The issue with isopropanol peroxide formation is that exposing it to air – even when just using it, like when you’re cleaning parts – starts the process. The air in the head space of your containers is also enough to form them over time. You don’t necessarily need to see solids in the containers for it to be dangerous, since they’ll crystallize out as you concentrate the solution during distillation.

It’s also a numbers game. It probably won’t explode the first time you do it. But there’s a chance each time. Do it enough, and you’ll have an incident.

There are chemical reductants that can clear peroxides. For industrial scale isopropanol distillation, I’m not sure what they use. It may be that they just never distill down to the point that peroxides concentrate to a dangerous level.

I love EnF. But I assure you, organic peroxide formers are scarier.

1. 2016
2. He currently works for a crypto betting market
3. 2016

Why on earth are we still listening to Nate Silver?

A lot of the Apollo work also got done in basically one administration (Johnson largely continued JFK’s policies). As soon as Nixon was in charge, NASA got gutted, and then they only had the resources for shuttle. Later Apollo missions got cancelled because Nixon thought the money was better spent killing more Vietnamese people.

Switching administrations means vastly changing policies, if for no other reason than the new boss hates the old boss. SLS “succeeded” (got hardware made and launched, at least) where Constellation failed partly because they buttered everyone’s bread in the right way.

HLS is dumb. SLS is dumb. But similarly to Commercial Cargo and Crew, it survived administration changes partly because NASA wasn’t directly at the helm, so the new guys didn’t just hit the big red stop button.

He’s like the third Car Talk brother. Unencumbered by the thought process.

Except for “I don’t even have the ability to conceptualize that alien’s gender, but who cares, I gotta get down with that.”

I work a 9ish-to-5ish in a science field, salaried. Nobody really cares when I arrive or when I leave, as long as the work gets done. Sometimes science stuff goes off the rails and I have to arrive early or stay late, but I keep track of my hours and arrive a little early or leave a little early on other days to compensate.

I mean, it took four years of college and more than six of a PhD to get to this point, which stunk. But now I can monitor my chemicals stirring in a flask for a few minutes while hanging out on my phone, which is nice.

Imagine this exact comment, but for advertising cigarettes to children.

If a business depends on doing harm to people to create ever-increasing shareholder value, that business deserves to burn.

Well, or when some yeehaw state botches an execution of one

A single AA battery is going to discharge itself just sitting on the shelf over a decade

This is commonly known information

My least favorite thing about these tools is that they are great at providing information that people don’t feel the need to look at critically.

“ChatGPT generated this, and it pretty much lines up with what I already thought, so it’s good to copy and paste” is not great for making conversations better.

They are cooled by liquid helium, but also have a liquid nitrogen outer dewar as well with a vacuum insulator in between. The N2 takes the brunt of the ambient heat so you don’t have to top off the (much more expensive) helium as often.