jowrose

wow, those are some nice sites. the peacemagazine article was the perfect resource for this thread. thanks for the info.

ahhh. yeah, my mistake. i'm confusing etch-a-sketches with those old toys where you use a magnet to draw stuff on a guy's face. his face is below a layer of clear plastic and there is a small amount of magnetite under the plastic. one would "drag and drop" the magetite using the magnet to make mustaches or beards or whatnot. thanks for the clarification

oh yeah, you're right. now i feel stupid. yeah, i know not to breath in the fumes. I always stand at least 20 feet back from the reaction. but i suppose that's more to avoid the flying bits of melted metal...

ah, ok. thanks for the clarification, albeit maybe i am more confused now.

Dimes half dollars and quarters all have a copper core? ah, that makes sense now. I was trying to melt some quarters with some thermite i have (it kinda worked...) and when it had all cooled off i noticed one of the quarters looked like it was oozing copper. I was confused, copper is definitely not one of the products of the thermite reaction... But i didn't think that quarters contained copper at all either. I've tried putting quarters on railroad tracks before and they still have the silver appearance even after being pounded on, so I figured they must be one single metal or alloy.

how exactly is heavy water used in the creation of atomic bombs? i was watching some national geographic "untold stories of WWII" and it was talking about this factory in norway (i think) that the germans captured and used to create heavy water. Apparently it was vital to the allies that it be destroyed, and it took 3 attemps through conventional bombing and commandos on skis. Interesting story though. But what exactly are its uses?

very good analogy dr 666. simply put alleles are just the different options of a certain gene. Say Black or Brown hair. brown would be the dominant allele and would be denoted H (capital H for hair) and black would be recessive and denoted h (lower case h for hair). The main use of this concept is in Punnett squares where the probabilities of displaying either the dominant or recessive alleles are determined.

cane and abel must have been pretty screwed up. no wonder cane killed him. or was it the other way around? but really, that is a very interesting idea. Has anyone ever read "Invitation to the Game"? Same concept, where a group of people are sent to repopulate due to overcrowding. But I never considered the fact that genetically there would be a large number of mutations and the next few generations would be screwed up. Seeing as there were only a dozen people... Another thing you might have to worry about would be the genetics becoming too stable and susceptible to a single disease. Like i read in popsci that the current banana population is at a huge risk to being wiped out because genetically they are all identical and a disease has been found that has started killing them in SE asia (i think). interesting article, by the way.

yeah but flyboy you have to remember that it would take hundreds if not thousands of genes altered to make your scary red monster, whereas a virus can only alter one at a time (correct me if i'm wrong, i very well could be). A far more practical and feasible use would be gene therapy as joerdz said. that is, creating a specific virus to alter a specific gene for a specific disorder or disease. Of course, any small failure in the creation of such a virus could have devastating effects. Genetics is a scary thing for us to mess around with as we have little knowledge of the long term effects.

hahahahaha you're a walking miracle

how so? the suicide part not the freshman part

hahaha very possible

yeah i'll try out the 2 liter sometime. And aluminum would be the ideal metal for a spud gun, like h2so4 said it doesn't rust (well it does a little, but it actually makes the material stronger) and it is lightweight. the only drawback is the relative expensiveness of aluminum when compared to pvc. yes, i've heard of using propane tanks and regulators attached straight to the chamber, paintball-gun style. very good idea, i'm sure it will work well. gonna be a freshman? yeah highschool's not so bad, hell of a lot better than middle school. at least for me. junior year for me this year.

Well this is definitely an interesting thread... I guess i'll just give some opinions (and random nonsense) in response to some of the "ideas" that have been expressed here. First, the disappearance of men. Altogether possible, due to the introduction of two elements into humanity: the sperm bank and the aluminum stepladder. We are essentially useless. Moving on, the genetic alteration of humanity. While i think humanity as a whole has "mutated" extremely little in the past several millenia, one cannot underestimate the effects of the growing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere as well as emerging viruses and new unknownd biochemical agents (and stuff like that). I sound so smart. So i believe that, as the human population in itself has been rapidly expanding (it took thousands of years for the globe to be inhabited by 1 billion, and only 100 years for that to grow to 6 billion) the rapidity of genetic alteration is hence accelerated. Artificial alteration to the human genome could also become an issue, as there will always be mad scientists trying to make their own frankensteins (imagine the new terrorist weapon: genetically engineered super-soldiers physically superior to anything else--crazy but theoretically possible). Oh and finally, somebody mentioned the end of the world. Well i was quite interested in the concept a few months ago so i did the most scientific thing i could: google searched it. Of course you get the occassional hippies saying it will be on their birthdays and that they are the antichrist and whatnot but i came accross and interesting concept. The earth is supposedly measured in different eras (or epochs or whatever the hell they referred to them as) that are ended by cataclysmic events. And we are due for one. The mayans supposedly realized this, and their calendar mysteriously ends in December of 2012. Just ends. As it turns out, there is also a "super volcano" underneath yellowstone national park that has the potential to make a crater from CA to Ohio... yeah it's farfetched and probably a lot of nonsense but come 2012... it'll probably be like that one scene in Independence Day, where all the loonies are out on the rooftops. Well that was my pseudoscientific opinion, you all probably got stupider reading this.

