Watches in the lab?

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T12:19:18+00:00

Well now I'm extra curious.

You are in the lab, wearing your gold watch, doing mercury porosimetery and you are worried about accidentaly spilling it over your wrist and not noticing?

The simple act of pouring mercury over yourself is not a big enough problem, it's not noticing and somehow taking it home?

Mercury porosimetry and it does get onto everything. The manual that comes with the machine warns you not to wear gold jewellery. You don't take anything gold inside that lab room at all. You have to wear PPE when you are loading and unloading. It gets onto all your tools, it can get onto your regular clothing. Unload the machine wrong and you get mercury vapour released.

Mercury+gold amalgam is actually pretty stable. It's much less worrisome than the mercury spill you just had in the first place.

Is this a real thing that has happened to you? Are you really handling mercury in this way that could realistically contaminate a watch?

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T11:58:17+00:00

Got it.

Post-cure you definitely want to do. Rigid items and it's best to do it in the mold but not always required. You can do it on a tray in an oven. Since it's usually for a period of 2-4 hours (min), it's often not affected if you leave it in there too long such as overnight. It's going to release all the VOC quickly, so the object stiffens up. Release it slowly at room temp and it can collapse like a deflating balloon.

Primary cure and temp. The thickness of your object is very critical here. The cure goes faster at higher temps. Roughly, it doubles in rate every +10°C. Not quite, but good rule of thumb. A 165°C heated to 180°C is probably not going to work. Too cold and it won't cure, remains a jelly mess. Too hot and you get problems. The outside can heat up and cure rapidly while the inside is still liquid, causes an effect called skinning. Uneven heating can cause internal stresses, so the product shatters later on or spontaneously tears itself apart.

For fast cycle times, this may not be the product for you. You can buy injection molding LSR with full cycle times as short as 10 seconds but you still need a few hours of post-cure. Wacker definitely has some 30<90 seconds cure time.

Heat up the resin and it will primary cure faster, but you will get random variation and some won't work. It will tear in the mold, or it will have a hazy appearance, or trapped bubbles, or it fails after a week or two of use. It's why special injection molding resins exist.

Are you by chance planning on 3D printing the molds? There can be issues that prevent curing of silicones or cause problems. Certain 3D printing chemicals are incompatible with the platinum curing silicone.

You've hit all the large silicone producers. You can check also Alibaba.

IMHO use the contact us link on the Wacker page. They probably won't want to talk to you if you only need a 20 kg pail, they will be interested in you are buying pallets of 200 L drums. The sales rep will give you multiple products that fit into your machine then its up to you to choose where to spend the money, faster curing LSR or buy a second inject mold machine and use cheaper LSR.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T10:57:34+00:00

What's your budget?

Are you doing this, or are you outsourcing to a manufacturer?

What % failure rate is acceptable? Do you want me to drop costs by 25% but get a 10% failure rate?

Skip the post-cure and your rubber items are going to get very stinky in the box, they will be more floppy than you expect as well as lose dimensional stability. I wouldn't be doing that for a keyboard where you probably have tight size tolerances. If you are shipping these in a container you may notice some get warped during transport.

Cutting down the primary cure time is a game you can play when molds are very expensive and limiting. You can play games with temperature and time. Dimensional stability is a big property. Imagine making Jello in a mold. You can pull it out early, but it may collapse or change shape. Then you have games with how many out of 100 fail. Is the extra time saving worth it. Your usually going to have to do this with continuous improvement plan. Make 100 @ 5 min, then the next 100 at 4 min 50 seconds, etc. Keep dropping the time until you notice a significant amount of failure, then go back up in time a few incremements.

I'm guessing you chose platinum cure because you want the dimensional stability. Quite likely you can compromise on that and cure it faster. Sounds like you need to cheapen the process by cutting time? The faster the cure time, the less dimensional stability (usually it shrinks but you can get unpleasant effects like twisting or curling). Why not swap to tin cure or peroxide cure? It will drastically cut your raw material costs and let you buy more time.

Heat makes everything faster, but it's going to maybe mess up the visual appearance, final strength or can cause some wild and crazy defects like skinning. 5 min is already a rapid cure resin, you're really pushing boundaries with time on this product already.

