Lowe's articles have the delightful quality of bringing in people who don't understand the chemistry, and making them feel like they're part of something.
I never got into o-chem, and I certainly don't know anything about excited groups that want to blow off some steam and relax. But I can read Lowe's posts and feel like I'm in on the joke, and that's pretty rewarding in and of itself.
Or one of the numerous chemistry sets available- preferably something with a lot of chemicals that are unsafe. I personally almost killed myself mixing things when I was an adolescent.
If kids aren't interested in chemistry, it's that the teacher/cirriculum/resources available to the students is just piss poor... and unfortunately that is the norm. It's so easy to keep kids engaged if you continue doing experiments that astound.
> Explosions and threats of explosions bring many kids (middle/high school/freshmen) into it.
That was exactly why I was a chemistry nerd in high school and almost made a career out of it. Veered off in a different direction ultimately, but I still have what are to me fond memories (not so fond for everyone else around me subjected to "side effects" from the "experiments").
Still not clear how I avoided getting thrown in prison for all the crazy stuff. I'd be terrified if my kids attempted the same things.
Why do you add "long monologue" to your counter example? I don't think adding that modifier is a fair equivalence.
And I'll add a counter-point: rm -rf stories, things like piping /dev/random to speakers or the first time I accidentally did the equivalent of whiel(1) fork(); were an integral part of my early appreciation and enjoyment of computers. I'd argue they are fairly analogous to things blowing up in chemistry.
I always found piping other devices into the speakers a bit more interesting. Mostly noise, but just enough order to occasionally give interesting bits and pieces for your brain to catch on and try to parse.
There are people who will run rm -rf / on a box they're in the process of decommissioning it to see what stuff breaks when. Was a bit more fun in the good ol' days when more stuff was statically linked, but it's always bound to give a few surprises, like when running it on certain UEFI systems [1].
It sometimes depresses me a little that on the best ways I know to 'impress' (but only barely) friends of mine with my line of work is to do a 3D css transform/transition on whatever website they're currently looking at...
Thankfully there's been the occasional friend who got really excited at the thought of being able to use their browser's devtools to change things on the page through css or javascript.
This is what I show kids at the youth centre I work. A more innocent version obviously, like changing the text below the Google logo. They can figure out the potential nefarious uses themselves :p
This is for the ones that did't really came to learn but thought they could fire up a gaming website or facebook. Something to keep their attention instead of just saying "no, not allowed".
I really like that CSS transition/rotation trick, made a note of it, because it seems like a perfect step up after you've gotten the concept of being able to change text.
If anyone knows more of these simple "party tricks", please do post them here :-)
Another one I like, surprisingly popular among the younger kids (7-9 or thereabouts), are the two linux command line tools "sl" and "cowsay". Two characters to display an ASCII steam locomotive in that weird black hackers rectangle? Yeah! Those two are actually super-educational, because they're not installed by default on most systems so you quickly explain/show them you need to "sudo apt install" them first (tell them "apt is kind of like the app-store and sudo means you want to do it as the super-user", not entirely correct but good enough for now). The more clever kids actually remember this and next time they want to show another kid, they partially remember they needed to do something with that apt install line (and then ask me what it was again, exactly).
That's actually a good point. I should probably find some 'party tricks' to reel in all the people around me who are vaguely interested in or curious about programming.
Edit: because 'hey look how I just told react to re-render the ENTIRE page and it only updated that one div' impresses nobody.
That's also a great way of teaching people how websites/servers/browsers work. They're not looking at "the actual" webpage on their computer, just an instance of it that their browser downloaded onto their own computer.
They can mess with it all they want, they're not really changing anything.
Teaching people this is also a great lesson in "screenshots of a webpage do not prove anything was actually written". More than once, I've found myself explaining that yes, that picture looks very convincing and has the right background image, but it's still totally fake text.
A lot of my enthusiasm came from things like Core Wars and abusing C to crash my computer by overwriting code (hooray for old systems with no memory protection), so, yeah.
