North Korea’s fabric made from stone
reuters.com
reuters.com
So basically they are wearing flammable and stiffening clothing that defeats the very purpose of combat uniforms....how can a country like this even survive the first few days of war? More reasons for it to never give up its nuclear weapons.
I believe they only issue cotton now, though my RAF shirts were still a cotton-nylon blend in the early 2000s.
The feedstocks would be acetylene (from carbide) and coal tar distillates. The enormous energy requirements of a carbide oven is why the American chemical industry settled near Buffalo, NY, that's where the Niagara Falls powerplant was.
My first thought was also that this must be something rockwool-like.
But I did learn about vinylon, so I got to learn something today.
The WHO says "all forms of asbestos are carcinogenic to humans" [1]. The CDC specifically addresses "naturally occurring asbestos," which it finds "is only a health problem if it is disturbed," e.g. via "surface soil disturbance" [2].
[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs343/en/
[2] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/noa/where_is_asbestos_found.html
In other news water makes you drown when sufficiently submerged
OP said their father keeps a bulk of asbestos in their house. For it to get to the house, it had to be picked up and transported. Once there, there is a risk it jostles around or is impacted by something, e.g. due to objects falling on it or it falling on objects. Collecting and keeping asbestos in any form appears ill advised under WHO and CDC guidance.
I also drink alcohol and use leaded solder FWIW.
The project in question was a volcano. It measured about 4 feet across and 2 feet tall. It was mostly made of chicken wire with paper mache. The crater was something like a large can containing a smaller can. I think the small can contained zinc and sulphur, which would burn to make suitably stinky smoke and fire. The other can contained loose powdered asbestos. A hose ran to it. You were supposed to blow into the hose, causing the asbestos to float up into the air like volcanic ash.
At least one other project in that book involved asbestos. It was a model airplane with a pulsejet engine.
PVA is one of the steps in the vinylon process.
I'd imagine this is a context-dependent acronym. Certainly, in public in the UK PVA refers to acetate, because it's a shorthand for glue.
This whole article reminded me of paper made out of rock. Depressingly, it's still a fuel-based product.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylene#Preparation)
"Until the 1950s, when oil supplanted coal as the chief source of reduced carbon, acetylene (and the aromatic fraction from coal tar) was the main source of organic chemicals in the chemical industry. It was prepared by the hydrolysis of calcium carbide, a reaction discovered by Friedrich Wöhler in 1862[17] and still familiar to students:
CaC2 + 2H2O → Ca(OH)2 + C2H2
Note that North Korea dropped 'communist' word altogether aroud two decades ago. Now it's Juche state.
Even during the lawful occupations of Japan and Germany, those countries are not referred to as “part of America” or “under British rule.”
Why the euphemism for Japan’s horrific and moreover unlawful occupation of Korea?
China can hardly be called a free market, by the way.
Read up on the chicken tax and the incident with Kerrygold butter in Wisconsin.
More recent examples are how the telcos got net neutrality repealed, the media companies strengthening copyright, and Trump loosening EPA restrictions. Those aren't really "free market" moves, but called free market by the parties who benefit from them.