I'm not sure why the "Things I Won't Work With" category/tag isn't working on the new platform; all other categories I checked seem to work, though I can't find a list of all categories.
I am fairly certain it is not legal to edit the URL to get to a page on a website.
People have gone to jail for this.
EDIT: To be clear, I am commenting as a way of venting over the ridiculous state of affairs, not because I agree or think that science.org will send the feds after you.
This comment section full of plutonian chemistry and sketchy rocketry is the perfect place to mention Charles Stross' A Tall Tail [0], a short sci-fi story covering both.
LOL, now that I've read it, I'm pretty sure Derek's blog inspired Charlie to write this story (that, or the common denominator of reading "Ignition!"). It's a great cstross "what-if" story :D
I reread it myself earlier today, and intemperately page-down'd into the comments... where I found Derek himself!! He wrote
>Hah! Glad to see my “Things I Won’t Work With” series wrapped up with a nice conspiratorial bow on top. (I have to say, though, I never would have brought FOOF and dimethyl mercury together; you have a weird mind, which is a compliment you’ve probably heard before).
It's useful to know that, before he was a successful writer, and before he was a programmer for proto-online-banking in the first Dot-Com Boom, Mr Stross was a pharmacist. I'm sure that comment from Derek Lowe was high praise to him!
Great read. Laughing at: “But when he started working on the mercaptans, he and his accomplices were exiled to a wooden shack out in the boondocks at least two hundred yards from the main building. Undeterred and unrepentant, he continued his noisome endeavors [snip] Anyhow, he came up with the ethyl mercaptal of acetaldehyde and the ethyl mercaptol of acetone respectively. The odor of these was not so much skunk-like as garlicky, the epitome and concentrate of all the back doors of all the bad Greek restaurants in all the world. And finally he surpassed himself with something that had a dimethylamino group attached to a mercaptan sulfur, and whose odor can't, with all the resources of the English language, even be described. It also drew flies.”
“it was magnificently hypergolic with many fuels. (I used to take advantage of this property when somebody came into my lab looking for a job. At an inconspicuous signal, one of my henchmen would drop the finger of an old rubber glove into a flask containing about 100 cc of mixed acid —and then stand back. The rubber would swell and squirm" a moment, and then a magnificent rocket-like jet of flame would rise from the flask, with appropriate hissing noises. I could usually tell from the candidate's demeanor whether he had the sort of nervous system desirable in a propellant chemist.)”
I don’t know if anyone has confirmed this explicitly, but it’s a likely assumption that Ignition! went back in to print after many years of unavailability precisely because of all the interest stirred up by this post.
The Autobiography of Max Gergel is a similarly interesting book about chemistry with some anecdotes from the early space age. Not in print that I've found but the PDF is on archive.org
Are there other works like this? I know about Gergel mentioned alongside this post, and if you're dutch, K.G. Paulus' Kernenergie en opwerking was also an eye popping cynical book about ongoing stupidity in the nuclear world.
I think it's less a matter of someone being dumb enough to try to eat the stuff than that it will never pass anyone's lips before other far more interesting things begin occurring.
I think we can agree, at least, that the intersection of "people smart enough to devise a way to ingest this without premature combustion of the head" and "people dumb enough to do it" is probably n<1
I feel easily confused by basic chemistry principles. Is ClF3 an ionic salt? I believe that if I drew that out in high school chemistry, it would get marked down because both constituent elements are of the same charge.
It could be about Alien. "a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. "
It's bounced around a couple hosts over the years, and sadly this latest incarnation on science.org doesn't preserve the tags from the original.
Nevertheless, look up "Derek Lowe things I won't work with" for a great and hilarious series of posts on "fun" chemicals.
For example:
* Peroxide Peroxides:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
* Dioxygen Difluoride, or FOOF to its frenemies (let's put the two strongest oxidants together just for fun):
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
* Triazadienyl Fluoride:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...