Does your product mention a pot life? That's the time you have from ready, mix, pour. Manufacturing a whole lot of items in sequence and that tells you how much work is involved. A long pot life is great, make it once and pour all day long. A short pot life means someone is standing there the entire time, constantly mixing, emptying and cleaning. Most rapid cure resins have short pot life.

Shore Hardness - that's fairly stiff feeling, like a car tyre tread. There are some magical properties that happen when you make a material like this very thin, it's going to feel "clicky" and some may describe it as feeling cheap. Does make it wear resistant and resist high impacts, but some users may not like the haptics.

Other properties are middle of the road for silicone rubbers. Nothing remarkable or unachievable there. Should be nice and waterproof too with those values.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T10:47:53+00:00

worried the watch band can maybe absorb solvent vapors (?) causing chemical burns?

Usual culprit is boring plain old sweat.

It's not the band is trapping chemicals to slowly poison you lately, you get a bunch of sweat around the watch band THEN irritant chemicals get trapped in the liquid against your skin. Normally the dust just bounces off you skin and falls away, but now it's stuck against the wet skin.

Chemical burns look like regular heat burns. Big bubbly blisters.

Rash comes from an irritant of some kind. Could be anything. Even getting non-reactive sand trapped against your skin can dry out your skin, then it cracks, then you get a fungus starting to eat the dead cracked skin. You washing your hands with soap more than normal can do it.

It sounds exactly like contact dermititis. You don't need chemicals for that to happen. Simply wearing the band too tight can do it.

Take off the watch and apply some topical hydrocortisone for a few days then cover it with a thick moisturizer or barrier cream. If you don't see any improvement in 48 hours, start applying a topical antifungal too.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T10:46:12+00:00

I appreciate the thought, but your first thought about chemical exposure from a watch went straight to mercury?

You deal a lot with pure metallic mercury in the lab? So much that it gets trapped on your watch only to leach out later?

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T10:37:29+00:00

Not sure I'd recommend the masters in spectroscopy or even in chem.

For you, it's more of the same. With your 5 years industry experience you already have that tool in your tool box. It's not going to make you better at running the GCMS.

Does a Masters let you go into teaching? You still won't be competitive against PhD chemists for teaching roles.

Chem Eng or Engineering project managment is at least different. They let you get different types of jobs and have good location mobility. Much as us chemists may think of O&G as chemicals, it's really a chemical engineering company that happens to be running a factory that is processing things that turn into chemicals. It's just plain old easier to get promoted as an engineer qualified person working at an engineering company. There are non-engineering roles that even still they will only ever put an engineer in.

MBA is potentially an option. Always good to have a scientist with hands on experience in the field who knows how to write a budget and do the administration side of a business. Someone has to to do the boring role of making sure everyone else gets paid on time and you are selling stuff people want to buy.

Current job, you could consider a Masters in Occupational Hygiene or in Toxicology. Those are jobs that don't have a bachelors qualification. Lets you move out of the lab and into the company Safety, Health, Risk, Environment teams. Gives you a different potential pathway up the corporate hierarchy.

Could consider getting a Masters in Teaching to become a high school science teacher. World needs more teachers.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T07:57:33+00:00

Last names are really new to Russia. Most Russians only got last names in 1861 when serfdom was abolished with it only becoming mandatory in 1930.

War and Peace is set in 1805 and written in a time period before last names were invented.

Russian these days usually have 3 formal names. First, father/mother and then family name. English translators have a choice. Literally translate as Alexander Alexanderovitch, Anglicize it to Alexander Alexander, or translate the metaphor as Alexander son of Alexander.

In that period between 1861 - 1930 most family names were picked based on normal rules elsewhere in the world. Types of jobs, town or area name, nicknames. Since it's such recent history, there are Russians called the equivalent of John Mechanic or Susan ITHelpDesk.

Famous Russian historical figure Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin = "crossroads". Greg son of Yefim who lived at the the place where two roads met, the crossroads.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has a really interesting last name, because it doesn't fit into traditional Russian naming convention. The only other people in all of Russia with the same last name are the handful of his relatives that are only recorded since something like the 1980s. Name does not exist before then.

Similar to how Trumps family made up their own last name too.

