# My unusual collection



## diddi (May 26, 2012)

i thought i would chat about my collection of chemical elements. its a bit of a shameless ad as well because if anyone else collects elements, maybe they would like to network... anyway, back to the elements. i have been collecting for 20 years or so and only have about 15 to go apart from the ones that are virtually impossible to get unless you are the dean at Berkley University. its a quite accessible collection, that people with no scientific knowledge find quite intriguing.

there are metals that melt on a warm day, or form wierd crystaline shapes, others that are so dense, a tennis ball sized lump would weigh over 3.5kgs. then there are metals so light they float on oil, and others so reactive, they explode in air, or so soft they can be sliced up with a kitchen knife.

there are shiney grey crystals that turn into purple gas without melting, blood red liquids that fill their container with red gas without boiling...

its all very interesting (to me at least).


if you have a collection to brag about, why not have a go now?


----------



## VoG (May 27, 2012)

Well that is absolutely fascinating. Of course as a chemist I am interested in all elements but I never thought to collect them.

I think that iodine is my favorite - heat it and it sublimes into a purple gas.

For the transuranic elements I think that you would need your own reactor or resurrect Glenn Seaborg from the dead.

Again, absolutely interesting. In my work I look at trace elements in drinking water but we never try to isolate them.


----------



## Colin Legg (May 27, 2012)

I love this idea. Where do you keep them and which ones are you missing? Where an element has several allotropes, do you collect them too? Have you lost any prized ones due to contamination/chemical reactions?


----------



## diddi (May 27, 2012)

@VoG
i did B.Sc with Chem double major, so thats where i got the interest. iodine is great. i have some 3ml sample tubes with screw caps and if i see kids interested in the sciences i give them a crystal of iodine and they can drop it a cup of very hot water.  instant kid pleasing demonstration especially when it all recrystalises on the sides of the tube. give them a bit of Hg in another sample tube and send them away with a much better appreciation of Chem. it can even get adults sucked in. anything to wave the flag, so to speak.

i have a few grams of UO2(NO3)2, but thats my only actidide, apart from a sample of material collected from under a nuclear test site in the 50s which is like a glassy volcanic remnant. it contains various isotopes of transuranics but i have never had it assayed. i have a report of the typical analysis from the era, but it is only 'typical' and does not really represent my sample. plus it has had 60 years to decay. i guess it will just end up a piece of lead in another 200000 years lol.

so far as a favourite goes - thats a tough one. there are some wonderful crystaline structures that make some metals truly spectacular. the bulk of my lanthanides are 4N and prepared by vacuum deposition, producing bizzare lumps, and there is of course Bi which would have to produce the most impressive display of any element. i love the reaction i get when inviting people to pick up my flask of Hg. its a bottle about the size of a 2litre coke bottle, but it weighs about 35kg.

i did some water chemistry in the swimming pool industry a while back and used to test for trace Cu etc plus usual pH bucket chemistry, but never environmental water.

@colin
i am working on a periodic table shaped display at the moment, and trying to choose the materials from which to build it (any suggestions welcome - think outside the box). they are a bit of a challenge to display for a variety of reasons. some require storage under oil, for example and others are toxic. then there is the issue of value. a pellet of rhenium 10mm wide and 12mm high cost me nearly 500. but its 40x less abundant than gold.

funilly enough, some of the ones i am missing are not that rare, but i just havent been able to negotiate to buy them at what i consider to be a reasonable price or they are difficult to buy. i had all sorts of trouble buying thallium, for example (cant imagine why LOL).  rough list something like this (off the top of my head) B, P, Se, As, Sc, Rb, Cs, La, some of the platinum group i would like to get bigger samples as i only have a bit of wire or nothing at all.  there are others i know i will never get, like Tc or Fr and i have no aspirations of ever getting the actidides.

i have sort of started to collect allotropes, like diamond, and sulfur, but have also tried to get different structures like Bi and have a couple of naturally occuring elements like native Cu and Au.  Saw a great native Os sample recently, but was a few 0's short of the asking price.

