Is there a good archive of this kinds of "not normally taught" chemistry things some where?
https://librivox.org/the-romance-of-modern-chemistry-by-jame...
An interesting feature is that if you go up the periodic table on the iodine column, the species become less reactive, with nitrogen bromide being explosive but more stable than NI3 and the fluorine derivative, NF3 being stable enough to use in industrial semiconductor applications (etching), and with the benefit of not being a persistent environmental pollutant due to relatively rapid breakdown.
Edit: It looks like the ScienceMadness page references the exact location: https://www.sciencemadness.org/smwiki/index.php/Nitrogen_tri...
And his whole series of "Things I Won't Work With"
One day the other half of my class was at the lab. They were boiling some organic compound with potassium permanganate and probably sulfuric acid. The idea is that you have them in a flask, and a long refrigerated vertical tube to condense the vapors and send the liquid inside the flask again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflux#Reflux_in_chemical_reac...
They forgot to add some porcelain scrap to the flask, that is useful to get an even boiling instead of big bubbles. So they added them while it was already boiling!
It boiled too fast and create a jet of hot mix that reached the ceiling that was like 3 meters (18 foots) high. Lucky nobody got hurt, but as a reminder we had a brown mark in the ceiling for a few years.
Many experiments need supervision from someone that knows what they are doing.
Of course. He was neither saying or offering that though.
For the record, 3 meters are more like 10ft.