this: Yeah, the story I heard originated from outside the forums, from people who witnessed the incident. The guy only barely survived because somebody at that party knew what the stuff was and preemptively called 911 when he eyedropped it in (after repeated warnings). Survival was not the better outcome, though, as he never really recovered. Last anyone heard, he was committed after detox because he attacked literally any source of sound he perceived.
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Jul 28, 2016 17:59
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Phy posted:OH NOO NOO NOO That genuinely made me giggle, thanks 
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Jul 28, 2016 18:59
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wdarkk posted:Yeah, I was specifically thinking of the Kirishima which did explode after sinking with the involvement of picric acid. In addition to some whoopses with their liquid-oxygen-fueled torpedoes, the Japanese had what is to my mind the most entertaining sinking ever, courtesy of the IJN's typically-awful damage control practices. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the carrier Taiho comes under attack by a US submarine, which fires 6 torpedoes at her. One of her pilots *kamikazes into one of the torpedoes* to protect his ship, but she's still hit by one torpedo which jams her forward elevator between the hangar deck and the flight deck, and breaks open some of her aviation fuel tankage. The flooding puts her down a the bow by a bit, so the leaking gasoline starts pouring into the forward elevator pit, where it floats on the seawater that's also pouring in. There's no fire, so they figure, okay, let's just plank over the elevator well with mess-hall tables so nobody falls in and get back to doing aircraft carrier things. Meanwhile the gasoline starts evaporating. They have a foam fire suppression system in the hangar, but don't think to use it. They attempt to pump out the elevator well, but the pumps aren't working. The vapors building up are starting to bother the crew. On carrier with an unarmored flight deck, like most IJN carriers and American carriers, the hangar deck would could be opened up and ventilated, but the Taiho had an armored deck so the structure surrounding the hangar deck needed to be strong enough to support it so that wasn't an option. They even tried breaking out all the porthole glass, but nope, they were still sucking on fumes. So eventually the ship's *chief damage control officer* ordered that all hatches on the ship be opened and the ship's ventilation system switched to full, in order to blow out the fumes. This turned out not to be the best idea, because now instead of just the hangar deck being full of gasoline fumes, so were all the other rooms, like the galley and the engine room and all the living spaces, etc. Yes, Virginia, that does mean they turned the entire ship into a giant floating fuel-air bomb. And yes, the predictable happened and the ship *blew the gently caress up*, the entire flight deck heaved up and the sides of the ship blew out.
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Jul 28, 2016 20:07
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pretty much all of that is comedy of the highest order, but i want to take a moment to salute that fine pilot who truly went above and beyond. godspeed o7
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Jul 28, 2016 20:18
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Two Finger posted:pretty much all of that is comedy of the highest order, but i want to take a moment to salute that fine pilot who truly went above and beyond. godspeed o7 Seriously, that is badass.
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Jul 28, 2016 20:40
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Phanatic posted:the Japanese had what is to my mind the most entertaining sinking ever, I dunno, U-1206, the u-boat sunk by somebody who didn't know how to flush the toilet, was pretty hilarious. This was pre-EPA, and also pre-nonessential tankage on German submarines, so to flush the loo while submerged (hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go,) you had to turn a series of valves in just the right order to seal off the pot, let in some water to flush with, then pump the contents overboard. Sort of like the Space Shuttle toilet in complexity, but in the reverse situation pressure-wise. Well, it was bound to happen, eventually somebody worked the valves in the wrong order and the water got into the people tube. Hey, it could happen to anybody. Worst-case, you figure it out and shut it off pretty fuckin' quick, and make whoever hosed it up mop up his shitwater, then either dump it in the bilge and pump it out, or store the mop bucket in his rack until time comes to surface. Which should be pretty soon, because submarines up until the '50s were more torpedo boats (btw, that's why even modern SSBNs -- the equivalent of a battleship or aircraft carrier and then some in cost/prestige -- are always "boat", never "ship") that could hold their breath and briefly hide underwater to stalk a target/escape afterward, than true submarines in the modern sense that prefer to be submerged and only come up occasionally to prevent the crew getting cabin fever. But this is ~*Fine Teutonic Engineering*~ we're talking about, the same people who design cars with cooling systems that have to be replaced every 50k miles and alternators under the intake manifold. Of course the most logical place for the shitter on a diesel-electric boat is right above the battery compartment. To even suggest one of the fine Übermenschen of the Kriegsmarine would ever gently caress it up is akin to treason! What brings it into the scope of this thread is the fun fact that seawater getting into lead-acid batteries produces copious amounts of our old friend chlorine gas. It's hotly debated on the internet as to whether it's some chemical reaction with the HCl in the battery juices or (more likely) just plain ol' electrolysis, but it's a been a known hazard since the first diesel submarines. So, in order to save his vessel (and crew) from rusting away from within, the captain made the right call and ordered the boat to the surface to ventilate it ... 15km from a major Scottish port, and right under a patrol of British bombers. That went about as well as you'd expect -- one sailor was killed in the bombing attack, and three more perished in the cruel North Sea after the boat was abandoned and scuttled before the 46 survivors were rescued/captured. To put a cap on the hilarity, it also had the ol' "he died less than a month before retirement" cliche -- U-1206 went down 24 days before their boss, Admiral Dönitz, took over the Chancellorship and surrendered. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 02:41 on Jul 29, 2016 |
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Jul 29, 2016 02:27
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Speaking of chlorine gas, someone decided to mix liquid chlorine and hydrochloric acid today at a hotel.
