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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

If you liked this blog entry, go check out http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with... which is a subselection of his blog entries about chemicals that he won't work with. For entertainingly good reason.

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I love that particular subset of his blog. My favorite is still the entry on chlorine triflouride ( http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa... ) This stuff is so nasty, it'll burn stuff that's already burnt. Oh, and there's no real way to put it out, so you just have to wait for it to finish eating through whatever was unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity when the spill happened.

"I do note that if you run the structure [O2F2 or FOOF] through SciFinder, it comes out with a most unexpected icon that indicates a commercial supplier. That would be the Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company.

"They offer it in 100g, 500g, and 1 kilo amounts, which is interesting, because I don't think a kilo of dioxygen difluoride has ever existed. Someone should call them on this - ask for the free shipping, and if they object, tell them Amazon offers it on this item. Serves 'em right. Morons."

"There’s a report from the early 1950s (in this PDF) of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks."

From http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa.... Brilliant.

That URL needs to lose a trailing hyphen:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...

I can't edit it any more. :-(

I didn't mean to seem pedantic. :-) More just for those who get a blank page (the response I was receiving -- no visible indication of 404, at least with Flash, etc. blocked) and assume the site's timing out.

It is not pedantic. It is important and I am kicking myself for not having checked that the link was working.

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