so far as lost samples goes, the Group 1s are difficult to store and they look grungy even when stored under dried parrafin. my K is looking particularly aweful. i have never had a chemical reaction as i dont keep any gasses. there are only 2 with color anyway, and i can make Cl on demand, and wouldnt want to have F for obvious reasons.  i did have a funny experience many years ago with bromine. Br has the most amazing ability to escape from virtually any container with a lid, and my sample disappeared whilst i wasnt looking.  i have had to settle for a little ampule, but its better than nothing. many other metals go off in air, so i have to keep them in the supplied vac seals. but i am hoping to find some suitable storage or reagent bottles and enlist the services of a mate who has a TIG welder and free Argon for my use!

i am thinking to myself that i have written enough for 1 post.  hope others find my raving of interest


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 28, 2012)

I am not a chemist, but I worked for 2 PHD chemists for almost 10 years in a small company eons ago. Only about 5 of us when I first started there. They were the 2 chemists that were responsible for the oxygen regeneration system based on Zirconia and Platinum that was to separate CO2 into O2 and Carbon. It was to be used for the oxygen for the astronauts for the Mars space shot back in the 1960’s. Those two worked at Lockheed and were doing all the work so they decided to quit and start their own company and bid on the contract and actually got it instead of Lockheed. But then the space shot to Mars got cancelled. So they reversed the electrochemical process using Zirconia for generation oxygen, into using it to read oxygen concentrations in inert gases instead. I was just a wild 20 year old then that got intrigued by their analog circuits they were designing and pushing to the max to read these extremely accurate O2 readings for the early 1970’s. We finished its development into a production and sellable unit for medical and research uses. 40 years later they still sell that Oxygen Analyzer today except I am sure they digitized the circuits by now, but still the same Zirconia based sensor no doubt.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
Zirconia is a ceramic, but the only way we could cut the tubes was with a diamond saw. The tube was hollow and 1/2" wide yet took about half an hour to cut through with water running on the saw to keep the diamond blade from overheating. Working for PHD chemists was interesting to say the least. One of them was even wilder than me. Maybe it was all those chemicals?
<o></o>
In chemistry class in high school (way back then) we used to pass around the chemicals to look at and we used to take the mercury out of the bottle and roll the mercury around in the palms of our hands. Lots of fun. I still have most of my teeth too... I hear they don’t let you do that in school any more.
<o></o>


----------



## diddi (May 28, 2012)

no, schools in .au have banned all but the most innocuous of chemicals.  no mercury any more.  oh well.


----------



## Firefly2012 (May 28, 2012)

Diddi, you saying that about H&S in schools, reminds me when I was a kid and the Chemistry teacher dropping sodium, lithium and potassium in some water behind a glass screen.  That was fun!  They don't allow that here now


----------



## diddi (May 28, 2012)

no, a lot of its gone by the wayside. no volcanoes any more.

i was teaching in the 90s and already back then i was getting a wrist slapping for explosions and the like. but it encouraged kids to enjoy science, so it was worth it.

i used to deliberately demonstrate noxious experiments to annoy those in charge


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 28, 2012)

Yes! The same teacher that let us roll the mercury around in our hands and on our desks, put Potasium (think it was Potasium) in water, and it exploded sending a mushroom cloud to the ceiling. We all thought he messed up, but perhaps it was planned afterall. lol


----------



## VoG (May 28, 2012)

chuckchuckit said:


> Yes! The same teacher that let us roll the mercury around in our hands and on our desks, put Potasium (think it was Potasium) in water, and it exploded sending a mushroom cloud to the ceiling. We all thought he messed up, but perhaps it was planned afterall. lol



We had a student teacher who did that only with sodium which he mistook for phosphorus (he had poor eyesight). As the explosion loomed he yelled "Get Out". Nobody was hurt, fortunately.


----------



## T. Valko (May 28, 2012)

VoG said:


> We had a student teacher who did that only with sodium which he mistook for phosphorus (he had poor eyesight). As the explosion loomed he yelled "Get Out". Nobody was hurt, fortunately.