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Jul 29, 2016 02:43
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Phanatic posted:In addition to some whoopses with their liquid-oxygen-fueled torpedoes, the Japanese had what is to my mind the most entertaining sinking ever, courtesy of the IJN's typically-awful damage control practices. Did someone post about the torpedoes ITT? I had always wondered why Japanese torpedoes were so incredibly better than everyone elses' in early WW2, and just found out that it's because they used liquid O2 instead of compressed air. It meant running oxygen generators to arm torpedoes, so ships had to jettison their torpedoes when under attack because they'd catch fire and sink the ship if hit by shrapnel or bullets, and aircraft carriers were super-extra-explosive when launching torpedo planes. Sounds like a weapon that could change the course of a war at sea, for one side or the other. American torpedoes tended not to explode even when hitting a target, which is almost as bad. IIRC some Allied submarine commander finally got fed up and fired their torpedoes into a cliff then brought the duds home. It turned out that the detonators was too fragile and half the time they simply broke when they hit a target instead of triggering explosives. bonus wikipeia trivia: the first US air dropped homing torpedoes were slow and a submarine could simply outrun them if it stayed on the surface using its diesel engines instead of diving. Fortunately the war ended before anyone found out that little spoiler.
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Jul 31, 2016 20:55
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Shattered Sword has a tally of what all was in a Japanese Cruiser's load of torpedoes and it's an eye-watering amount of high explosive and oxygen.
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Jul 31, 2016 21:22
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Syd Midnight posted:It turned out that the detonators was too fragile and half the time they simply broke when they hit a target instead of triggering explosives. It was so much worse than that, there were multiple failures of design and testing that acted to conceal one another. The first problem is that they never bothered to test a complete torpedo, test shots used dummy concrete warheads that weighed less than the actual explosive, so the real things ran too deep for the magnetic detonator to sense the target. Okay, so sub captains set their torpedoes up to run on the surface. Now we find out the magnetic detonators are too sensitive and detonate too far away from the target. Okay, disable the magnetic detonators and rely on the contact fuses. Which turn out to be so massive and have so much inertia that an ideal hit leads to a bent-up fuse that doesn't detonate the warhead. The whole thing was a chain of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance generally resulting from the same government agency having responsibility for design and testing and manufacture. It was a total shitshow. More details can be found in the military history thread. Phanatic has a new favorite as of 21:30 on Jul 31, 2016 |
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Jul 31, 2016 21:27
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Syd Midnight posted:bonus wikipeia trivia: the first US air dropped homing torpedoes were slow and a submarine could simply outrun them if it stayed on the surface using its diesel engines instead of diving. Fortunately the war ended before anyone found out that little spoiler. On the other hand, staying surfaced and getting strafed wasn't an ideal option either.
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Jul 31, 2016 21:32
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Syd Midnight posted:Did someone post about the torpedoes ITT? I had always wondered why Japanese torpedoes were so incredibly better than everyone elses' in early WW2, and just found out that it's because they used liquid O2 instead of compressed air. What did the liquid O2 react with? I assume you can't just run it on that alone.
