Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

[Ketaru]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

You know as a conservative myself, I have to say she is one loon. She is one that will possibly make the nomination but will not win the seat do to her super right wing antics and policies. She is what some would call a neo conservative

Things like this though are what make political games so tiring to watch. Just as I knew the left would take the opportunity to tout gun control and political discourse when Gabriel Giffords was shot, sure as the sun rises, I knew somebody on the right would attach a God angle to the hurricane. And who better to do it than the woman who gets more and more annoying every time she opens her mouth?

[pxch]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

You know if she is elected as the canidate she will single handidly get Obama re-Elected.

[Raydeus]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

The following video scared me in a good way.

But maybe it just doesn't have the same impact on a small monitor at work. XD

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Juneau woman saves dog from bear with well-aimed punch | Anchorage Daily News - The News Tribune

She punched a bear in the face to save her dog.

In the face.

And it ran away.

And she has purple hair.

All of this is awesome.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

My crazy person sense is tingling.

[Taskmage]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

More things that are hilarious and chemistry related: In the Pipeline:

The compound also a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen itself, which also puts it into rare territory. That means that it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile. It’s been used in the semiconductor industry to clean oxides off of surfaces, at which activity it no doubt excels.

There’s a report from the early 1950s of 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. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: 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.

I’ll let the late John Clark describe the stuff, since he had first-hand experience in attempts to use it as rocket fuel. From his out-of-print classic Ignition! we have:

”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

[Taskmage]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Ohmy god Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride. In the Pipeline:

The latest addition to the long list of chemicals that I never hope to encounter takes us back to the wonderful world of fluorine chemistry. I'm always struck by how much work has taken place in that field, how long ago some of it was first done, and how many violently hideous compounds have been carefully studied. Here's how the experimental prep of today's fragrant breath of spring starts:

“The heater was warmed to approximately 700C. The heater block glowed a dull red color, observable with room lights turned off. The ballast tank was filled to 300 torr with oxygen, and fluorine was added until the total pressure was 901 torr. . .”

And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. "Oh, no you don't," is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal, ". . .not unless I'm at least a mile away, two miles if I'm downwind." This, folks, is the bracingly direct route to preparing dioxygen difluoride, often referred to in the literature by its evocative formula of FOOF.

Well, "often" is sort of a relative term. Most of the references to this stuff are clearly from groups who've just been thinking about it, not making it. Rarely does an abstract that mentions density function theory ever lead to a paper featuring machine-shop diagrams, and so it is here. Once you strip away all the "calculated geometry of. . ." underbrush from the reference list, you're left with a much smaller core of experimental papers.

And a hard core it is! This stuff was first prepared in Germany in 1932 by Ruff and Menzel, who must have been likely lads indeed, because it's not like people didn't respect fluorine back then. No, elemental fluorine has commanded respect since well before anyone managed to isolate it, a process that took a good fifty years to work out in the 1800s. (The list of people who were blown up or poisoned while trying to do so is impressive). And that's at room temperature. At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature. But that's how you get it to react with oxygen to make a product that's worse in pretty much every way.

FOOF is only stable at low temperatures; you'll never get close to RT with the stuff without it tearing itself to pieces. I've seen one reference to storing it as a solid at 90 Kelvin for later use, but that paper, a 1962 effort from A. G. Streng of Temple University, is deeply alarming in several ways. Not only did Streng prepare multiple batches of dioxygen difluoride and keep it around, he was apparently charged with finding out what it did to things. All sorts of things. One damn thing after another, actually:

"Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred."

And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.

Even Streng had to give up on some of the planned experiments, though (bonus dormitat Strengus?). Sulfur compounds defeated him, because the thermodynamics were just too titanic. Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost. The sulfur chemistry of FOOF remains unexplored, so if you feel like whipping up a batch of Satan's kimchi, go right ahead.

So does anyone use dioxygen difluoride for anything? Not as far as I can see. Most of the recent work with the stuff has come from groups at Los Alamos, where it's been used to prepare national-security substances such as plutonium and neptunium hexafluoride. But I do note that if you run the structure through SciFinder, it comes out with a most unexpected icon that indicates a commercial supplier. That would be the Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company. They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don't think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed. Someone should call them on this - ask for the free shipping, and if they object, tell them Amazon offers it on this item. Serves 'em right. Morons.

I nearly died laughing after reading "Satan's kimchi." And "FOOF" omg hilarious. It's like a vitrified Aperture Science project.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Every single one of those "Things I Won't Work With" articles is chemical comedy gold. Moral of the story: Halogens are bad, mkay?

[Gobo]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Every single one of those "Things I Won't Work With" articles is chemical comedy gold. Moral of the story: Halogens are awesome, mkay?

ftfy

[Mhurron]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

ftfy

One mans awesome is another mans SEARING HOT DEATH.

[Gobo]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

If I am going to be the cause of my own death, it is going to be in a blazing fireball of glory.

[Raydeus]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

If I am going to be the cause of my own death, it is going to be in a blazing fireball of glory.

Dude, stop, don't do anything drastic. Marriage isn't the solution to your problems.

[Taskmage]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

How did we go from blazing fireball of glory to marriage? I don't see the connection.

[Mhurron]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

How did we go from blazing fireball of glory to marriage? I don't see the connection.

Ray is just being a pansy. Everything scares him equally.

[Raydeus]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

/nod