jdurg

Solid NaOH works VERY well.

This can be done for nearly every Ksp value. Since the Ksp is an equillibrium constant at saturation for a dissolved salt. Since the Ksp is calculated from these concentrations at saturation, the concentrations can be determined. If you have a salt that's not binary, it's still easy to calculate. Let's take Na2SO4 for example. (Sadly, I cannot find the Ksp of this salt. It's a pain in the ass if you don't have a CRC Handbook to find Ksp values of soluble salts). So we'll assume the Ksp of Na2SO4 is 40.8. We would write the equation as 40.8 = [Na+]^2[sO4(2-)]. We'll replace the concentration of SO4(2-) with 'x', and the concentration of Na+ with '2x' since the concentration of sodium ions will always be twice that of sulfate ions. We now have 40.8=((2x)^2)(x) = 4x^3 -> 10.2 = x^3. x = concentration of the salt at saturation = 2.17 moles/L.

Well, the Ksp of NaCl at 25 degrees Celcius is 37.3. So the equation is Ksp (37.3) = [Na+][Cl-]. Since one mole of NaCl results in a mole of Na+ and Cl- upon dissolving, you can say that 37.3 = x^2 where x = concentration of the salt at saturation. So the square root of 37.3 = 6.11. Therefore, the concentration of NaCl in a saturated solution is 6.11 moles/L, or 58.44 grams per Liter at 25 degrees Celcius.

That's why I always laugh at people who are working out or doing a lot of running and drinking gallons of water. Sure enough, a short while later they start getting a ton of muscle cramps because of all the water they've been drinking. lol.

Yes, but if you drink enough water of any kind you will deplete ions and vitamins from your body which will make you ill. (It will cause you to cramp up as you remove all the K+ ions). On a volume for volume basis, distilled water will accomplish this a bit quicker.

But if you wanted to know the exact mass of salt needed for a solution to be saturated, you'd have to use the Ksp value. But if it doesn't matter what the mass is, then just keep adding salt until it doesn't dissolve.

I believe you would look at the Ksp of the salt. From that you can calculate the amount of salt needed to saturate a solution.

The anion does not matter. It's the Li+ ion that handles all the action. Li2CO3 is commonly used because it's cheap, it's fairly non-reactive, and it's easily absorbed by the body. However, LiCl could be used if one wanted. Anything that will give you that Li+ ion would work. (So really, if you didn't mind the intense pain and burns from doing it, you could just chew on some pure metal. heh).

But the theraputic dose of lithium is so VERY close to the lethal dose of lithium that giving it to a really depressed person isn't such a good idea. heh.

So what are everyone's chemistry related Christmas plans this year? For me, I plan on performing numerous experiments involving the dehydrogination of ethyl alcohol via alcohol dehydrogenase. When that is not happening, I'm going to try and rephotograph all of my elements. I plan on getting a digital camera for Christmas, so I'll set up a standard photography area so that the camera is always the same distance from the item being photographed and so that the lighting remains the same throghout. The photos I have now are pretty good, but they were taking at various different levels of light so they aren't all 'the same'. (Some were taken during a sunset, so there's a reddish-blue tint to the photos. Others were taken without a flash, and most weren't photographed from the same distance so the sizes of them in the pictures are a bit different.) Things like my noble gasses and my discharge tubes will not be rephotographed because they all look great as they are. I'm also going to polish and clean up the metals that I can. (I.E. metals that aren't really reactive in a powdered form, or toxic in a powdered form. I've got a dremel that has done a great job in polishing my Yttrium). If we get some snow, I might also try and get rid of some of my sodium metal as well. I figured it'd be neat to throw a few small chunks in a pile of snow, and as the snow melts the metal will suddenly start to react. Should be pretty fun.

But there are some other countries who do have capital punishment but have insanely high crime rates. Look at a few middle-eastern counties. You can be executed for simply looking at someone wrong. With the strictness of their laws, you'd expect there to be zero crime. However, that is not the case. Capital Punishment really only works in a high-wealth society. If the vast majority of people are really poor and are living a difficult life, they really won't care if they die or not. Especially if they are deeply religious. So really the socioeconomic status of a person will determine whether or not they are going to commit a major crime if capital punishment is present. If everybody was well off and their life was going great, then capital punishment may be an effective deterrent because they won't want to lose everything they have. So I also think that capital punishment is only an effective deterrent for the well-off and people with no troubles in their lives.

Heh. I alwasy get bashing over my beliefs. I've learned to deal with it. With the abortion aspect, most people say 'Children aren't mistakes. If you're willing to have sex you should be willing to care for a child'. I always laugh at that because it's just like saying 'You should always be perfect. It is wrong to ever make a mistake.' That's where I always say 'Well then, let's remove the seatbelts and airbags from your car because you should never make a mistake with something as important as driving a vehicle.' A typical response to that is 'But with driving you have to deal with other people making mistakes which are out of your control. Or you have a part of the car that can suddenly break and so you need those seatbelts and airbags.' With this, I just say 'Well, with sex the condom can break or the birth control can not work. You need to have that early abortion available for that. Also, someone could rape a girl and make her pregnant. That wasn't a mistake she made. It was something someone else did.' I've heard virtually all the arguments pro-choice/life. For my capital punishment thing, I just thought of the voluntary death thingy while at work today.