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Aug 1, 2016 00:06
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StandardVC10 posted:What did the liquid O2 react with? I assume you can't just run it on that alone. Wikipedia: quote:These torpedoes used an otherwise normal wet-heater engine burning a fuel such as methanol or ethanol. Since air is only 21% oxygen (and 78% nitrogen), pure oxygen provides five times as much oxidizer in the same tank volume, thereby increasing torpedo range and the absence of the inert nitrogen resulted in the emission of significantly less exhaust gas, comprising only carbon dioxide, which is significantly soluble in water, and water vapor, thus greatly reducing tell-tale bubble trails.
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Aug 1, 2016 00:12
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Phanatic posted:the most entertaining sinking ever "As the Japanese sailors attempted to man their three-inch deck gun, the O'Bannon's deck hands, not having side arms, grabbed potatoes from nearby storage bins and pelted the Japanese with them. Thinking the potatoes were hand grenades, the submarine's sailors were too occupied with throwing them away from the sub to fire. This gave the O'Bannon the opportunity to distance itself to fire its guns at the sub and damage the conning tower. Although the sub still managed to submerge, O'Bannon used depth charges to finally sink it."
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Aug 1, 2016 00:35
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Syd Midnight posted:Did someone post about the torpedoes ITT? I had always wondered why Japanese torpedoes were so incredibly better than everyone elses' in early WW2, and just found out that it's because they used liquid O2 instead of compressed air. To give you an idea of how bad an idea this was the USS White Plains, a escort carrier (designation: CVE, known by their crews as Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable), mortally wounded a Japanese cruiser with it sole 5" rear mounted gun by hitting the torpedoes with a shell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_cruiser_Ch%C5%8Dkai#Sunk_in_the_Battle_off_Samar Raskolnikov38 has a new favorite as of 17:35 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 17:33
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Gyro Zeppeli posted:Do you think the Germans that discovered hexadecanitrofullerene had an Oppenheimer "what have I done" moment? Is a 16-nitrogen soccer ball enough? There's still carbons, aren't there?
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Aug 1, 2016 18:11
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Delivery McGee posted:It's like a lifetime of smoking asbestos-filtered Kents, but from sniffing the fake butter flavor of your microwave popcorn! All the lung damage with none of the fun! It's mainly a factory workers' disease just like coal miners' lung, but there's at least one end user who got it, lol. Except it turns out those e-cig fluids also contain diacetyl, and those are straight up intended to be inhaled. Granted, there's even more of the stuff in most conventional cigarettes, but still.
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Aug 2, 2016 00:48
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This thread sounds like the prefect place to mention my recent learning lesson in the lab. I work in a LC-Mass Spec lab where we were having to set up for an elective demo for a metabolism symposium. I was to teach participants how to obtain spectra & other basics about mass spec. Recently having worked on a agal toxin, Domoic Acid, I decided to show them how with that compound. It had a cool story behind it - it is a bioaccumulating toxin that will gently caress with your brains glutamate receptors and possibly lead to death. Oh and it can also end up on your dinner table through fish, bivalves, and shellfish. So with the cool story in hand I decided to test out the stock solution of the compound we had before hand so I didn't look like a fool later when it didn't work. In order to do this we use a glass tight syringe to infuse into the instrument at a set rate. The MS is controlled via computer after the infusion line & motor has been properly squared away. While trying to set up a 250 ul syrngine full of 1 ug/ml domoic acid in 80% MeOH 0.1% Formic acid the syringe plunger decides it wants a change of jobs and drops out of the back of the syringe spraying the domoic acid infusion all over my right arm and face... I was very lucky that this toxin was 1) poorly absorbed through the skin 2) too little to do more than possibly wreck my kidneys 3) didn't get in my eyes. That POS syringe was retired because it was loosey-goosey and shouldn't give out at the slightest change in pressure. And lets just say I've taken a step back and though about my PPE & handling precautions when working with dangerous toxins in the future. Luckily the main part of my job has me doing more mundane work related to energy metabolism and quantification of lipids, proteins, and drugs.
onemanlan has a new favorite as of 13:53 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 13:49
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onemanlan posted:Formic acid the syringe plunger decides it wants a change of jobs and drops out of the back of the syringe spraying the domoic acid infusion all over my right arm and face... Do you look like Two Face now?
