jdurg

0.2052. Can't post a picture because I'm here at work.

Another common argument that is heard in threads like these is that abortion and murder are the same thing. That is something that I tend to disagree with. If you look at murder, it is something that could possibly happen to you, to me, to anybody around to read this post. If murder were legalized, we'd all have to fear being murdered at any point. With abortion, abortion cannot happen to you, it cannot happen to me, it cannot happen to anybody who is alive in this world. None of us here have to worry about being aborted. The fact that abortion is legal does not put your life in danger. If you look at the vast majority of the laws in existance, they are all designed to protect us looking forward. They are there to prevent things that might happen to us in the future if they were not illegal. With abortion or 'gay marriages', it's not something that will harm you now or in the future. That's my belief on this/these subjects.

Hmm. Sorry to hear about all these problems. I'm a Type I diabetic and one thing I've always found strange is how they say diabetics have a weakend immune system. I have really yet to experience that. In my life, I am RARELY sick. People can cough and sneeze on me and I never seem to pick up whatever bug is going around. I never caught Chicken Pox growing up and was recently found to be naturally immune to it. In fact, the whole reason I have diabetes is believe to be an overactive immune system. (The research hasn't advanced too far yet, but my doctor is looking into my medical history. As a young kid, before I got diabetes, I went through a large number of ear infections. Shortly after one of the infections went away, I came down with diabetes. It is believed that I have a genetic 'flaw' which caused my immune system to think that my Islet cells were a virus and thus killed them. So I guess my immune system kills pretty much anything it can find). I also drink milk like crazy. Have been doing so for my entire life. Unfortuneately I haven't really kept track of the brand names I've ingested. I just know that I haven't gotten ill yet when in reality, I should be one of the first people to get severely sick. (I don't exactly live a healthy lifestyle, though I did give up cigarette smoking a few months ago).

Hmm. That could lead to some strange pick-up lines. "Hey baby, want to see my cure for Breast Cancer?"

Topics like this can only spurn arguments and flame wars. There is no way that someone's viewpoints on this topic can be changed. If someone believes that life begins at fertilization, then they will ALWAYS feel that way. You will not be able to change their opinion no matter what you say. The same is true for those who believe that life begins 7 weeks after conception, or something like that. No matter what you say, they will ALWAYS feel that life begins at that point and not at conception. Trying to make people believe along the same lines as you will only lead to arguments and flame wars. People need to remember is that peoples answers to this thread are all their opinions. There are no facts. There can be no 'facts' since there is no solid definition of 'life'. So saying that someone is 'wrong' is just downright foolish. The same can be said if you feel that you are 'correct'. What you are stating is an opinion and nothing more, nothing less. With that disclaimer out of the way, here is my opinion: I believe that life begins when the fetus is able to survive outside of the mother's womb without any medical help/intervention. So if the fetus was born in the middle of the Amazon Jungle to some competent parents, it could survive.

I can tell the difference based upon the smells. Methanol has a much 'sweeter' smell to it than ethanol does. Ethanol has a bit more 'alcohol-like' odor to it while methanol tends to have a sugary sweet odor. Methanol is also incredibly toxic, but that's not something you can just tell by the odor or looks. Approximately 2 shot-glasses full of methanol will kill a typical adult, while far less than that will make them violently ill and/or blind. Oddly enough, the best antidote to methanol poisoning is ethanol. If someone is admitted to the ER after ingesting something with methanol in it, they will give them straight ethanol instead. The body would rather metabolise ethanol than it would methanol, so the methanol winds up being filtered out of the system unaltered. Methanol itself is not poisonous to human beings, its the metabolite of it that is deadly. Methanol is metabolised by the body into formaldehyde which does the major damage. Unaltered methanol will just pass right through your body and is quickly excreted. Hence why they treat methanol poisoning with ethanol. The alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme is better suited to attacking ethanol than methanol, so if there's a bunch of ethanol in the system it will 'ignore' the methanol which is promptly excreted in the urine. This is the reason why the small bit of methanol which exists in all alcoholic beverages is nothing to worry about. The proportion of methanol to ethanol is far to small to cause any harm.

Generally speaking, the major side effect of methanol poisoning is going blind. Not really too nice of a side effect.

Gallium's similar to water in terms of toxicity. Both of them can kill you, but it would be quite the freak accident.