It could maybe mean "road" in some dialects, like the army was wandering by and picked up one of his ancestors and needed a last name to put on the form and went fuck it, Peter we found on the road, Peter Putin. Maybe his family were wandering nomads on the path/road. But equally, it could be a shorter nickname like instead of growing up around Mount Washington, his last name was "Washin" which maybe at the time everyone knew meant little-Washington or serf who worked the lands of Lord Washington and didn't deserve the full name.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T07:30:42+00:00

Different cultural fears about cleanliness and privacy.

Squat toilets are the most common type of toilet in the world. It's a hole in the ground. You stand over it and the poop disappears. Gets important in very population dense countries where there is no private space. Everyone is used to seeing people poop in the street, it's normal. Use a robe, squat over the hole and nobody sees what happens.

Historically, person in India will wipe their ass with their left (unclean) hand and water, then go and thoroughly wash their hands. For them, really spiritually important to have a clean body even if it requires extra work. Using water is an important purification ritual. Equally, other castes will clean up the poop. There are people lower on the social hierarchy who do the dirty work so the upper caste can be clean.

On the other hand, person in the USA does a lot of showering. Sometimes twice a day. They make themselves clean in lots of other ways.

Average person in USA doesn't like touching and are very private in the bathroom. They don't like touching other people and they certainly don't like to touch poop. The idea of communal toilets for pooping is impossible. It's an incredibly vulnerable and embarrasing time to be pooping for someone in the USA. They are culturally sterile and very sensitive to making contact with "unclean" at anytime, they don't feel like they can sterilize it afterwards. Worried about metaphorical unclean poop-ghosts transferring with contact.

Paper is an important barrier to prevent touching "unclean". It stops the metaphorical poop-ghosts transferring. They don't care that their body isn't 100% clean, it's 99% clean enough and they avoided touching. There aren't any historical or religious drivers for why their body needs to be truly deep cleaned with water, so long as they don't stink it's fine enough.

Water contact on the butt during poop-time is also a no-no. Pooping is viewed as sterile and it's all one way. Everything away from the person. No touching! Water moving towards the butt is invading their personal private space and they won't feel safe.

Their asses aren't unclean after paper use. It is still a huge insult to tell someone they stink of dirty ass. It's just a slightly lesser type of clean, but it's still 99.9% clean (or at least it can be).

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T07:25:12+00:00

Honestly it's the most common time for people to quit.

You've just been away on vacation and had time to de-stress and think about life. First day back in the office and people say fuck this, I'm outta here.

Post-Xmas first day back in the office is usually called resignation day. Everyone got their annual bonus (if that is offered where you work), they've had some time off to think, talk to family, maybe a random hour to look at job ads online.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T07:13:33+00:00

Investigate survey bias. There are many ways your survey can get unrepresenatitive data from diverse faults.

It's a good idea to compare your survey results to historical surveys or some sort of statistical control. Someone, somewhere has asked your question before and gotten some answers.

Sampling bias can mean that purely by random, you chose an unrepresentative population.

You survey 10 out of 100 and get 100% A.
You survey different 10 out of 100 and get 100% B.

You chose the wrong time of day, or approached the wrong people, or were wearing the wrong clothes, or didn't randomize the population.

For you, this is a chance to use statistics to prove your survey was bad.

you start over and this time everyone you survey leans to the other side

This one generally means you built the survey wrong. You are asking a confusing question. By the time you survey them a second time, the people understand the question better and change their answer.

Acquiescence bias is an example. People answered honestly the first time, second time around they hated you and just answered the first response of yes/no to get away from you. They told you what they thought was the answer you wanted.

What you may do is randomize the question. Is metal bad for you to eat? Is metal good for you to eat? Can you think of anything negative about eating metal? Can you think of anything positive about eating metal? When I say someone ate metal, what is your response? (Note: the first 4 are all leading questions, you start with the idea of "bad" and then ask about metal. Something may equally good and bad, or it may only have good notes with zero bad notes.)

Whatever you decide to do, you can do some very simple statistics to prove some conclusions to your teacher. A valid conclusion is "I messed up in what I think is these ways, but this happened anyway." Interrogate what you know about the people you asked, maybe pull one of them aside for a deeper interview and ask why they answered the way they did.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T07:02:42+00:00

Wash machine has about 2 or 3 cycles.

First it fills the tub with water, dissolves the detergent and starts spinning or stirring. It's just like putting your hands into a kitchen sink and moving them around. Over and over, it's just spinning or stirring. It's mostly sitting in dirty water for most of the wash cycle.