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Aug 3, 2016 14:19
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That's not enough Formic Acid to do any harm unless it gets into your eyes. Edit: And even then it's an irritant at best. It's not really a corrosive below 1% concentration. Kwyndig has a new favorite as of 14:30 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 14:27
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If you've ever unfortunately chewed on an ant, or several ants, the disgusting taste is formic acid  .
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Aug 4, 2016 02:44
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I was just recently directed to this thread, but wow that's a lot to read through. Anyways, my own story to tell isn't quite mine. Instead, a friend of mine (let's call him Matthew) likes to tell this on behalf of his parents. Both of Matthew's parents are schoolteachers of some sort, and as you'd expect have collected a lot of stories over the years. They're actually planning to write a book about such experiences when they retire, if they haven't done so already. (I first heard this perhaps five years ago, for context.) And in particular, Matthew's mother works teaching something that necessitates a storage room attached to her classroom. Perhaps biology, perhaps chemistry, perhaps something else, I forget. The previous user of the classroom and its attached storage room had some genial person who'd been willing to store things for others in that storage room. So long as the item in question could fit on a shelf and you hadn't pissed this person off, you could likely drop off said item without many questions. And when that previous user had left, most if not all of the relevant contents had remained in the room. So it was that Matthew's mother was rather surprised on her first day to find an oil-filled jar of white phosphorus in the storage room. Given that it was otherwise filled with oil, the jar wasn't at immediate risk of causing a massive hazard and potentially killing students or staff. But Matthew's mother was still understandably disturbed to find a war crime waiting to happen in her back room, or more generally on school grounds, and thus made some phone calls. Shortly thereafter some well-trained folks from the EPA came to dispose of the jar and its contents, letting everyone else get back to business. I'm sure that none of the staff forgot that particular incident.
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Aug 4, 2016 11:26
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White Phosphorus is only a war crime if you intentionally use it against people. Now, if you use it against the weapons they're holding, or if you try to, miss, and Accidentally hit them, that's a different story! 
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Aug 4, 2016 11:47
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Hremsfeld posted:White Phosphorus is only a war crime if you intentionally use it against people. No, the attacking weapons thing is pretty much bunk. Claiming you're marking the target is what the cool kids do.
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Aug 4, 2016 13:36
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Reminds me of cleaning out our equipment store at work. Our ancient computer graveyard is also the electronics hardware lab store room. So in addition to our junk, it's got lots of fun things like half-etched circuit boards. One day, we were having a clear-out and cracked open a cupboard that hadn't been opened in about ten years. At the back of a shelf was an old sealed jar. The contents looked a bit shiny, so we took it out. Fucker was heavy, and the contents sloshed against the side and went 'clunk.' We look at one another, and my coworker gets to make the call. "Hi, yeah, this is XXXX in the School of Engineering. We've just found some mercury." ... "No, a bit more than a couple of old thermometers." ... "About a pint." Cue the guys in hazmat suits turning up and whisking it away. Since we're a university in the UK and we have lots of interesting chemicals to dispose of, it turns out it's cheaper for us to get a license as a hazardous chemical disposal facility than it is to hire the appropriate certified transportation each time, so somewhere under one of the Chemistry buildings is a room full of Cool poo poo™. One day, I shall find it.
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Aug 4, 2016 14:57
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Mercury sometimes gets used by ye old timey chemists in Schlenk lines to keep air out of the reaction. You can probably find a beaker of mercury just chillin in some buried away cabinet in a lot of old inorganic labs.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:09
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More FOOFier, I don't think I've met someone born in the baby boom who has anything to do with chemistry that didn't explain with some combination of excitement, nostalgia, or horror that there was generally a jar full of mercury that was passed around to highschool chemistry students to go ooh liquid metal, with varying experiments meant to poke, prod, or manipulate it. The older ones generally following up with how its bullshit how controlled it is these days because its the fumes and organic compounds you need to monitor etc., which is technically correct in the least helpful way possible.
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Aug 4, 2016 20:44
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zedprime posted:More FOOFier, I don't think I've met someone born in the baby boom who has anything to do with chemistry that didn't explain with some combination of excitement, nostalgia, or horror that there was generally a jar full of mercury that was passed around to highschool chemistry students to go ooh liquid metal, with varying experiments meant to poke, prod, or manipulate it. Some of the denser ’90s kids played with mercury, too.
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Aug 5, 2016 05:46
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quote:Another youth was treated after smoking mercury-laced cigarettes, 
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