PolitiCook.net

The Importance of Tire Inflation - a Scientific View

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

Wow, lots has been said about Obama’s technically correct response to a question, to paraphrase, asked, “What can we ordinary people do?”. The McCain campaign has been brutal, and ignorantly so.

Nothing is more important, other than the drive train, in making any land vehicle “go” than the instruments that actually touch the road. Those instruments are tires, or as the Brits say, tyres.

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Chemical Weapons V: Locations

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

The United States chemical weapons stockpile is distributed all around the country. There was one outside of the Continental United States, but it is done will all operations now. Some of the facilities are finished and closed, but most others are not.

This will be a comparatively short diary to show where the stockpile is, or was. Some of those locations may be near you. Effort will be made to tell what kinds of materiel was located there. In no particular order they are:

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Chemical Weapons IV: Delivery

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

For any weapon to be effective, a means of delivery must be devised. This is particularly important for chemical weapons, because, even with protective gear, there is extreme risk to the forces using them if off normal cases occur.

The first delivery system in World War I was to open a valve on a cylinder of chlorine (chlorine is a gas at normal pressures, but a liquid in the high pressure cylinder) and let the wind carry it towards the target. That works OK for materials like cyanogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, and phosgene that are gases, but obviously will not work for solid and liquid materials. In addition, a shift in wind direction can be a disaster.

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Chemical Weapons I. They are still in our world. Overview II

Crossposted at http://Dailykos.com

This will conclude the overview part of chemical weapons. Once again, I focus only on the ones that have been developed and stockpiled by primarily the United States and the Soviet Union.

Most of the information here is about really scary agents, the nerve agents, but there was or is an inventory of other agents, and a considerable amount is in the hands of the civil authorities.

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Chemical Weapons I. Overview

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

This the first in a series exploring chemical weapons. We will begin with a brief history and basic properties, then move to the state of chemical weapons in the world today. Chemical weapons have been used for centuries in warfare. One could say, at the extreme, blackpowder and other explosives are chemical weapons, but modern usage defines chemical weapons as having a physical, physiological, or combination of effects against people.

There are many classes of chemical weapons, from “tear gas” (technically called a lacrimator) up to the lethal agents, commonly the “mustards” (blistering agents, vesicants) and the “nerve” agents (nerve impulse disruptors).

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How Fireworks Work, by a Pyro

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

I touched on fireworks a little in my series on the electromagnetic spectrum, and it is here.

Since it is topical today, I decided to expound on it a little. The “pyro” term is apt because I spent several years as a pyrotechnician, making everything from better screening smokes, better signaling smokes, better delivery systems, and novel bursting mixes for the Army as a civilian.

Fireworks are ancient, dating back, as best we can tell, to China. That is where black powder, a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, was developed. The Chinese used it in small rockets for display and for warfare for centuries until it, and its formula, made its way to Europe around 1250 C.E., give or take. That is where fireworks got started.

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Phases of Matter X - Elements, Compounds, and Mixtures

Normal matter (not exotic matter like black holes or neutronium) is either an element, compound of two or more elements, or a mixture of elements, compounds, or both. This sounds pretty basic, but is important and will be needed for future installments.The classic definition of an element goes something like, “a material that cannot be decomposed into simpler materials”. That is pretty good, but a more fundamental one is that an element is a material composed of atoms that all have the same atomic number. (The atomic number is the number of protons in the nucleus). This is a better definition because we now know that we can fission uranium, for example, into simpler elements.

Elements come in several varieties, called isotopes. While atoms in an element all contain the same number of protons, they can differ in the number of neutrons (uncharged particles, protons have a single positive charge). Only one stable element has no neutron in its nucleus, and that is the common isotope of hydrogen, the nucleus of which consists of a single proton. Another isotope of hydrogen, called deuterium, contains a proton and a neutron, while a third isotope, tritium, contains a proton and two neutrons. Tritium is radioactive and must be produced artificially. One way that can be done is to bombard lithium with neutrons. This is how thermonuclear bombs work.

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Phases of Matter IX: The Wonder of Water 2

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

Hydrogen bonds are not very strong, but they are common. Looking it from an energetic standpoint, covalent bonds (the pure sharing of electrons, like in diatomic oxygen, for example), then ionic bonds, like in salt, are stronger. But there are lots of hydrogen bonds, and numbers have power. The only other that is so diffuse, and thus so powerful, are metallic bonds. I have covered all of those in previous diaries.

A hydrogen bond forms when a hydrogen atom (the smallest and lightest) is bonded with either nitrogen, oxygen, or fluorine. From a zero point approximation, a hydrogen bond is a strong dipole-dipole bond, but they are much more important and quite different.

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Phases of Matter VIII - The Wonder of Water 1

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

None of us should be alive. We are only because of water. Water. Everyone knows about it, everyone uses it, but few understand it. Every schoolchild knows that water is H20, but few scientists realize the ramifications of that simple formula.

Water has a molecular weight of 18 atomic mass units (amu, the mass of a proton or neutron, roughly) since the common isotope of oxygen has a a mass of 16 amu, and that of the most common type of hydrogen has a mass of one amu.

Water looks sort of like Mickey Mouse, in that the two hydrogen atoms make an angle through the H-O-H bond of about 104.45 degrees.

Water, at 18 amu, should be a gas. Nothing with that molecular weight is a solid except for lithium, and it is a metal, and metallic bonds are special. I wrote about that earlier in this series.

All of the atmospheric gases weight more, on a molecular basis, than water. Ammonia, water’s close cousin, is a gas at STP (standard temperature and pressure, one atmosphere at 20 degrees C). Both ammonia and water share a special property, but water does it better.

The secret is the hydrogen bond. It turns out, due to both electrostatic and quantum mechanical considerations, that hydrogen (the lightest and smallest element) when bonded to nitrogen, oxygen, or fluorine (the most electron hungry elements in the second row of the periodic table) is “special”.

We should all be dead, and water should not exist. But the hydrogen bond changes everything. More in future, if any interest. I will hang around a bit to answer comments and stave off flames. Warmest regards, Doc.

Phases of Matter VII - Plasmas

Crossposted at http://Dailykos.com

A plasma is a noncondensed, fluid state of matter, much like a gas. The difference between gases and plasmas is that gases are electrically neutral, while plasmas have had some, most, or all (depending on conditions) of its atoms separated from one or more electrons.

Thus, a plasma is mixture of ions (atoms missing one or more electrons) and free electrons. This makes them have some extremely useful properties, and we exploit those properties on a daily basis.

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