I love these types of debates. Here's my view on it. I am somewhat anti-CP simply because it's so expensive and time consuming. It requires a LOT of public money to go through the entire process and a LOT of time in order to ensure the sentenced is indeed guilty. It's cheaper to just keep them locked up for the rest of their life. However, I think that if a convicted felon wants to die rather than spend his eternity in jail, let him get executed. This would be something that would be given to the convicted upon sentencing. Tell them that they can either spend the rest of their life in jail, or they can be executed. Give them a good deal of time to decide and let them make the final choice. For abortion, I am mostly pro-choice. However, I am COMPLETELY against late term abortions. Once conception takes place, the pregnant woman has plenty of time to decide if they want to get an abortion. There is no excuse for going half-way through the pregnancy and then saying 'Nah, lets get an abortion'. I agree with early term abortions because we're human. We make mistakes. Perhaps the Birth Control didn't work. Perhaps the condom broke. Maybe you were under the influence and you shouldn't have been having sex. Maybe you were raped? Do you really think the eventual child would be better off living with a mother who does not want him/her or cannot provide for him/her? Overall, the impact on society could be far more expensive and far worse for that neglected child. Therefore, upon finding out about the pregnancy the woman should be able to abort the child.

Yeah, KOH easily exists in a solid form. But like NaOH, RbOH, and CsOH, it is quite deliquescent. I.E. it readily absorbs carbon dioxide and water from the air so it's hard to keep it 'pure'. KOH is used to make liquid soaps if I recall properly.

With Oxygen I'd have to use a platinum electrode or perhaps a silver one. Whichever element won't react with oxygen at a high temperature. (If it's melting point wasn't so low, I'd use indium since that's very 'unreactive'. I'm not sure if silver reacts with oxygen at any temperature though. I know that silver tarnishes, but that's due to halogens and sulfur oxides in the air). Hydrogen's just fine as long as there's no oxygen in there.

You want to know something scary? I COMPLETELY understood everything you just wrote. lol. That's generally the process I was going to use since having the tube at the high temperature will make sure that the gas is in there at a high pressure. As it cools off, the gas will lower in pressure as well, thus giving the nice low pressure that you want in a discharge tube. (While higher pressure will output more light, it will also shorten the life of the tube. The low pressure gas will still give off a TON of light). The trick for me will be bending the tube into the shape of an N for the nitrogen gas. That will take me quite a bit of time to do, so it may be a few months before it's all set and complete. My goal is to be able to produce glass tubing in the shapes of the elements they contain. Max Whitby over at RGB already has tubes setup for the noble gases, but there are none for hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. I would like to make those tubes for myself, but I'll be practicing with a helluva lot of nitrogen before I attempt oxygen and hydrogen. (I think oxygen and hydrogen may be a bit more dangerous due to their reactivity).

It won't be all too hard. The first thing you would do is fill the tube with an excess of the gas that you want. Then you try and pull a vacuum on that with your vacuum pump. Unless you have a really good pump, it won't pull a complete vacuum in there which will leave your wanted gas in the tube at a low pressure. It's one of those cases where a cheap vacuum pump may actually be better than a really good one. The only thing you have to deal with is a backflow of gas, but if you have it setup right there won't be one.

With the sodium peroxide method, you'll need to be VERY careful as the heating of the peroxide to a liquid form could easily catalyze it's decomposition which would be quite bad.

Yeah. Bromine VERY easily vaporizes. If you have enough of it, it will remain as a liquid. (I have a few mL of it). But it will also evaporate at a high rate of speed, and since the gas is so deeply colored and dense it is quite easy to see.

Yes, but the act of observing that 'object' at absolute zero would inherently transfer energy to the object, thus pushing its temperature above 0K. Since the act of observing it would involve some type of particle (photon) or EM wave to perform the observation. That particle/wave would cause the 'object' to obtain some of the energy from the particle/wave, thus pushing it above absolute zero.

Bromine can be kept in a sealed vial for an element collection, or you could react it with some aluminum foil and then RUN far away. You could mix it with some alkali metals, and again, run VERY far away. You could add it to some unsaturated fats and watch the color of the bromine dissapear. You could use it to form iodine from iodide ions. You could mix it with lye and form chlorine free bleach. There's a lot of stuff that you can do with bromine. Just don't ingest/inhale it. Or get any on your skin.

Yup.

I say that the positive electrode should be called the 'posode', and the negative one should be called the 'negode'.

This is a good theoretical question. In order to observe that gravity exists, you need to observe an object being moved towards another object. If something is at absolute zero, then it wouldn't be moving, would it? The act of it moving would bring it right above absolute zero. So couldn't we conclude that at absolute zero gravity would not affect that object? (ARRGGGHH!!!! Brain seizing cuz of quantum mechanics! heh. Kind of like how my p-chem professor mathematically showed that it is theoretically possible for someone to run straight into a wall and actually go through it. However, the probability of that happening is so infantessimally small that they don't even have a number for how small it is. lol. But it's not zero!)

Yeah, sodium bromide is used as a bath salt for your feet. It's also used to disenfect spas and pools for those people who don't like the chlorine.