Well, you can easily make a holder for the ampoules so that they don't role around, or so that they can be held upright. Look at my halogens. Those are in test tubes that were sealed at one end and I just built a little holder for them. Having it in a white color is very nice because it makes the colors stand out more. If the lighting is right, you can see the green chlorine, the orange bromine, and the purple iodine vapors. Although, it doesn't matter what the lighting is because you can always see the bromine. I guess element collecting has a LOT in common with coin collecting. You first need to set some goals for yourself so you know what you're collecting. Then you need to have a pretty good budget to work with. You need to pay attention to how the items are stored and contained. The main goal is also to get items that have great eye appeal to them. The more eye appeal a sample has, the more expensive it will probably be.

Yeah, that can make it a real bitch to work with the stuff. You want it solidify, but it just doesn't seem to want to get started. Usually if I take a sliver of some plastic and stir the liquid, it will begin to solidify soon thereafter. The fact that it wets glass is also annoying since if you have a small amount but in a big glass vial, if it melts and coats the vial, you really can't bring it back into one solid glob again. Rubidium is kind of the same way, but that's actually a good thing with Rb. I had bought a one gram ampoule of it off of E-Bay before they cracked down on the alkali metals. The little bit was in a small glass ampoule and was about half full, but you could see some heavy oxidation on the surface. I went and put the ampoule in a beaker of boiling hot water and liquified all of the Rb. I then went and swirled the ampoule around so that the metal could coat the glass. It coated about 90% of the ampoule with a small section exposed. It also didn't 'wet' the areas that had dust or other contamination on the inside, but it coated it enough to look really good. Cesium is nice because it melts just from holding the ampoule in your hand and solidifes quite quickly too. I wish I could have gotten my Cesium in a little cleaner of an ampoule though, because the inside of mine is covered with little bits of dust which now show up. So the glass is looking a bit blurry and less clear. (Though that could be miniscule amounts of CsOH which are attacking the glass. Who knows).

Heh. That's how I got the gallium into that vial. A buddy of mine gave me the gallium in it's original plastic container, but it was too big to fit into the small vial. So I melted it down and poured it into the glass where it finally solidified again. It was very oxidized, however, so I melted it once more and skimmed off the oxidation to leave a nice shiney surface. I want to buy more since I'd love to have that container filled up about halfway with gallium. (I don't want to fill it up too much since Ga expands upon cooling and too much of it in there can crack the glass).

Thank you. It took me a long time to put everything together and for many samples I was just in the right place at the right time. Being a repeat customer with many dealers has helped me get some good deals, and I've also had some financial success. I won my office's football pool this past year which earned me over $500, and my poker playing has given me quite a bit of money to spend. The Rhodium is about 1.2 cm wide and 0.7 thick. It weighs around 10-11 grams and I spent $200 on it. This was when Rhodium was only about $800 an ounce. Shortly thereafter, it jumped up to the level it's at right now so I got a GREAT deal. The Iridium is about 2cm in diameter and 0.8mm high. It's 35 grams of pure Iridium and cost me only about $400. So it did cost some money. But that money was well worth it. I got my one ounce palladium bar at Pd's low point, and a few of my silver pieces when silver was pretty low. The rest of the PGMs are about 6mm in diameter and nothing too special. I bought the gold pieces slowly only spending a little bit of money each time, but after a while all the gold has really added up. The vial contains a bit over an ounce of .999 pure gold metal, and some small, less pure nuggets. Another nice thing is that for carbon, it's pretty easy to find some small, rough diamonds that provide a GREAT example of the allotrope at a lower cost than high-grade diamonds. I also found some place that manufactures synthetic diamonds and got two pretty massive samples for only a couple hundred dollars. If they were the real thing (as in coming from the ground), it would have cost probably four times as much. I've just slowly found that buying things a little bit at a time and then upgrading later is the best way to fill out the collection. Over the next few weeks I will be upgrading my Cobalt, Ruthenium, and Rhenium samples since they are my "poorer" specimens and upgrading them wouldn't cost too much. I also would like to get more Gallium metal just to help fill up that container a bit more. Then, I'll purchase more osmium as the finances allow to watch that vial fill up. Ahhhhh.... The choices, the choices.

www.chemicalforums.com Periodic Table Just click on the link above and use the link on the main page to the Periodic Table. There you can see plenty of pictures of my elements and even download them if you'd like. I have yet to take really close up, detailed pictures, but that may be a project I'll do later on.

Wow. I really should have read the post first before I replied. That's what I get for trying to post at work. Nice catch.

It makes interhalogen compounds such as Iodine-fluoride, chlorine-fluoride, bromine-fluoride, etc. etc. In all cases, the fluorine atom is of course in the negative oxidation state and the other halogen is in a positive oxidation state. As a result, these compounds react pretty vigorously with most anything.