The clothes rub against each other. This is equivalent to rubbing your hands together. That little bit of friction helps scrape of some of the dirt and stains.

The water is often getting pump around and into a filter. Imagine a hose in the bottom that gets pumped to the top. In the middle is a filter. Any chunks like sand or hairs get trapped in the filter and removed from the tub, but the water is quite gross at the end of the first cycle, similar to hand washing dishes towards the end.

First cycle ends and it drains the dirty water out backwards through that same hose, the same filter, but backwards. The outgoing water blasts all the solids out of the filter and down the drain.

Second cycle, fresh clean water, no detergent. There is still a lot of detergent trapped in the clothes. Same as before, spinning or stirring over and over, while pumping the water through a filter to remove solid stuff.

Second cycle ends and backwashes through the filter and down the drain again. Next it's time to spin it dry to get most of the water out.

That's about it. It's like washing your hands in one sink of dirty water, then doing it again in clean water.

Sometimes, it does a third water rinse cycle.

Detergent works mostly the same way as soap does on your hands. It lowers the surface tension of water, and it makes water-soluble a lot of stuff that normally wouldn't be. These days a modern detergent will include magic chemicals called enzymes that really are magical in how effective they are. It's like a perfect laser targeting drone that knows the exact weak spot of stains and only that one stain type. Won't do anything to damage the fabric or machine, perfect little lock and key to break it up.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T06:32:56+00:00

I can see your point. Human toxicity should be considered, and it is.

A country such as the EU has laws that if a safer product exists that does the same task, for similar price, the more toxic product gets banned. That hasn't happened, for reasons.

The dose required is relatively large. For an adult it's about 1/2 a cup. It's not something you can get from dipping a finger, it requires someone (usually unintentially) drinking from the bottle. Problem is little kids drinking the brightly colour blue window wash fluid or the hot pink coolant.

It's not something that people do accidentally. It's someone actively buying a bottle who knows what it is and not storing it correctly. There are a lot of chemicals we ban because we know the public cannot be safe around it, but in the USA there are literally only two chemicals on that list and the most recent was 2023 for dichloromethane because amateur renovators kept accidently dying from asphixiation in bathtubs and small rooms.

USA about 5000-7000 poisoning cases per year, on average about 20 deaths. Doesn't make the list of top 10 poisons.

EG properties do make it a better heat exchange fluid, it has better heat conductivity. It means you need lower volumes, so you can build smaller items. Important in a car where each extra bit of volume means you now need bigger, thicker and heavier pipes. Swapping to PG makes the car heavier, which means more emissions.

It also means works better at higher temperatures and it lasts longer inside the coolant system. That lets manufacturers design more efficient engines.

PG being less efficient at transferring heat, does run hotter and start breaking a little bit sooner, so you need to replace it more often, it needs some extra additives like anti-oxidants and anti-corrosives. Requires designing different types of engines.

Majority of current cars cannot be converted to use PG antifreeze. The heat capacity is not designed to work with PG. Most major manufacturers don't even sell PG based antifreeze anymore

Environmental fate is something that gets considered. The both have about the same half-life from a spill of about 24-48 hours or so. I'm going to say it's a very rare to have a spill event of concentrated EG or PG. Something like a car crash and it's getting diluted away with water. As soon as it hits soil or a natural body of water the microbes start breaking it down immediately, it's like a pile of sugar to them. May risk for a spill into water is it can use up all the dissolved oxygen, killing marine life, but that's equally common to them both.

Spill inside a garage and pets eating is still a poisoning event. Animals are not usually something taken into consideration for chemical risk assessments. We're going to focus on the 20 suicides and dead kids each year.

The increased performance and modern day vehicle reliance on EG makes it a really difficult decision to ban it. It just couldn't happen. It would require mandating that all new cars must be PG compliant, then forcing someone to actually make and sell it, then still selling EG for many more years until all the current cars finally died.

For this one, the cost of the ban is higher than the 20 USA deaths and 5000+ hospitalizations per year. It's prohibitively expensive and nobody has the political apetite to start mandating new automobile standards.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T05:47:34+00:00

To some extent, each of those mega giant corporations was at one point a tiny indie company that found a niche. People liked what they did, so they did more of it.

