jdurg

Athletes are drug tested not because of the "image" that the league wants to portray, but because of the monetary size of their contracts. The owners put a LOT of money into those contracts and they want to be sure that the performance of their players will not be hampered by the use of drugs. If you just spent $100,000,000 on a player to perform at the highest level for you, and that player was using pot and heroin which was slowing down his reaction time and ability to play the game, you too would be quite upset.

Heh. I actually like the smell of toluene. It is a major component in plastic model cements, so whenever I smell it I get reminded of all the time in my youth I spent building model cars.

Heh. Already done.

Heh. I really hope I'm reading this wrong, but your intial post asked: What if water was a linear molecule? So when you asked: I kind of chuckled.

Ca(OH)2 is most definitely a strong base. The problem is that it is not very soluble at all. What little bit of Ca(OH)2 that does dissolve, however, completely dissociates into Ca+2 ions and 2OH- ions. Therefore, it is a strong base because it ionizes, for all intents and purposes, 100%. Solubility has NOTHING to do with whether or not a substance is a strong acid or a strong base. Only the % dissociation separates strong bases/acids from weak bases/acids.

Yup. You've explained it perfectly. It's similar to Ca(OH)2, which is technically a strong base, but not very soluble.

UV light has a far, far, far greater wavelength than X-Rays and Gamma-Rays do. As a result, they are far easier to block and ANY non-transparent substance will block the UV rays. In fact, your sunglasses will block UV rays too.

Actually, your great-great grandfathers/mothers never turned lead into gold. Those types of nuclear transformations were not known about until the early 20th century. The goal of alchemy was to turn cheap, easy to get base metals into gold. As our modern knowledge of chemistry and physics tells us, however, their dreams were flat out impossible to do. Still, the field of alchemy led to many great discoveries about chemistry. In modern times it is possible to turn lead into gold, but the process is so inefficient and slow that the money it would take to produce the gold, refine the gold out of the now radioactive base metal, then concentrate it into a useable form would most likely cost in excess of 10 times the current price of gold. (I.E. in order to produce one ounce of gold in a nuclear reactor it would cost in excess of $5,500). So to sum it up, yes you can make gold atoms out of lead in a nuclear reactor, but realistically it would be absolutely useless.

I too fail to see any legitimate "reason" to prevent this from happening. The USA has VERY few 'friends' out in the Middle East, and to alienate yet another country with which we've had good relations is not a wise thing to do. Currently, the UAE has decided to hold off on the purchase of the ports in the USA until the USA can settle things. Meanwhile they are going through with the purchase of ports over in the UK. It seems to me as if the UAE is being very diplomatic over all of this and is just allowing the USA to hang itself if it so wishes.

Yeah, tell that to the person who just happens to be walking by and notices the bottle, walks by it, then gets covered in concentrated HCl and shards of flying glass.

I couldn't tell for sure if the decrease in color intensity was from optical differences or chemical differences. In the reaction vessel, the depth of the chamber was approximately 10 cm. In the tubes containing the water and NaHCO3, and eventually the vessel it is contained in, the diameter is only about 1.5 cm. So the difference in color intensity may be due to the depth of the viewing area. When I look at the tube from one end, it is a nice deep green like in your picture. It's when I see it from the side of the tube that it is nice and pale. In the picture you have, you have a large vessel so it is much easier to see the color. If you put some Cl2 in a thinner test tube, the color will be much less intense.

Pretty much anything in existance will oxidize potassium.

Indeed, Cl2 is a VERY pale color in regards to ClO2. When I made the chlorine gas in my element collection, the space right above where the Ca(OCl)2 and HCl met was a very intense color, but by the time the gas got through all of the purification steps we had setup (water, then anhydrous NaHCO3) it was barely visible. I couldn't even see the gas until we put a white cardboard sheet behind the collection tube and then we could see the green color. To this day, if I just hold my chlorine tube you really can't see the color when looking at it. If you turn the tube on its side and look at one end of it, however, the green color really shows up.

"I'd LOVE to go and visit the Middle East with my new America Is Great tee-shirt!"

Yeah, and there are some acids that can be/are unique molecular compounds too. If you were to go and say 'what's the exact molecular formula for an acid?' you'd get the same response; There is no exact formula. You can give a general formula for a ketone, or an acid, or a base, but you can only give an EXACT formula for a specific compound.

Correct. 'Soap' is not a unique molecular compound. 'Soap' is a classification like 'acid' or 'base' or 'ketone'.

Don't disregard the ability of the H+ ion to act as an electron carrier in this instance. Since these reactions do not occur without the presence of a concentrated HCl solution, the hydrogen ions must be playing a role in this reaction.

Heh. I didn't even need to look over at his profile to know that he was from the U.K.

Cellulose nitrate really can't "explode" per se unless it is confined. Hence it's use as "guncotton". The chances of it spontaneously combusting or exploding are really pretty slim. I mean, ping-pong balls are made out of cellulose nitrate, albeit a stabilized form of it turned into a plastic of sorts. I have yet to see cellulose nitrate suddenly catch fire when dry. It is, however, INCREDIBLY flammable and will burn very readily and quickly if ignited. As for sodium/potassium, they are really nasty buggers in a molten state. The liquid metal will eat through your flesh quite rapidly.