Things I Won't Work With: Thioacetone (2009)
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He ends up doing the final step of the process on an uninhabited island in the middle of a lake for safety.
"The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable ... and genuinely denied responsibility since they were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile, and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds."
In other words, the smell intensity increases with dilution, _not_ decreases. We must protect this data from the homeopaths.
There's a saying! "Skunks don't have the WORST smell, just the MOST smell"
It's not the worst smell in the world. I would say it's not even remotely as unpleasant as summertime "dumpster soup", sewage, or whatever. But man, skunk smell is just so intense and overwhelming.
I did my coding bootcamp in downtown Chicago, near the Merch Mart, and (at least back in 2013) there was a chocolate factory not too far away. I remember walking to class and being almost overpowered by the smell. For awhile it turned me off of chocolate entirely, and I normally have a pretty strong sweet tooth.
I remember feeling so sorry for the people who had to work there, day after day.
Soup factories are notorious for smells. A single pot of cooking food generally smells good, but layer up a dozen different soup flavors and in total it smells like rot.
As a kid one of the tours we did was a chocolate factory. When the person leading the tour told us the employee told us workers were allowed to take as much chocolate as they wanted we were super jealous.
At the end of the tour, there was a buffet of chocolate snacks nobody wanted to touch (though we were allowed to and did bring bags of products home), the person told us that after a day of working at the factory, most workers have no taste for chocolate snacks whatsoever, and those which do will generally fuck up, binge, get an indigestion, and at best be a lot more reasonable (at worse stop eating chocolate if it was bad enough). Without the allure of the forbidden fruit (sneaking snacks out), chocolate is definitely overpowering enough that it's a turn-off.
But still, the covid hypothesis seems extremely farfetched. Desensitization from exposure I could believe.
The worst was when a reaction overheated and the chemicals decomposed.
The smell was truly revolting. It reminded me of skunk, burnt rubber tires and sewer.
My footnote is for a scan of the original printing but I believe the book has have recently been reprinted in multiple formats. Regardless of the format you choose, it's a hell of a read.
[0] https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
Though that may be a skill I acquired from my youth misspent reading Alexandre Dumas and Jules Vernes (as writers of serials, padding chapters was a very common occurrence which makes for frustrating reads when you hit 5 pages of fishes in 20000 leagues under, the ability to quickly skim and skip is necessary to reach the end).
"[...] it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile."
The MSDS warnings for ClF3 read like the State Department travel advisory warnings for Bhakmut.
> This stuff was first prepared in Germany in 1932 by Ruff and Menzel, who must have been likely lads indeed, because it's not like people didn't respect fluorine back then.
Referring to fluorine’s “gentle and forgiving nature” got a good laugh out of my wife, who has a chemistry degree. It also got me a good education about just how gross elemental fluorine is.
Bradford pears also smell similar, though tending a bit more fishy.
(Grad school, a project next door involved making a whole library of polyamine derived chemical probes, so we got basically all the flavor notes of semen in succession. The lols outweighed the unpleasantness.)
More likely, I guess, that the distance was up to a quarter mile and the time was as low as seconds, but for different observers at different distances.
It would be classed the same as pepper spray in the UK (a "noxious chemical").
The skunk lock and similar products that use a malodorous chemical are illegal in the UK for this reason.
There are "self defense sprays" sold in the UK and some other countries that just contain a dye, no irritant or malodorous substance, but even those are legally questionable at best - just there's been no case law yet that I'm aware of.
The UK is highly restrictive, in so many ways.
As for knives in the UK: so long as the blades under 3 inches long, and it is a non locking folding knife, it is legal to carry in public (with some exceptions).
Any knife longer than 3 inches, or any knife with a locking blade, cannot be carried unless you have a good reason (eg: going to/from work, etc).
You likely will have to argue this reason in court if the police officer is a cunt, and most of them are cunts when it comes to having common sense around blades.
Fixed blade knifes of any length require a "good reason" to carry.
A lot of coppers in the UK are ignorant as fuck too, and will confiscate your folding, non locking, sub-3 inch Swiss army knife requiring you to jump through burning hoops, wade through an ocean of piss, and sacrifice a virgin goat at midsummar to get it back.
Sounds like you can easily get around any problems by just saying you are heading for work.
I can't really overstate how ridiculous the UK's laws around knives are.
Even tradesmen with glaringly obviously valid reasons to carry knives are recommended to lock them securely in a toolbox while not at the jobsite to avoid prosecution.
I’ve heard the expression “don’t go into a knife fight and expect to come out uncut”. As in, even if you win, there’s a high likelihood you’re going to have slash wounds on some part of your body somewhere. Yes a bit of common sense should be in order but I can also understand why they want to be very strict about these things. Having to deal with a knife fight and the aftermath probably isn’t a great day at work.
there was one answer, and it was for a prank device to detect that.
Plus I got a box inviting me to select the vehicle type this was for. I took one, and got a lot of miscellaneous stuff having nothing to do with thioacetone.
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"Romani Invadest Albion!"
> Please add 40BC to the title
^^ like that
Wind shifts.
Before you know it your own troops are vomiting and choking on their uvulas.