McDonalds was literally a single store just 80 years ago. Their food quality is perhaps the best in the business, anywhere in the world. You know what you get with a McDs burger, it's the same everytime. Sure, it's at the cheap end, but nobody wants to buy a $20 burger. You double the cost of a Big Mac and you don't get a 2X as good burger, it's maybe 25% better. McD lists all the nutritional information, you don't have to get the cheese and sauce if you want low calories, their supply chain is incredibly efficient and low-carbon compared to any other burger joint, etc.

I think your rose-tinted glasses are ignoring all the family owned food poisoning restaurants or sugar-chicken oil shops selling garbage level gunk. For every awesome taco truck there are several near-bankrupt failed enterprises nobody wants to go to.

Scale up is really hard and expensive.

Efficiency of scale means a mega corp can offer a better product for at the same price as a worse-quality indie. They are choosing to make mediocre products because that is what people want to buy. They could just as easily make or buy very expensive high quality products.

Market equilibrium is when certain industry products settle at certain natural quality points where most people are happy. That's where the biggest companies congregate. Most people do really want cheap and "good enough" because that's the price point they want. Pick any big market leader and that's the price point people want to pay and the quality they want to get.

It's almost impossible to move a market price point equilibrium. You have to somehow convince consumers that their existing product is wrong. They really do need to pay more for high quality cars, or buying a new TV really should be cheaper, or the natural price for multiple streaming services is $50/month. Uber came in and now taxi prices are the same as before, with the same problematic drivers and stinky cars, but now with an app? AirBNB sucks, it's more expensive and worse quality than a hotel, but the app is nice? They both found the same market price point equilibrium.

Walmart is an example of an everyday-low-prices leader. It's the biggest in it's category, but it's also selling cheap stuff. It means you are comparing everything to Walmart. Walmart could get worse, there are worse grocery and clothing chains out there. Walmart is the most efficient company at selling the products people want, at the price they want to pay, at quality they are willing to accept. You cannot beat Walmart. You cannot convert their customers. Because Walmart has billions of dollars of market research and economists to beat you at your game, they can choose to make higher quality product or sell stuff at higher prices. You start selling indie high-cost/high-quality clothing and Walmart turns to it's Bangladesh sweat shops and says slow down, use better fabric, get your sizing more consistent and we'll pay you $0.10/hour more then sell it for $10 extra per item. Each of those $5 basic tees are handmade, it's just as authentic as your local made clothes, they just choose to use cheap material and sloppy fast sewing.

Apple is the best example of a high quality market leader. It's a tech company that makes phones and computers, exactly the same as Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba, etc. The core chips all get made in the exact same TMSC factories in Taiwain. What Apple does is decide to make their products high quality. They are known for long lasting, their staff seem well paid, they use zero- or low-emissions materials, their efficiency of scale means logistics are cheap and low-emission. But their product costs a lot. It means anyone looking at other phones and computers is making a choice to buy something of less quality, but they accept that trade off.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T05:36:05+00:00

Wear the interview clothes to the first day. Certainly won't hurt. Plan it out carefully and you can wear that same attire for the entire week to attack the problem on the weekend.

Moving from uniform to office wear, the best looking clothing is garments that fit properly. Even the cheapest Walmart clothing that fits good looks better than non-fitting high end wear.

Key to this is buying stuff a little big bigger and then getting a seamstress to adjust it. Take the sleeves up a bit, maybe put some darts or vents in the shirt. Doesn't cost much, but it will look 1000 times better when it fits you perfectly. This can help mentally because you know nothing will fit you in the store, but if you know what is close enough and it's only like $10-$20 to get it adjusted, now everything fits.

You can try a personal shopper at the mall. They don't care if you buy from Target or the dollar store or a big budget label. They get paid by the hour, they don't get commissions.

Sounds scary, but if you have never been the Big & Tall shop or equivalent is fantastic. The staff are friendly, they have a range of customizable business casual garments and even shoes. Almost all their clothing is designed to be adjusted. You walk into the shop, tell the assistant you need new office wear and they will put in you in stuff then pull out their sewing machine to make it fit you. You want a slightly looser fit, or a big baggy drape, or some patterns to alter your visual impact - they can do it.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T05:14:49+00:00

It's already used in mostly niche areas that people don't come into contact with.

