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lajoswinkler

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Everything posted by lajoswinkler

  1. Crude oil additive - yuck. Benzene - silent killer, avoid it as much as you can. Hydrazine - no, thanks. 90% hydrogen peroxide - not exactly poisonous as it will turn you into smoldering goo first. Ammonia - it's difficult to poison yourself with it. Lithium - not poisonous. Just corrosive and harmful. Caesium - same as lithium, only way more corrosive and reactive. Yeah, that last claim of his was so stupid. It would not happen for several reasons.
  2. I don't like the fact they're presenting the public with digitally blown up images with enhanced colors of Hydra and Nix. Those will again, as many other things have, enter the public perception as skewed. Just like Venus, which is often shown in UV or radar image, and in fact it looks like a milky-cream gas planet.
  3. First astronauts used pure oxygen so that the total pressure of the craft could be much lower than 1 atmosphere. That's not the case anymore and is also dangerous. Deep sea divers certainly do not use pure oxygen as it would kill them. They use various mixes, depending on their diving procedure (depth, duration, etc.) such as heliox, trimix, nitrox, etc.
  4. Saying "until we get FTL" is like saying "until we manage to draw a cubical circle". It won't happen. It's a property of our universe. We're stuck here.
  5. It's pretty easy. Cover it with moist sand. It cools the melt and prevents oxygen to reach it.
  6. Absorption of doses as low as 0.1 mL can result in severe mercury poisoning. This severely underestimates the toxicity of it and it's a dangerous myth. She might've spilled that amount (drops IIRC), but the amount that leaked through the latex glove and went inside the skin and then killed her after a long time are probably nanolitres or less. She probably didn't even feel there's something wet inside the glove as it was microscopic. Dimethylmercury has almost 100% absorption rate in organisms. The reason why it's so difficult to poison yourself with metallic mercury (unless you're really being stupid with it, or living in a place where you have chronic exposure to fumes) is because its absorption rates are very, very tiny. Very little clings to you, and most of that will get purged out fast. Ions of mercury are way worse, but organomercury compounds, especially dimethylmercury, chemically cling to your body like white on rice. Almost 100% absorption, almost 100% retention, therefore almost 0% excretion. It's so incredibly poisonous that even a whiff of it in the air, so that you could feel the smell of it, is lethal. Granted, it takes months to kill you and it's perfectly safe in a sealed ampoule.
  7. Oil is not highly flammable. Highly flammable things are hydrogen, low hydrocarbons, phosphorus, etc. Crude oil is mildly flammable. And it does not kill everything. Anoxic bacteria are happy with it, and there are also bacteria that eat it. If that didn't happen, oceans would look very crapped up from the oils released by putrefaction of other organisms. Plutonium dioxide is not pyrophoric (it's a refractory material), but plutonium powder and shavings are.
  8. All nitrogen trihalogenides except the trifluoride. They are all contact explosives and release their constituent halogens. Trichloride is a liquid that wrecked Dulong and Davy and probably more less famous scientists and others back in those times. Tribromide is a deep red solid that probably never harmed anyone because it was synthesized in cryogenic environment in the 70s in small quantities under a lot more safety considerations. Triiodide is easy to synthesize but I also don't think anyone got wrecked by it. A tiny grub of it made me deaf for a minute or two a long time ago. All of them are notoriously sensitive explosives, unusable for such usage. Mercury(II) fulminate is less sensitive, but also something you want to handle very carefuly, and upon detonation it releases gaseous mercury and its soluble cyanide.
  9. I've used one series of latest Pluto's limb photos to stitch them up without any modifications. It was quite difficult because there's almost no discernible markers to help with stitching. Manually, of course.
