Gilded

On the topic of sodium on eBay has someone actually seen/bought some recently? I thought eBay prohibited the sale of alkali metals some time ago. Not that you couldn't get them elsewhere, I was just wondering as there could occasionally be some pretty good deals.

A temperature of 950 Celsius seems to be ok, the sintering time depends on what stage of the process you do it in. Here's one process:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/reports/m/ornlm3063r1/pt7.html

Here's a process that uses hydroxide rather than oxide (not sure if it will yield such a high-purity product but at least it circumvents the use of an external oxygen source):

http://chemiris.chem.binghamton.edu/chem445/HighTc/HighTc.htm

Good luck! This is really something I wish to do myself as well if/when I buy a tube furnace. While this isn't the easiest synthesis to do at home it's certainly easy compared to other high-temp superconductor materials.

I'd like to add that I tend to play FPS/RPG/RTS games or read forums like 4-10 hours a day which might be considered a bad habit.

I remember wanting to be a chemist or a geologist at a very early age, like 8 or something. I gradually became interested in writing and game designing as well, and my interest in chemistry grew as I found about pyrotechnics and such. In high school I became interested in music as well. After that I was about to go study chemistry in uni but decided the studies would be too diverse for me to maintain interest. Luckily, becoming a pyrotechnician doesn't require university level chemistry. Besides that I'd definitely want to be a writer but I suffer from writer's block and excessive self-criticism way too much. Over the last few years music has become a semi-serious hobby for me and I wouldn't mind being a professional musician either.

Overall, I've pretty much gone from "pure" science towards art more and more. I still love science enough to hang around in science forums though.

*makes a grilled cheese with Richard Dawkins' face on it*

The Onion Movie is pretty good btw.

I don't play MMORPG's they are a huge waste of time.

That's what I think as well yet somehow someone always persuades me to start playing one.

I don't think there are too many MMORPG people on SFN but decided to make a thread about this anyway. I'm a rank 6 magus at the moment and things seem good so far, but I have yet to see anything that would make it especially good compared to WoW for example.

So then, what is the problem with that theory?

And yeah... Electrons are always in orbit around the nucleus just like a fan around its center...So there's never any empty space.

Actually there's a huge amount of empty space. The electron cloud around an atom isn't really dense at all in this sense, and as mentioned alpha particles have a velocity large enough to pass through a thin solid layer of atoms where very few collisions occur.

Titration with Benedict's reagent is probably the easiest method.

I suppose you could also start with the premise that Diet and Zero do not contain any sugar.

I don't think any gas rivals sulfur hexafluoride's combination of density and non-toxicity. Xenon comes close in terms of density but it's a powerful anaesthetic (and somewhat expensive). Tungsten hexafluoride has a much higher density but is toxic as hell. If you're just interested in doing the voice changing demo I'm pretty sure you can buy SF6 just as easily as nitrogen and other gases used for electronics and welding etc.

I agree with John Cuthber, there are just too many problems and you could just as well leave the reactor on the ground. As for advantages beyond fuel availability, the main advantage of dragging a nuclear reactor with you to high altitudes is extended flight time but it isn't exactly the biggest priority in civilian aircraft, unless you're going to the Moon or something.

Psilocybin helps

with stuff like haiku and such.

Or so I have heard.

---

Warhammer Online!

Who needs a job anyway

when you can kill dwarfs?

---

One BFG please.

There is a cyberdemon

in the yard again.

---

Cherry Coke for me?

No! Such eldritch blasphemy!

Burn it with napalm!

I don't think so. AFAIK current theories predict that a photon's wavelength will asymptotically approach zero or infinity as the energy increases or decreases.

I like swimming ,reading and quake (3).

Q3 is awesome. Do you play Rocket Arena, or some trickjumping mod like Defrag?

Welcome anyways.

Ions don't really have especially much to do with movement per se. For example noble gas atoms which are pretty much as neutral as it gets can move around just as easily or even more so.

any news on the lhc?

Hacking mostly.

Plan: Buy a 250g ampoule of cesium, go outside when it rains, throw the ampoule in the air and smash it with a baseball bat.

The mechanism might be well understood by someone but that is not me. I will accept this for now but would be interested in how the speed of gravity was figured out.