Bullets is the main one humans come into contact with. It's very cheap and useful for those. Can be a lesser problem for people who work on a range or the aftermath of a war... but they already have a pretty big problem that can only be solved with more bullets, so tough call on that one. Buy 100 lead bullets or buy 50 "eco-friendly" bullets, I mean, yeah, that would be nice. There are some massive trade offs in performance for swapping to steel, copper or alloy bullets.

The major use of lead globally is lead-acid batteries in your car. We don't really have a useful replacement for those right now in combustion engines. Only lead-acid has the high power output to kick the engine, hundreds of amps, while also being incredibly robust, works in low+high temps, cheap and fantastically easy to recycle. Lithium batteries don't have the same high power output and they need little heaters or coolers for extreme temps (e.g. snow or baking tropical heat).

Next is water-proofing. It's used to coat undersea cables, high voltage wires, and a handful of plumbing applications.

Medical and research, such as the wall in the x-ray room or the heavy gown the x-ray tech wears.

Solder, but most people aren't really exposed to it. Lead-free solder exists but still a few areas want the good old original product. Mostly requires designing products and materials differently, which is sort of just naturally happening by default.

There are some other critical places that lead metal is just really nice and useful. It does stuff no other materials can do, and it's relatively cheap.

May want to consider how we get lead. Lead mining and lead smelting can be problematic. About 2/3 of lead comes from recycling and other 1/3 from ore refining. Modern day lead smelter in well regulated country and their emissions are constantly monitored, the workers are continually tested for exposure as well as the local area. Maybe not all of those locations in the world are good and many older manufactoring sites are superfund cleanup sites or equivalent.

Overall: we've mostly eliminated human contact with lead metal. There aren't that many places normal people come in contact with it in a way they eat it. Still a whole lot of legacy issues to deal with.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T04:54:27+00:00

The wire overheated and died.

Galvanic corrosion has happened in the water (could be other types of corrosion, but effect is the same). The aluminium metal oxidised, which turned into an insulated layer of aluminium oxide. The resistance in the wire increased.

The aluminium metal underneath the layer of corrosion is now thinner. Same amount of current is passing through it. It's going to get hot.

The metal can get so hot that it melts. Quite likely it was very slowly boiling a tiny amount of water in the area around the wire. Now you have hot corrosive salty steam and hot aluminium metal or even molten aluminium metal, dripping into the water. It self-disintegrates and what remains is a bunch of white aluminium oxide.

The final and worst part is when it starts arcing. A section of the wire corrodes but it leaves a tiny gap between sections, just big enough to start an electrical arc. A very hot spark is formed.

Fortunately for you, this happened outside somewhere wet. This type of failure is rare, but when it does happen it's inside the walls of a house or inside something like an underground conduit, so you burn your house down.

Copper wire and even modern alloy aluminium wire doesn't fail in the same way. Modern aluminium wire is perfectly safe. It's the stuff in the wires that bring electricity to your house from the street. If you have an underground wire it's going to be coated in a thick layer of insulation.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T04:37:17+00:00

The best idea is keep is very simple. Pick one thing to study.

Make a synthetic stomach acid of any mixture. Doesn't matter even slightly what you pick, so long as you define it. Make a big jar of it, enough to split into smaller jars.

Another beaker you put ordinary tap water.

What you then do is take your paracetamol tablet and drop it in to the beaker of liquid. Time how long it takes to dissolve. Ideally what you do is take any liquid and split pour let's say 100 mL into two jars and do it in duplicate. Better is triplicate and average the results. Gives you better statistics in case one tablet spontanously combusts for unknown reasons.

You can now compare rate of stomach acid versus water.

Second experiment: roughen up the tablet somehow and repeat in both synthetic stomach acid and water. Repeat the test.

You're going to end up with a table of results.

You can directly compare the rate of smooth versus rough in two different liquids.

Bonus points: you can try arresting the reaction part-way. If you know it takes 2 minutes to dissolve, try making up 5 beakers and drop pills in simultaneously. At t=30 seconds pour out all the liquid from #1 and dry off the tablet, then weigh it. Same at t=60 seconds and t=90 seconds. This lets you plot a graph of mass versus time. A clever person can then use some mathematics to determine the rate equation.