I liked to disolve pennies in HNO3.

I used to work in a quality control lab where we tested materials (aggregates) for oxides using xray fluorescence and gravimetic analysis.

This is where I got most of my experience with Excel!


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 28, 2012)

VoG said:


> We had a student teacher who did that only with sodium which he mistook for phosphorus (he had poor eyesight). As the explosion loomed he yelled "Get Out". Nobody was hurt, fortunately.


Those school chemistry labs can be more dangerous than one might think.

BTW since you work with trace minerals in water, do you add them as a suppliment to bottled water products?

Every day with breakfast we take Trace Mineral Drops called "Liquimins" by company "Trace Minerals Research". We do that because we figure there really isn't many minerals left in the food sources like there used to be, due to the soils have been depleted of such, and minerals are not in typical water sources here. At least that is the thought for our taking trace minerals every day.


----------



## diddi (May 28, 2012)

hooray for nitric acid!  students used to make thermosetting polymers and the dumb-ar** teachers would just dump 25 conical flasks full of grunge on the poor lab tech and she would spend days trying to clean them.  i was in her work area one time and saw this...

the solution: nitric acid and ethanol.

it just sits there doing nothing for 15 or so seconds and then reacts violently issuing forth  volumenous quantities of NO2 (fume hood) and voilla! the flask is de-grunged and nasel passages impared for life. very impressive for the lab tech who had undoubtedly wasted months of her life cleaning glassware the hard way over the years.


----------



## Atroxell (May 29, 2012)

Back in my younger days I worked in the photonics industry. it was a small company and there were a few of us that were proficient at various jobs in it. I did machine work, high-vaccuum pumping and various type of metal treatment in preparation for loading lamps.

As a result, I have been lucky enough to machine everything from steel and copper to titanium, molybdenum and tungsten. I was constantly trimming my eyebrows and moustache with burning clouds of hydrogen, but that's a different story for another time, perhaps. I also worked with most of the Noble gases and more mercury than I like to remember.

One day I was loading mercury into 200 watt lamps prior to pumping them out. Part of the process was to measure 12 landa (lambda? I am not sure--one was a very tiny amount of mercury) of mercury into a 1x3 mm glass tube, then gently blow it into a bubble just a short distance down the tube. I blew too hard, causing the mercury to jump across the bubble. When I released pressure, the mercury drop jumped right back across the bubble and down my throat.

I panicked. Jumped in my truck and drove to the Med Center to get my stomach pumped or whatever. The doctor asked how much I had swallowed and I told him. He told me not to worry, since I was working with triple distilled mercury. He claimed it was safe to drink up to a kilo of the stuff and that the salts of mercury were the bad stuff since it could be metabolized in one way or another. I made him put it in writing for my widow. He did. I'm still here.


----------



## Firefly2012 (May 29, 2012)

Atroxell said:


> Back in my younger days ...
> 
> .... I made him put it in writing for my widow. He did. I'm still here.


 

That story is going to lose most of its impact if you tell us your younger days were in 2010!!



Did it taste of anything?


----------



## Atroxell (May 29, 2012)

Hahaha! Sometimes I wish my younger days were in 2010. (Only sometimes, though.)

This happened back in the mid 1980s.

As for taste...well, there was a brief moment when I had a metallic, battery-like sensation whiz across my tongue toward the back of my mouth. It was gone as quick as I tasted it. That was what made me start loking for the mercury in the pod. And I never got a feeling of any kind of mass in my mouth. 

All I could imagine when I swallowed it was some sort of neurological catastrophe was minutes away. It was a very panicky hour for me. And the only time in my life when I did not have to wait to see the doctor. Medical staff move quickly when you walk in and say, "I just swallowed some mercury. What needs to be done?"

And if my memory serves me correctly, a "landa" is 1/1,000,000 of a liter. So 12 of them would be a very small amount. Not that I feel there is a safe amount--I worked from that point on with a very careful respect for all of the materials I handled.


----------



## Atroxell (May 29, 2012)

You know, I never really thought about how much a "landa" was until now. I just knew what amount I needed for each lamp. Depending on the application and rating our lamps would use anywhere from 3 to 75 landa.