On which note, Lowe's piece on ClF3 is a great example of explosions producing lots of different experiences. It contains one of my all-time favorite sentences:
> 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.
That's what I was thinking, I don't quite know about "nito-groups" other then it has nitogen in it, but I get the feeling it blows up a lot, and that's good enough for me (to read about, not acually try this)
In chemical terms, nitro groups are -NO₂, which puts the nitrogen atom (which usually wants to attract electrons) at the oxidation state of +5. This makes nitro groups likely to be explosive, since nitrogen wants to return to a more neutral oxidation state (more specifically, elemental nitrogen, N₂ with its very stable triple bond), and will tend to do so exothermically and rapidly.
The desire to return N₂ quickly also makes N-N and N=N single and double bonds very likely to make compounds explosive, because those bonds are already well on their way in the quest for stability and will happily release lots of heat as they do so. See the hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane mentioned in the article--it's full of -N-NO₂ groups! And, naturally, it blows up.
As a grad student I somehow turned my experiment under the hood into an evacuation of the entire building, by reducing DMSO to DMS and discovering that Dimethyl Sulfide makes a great building emptier, especially since the hood system sucked (or rather did not). Two Nobel winners and a host of professors and students abandoned the building post haste and they made me go back in to look up whether it was dangerous or not (this was before mobile devices). Thankfully it stinks something fierce but is not fatal likes its cousin, Hydrogen Sulfide.
No wonder I decided programming was safer, code might blow up but it doesn't Blow Up. I also worked in the lab with a guy who worked with ether and smoked in the lab.
I have a fun memory of a lab in high school, must have been sophomore chem... Mix sodium bicarbonate and hydrochloric acid, it bubbles a lot, precipitate NaCl (table salt) out of the result. My lab partner and I finished that in about 3 minutes.
And then, fueled by boredom, we started hunting for other bases and acids to mix... for science! Everything is going well until the teacher races over, grabs the beaker and practically throws it under a hood. I can't remember the precise inputs, but the resulting gas was _noxious_.
Isn't that precisely what (scrubbed) hoods are for?
Failing that, isn't that why your log of on site chemicals is kept well away from them and where they might be used, and the use area preferably having a nice set of windows for external viewing?
At my first job we had a computer controlled wave tank we had built.
The guy I shared an office with said you had to be careful when programming it, as a divide by 0 error could have tried to send the paddle to its full travel in 0 seconds.
Which would have created a wave so strong it would have flooded the entire lab - and that was using water as working fluid we hade some experiments that used molten metal or Freon
If you've been enjoying Gergel, definitely give Ignition! a read, also a Lowe recommendation. It's a first-hand account of early rocket fuel research, and it is hair-raising like no chemistry I have ever heard of.
This is an absolutely wonderful series, one I find myself re-reading in their entirety every time a link is posted. I should set up a script to automatically book off an afternoon at work if I open one of the links at lunch.
If any of you would like to experience something like that article but at book length here's a link to a PDF of "IGNITION ! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants".
Oh yes, I can thoroughly recommend that book. The author's dry descriptions of things going horribly, horribly wrong are extremely amusing. I found the second half to be a lot more chemistry and a lot less accidents than the first half (which is definitely the more amusing one). It's long out of print, sadly, and used copies go for obscene amounts (there's one on Amazon for $2099, and no I didn't forget the decimal point), and it seems to be in the public domain anyway (at least the science madness library claims so), so you probably don't have to feel bad for just grabbing the pdf.
Here's a nice teaser quote from Chapter 3, "The Hunting of the Hypergol":
Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and
WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go
up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it—the acid valve is leaking!"
"Go ahead—fire anyway!" Paul ordered.
I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started back-
ing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet. Howard Streim
opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dogeating
grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed
the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a
brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber
went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later),
the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical
glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.
