(no subject)

Sometimes reading can be more satisfying than watching things- for example, all a YouTube video of some of these buggers would show would be either a big explosion or people runing away, whereas there's some real skill gone in to the descriptions...

(Polyazides: "Thermodynamically, nitrogens bonded to each other are always regarded as guilty until proven innocent - there's always the fear that they're going to find a way to throw off their civilized clothes and revert to wild nitrogen gas."

And more specifically, Chalcogen Polyazides: "Spirited stuff, that tetra-azide. The experimental section of the paper enjoins the reader to wear a face shield, leather suit, and ear plugs, to work behind all sorts of blast shields, and to use Teflon and stainless steel apparatus so as to minimize shrapnel. Hmm. Ranking my equipment in terms of its shrapneliferousness is not something that's ever occurred to me, I have to say.")


(Via thesaucernews on james_nicoll's blog, which often has good stuff like this)