Well actually it isn't a very conclusive measurement, but it is consistent with general relativity predicting gravity to propagate at c.

"In September 2002, Sergei Kopeikin and Edward Fomalont announced that they had made an indirect measurement of the speed of gravity, using their data from VLBI measurement of the retarded position of Jupiter on its orbit during Jupiter's transit across the line-of-sight of the bright radio source quasar QSO J0842+1835. Kopeikin and Fomalont concluded that the speed of gravity is between 0.8 and 1.2 times the speed of light, which would be fully consistent with the theoretical prediction of general relativity that the speed of gravity is exactly the same as the speed of light."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity

On another forum a user was joking about using nuclear weapons to divert or partially dissipate hurricanes. While it's perhaps the most unfeasible and the least environmental idea ever I think the idea is sort of interesting. I looked at some hurricane data, pulled out a few variables out of my ass (which I found to be common practice in this part of the forum), did a few energy conversions and came to the conclusion that the wind energy dissipated by a matured hurricane per day could perhaps be rivaled by a thermonuclear weapon in the 30Mt range. The energy dissipated through water condensation is much larger though, so I'm not sure how that fits in. Anyway, should a country choose to pre-emptively nuke a growing tropical storm, how should the nuclear blasts be positioned to optimally dissipate or divert the storm?

5) How much has Russia (in percentage of monetary funds, infrastucture and technical information), contributed to the LHC?

Over 700 Russian scientists have contributed to the LHC program, but I'm guessing Russia hasn't funded the project that much since they're not a member state of CERN. I couldn't find any actual funding figures though.

If you felt like living dangerously, you could always give cinnabar a go

That was discussed in the Sciencemadness thread but it sounds rather boring though considering the mercury will just vaporize right away. :| Gaseous mercury while dangerous is rather boring, I'd presume.

I'm wondering about tungsten though.

I once got into trouble in the US for using the phrase "smoke a fag" (iirc I was suggesting it as a method of stress relief).

"I'm so stressed out these days..."

"Sheesh, go smoke a fag."

Many years ago I was in the navy and worked at a reactor onboard ship, yet I barely understand the physics behind higgs bosons.

Don't worry about that, yourdadonapogos is a navy reactor technician at the moment and has trouble putting his socks on in the morning.

I do not like the idea of "spooky action at a distance" proposed by more famous physicists than myself. It is probably my lack of imagination but I can envision no undetectable mechanism for it. The alternative, is the idea of some kind of aether, one rejected by Einstein and most others, that connects everything. My bet is with Mr. Hawking and having to come up with a new paradigm. Imho things should become less complex the smaller we go rather than more.

It's not an undetectable mechanism just because we haven't detected it yet.

On the things becoming less complex the closer you look is a weird concept to me. If anything they should become more complex, just like a small insect might look rather simple but up close is actually made of all sorts of neat plates and cells. And as you look at these cells you see that they're actually incredibly complex structures. At this point you might see a bit of DNA as some sort of small strand but upon closer inspection it's revealed that it's actually made of atoms and so forth. Then people formed equations to describe the behavior of atoms but noticed that these equations were too simple and had to be expanded. And soon came the era of quantum mechanics, which is just batshit insane to be honest, no offense.

http://www.sciencelab.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PVAR&Product_Code=SLG1306

Cheap as hell!

Somehow I'm guessing that's reagent grade, so if someone wants to just sell their car rather than their house they might want to get a price quote from American Elements on the 99% powder.

http://www.americanelements.com/auox.html

And you can always collect the metallic gold and sell it. That would get some money back, but looking at those prices it seems like the oxide is at least four times as expensive as metallic gold.

Uranium Thermite would be impossible since Uranium bonds so readily with oxygen that the heat created when it was formed would cause it to bind with atmospheric oxygen immediately. Plus, I'm not sure it would be thermondynamically favorable.

Bleh, I suppose I'm not extracting metallic uranium from pitchblende anytime soon then.

The gold thermite still intrigues me though. Molten hot "golden shower" anyone?

(Interesting fact: Gold has a melting point of approximately 1337 K. r0flm40 r0x0rb0x0rz and so forth.)