  10. All halogens are a nightmare, with fluorine being the worst, ignoring astatine because we never made it in macroscopic amounts. Although chlorine is more powerful oxidizer, bromine is probably worse to deal with because it's a very volatile liquid producing thick, dense fumes which linger and cause wreckage in the lungs. It behaves like a very concentrated chlorine. A bit less oxidizing, but it redeems itself with its density. I've actually made lots of high purity larger amounts in my life and I can say that although it's a very nice looking element, it's not something anyone can deal with. That would be a trademark name, and those are often horribly against all logic and rules of nomenclature. I think you're talking about tetrachloroethene, the degreasing fluid. It has a sweet odor, not foul one. It is an anaesthetic and a central nervous system depressant, and in high enough concentrations it feels warm and fuzzy in your lungs, douses your will to live like a candle in low oxygen environment. Very similar to chloroform (trichloromethane) which is sweeter. Seems to me your factory had an extremely low, criminally negligent occupational hazard mitigation ethics. I'd understand if that happened in China, but in USA? Those people exposed to it chronically in such high amounts have a high probability of developing hepatocellular carcinoma or cirrhosis.
  11. I wouldn't say they were tholins before reaching Charon because tholins aren't volatile at those temperatures. But yeah, seems to be the case of a process lasting for an ungodly amount of time involving Charon grabbing gaseous particles from Pluto and subsequent photolysis and recombination. Billions of years for a thin cover.
  12. They do not become raw energy. They become gamma photons. Energy is not a particle, it is being carried by particles.
  13. The most dangerous chemical would mean something notoriously difficult to work with to ensure the safety of the person working with it, right? That must include both fierce radioactivity, easy dispersal, chemical reactivity and poisonous properties. Chlorine trifluoride is a kitten compared to these. Transuranics in metallic forms are a good candidate. They corrode in atmosphere to form a powder charged by alpha rays they emit, and can also catch metallic fire. Extremely radioactive and produce lots of heat by decay. Metallic radium and polonium. Radium is a soft, very reactive earth alkali metal taken up by body and it emits a blast of gamma rays. Polonium is a radioactive chalkogenic element (oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium group - taken up by body) and macroscopic amounts heat themselves up very fast. Metallic strontium-90. It would probably burst into flame because its radioactive decomposition would heat it up. Also produces electrically charged powder of hydroxide and carbonate. Liquid radon. Cryogenic liquid, absolutely bonkering radioactive, needs constant heavy cooling, absolutely tight seals, ventilation. Inert, but good luck handling it. Iodine-131 in elemental form. A nightmare difficult to describe. Perhaps not a good thing to include as it is gone in a short time, but it is a nightmare. Elemental iodine is extremely volatile and when you add heat released by the radioactive decay, and the fact our thyroid wants it, ugh... There is no use for mentioning francium because we never made a macroscopic amount of it. With such a short decay halftime, we probably never will. Hypothetically, it would be a very hot liquid under vacuum because of the decay heat.
  14. Not really. If you had a jar-sized lump of potassium and tried to ignite it, it would start a smouldering metal fire. If the lump is thick enough, it wouldn't even finish burning because oxygen can't reach through all the oxides covering it like moss. They also react with the moisture in the air, forming a deliquescent hydroxide that just cakes up the metal. That's why alkali metal fires are best dealt with by covering them with dry sand and just leaving them like that for a while. When the thing cools down, one can pour mineral oil (or kerosene, if you're sure what you're doing) to wet the pile and then slowly dig out the metal, clean it with a knife and put it in a jar of kerosene.
  15. There's an image AS17-136-20862, too. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-136-20862HR.jpg And here's the AS17-136-20863. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-136-20863HR.jpg (don't hotlink high resolution images) It's a silver emulsion degradation and some debris. Very common and annoying stuff. It's not like nobody here ever used a classical camera.
  16. There. There's a possibility stupid people will think you're a pencil, though.
  17. Laptop with 8 GB of RAM. Current amount of mods is 333 MB.
  18. Kao što piše u opisu, nije specijalizirana u smislu da ne smije nitko drugi doći. Eto, samo je lokalizirana. Koliko znam, prva je takva, a općenito i prvo takvo mjesto.
  19. Napravio sam ovu FB grupu. Tko želi, neka se uÄÂlani. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1912082375683763/
  20. Now available online? This has been online for more than a decade. http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html
  21. I'd have to skew the image precisely, which is a pain in the ass.
  22. I've tried, I can't. Raster Prop Monitor used to cycle through all of the cameras, even if they weren't installed, and that allowed for the "no signal" image to be used. Now it cycles through the available cameras only, so I don't know how to show Gerty anymore...
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