Looking back I realize that a landa could not be millionth of a liter. That would be extremely tiny. Too small to see or work with.

When filling a 1 x 3 mm piece of tubing and having it all congregate in a single clump, 12 landa of mercury would be around 6-8 mm in length. the tubing would vary a bit in diameter, so it was never precise. But I sense that millionths would still be nearly invisible.

Anyone familiar with this measurement reference?


----------



## Cindy Ellis (May 29, 2012)

One one-thousandth of a liter is a milliliter, and one-one-thousandth of that is a microliter (1 millionth of a liter).  I used to regularly pipette between 4 and 10 microliters for assays.  With volumes that size, the interior diameter of the pipette tip or capillary tube has a big impact on the height of the column of liquid.  With a "typical" capillary tube (I no longer remember the i.d.), 10 microliters resulted in a column that was around 1 cm high, if I recall correctly.  I haven't heard lambda used in reference to volume, though.  When talking about wavelengths of light, a lambda is equal to a micron, which is 1 one-millionth of a meter.  Maybe the term has also been used for volumes.


----------



## diddi (May 29, 2012)

1 lamda = 1 microlitre

not sure of the origin. maybe like other non SI units like the angstrom that is perculiar to a particular industry or branch of scientific persuit?

organo-mercury compounds are particularly toxic.  the mercury atoms displace the sodium and potassium atoms that support memory and neuron communication in the brain which causes 'short circuits' so to speak. typical early indications of exposure include tremors, and cognitive impairment.  the felt hat industry in the early days used mercury compounds in the manufacture of the felt, hence the term "Mad as a Hatter"

i heard a bizzare anecdote that if you suspend a duck by its bill, you can pour mercury straight through and out the other end without causing any harm to the duck...
i cant say ive test the theorem


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 29, 2012)

Wow, this is starting to sound like my rolling around mercury in the palms of my hands was not so bad, since others here were swallowing it. I guess one could call that a "heavy meal" - lol.

Guess I can't say the reason my hair is falling out now is due to my playing with mercury during my "younger days".

Hey BTW - here is a mercury riddle: Does anyone know how the term "Mad Hatter" came about? (No fair using Wikipedia, but it does help).


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 29, 2012)

Ooops - I'm too slow on that. diddi just posted that before I looked.

...beware of fur hats...


----------



## diddi (May 30, 2012)

i have had a fascination with mercury since childhood and been collecting it ever since. i store it carefully and havent "played" with it for 20+ years.

in recent times i have had 2 odd experiences with 'alternative medicine'. one involved holding an electrode in one hand and having another pressed against my toe, and the other... wel it was odd, where the practicioner held my hand and could detect changes in my energy whatevers (some sort of quackery, that somebody else paid for on my behalf)

but the upshot was, that they both detected mercury poisoning, without any prior knowledge. it was quite unnerving to a sceptic.


@chuckchuckit
being too slow might be a sign of mercury abuse in childhood


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 30, 2012)