I have to totally disagree with you there. De-Ionized and Distilled water are COMPLETELY different. De-ionized water just means that any ions have been removed from the water, but non-ionic solutes can still be present. Distilled water is used when absolutely no solutes can be tolerated. De-ionized water is used when you don't care about non-ionic solutes, but you don't want any ions interfering.

Yeah, that's why I like the Iodine/Aluminum reaction. However, that beautiful purple cloud can do some nasty damage to your lungs if you go and inhale parts of it. It will cause a nasty case of pulmonary edema just like chlorine and bromine will. Liquid Iodine is also pretty neat looking. It's a VERY thick, soupy liquid that just pours out a deep purple vapor. When I actually saw the liquid, I was shocked. It was just Iodine in a test tube that we heated up, and I guess the vapor pressure from the subliming Iodine on the surface was enough to allow the rest of the solid iodine to actually melt. REALLY neat stuff.

lol. With that, you can just take some iodine and mix it with the aluminum, then from a distance fire a squirt gun at it. The water will make it go POOF!!!!!

I think they are. They always start out a bit slowly as the aluminum-oxide barrier is kind of annoying. However, once they pick up in speed and intensity they are INCREDIBLY neat to see.

At a pool/spa supply store you can get everything you need to make as much chlorine/bromine as you want. Once you've got the chlorine generation going on, you can direct the chlorine into a solution of NaBr which can be found at a pool/spa store. This will give you plenty of bromine and then you can use that to have some "fun" with aluminum or create some iodine from KI or NaI.

....and if the slightest bit of water gets into/onto your molten sodium, you have an explosion which will send molten NaOH and other caustic chemicals all over the place. You also need to make sure that your inert blanket of argon isn't going to extinguish the flame on your blowtorch. There are a lot of things that still need to be kept in mind when doing this, and thinking that you're going to get ounces of sodium metal is very unlikely. Now for the question about 'other neat experiments', there are a few that can be done. You can take some lye and make a concentrated solution out of it, then put some aluminum foil in there. The foil will slowly start to bubble and give off hydrogen gas. After a while, the bubbles will start coming off more vigorously and pretty soon you'll have a good amount of hydrogen gas. Another neat one you could do, although it is quite a bit more dangerous than the aluminum + NaOH one, is generate chlorine gas and use it to make some iodine or bromine. If you really want to do that one, let me know and I'll try and guide you in the right direction. Making chlorine is pretty easy, and once you've got chlorine you can use NaBr to make some bromine. Then you could possibly take the bromine and put some aluminum foil in there and GET THE HELL AWAY FROM IT! It's a pretty interesting experiment. Again, however, extreme caution must be taken when handling any of the halogens as they are all fairly toxic and reactive.

The problem with sodium hydroxide electrolysis is that in addition to making sodium metal, you also make oxygen gas and water. That's not good. You would need a good deal of NaOH in order to make sure that the anode and cathode are far enough apart to prevent mixing of the electrolysis products. For the oxygen problem, you could always seal off the molten NaOH and just draw out the oxygen by putting the electrode in a cylindrical outlet and either draw a slight vacuum to pull out the O2 or burn the O2 as it is coming out. Still, it's not an easy setup.

When I made my chlorine gas, which was quickly sealed in a glass ampoule, we did so using the HCl + Ca(OCL)2 method. Calcium hypochlorite is very cheap and easy to purchase in bulk. It's known as 'pool shock' and is a bit better value than sodium hypochlorite. (The two hypochlorite ions are a bit better than just one). So we had an apparatus where in the first vessel was a slightly oversaturated solution of Ca(OCL)2 and concentrated HCL added in dropwise. An outlet in the vessel then forced the resulting gas to flow through a vessel full of distilled water. From the water vessel, an outlet forced the purified chlorine gas to go through a vessel filled with anhydrous sodium bicarbonate. This dried the gas and finally, the last outlet led into the test tube where we collected the gas and eventually sealed it in. The setup worked very well and we generated a LOT of chlorine gas. We finally ended the reaction by putting in some anhydrous sodium hydroxide into the reaction vessel which quenched the reaction and formed a lot of bleach. heh. I guess that's why chlorine is my favorite sample. I generated it myself, purified it myself, dried it myself, and sealed it up myself. It was fun. (Well, it wasn't all by myself. I was up at Dave Hamric's and he was willing to help me out since he'd then be able to use the apparatus to offer chlorine to his customers if requested).