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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

An official lead casting kit? That's pretty neat. I just pulled cells out of discarded car batteries that I found while playing on a construction site, and melted it in bottle caps over the kitchen stove.

I cannot believe my parents let me do ANY of that. The joys of growing up in the USSR.

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When I was growing up in the former USSR, we used to sometimes enter the decommissioned parts of a nuclear plant / research station.

One day we found what was a deuterium/water solution ("heavy water") in a storage locker and took several gulps of it to prove something stupid.

Beat that!

I'd rather not. You win.

http://lana-sator.livejournal.com/160176.html#cutid1

heavy water is not really toxic, is it?

If it had already been used as a reactor coolant, or was from some other industrial processes, it could be more radioactive than you would like it to be.

Otherwise, no, unless you get enough of it to saturate your tissues and cause problems due to it being denser than your biochemistry evolved to expect water to be.

Did it taste like anything?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

An early experiment reported not the "slightest difference" in taste between ordinary and heavy water; on the other hand, rats given a choice between distilled normal water and heavy water were able to avoid the heavy water based on smell, and it may be possible that it has a different taste.

Didn't everyone make "tin" soldiers? We had a supply of old metal types (they are basically made of lead, no idea where we found those) and made armies of them on the stove. You could buy molds of various kinds to make them in. I wonder how much lead we ingested in the process (and from playing with them)...

i seem to remember these been sold as multi part magazines even into the 80s here in ireland. checking online it looks like an irish site is still selling the molds.

though when my brother was messing with them my father made sure we did it outdoors and with a breeze taking the fumes well away from the person pouring lead.

so we've lost the hobby of lead soldiers but we've gained 3d printers. i think we've gained overall.

http://www.princeaugust.ie/

Prince August! Yes, those are the molds we used, too! (And I'm talking about the 80s, too. I'm not THAT old. ;-)

Whether we have gained overall is an interesting question. If kids really learn to design and make what they want on 3d printers, that would be awesome. But many of the "improvements" since then are unfortunately mostly black boxes meant for consumption, not exploration.

I remember collecting and playing with mercury from thermometers (here in the US), probably why I can't recite PI to anything more than 6 places :)

Back in the early 80s at high school in chemistry class we had a beaker full of mercury we'd float nuts and bolts on. The teacher would just let us grab 'em out of the beaker with our bare hands.

Crazy stuff -- I'm still not sure how I feel about it. We've gone too far in the name of safety in some ways but in others it's needed as we learn more about the risk factors.

Regardless, my kids experience in school is profoundly different than mine -- very little hands on stuff or experiments. Hell, just going on a school field trip with your own kids requires a criminal background check...

I graduated highschool in 2007 and science class was devoid of experimentation. I remember there being a bunch of hype months in advance for a day where we just watched our teacher do something with a bunsen burner. I don't remember what she did with it, but it was undoubtedly within the realm of making food-dyed water boil over a flame.

I graduated highschool in 2007 and "luckily" our chemistry teacher assessed us with our bunsen burner skills every fortnight. We basically put all sorts of chemicals and heat them up; recognize what materials depending on color of the flame; create compounds from different elements; etc... Once some of that stuff splashed into my eye, after the burner was turned off and I took off my goggles. Off to the eye wash I went...

Oh, man. The eye wash tower. An eye washer and a shower rolled into one pipe that extended from the floor to the ceiling. The thought of ever working with a substance that could validate suburbia's property tax spent on those things was the subject of every kid's daydreams during science class. Or that poster of that girl with the seeing stick that said something like "Karen didn't wear her goggles. But now she doesn't need to anymore." Gee, Karen, I remember muttering, I'd at least like a shot at danger.

Six bunsen burners, test tube racks built into the three sinks, and an eye wash tower in each science classroom of my youth. Yet the only thing I remember doing in four years of highschool is an over-chaperoned field trip with drug dogs and watching baking soda, vinegar, and water expand a balloon (goggles on, of course).

Might as well teach class in a Willy Wonka factory but feed us celery all four years.

Maybe most high schools have gotten that way, but I had a very different experience. Made some chemical mixture in Chemistry that would go up in a puff if it was bumped. In my high school engineering classes, we stripped the motor out of a CNC router, attached a custom built head on it and then connected that router's computer to another control box we used to control two robotic arms, a conveyor belt, and a couple of control valves for water.

There are still a few good high schools left at least.

Your experience was extremely expensive and therefore not scalable to a nation where many highschools can barely afford teachers, sadly.

In the 1950's, teacher labor was subsidized by the fact that it was one of the few intellectual jobs available to gifted females.

I realize the experience I described cost quite a bit, but for some context, our high school was in a blue collar town. We several neighboring high schools in white collar towns, that didn't have what we had (and in fact were sending a few of their students to our school to participate in these classes). Instead they had fancier sports teams and facilities than we did. It was a matter of prioritizing money and energy, not necessarily spending more of it.

We used to steal stuff from the chemistry storeroom and make bombs. Today that'd get you a visit from the DHS and probably onto some kind of terror watch list.

I did that too, and used to worry about it. Then I saw a video of a guy messing around with a giant tub of liquid mercury, talking about how it's not all that dangerous in that form.

Doesn't it evaporate fairly easily, though? And can't it also be absorbed through the skin?

As far as I remember, mercury isn't the best thing for you, but it's not as bad as people make out. It takes a fair amount of exposure to do anything too terrible. It's the compounds that become very nasty (eg, dimethylmercury).

I remember an article in wikipedia about CFL's, it had effects of mercury exposure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Enviro...

Some people have an allergic-like reaction to it.

Indeed. The equilibrium vapor concentration of mercury is, IIRC, high enough to be hazardous, and you only need a tiny drop to saturate a room.

This was all prominently on my mind as I broke a mercury manometer during an unofficial experiment in school and was trying to find all the little drops that exploded across the floor and hid themselves in the corners. However, I can say that it's a very efficient way to collect dust bunnies... ;-)

But did you ever do a shoe-store fluoroscope?

> I just pulled cells out of discarded car batteries that I found while playing on a construction site

Dodging the acid in the lead-acid batteries?! Now that is dedication.

I raise my cup (of coffee) to you in honor of your superior talent for self-destruction.

If the batteries are dead/discharged, the pH is fairly high.

In any case, you can easily neutralize it with a little baking soda.

Or limestone.

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