John Cuthber

Weird question. About the only thing you can do with a mug is put things in it. About the only thing you can do with a balloon is blow it up. Was that any help?

The BEST thing to do with Galileo is to remind OTHER people that he DROPPED things from a tower to see IF he was right. Really, he didn't need to convince himself; he was trying to convince others who didn't understand logic. Oh, and don't forget to use inapropriate capital letters, underlining and italicisation. Also, remember, when all else fails, tell lies and make up data. Nobody can run a polygraph test on you through an internet link. If you say "I levitated my kid brother (Mass aprox 40Kg) using a bicycle dynamo and a fridge magent!" nobody can prove you didn't. With a bit of luck your kid brother will turn up (using the same computse of course) and confirm this.

"To apply this science personally, using your Conscious Quantum Mind Power" But it isn't a science.

What's the molar mass for a mole (either type)? Is it fair to say that it would be mainly water so you would need to blow up about 18g of "mole" to achieve the target? 2g of H2 would be more fun, or a mole of thermite, perhaps molded into a mole shape with a bit of gum? With a high molecular mass fuel you would do a lot of damage. Starch can have a mass of a million or so which would give you a tonne of dust exploding. That would make a big hole. How widely publicised is "Mole day?"

You also forgot the importance of using scientific terms wrongly. "Energy" for example is widely misused, "Entropy" does even better. Another usefull trick is to make up new definitions for words that are related to, but not the same as, the normal definitions.

Well, I studied chemistry at university, and I work as a chemist. The silver carbonate should work OK the other product will be H2CO3 which will decompose to CO2 and water. I might try shaking the aldehyde with a solution of silver acetate in water. Silver acetate is slightly soluble so enough would dissolve in water to react with the HCN but the solubillity is low enough that you can make it by precipitation. In any event you will need to filter and dry the product. It's going to be easier to distill it.

Silver is a noble metal. It doesn't react with acids (except oxidising ones like nitric). The complexation of Ag+ is just strong enough to offset this, so silver just about dissolves in HCN, but only if there's enough HCH present to form [Ag(CN)2]+ ions. In this case you simply don't have a lot of cyanide present and most of it will be trapped as a cyanohydrin. To get the silver to dissolve you need lots of cyanide and an oxidant. Oxidants that will oxidise Ag to Ag+ will generally oxidise the aldehyde. In the limit, the weakest oxidant that will oxidise Ag is Ag+. Ag+ is noted for oxidising aldehydes.

wear good gloves.

I was asking YT2095 to explain how you could use elemental silver to strip HCN from the mixture. I don't think it's possible. Silver will react with HCN to produce AgCN, but you need air to oxidise the silver or the reaction is far too slow. Air oxidises the aldehyde quite quickly so if there were enough air to get the silver to react the air would trash the benzaldehyde. Distillation looks like a much easier option. Another possibillity would be to treat the mixture with precipitated "Fe(OH)3" and trap the cyanide as ferricyanide then steam distill the aldehyde out.

I'd like to see you balance the equation using silver metal. Don't forget that benzaldehyde is a classic example of auto-oxidation in air.

I think sugar glass is still used in the film industry for stunts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_glass

The last thing looks like a bulb pipette, but it's a shocking picture. This sort of thing. http://www.brand.de/en/products/volumetric-instruments/bulb-pipettes/

Liquidsilver's first post "1.) Grab a good proton emitter like Polonium or Radium" (and the posts telling him he's wrong)

Thanks for your support but I will add that KCl sold as a "salt substitute" has added NaCl (in my experience) and I'm not sure if that's because it tastes better or to make sure that the toxicity is trivial. OTOH potassium based fertilisers are not labelled as toxic. To get back to the OP; couldn't the guy just kill himself by blowing the lab to kingdom come with as gas explosion?

I'm still waiting to hear from liquidweaver what isotopes of Ra and Po emit protons. He seems to have spotted that Gilded realised this was a valid question. Just wondering how he didn't realise that when I asked.

Sarcasm is all very well, it seems it can be missed in either direction. Anyway, please let me know what isotopes of Ra or Po emit protons rather than He nuclei?

People eat potassium compounds (not the hydroxide) If they don't, they get sick and die. http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/nutritionessentials/vitaminsandminerals/potassium/ The body can do a pretty good job of excreting excess potassium so it's quite difficult to kill someone with it. It does happen from time to time in hospitals where a patient needs potassium. The doctor prescribes it and says it should be added to an intravenous drip. If it is accidentally injected directly (or if a dense strong solution of KCl is added to the drip bag, but settles to the bottom of the bag) it stops the heart, but you need a sudden, large dose to do that.

OK i_a, you beat me to it. I don't mind just as long as someone prices that particular waste of bandwidth out of the market.

Do you have any idea how big a radium+ beryllium source you would need to produce anything like 10^9 neutrons a second? Do you have any idea how little Au197 you could make with 10^9 neutrons a second? My guess is that you don't, because if you knew what you were talking about you wouldn't think Ra and Po were proton sources.

More like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova I think. Anyway, no neutron source is "safe".

Imagine that you add the acid in several lots. Say you add 1 gram of it first then another 1g and so on. The first gram of acid is being mixed with water and reacts vigourously. The second gram is not reacting with water- it's reacting with dilute sulphuric acid. This reaction is less vigorous. If you add enough acid then, in the end you are adding acid to something that's nearly pure acid already. That produces very little heat. So each addition of acid gives rise to a different heat of reaction. Just to complicate things further the heat from the first reaction goes into heating up nearly pure water. Water has a very high heat capacity. However all the subsequent aditions of acid are not heating water- they are heating dilute acid whic is likely to have a smaller heat capacity. Confused yet? OK not only is the second gram of acid reacting with something different and dissipating its heat into something different, but the stuff is now hot. The heat capacity of water (or dilute acid) changes slightly with temperature. So this stuff has 3 different reasons for being non linear.

Do you mean from the pain caused by the corrosive chemical burning holes in you from the inside?

The problem is that for some isotopes it would help to irradiate them and turn them into somethinmg else (with a shorter half life for example) for a lot of other isotopes irradiating it would turn it into something more hazardous. The only way it would work would be if you could separate out each element in the waste, then separate the individual isotopes of each element, then treat those resulting isotopes which would "benefit" from treatment. I don't see how it will ever be practical.

I predict a bunch of conspiracy theories saying " It wasn't a magnet quench, it was a mini black hole/ gateway to a parallel universe/ unspecified big scary thing." Even better than predicting it, I'm going to stake my copyright claim right here. It's MY idea! Anyone wanting to post conspicary theories about the CERN incident like the above can pay me for the honour. (Obviously this won't really work, but if it stops a few notters wasting the world's bandwidth it has to be worth a try. Any thoughts?)

"Ah, but this effect should not be ignored." Failing to ignore it is going off topic, you might find youself talking about dishes in ovens.