Lol – I still think that might be why my hair is falling out... It seems to be holding it’s own past few years though.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
Of the two PHD Chemists that owned the company I worked for back in the 1970’s one was an MIT graduate, youngest PHD graduate from MIT up to that point anyway. I wouldn’t say he was a mad hatter but quite interesting. I worked closely with him for years before he left the company. Even though he was a chemist, I learned a lot from him about analog circuits etc as they were just finishing up the final circuit designs then on the Oxygen Analyzer we made. He didn’t want to be responsible anymore for circuit designing or any production at all, and one day just turned the whole thing over to me so he could do other development things. But I really liked the circuits and getting it all production ready, QC etc. We built it all there, circuit boards too. We did a fair amount of modifying sometimes for different University customers and research facilities. Think we had over 10 units we sold just to SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) alone. Had to do with their laser glass containment sections filled with argon gas if I remember right, that any oxygen leak at all would cause oxidation of the glass or something like that. Our unit would find the smallest of oxygen leaks right away. Was all fascinating to me and I liked the QC and Production responsibilities. One of our customers was putting tarantulas on treadmills and measuring how much oxygen they used.
<o></o>
We never got bigger than around 15 employees, so our electronics assembly area actually looked more like a chemistry lab as they were always working on new potential products and testing things in the production area. I did the circuit bread boarding and we even made some of our own 2 sided crude PC boards there for a while (acid etched them etc). They would bring in these other Chemists, Scientists and Physics friends etc from various areas of expertise. They often were from Stanford, SLAC, Lockheed etc as they would talk about potential products and actual do experiments and basic circuit designs for potential devices. That company in Sunnyvale was literally right in the middle of the start of the electronics boom of silicon valley. A lot of them rubbed shoulders back then as the “valley” really wasn’t that spread out then in the early 1970’s. It was a small world then. I didn’t even have a College degree so it was a whole new thing to me that was a lot of fun at times. I really liked talking with those people as I liked how they would think. Some were very inquisitive and it perhaps was like exploring to them as they did different experiments and designs there in that lab/assembly room.
<o></o>


----------



## PaddyD (May 30, 2012)

"Those school chemistry labs can be more dangerous than one might think."

About the only thing I remember fondly about my organic chemistry A-level was the approach taken to waste disposal. 

As it was obviously a bad idea just to tip the stuff down the sink we collected the day's efforts in 'Oswald the Organic Waste Bottle'. Probably had a capacity of about 25 litres. We'd keep filling it up with whatever mix of highly-reactive compounds we'd been working with and when it got full we'd take it out to the back of the playground area and set light to it. Unsurprisingly, that didn't always go quite as planned


----------



## diddi (May 30, 2012)

'Oswald the Organic Waste Bottle'     oh dear...

i only ever tipped 1 nasty down the sink and the result was potentially very bad. i tipped a small amount of bromine down the sink, and the person before me had used hot water...  the bromine burst into a furious rush of swirling red gas and attacked my nose and eyes. a most unpleasant experience.  never did it again, tho.


----------



## Atroxell (May 30, 2012)

@chuckchuckit

We have something in common. Where I did all my silly work with laser pumping flashlamps and high intensity light source manufacturing was literally right next to 101 in Mountain View behind FMC. Like your company, we never got more than about 13 or 14 employees, but we had some ridiculously good times doing our thing.

I grew up just north of there. I can't tell you how many times I was chased out of SLAC when I was a kid. Maybe it was you yelling at us a couple of times. Mostly it was guys in security uniforms. 

Page Mill Road and the back of Stanford's property were among our favorite places to go "exploring" on our bicycles because you could ride for miles and never see much in the way of civilization. I have no idea what might be out there now. I think HP has (or had) a campus up there somewhere. I moved out of the Bay Area almost 25 years ago.

I can remember Silicon Valley when it was mostly empty. Back in the days when going to Los Gatos was a drive through the orchards and 101 was a 4-lane highway and El Camino was just starting to expand to more than 2 lanes in many places. Or when Great America was built and you could watch the 4th of July fireworks from the empty fields along highway 101. Then came ROLM, LSI, Crystal Technologies, the monster tech firms, etc. <SIGH>...memories...


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 30, 2012)