Empty 2-liter bottle?! with propane?! jesus you are going to blow your hand off soon. How on earth does the bottle not just explode? Wow you have more guts than I would... While in theory any combination of combustion chamber and barrel will work, I have found that PVC pipe is the most practical and durable material around. It is easy to construct with and will easily withstand any blasts from hairspray, deoderant, propane, butane, etc...

One can use magnetite in ferrofluids (do some research on internet- very cool mixtures) or in thermite. These are the only 2 applications i am aware of. Practical applications at least. Oh yeah, it's also the stuff used in etch-a-sketches i think. holy crap ffsjoe, that's one hell of a magnet.

google searching is usually the best way. there are inumerable ways to make a spud gun, but there is a rule of thumb: compressed air is more reliable while hairspray/deoderant is more powerful (and make a better sound when shot... ). Usually, PVC pipe is used for construction but someone earlier on this thread has mentioned his intentions of using steel. I hope he posts when he is finished, i would like to hear the results. One thing to keep in mind is that when building the gun, be sure to have a good barrel-to-combustion chamber ratio. Obviously, the higher the ratio the farther the potato (or whatever the hell else you shoot; i've heard of people shooting frozen birds out of guns...) will fly. Up till a certain point, of course. 3 weeks to school, same here. from now on, no more mentions of school... school sucks...

but using steel is so heavy... I prefer PVC because i know it's not going to explode, it's lightweight so it's easy to carry around, there are a ton of very easy options that one has (for example, it's very easy to make interchangeable parts, such as a perpendicular handle for the trigger). When you are using relatively low pressure (as in a potato gun) it's better to stick with PVC i think.

Yeah, i'm heading out to Michigan in a coupla weeks also; i'll bring the magnets and hopefully get at least 20 pounds of the stuff. I'm still working on refining the sand/magnetite i collected earlier. Anyone have any suggestions? I know that the magnetite particles are very small, so would mechanical separation do any good? with thin mesh or something? or should i only refine it magnetically?

thermite is fun stuff. nice signature, flyboy. great album

ok, i've made 5 different potato guns: 1 pneumatic 2 Hairspray/Deoderant 2 Butane first off, the pneumatic. It is easily the most consistent of the 5, it fires every shot (ok that's kinda obvious) as there's no problems with ignition. It has medium range (in my opinion) but the effects of firing it leave something to be desired (aka no loud bangs or anythign). the hairspray one worked well, with the exception of ignition. it would light probably only once every 5 tries. The deoderant one had a slightly better ratio. Both these guns were very fun to shoot and could achieve better distance than the pneumatic. however, the hairspray one only lasted a few months because the barrel got fouled up from the remnants of the hairspray. the deoderant one burns cleaner. the butan ones were good in theory, but miserable failures in practice. there is just no way to harness the butane gas efficiently. given, i was using lighters (kind of stupid). I've heard that using propane tanks works very well, maybe i'll try that someday. And earlier in this thread people have been ripping on the anarchists cookbook. now i've read the whole thing and while it is true that there are some truly stupid ideas (plastic explosives from bleach, anyone?) there is also some worthwhile chemical content in the book. for instance, the section on thermite is what led me into the (in my opinion) fascinating chemical reaction. So dont rip on it before you've read it.

They aren't that big; 2 x 1 x .25 inches. But i have 4 of them so i can combine them to make a more powerful magnet (given it is VERY hard to pull them apart afterwards...) Yes i tried using the bag idea but it didn't work very well. I had a weak ziploc bag and it just ripped when i would try and pull the magnetite from it. I'm sure it would be the most efficient way if i could find a strong enough bag. After the bag broke i just took two of the magnets and put a piece of string between them so they would hold it in place. then i just dragged the magnets accross the sand (no bag or anything) and when i had a sufficient amount i would peel it off into a bag. Not very efficient, and a pain to clean off the magnets at the end, but it worked.

yeah i just bought 4 neodymium magnets off ebay (holy crap, crazy powerful!) i went to a beach to test them out. in about 20 minutes i found over 2 pounds of magnetite. given, it's pretty impure so i'll have to refine it using the magnets again, but i'm pretty sure it will work in a thermite reaction.

I am going to assume you are planning on using the rust for the thermite reaction, in which case i think you might be sunk. The thermite reaction requires relatively pure ingredients (especially the aluminum; it can't be oxidized) so you might be better off creating iron oxide using the classic DC converter in glass jar with nail (very time consuming though). However, you could also go the way of the magnetite (Fe3O4). This is very easy to find and refine, just run a powerful magnet over most any beach and you should get plenty. If you aren't planning on using the rust for the thermite reaction then, well, i just made myself look like an idiot then didn't i

No, i've heard about government thoughts of listing everyone who's ever google searched "make plastic explosive" or something like that. Come on, that's ridiculous. If they're worried about TERRORISTS making plastic explosives from bleach, there's something wrong... If they can arm themselves with enough modern weaponry to fight wars, then i think we need not worry about them making their own black powder. We ought to be worried about them getting nukes from N Korea or S Africa. They will always find ways to get far more powerful weapons than anything they could find on the internet. And sure, why not trust the government? when have they EVER wronged anyone? (please do not include Indians, African Americans, Middle Easterners, wrongly-accused death row inmates, Afghanis, etc...)