I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab,
to collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in
a huff. When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I
found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost,
some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had
rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled,
in our lab.
Most of the black and white book scans in the sciencemadness library use JBIG2 compression since it produces considerably smaller files. I keep thinking that the in-browser PDF handling of Chrome/Firefox will support that eventually but it seems to be low priority.
Lowe's writing is, as always, phenomenal, just the right mixture of hard facts and tongue-in-check humour.
The part about grinding the second compound down for X-ray though - I second his thoughts: in just what state of mind you have to be to even consider that? Did they have to draw straws?
My favorite bit of most of these articles his horrified read-through of the characterization. The list of drop tests and reaction descriptions that these lunatics are willing to try is always truly impressive.
> But I have to admit, I’d never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? Indeed, why not? This is a general principle that can be extended to many other similar situations. Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three? Instead of having two liters of pyridine poured down your trousers, why not three? And so on – it’s a liberating thought. It’s true that adding more oxygen-oxygen bonds to a compound will eventually liberate the tiles from your floor and your windows from their frames, but that comes with the territory.
To someone who didn't know, the idea of those two common "farm items" being mixed to produce an explosive material wouldn't be expected or thought about (unless your dad or relative you lived with was into "stump removal" or such and too cheap to purchase the real stuff).
> This is apparently the first time anyone’s done this “peroxate” solvate trick with any energetic material, and no doubt others in the field are slapping their heads while reading this paper – gently, though, so as not to set off the stuff next door.
Could anyone confirm for me my suspicion that the phrase repeat this paper (he said "if I had to repeat this paper") is standard jargon for a lab following the procedures described in a paper to replicate the results?
The author is from Arkansas (the South). Even though he has an advanced degree from a prestigious university and knows what "proper English" is, it seems he likes to play with Southern dialect.
The journal he's writing for ('A'AAS) is 'A'merican so native readers (even those outside of the South) will understand the slang.
It looks like 99% of his hundreds of blog articles have straightforward serious titles but a few have cutesy irreverent ones. A few more examples of Southern colloquialisms such as "gosh", "darn", and "dang":
The slang is also a flag for sarcasm/joking in this context (and many others). It's actually meant to come across as a bad idea stated by someone of questionable intelligence or at least wisdom.
To answer the original question: the article is explicitly humorous whike also using the correct language for the topic. It's meant to be "harder to read" as a way to add a layer of wordplay.
It also, for those familiar with the semiotics of American English dialects, subtly invokes the "Hold my beer - hey, y'all, watch this!" stereotype of rednecks.
"This here" is a drop-in replacement for "this", and is mainly used as an emphasis marker in the South and West. Adding more words that do not add to the meaning of the sentence makes it the same idea, but more of it.
Compare:
We have a communication failure.
What we've got here, is failure to c'mmunicate.
"Have" is the base word. "Have got" is the same as "have", but with more "havingness" somehow. "Have got here" is also "have", but with so much "havingness" that you might find yourself unable to get rid of whatever it is without a severe beating. And with "what <subj> have got here is", well, you're just going to get shot.
It's really part of a sort of a generalized redneck/rural argot, at this point. I'm from the farthest northern stretch of the Appalachians, a stone's throw from Canada, and quite often flummox people when I tell them I'm not from West Virginia or Kentucky.
That's because it didn't originate on this side of the pond. You can also find it in the West Country dialect(s); think Hagrid, Samwise Gamgee or Robert Newton's prototypical movie pirate captains (Long John Silver and Blackbeard). Poke around England a little more, and you'll probably find it elsewhere as well. Standard English really is a much smaller and lesser-used dialect than most literate people think it is.
I don't think it's technically proper English. It's just a way that some people in some parts of the US sometimes speak. At least, that's what I, as a Canadian, have noticed during a lifetime of watching US TV shows. Now that I think about it, maybe it's a TV-only thing? I can't say I've ever observed a real live American say it.
To read it more easily, try removing the word 'here'.
