What did you find today?

[Parts]

That an old tool I bought a few weeks ago for $2.50 is rather rare after showing to the leading expert at the flea market.  He has seen only one other and he owns it he advised me not to sell it

What is it? Was it one of the Starrett?

Found a nice size roll of new indoor outdoor charcoal colored carpet...runner size... for everyone to slop up with there boots this winter.

It's a center gauge/square the rule is Starrett but I am not sure if it's original to it, it is from before 1900.  He says it's worth a minimum of $100 but probably much more

Wow. That's no Starrett that I've ever seen.

I pulled up this...similar, but not the same. Ad I'm pretty sure is wrong though...probably Union tool company, Orange, Mass....not Orange tool co.

http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-combination-square-12-orange-172282803

Nice find.

There are no markings on mine except for the rule either like the one on worthpoint. Mine came with the rule the one the guy had came without one.  The scroll work it a little different but very close

[QuirkyCarla]

A comforter set on clearance for $69.99. Got $14 off because I had a 20% off coupon. 

[Parts]

A small portable record player from the 50's I think for $10.  I am hoping it works or is at least fixable so I can use it to listen to 78s

['andersom']

Found out how lucky I was yesterday.
I fell down a flight of stairs, in the morning, and got some deep tissue bruises in the bum.
Of course I did not feel all. During the day they developed further, and when I got up after sitting down for dinner, I noticed a few more. One only a cm from my coccyx. And, over my lower left rib there is a nasty looking deep blue purple spot, the latter is very superficial.
So, considering myself really lucky, not to have damaged a rib or coccyx.

[odeon]

You were lucky indeed.

['andersom']

My boss wanted to send me home, saying I would be completely stiff because of the bruising soon. I replied that that was even more reason to keep my muscles moving. I think it helped a lot indeed.

A colleague was offering me a massage. He's the hugging type.
The other offered to throw me off the stairs to get the right side of my body balanced with the left side.

[odeon]

Helpful colleagues.

['andersom']

I know, I'm blessed. 

['andersom']

Couple of days ago, at my mother's, we found a school note book, of my dad. On the first page, my grandparents had been fooling around. My granddad wrote with pride how his son had been accepted at secondary school, and, how his wife was bursting out in laughter, standing behind him, while he was writing. All written down in a very official style, as if they were at a notary attorney. With signature and all.
I never met my granddad. He died when my dad was 13. I have heard stories about him. But, this fooling around on paper, with my grandmother laughing her arse off, made him more real than anything before. I think I would have liked him.

[Lestat]

Been tidying my room and ditching anything useless or trash.

So far? some gabapentin caps, a round bottom flask full of iodine monochloride...shit..glad that never got stepped on, or unsealed. Enough packs of smokes in 10 minutes to last me the next couple of weeks, a whole load of unused rigs and pins (in packaging, still sterile), a small amount of money, and quite a lot of lab notes and various project research background stuff.

[TheoK]

Have you ever made ammonium nitrogen trioidine? I used to make that many years ago, outdoors and watch the spontaneous explosions 

[Lestat]

Fuck that stuff is so sensitive. Whilst I have never tried it myself, apparently it can be detonated by alpha radiation! Personally I'm not really in favor of putting radioisotopes of any kind in that close a proximity to primaries sensitive enough to make a crackwhore with BPD look ready to face off with mike tyson...they generally aren't cheap, nor all that easy in many cases, to get hold of:D

NCl3 is worse though....the triiodide is relatively safe, in that it can be prepared, left to dry, and then allowed to go off, or provoked with a bit of thread on the end of a long stick.....or, if your a kid, like most, a bit of a horror, baited with something sugary in anticipation of a fly coming by for its very last snack (well its a lot quicker and more humane than poisoning with anticholinesterases at any rate, that sort of toxicity HURTS, if it doesn't kill you...and presumably if it does...at any rate, one ends up feeling like they just went twenty rounds with a sack full of angry bricks and lost horribly..I figure far kinder to blast them to hades.)

(memories of that are not going to fade any time soon. I could barely walk to the bog a few meters from my room after that incident, everything was so stiff and painful. A long time ago now, but not nearly long enough)

Bit nitrogen trichloride is just plain scary. Yellowish, nasty smelling oily fluid which will go off if you so much as utter a profane word within a few hundred meters. And whilst I can't measure it, there is no way to drop-test the two for impact sensitivity I can think of, short of perhaps making weights out of aerogels, to the eye it at least LOOKS like it is a lot more destructive.

Never made or seen the tribromide though, have you ever tried making it, lit?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trifluoride is quite stable, enough to be a commercial item, its used in microelectronic fabrication. I think either for some sort of semiconductor doping, or cleaning silicon wafer processing chambers. Got to beat HF at any rate.

Hehe, I'd love to see some poor bastard try to make the astatine homolog to the series, if it were actually possible to do (even if enough astatine could be A-produced, B-not vaporised by the heat generated by its radioactivity, the radioactivity would cause spontaneous autolysis..interesting thought though on a conceptual basis, a primary or HE that is its own initiator...a dirty bomb that combines both explosive charge for distribution, and its radiological toxin in the same molecule)

Apparently NBr3 (well, the ammonium complex, assuming it behaves like 'NI3') is so unstable as to go off spontaneously, even at -100C, according to wikipedia)

[TheoK]

No, I never made anything but the iodine.

[Lestat]

Funny this particulr subject came up just now...right after I found a printout of a journal article, dealing with synthesis of nitriles, along with some amide, triazole and tetrazole derivatives from aldehydes, in which they explore the use of iodine in aq. NH3, liquified anhydrous ammonia, and alcoholic ammonia solutions.

My first thought was 'I wouldn't touch that with a fucking bargepole'

If someone proposed running that in any lab I was working in, or wanted to use my equipment, I'd run for the hills and take cover, in the first case, and tell them to fuck right off and leg it in the latter.

Some snippets of rxn conditions involve the former, followed by addition of such things as hydrogen peroxide, or azides.  And that in refluxing THF, or dioxane in some cases.


This is published in JOC, and they give a warning, a very small paragraph right at the end of some side notes about ammonium nitrogen triiodide,  warning its explosive, and can be sensitive to heat, shock or irradiation.

The yields of end products were absolutely amazing, only a couple of percent below stoich in most cases, but that protocol,  reads to me as though it was designed by satan himself.

Anhydrous NH3/I2? or even aq. NH3/I2 is bad enough, but oh, hey, lets see what we can do if we throw in a shock and heat-sensitive, explosive electron transport chain-targeting mitochondrial poison (I.e works similarly to cyanides), or better yet, lets toss in some fucking peroxide for shits and giggles. And peroxide in ETHERS? particularly THF, its a bugger for peroxide formation, I only buy what THF I KNOW I will need immediately, or what I know will be used up within a few months. Overkill I know, but better than becoming meatpaste.


Afterall, it wouldn't take very much at all, of sensitive primary like NI3 to form...one can imagine what happens when the whole shebang gets dumped into a pot full of boiling peroxide+THF/dioxane/ethanol were it to go wrong.

I bet the chemists involved in that research either had solid titanium gonads, nerves standing to attention like SS troops in the personal company of Hitler himself, and VERY steady hands, or in the case of those possessing a survival instinct, dived for cover out the nearest window.

[Parts]

An unopened one pound can of WW2 aircraft grease