Atroxell - Yes, that was quite an era then. Just a few square mile area there in Mountain View and Sunnyvale with all those “tip-up” buildings they made then was where so much technology first started. Almost all the big names later started from there or spun off from just that few square miles and some in Palo Alto just a few miles away.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
Very crowded here now, but a lot of your old stopping grounds around behind Stanford and Page Mill Rd is still a bit remote. Stanford still owns a lot of the barren hills there. Huge satellite on top of one of them though now. The rolling hills around Page Mill have some nice campus’s now with HP, SAP, VM Ware, Tesla etc that they developed those hills for nice work campus’s. I currently do machine repair etc work inside many of those as even yesterday I was at one for 3 hours they are “modernizing” a couple of the buildings back there. I always like going back there in those hills since I am originally from Minnesota and still like to migrate to the remoteness whenever I can.
<o></o>
Always wanted to go inside that literally “mile long building” at SLAC where you got “chased” around - lol. We had a lot of analyzers there, but I never got to go inside that one. But interestingly just 6 months ago or so I got to go inside the original linear accelerator that literally runs under the Stanford campus. Think it was the world’s first but now it is just an empty tube about a quarter mile long under Stanford. I was there doing some equipment work for them and one of the guys there took me into the empty tube where that original accelerator was, and we walked the quarter mile all the way to the end and back. That was a real treat for me to be able to do that! Only a few scientist types in that fascinating building now as they are doing some things along the lines of galaxy and stars research etc in it now. Some satellite people are also affiliated with those workers there etc as I also got to chat a bit with the head of a satellite group (while doing a repair for him too) that years before they built a satellite there at Stanford. So this area here is still very interesting, and I still sometimes seem to get to somehow be involved with the fringes of it to some degree anyway. I’m still sort of like a kid in a candy store when it comes to things like that.


----------



## Sandeep Warrier (May 31, 2012)

I remember from my college chemistry, we had to identify salts in a mixture. One of the tests was a smell test - to check for ammonia. In testing one of the salts, I took a couple of sniffs, couldn't smell anything. Then I inhaled deeply, the mixture decided to react at that moment and I got a huge dose of ammonia 

I could feel my eyes watering cuz of the smell...

Those were the days!!! ahahahahahahahahahha


----------



## T. Valko (May 31, 2012)

Sandeep Warrier said:


> I remember from my college chemistry, we had to identify salts in a mixture. One of the tests was a smell test - to check for ammonia. In testing one of the salts, I took a couple of sniffs, couldn't smell anything. Then I inhaled deeply, the mixture decided to react at that moment and I got a huge dose of ammonia
> 
> I could feel my eyes watering cuz of the smell...
> 
> Those were the days!!! ahahahahahahahahahha


Ah, the smell test...

Some of my buddies were over and we were partying (this was the mid 80's).  So I decide to give them a little demonstration how nitric acid can dissolve a penny. I also had a jar of hydrochloric acid and was explaining to them what we use this for at my job.

I told them that this stuff will take your breathe away. Of course one guy had to try it and takes a gigantic snort even after I warned him not to.

Needless to say, he'll never do that again! I thought he was gonna die!