It's a feature of the Southern and Texan dialects, and appears occasionally in AAVE, mostly among older speakers. As a Southron, it's fairly natural for me to say it, but since that dialect marks low status most places outside its home region, I generally code-switch into acrolect, so you wouldn't hear me say it. The same is true for most other Southrons I've known outside the South - especially those of us who can't or won't shake the accent, and have social or professional reason to avoid being perceived as a dumb redneck. (Sometimes that happens anyway, but one doesn't help oneself by making it more likely.)
I think you can make it into an oddly useful personality trait, where you can say things that get remembered. Instead of "If we can't get this software to handle the load we'll have to rewrite it," you get to say, "Wall, shucks, if we can't git this mule to cross the river, we gon' have to find us another mule."
"this here" is redundant; "This" being something near the speaker, "here" being near the speaker. This type of redundancy is often found in rural and vernacular speech in the US. A similar redundant construct is "I don't got no..." meaning "I do not have any...", but one that is entirely more grotesque to my ear.
Not so much for emphasis as because of different rules for spatial deixis. Even Standard English used to have more than just this and that; we also had yon to indicate things that were farther away than that, and there are finer distinctions in several dialects of English (and in many languages other than English).
what some are passing over is, while its a form of speech in parts of America, it along with the general tone of his article, are all parts of the humor wrapped around a very serious subject.
I take it as redneck humor, as in famous last words of "Hey ya'll, watch this"
I envy Shreeve’s and Matzger's groups. Not that I want to do what they're doing, but man I would love waking up to an article written about me like this. I can guarantee that their teams have a getting a huge kick out of this.
Cave Cohnson puts it nicely, but to add some more detail, I think a lot of that research was motivated by rocket science (the actual one).
Suppose you want to increase the vertical speed of your rocket. If you just put in bigger engines and a larger fuel tank, you wouldn't have won anything: Sure the engines will provide more force, but you also increased the mass that the force has to move.
What you actually want is a more efficient fuel that gives you more power for the (approximately) same mass - you quite literally want more bang for your buck.
Because the required forces and mass constraints are so extreme, the number of possible fuels that are efficient enough for your purposes are quite limited - they are commonly known as "explosives".
As rockets with more cargo space are needed, so grows the need for even more efficient fuels - driving the development of compounds that are even more hellishly explosive than their predecessors.
Many of Lowe's 'Things I Won't Work With' entries (or the explosive ones at least) show up in Ignition! as rocket fuel attempts. Even the ones that are utterly idiotic like ClF3, which will happily light asbestos on fire.
A lot of the things people make turn out to be useless, but the dream of a quality rocket fuel (high energy, dense, hard to trigger) keeps things going.
From what I can tell there are all sorts of ways to produce highly energetic, unstable compounds, which are mostly curiosities. But if you can find a highly energetic stable compound it has all sorts of industrial and scientific uses.
I have to agree with the previous commenter, but in a more serious fashion. It's not just about the fun. A lot of modern technology is possible not because someone did some directed research but because someone thought about if something could be done and how to achieve it. Sometimes it may even take generations before a small piece of knowledge suddenly finds an application, and then it can still lead to breakthroughs.
Certainly not all, but some people need to be able to do things without apparent meaning, including artists and (theoretical) scientists.
One simple example is the invention of styrofoam, which was accidentally created [1] when the inventor was looking to produce a flexible electrical insulator.
"This work was supported by the Army Research Office (ARO) in the form of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) (grant number: W911NF-13-1-0387)" -- from the acknowledgements of the paper.
Thanks, found it. Actually, I like the possibilities of web fonts quite much, but there are always people who just do it badly. Also, icon fonts are great to get somewhere quickly, even though not really best practice.
I never got into o-chem, and I certainly don't know anything about excited groups that want to blow off some steam and relax. But I can read Lowe's posts and feel like I'm in on the joke, and that's pretty rewarding in and of itself.