----------



## chuckchuckit (May 31, 2012)

Clues and patterns… - One of the fringe Scientists there at that company once said something to me that I have remembered ever since. It affected my thinking in ways I still apply in my work today. He was a man that had retired, but was healing from a bad leg break before leaving to Spain. Trying to find something to do, he would spend some days at that Oxygen Analyzer company dabbling in a new product they were developing that was going to be a CO2 analyzer based on infrared light, as infrared is absorbed by CO2. He was working on a potential gas flow sensor design for it and was using a manomiter to see if the design might have some “Venturi Effects” that might be trouble. He couldn’t see the water level easily during testing so since we didn’t have any colored water, he added coffee to it so he could see it better from a distance. I was curious what he was doing when I saw him pouring his morning coffee into one of the tubes. So I asked him if it was possible that the coffee might outgas of sorts to interfere with the rest of the testing’s? And he said, nope, just working on the sensor flow characterizes at this point. He called it the “Coffee Manomiter” - lol.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
Anyway, one day he said that he had been recently hired by a cancer research company to look into why their cancer culture experiments (or whatever they are called) were not going well. As the cultures were giving erratic results and there was no consistency in the experiments due to the cancer cells they wanted to do experiments on were not growing consistently. So he determined that the room lights were affecting the cancer culture cells. And now they were asking him what would be the best way to go about shielding the cancer cultures from the various light sources. And what he said next is what I have always remembered:
<o></o>
He said in effect, “So I said to them, it seems to me that you are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how can we grow the cancer cultures better, shouldn’t you be asking the question: Why are the lights killing the cancer cells?”
<o></o>
He said he tried to get them interested in that approach but no one was even remotely interested. And he was baffled and actually a bit appalled at their disinterest in that obvious fact. He kept saying that he couldn’t get even remote interest from them in that fact. Not necessarily that lights will cure cancer, but perhaps if they looked into it more, they might find out what it is in the atmosphere of lights that doesn’t allow that cancer type to survive very well. It was that type of thinking he was trying to get them interested in. But they were not even the least bit interested, and he was bothered by their attitude about it.
<o></o>
I’m not so sure I thought a lot along those lines before he said that, but it was like the “lights” went on for me about what he was saying. It is kind of like: Can you help us cut down all these trees that are in the way of our trying to find the forest? – That old saying “Can’t see the forest because all the trees are in the way.”
<o></o>
Just because almost everyone says: something must be done a certain way, or it is always done like this, or my job only involves this part here, doesn’t mean that is the best way to do something to benefit others, or will reveal the truth or the right answers.
<o></o>
Like the guy who invented the microwave for cooking food. He was working on the early radar during WWII I think, and he noticed that the chocolate in his pocket melted when he was near the radar when it was on. If he had then asked himself something like: How can I keep the chocolate in the room from melting when the radar is on? we might never have had the microwave to cook our food. But he instead asked a different question from what he observed, and many people have benefitted from it since.
<o></o>
Seems a lot of things are like that. I certainly have been blessed to be able to have done something like 25,000 to 30,000 machinery repairs in my business over the past 25 years. I have had to apply what that Scientist said all the time or I won’t see the “truth and facts” of what is really going on when I am trying to diagnose a problem. It is easy to get diverted away from solving the problem, as many irrelevant things will tend to look like the cause or the way to solve the problem, but they are not. But they sure seem like they are at first. And paying attention to the irrelevant and not the bottom line on things, is a quick way to go broke when self employed. Perhaps only bureaucracies and non-profits can ignore the bottom line and “the truth” of what is really going on, and instead focus on everything else. But for those willing to look at the clues and patterns, much might be discovered when taking time to investigate where that leads.
<o></o>
Here is another clue and pattern I just noticed today! – When a person’s hair starts to fall out, they start to reminisce and turn into a Story Teller - lol. I just finished my morning coffee, so back to work for me now.
<o></o>


----------



## diddi (May 31, 2012)

the smell test - reminds me of a guy i did my chem with back in the day...

he was a great guy and absolutely brilliant in the mind (compared to my distincly unbrilliant one) but had often had momentry lapses of realisation of the real world.

so for example, in one prac session he had conical flask which he had to swill around for 60 seconds... he is busy swilling and decides that he should check his watch to see if 60 seconds has elapsed... he turns his arm to see his watch... and tips the product on the floor.

another day he managed to get a mouth full of hypochlorite solution whilst drawing a pipette


smells in the classroom are great too! i had a particularly uncoleagial coleague who's class was in the room i used immediately after me.  when she annoyed me sufficiently i used to leave unpleasent smells in the sink down the back of the room which would cause consternation amung her students who would disrupt the whole lesson. n-butyric acic, which smells like off cheese, or burnt milk (you get the idea) was a bit of a favourite, but i didnt mind stashing a little lump of FeS in H2SO4 up in a cupboard somewhere... the ultimate 'fart' smell.

ah, the memories come flooding back   and who could ever forget when i put the goldfish from the science lab in her coffee cup in staff room, or liquid nitrogen in her lunch box whilst she ducked off to the toilet?


----------



## Sandeep Warrier (Jun 1, 2012)

diddi said:


> another day he managed to get a mouth full of hypochlorite solution whilst drawing a pipette



Guilty of this tooo.... though now I don't remember what the liquid was!! hahahaha

Also spilt some sodium hydroxide on my black jeans... haha.. suffice to say I could never wear it again!


----------



## TinaP (Jun 5, 2012)

As someone who lost a patch of hair to a small chem lab explosion, I find this thread rather disturbing.

Never cork a test tube while it is still reacting.


----------



## diddi (Jun 5, 2012)

one should always have a healthy respect for chemicals.. even simple household chemicals can be nasty if used in ways not intended by the manufacturer.


----------