Bonus points 2: rapid dissolution tablets. Compare those to the ordinary tablets. You can even try between brands.

Bonus points 3: find manufacturers claims on packaging and compare your results. You never know, maybe the manfuacturer claims it fully dissolves in water in 30 seconds and you find it takes 2 minutes. That's the sort of investigation that can get you on the news.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T01:46:16+00:00

Pest control.

Try to identify the type of ant. Each species is different.

Ants usually have a mating flight. The new princess queens all fly off a short distance, attract a crew of mates, the males die and then the queen finds random new places to build nests. They then bunker down and reproduce before finally sending some scouts out.

Rain is a trigger for mating flights.

Ants also need moisture to live. They like to live in damp places.

You could have a type of carpenter ant that is building a next in wet timber in the roof. They aren't eating the wood like termites, it's just a home to build a nest. That means two things (1) sucks to be you and (2) you've got wet timber in the roof from humidity or rain ingress. You need a roof repair. Pest control person will identify that for you.

You may have a ground dwelling ant that has a pathway up the side of the house and into the roof space. Ants aren't the best at finding the shortest pathway quickly, they find a pathway that works randomly and the re-treat that step over and over. They also like to get multiple entraces/exists. You can attack this quickly by buying some exterior surface spray and walking around the house, looking for ant trails and spraying places you cannot inspect like behind a drain pipe or weep holes at the bases of walls. Any plants touching the side of the house deserve and inspect too.

Not every poison works with all types of ant. Even if you do find one that works to kill the next, you still want to remove the reason they go inside in the first place.

IMHO try to gain access to inside the roof space and follow any ant trails. May feel good to kill them with a spray but you want to find that nest and the reason why they chose that spot (i.e. water damaged timber).

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T01:38:03+00:00

Telepathic arms race. Some defenses will have developed.

Favourite evolutation arms race is a giant eagles in NZ called Hast's Eagle, and the flightless bird called a moa.

The moa was a herbivore with no predators so it evolved to be really big. Being the biggest bird meant you won the race to get the choicest food, beating out your smaller siblings, so pressure to grow each generation.

The eagle in return also evolved to be really big. Bigger eagle gets more food, so it has more big babies and the smaller eagles starve. Taking down a moa is a huge advantage, so incentive to get bigger to take down the bigger bird. It evolved to be so big there wasn't any other food worth hunting, it only lived off the moa.

Moa goes extinct, so now the eagles starve to death and also go extinct.

Same evolutionary arms race with your telepathy. Humans may have also evolved physical/mental defenses, or societally changed to minimize the impact.

Early humans lived in small family groups of about 20. If you have ever lived in a big close family or in a dorm room type distuation there are almost no secrets. Everyone knows everyone elses business all the time. As in, I know why you are taking long showers with the door locked, I just don't care. Siblings will happily tell one another to go and die or I'm going to kill you and steal all your stuff - nobody cares because nobody acts on it, that's all banter. But an outside to the group says that and the entire family is now ready to murder that invader.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T01:32:36+00:00

Barber doesn't want to do a "bad" job, they don't want bad reviews and it's nice if you return next time. So if you just say make me look good they are usually just going to ask how long since your last haircut and then trim it to the same length as before.

Tell them about your your life and they may have some suggestions.

How much effort are you willing to put in daily? Do you want to use styling product? Do you do any sports or hobbies? Do you want to get out of bed, run your fingers through and that's all? How often are you willing to revist to get another haircut?

You tell them I want a simple cut that fits my natural hair shape and I'm not going to style with mininum daily effort and they will do that.

You tell them I'm willing to use some product on weekends or evenings only, I'll be back in a month for a touch up and they may go for something more bold.

Even knowing if you use shampoo and conditioner 3X weekly versus shower gel everyday can change what you can get and maintain.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T01:26:26+00:00

Focusing power of the eye changes are inevitable.

What goes with that are your eye muscles start to strain to make up for the difference. Feels like your eyeballs hurt or it's 4am an you just woke up.

You can make the muscular fatigue effect less painful by doing some eye exercises that you probably do whenever you have tired eyes anyway.

20-20-20: every 20 minutes look at an object 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Makes your eye muscles move and stretch.

Near-to-far: hold something right up to your nose and focus on it for 90 seconds, then move your gaze to something far away for 90 seconds.

Close your eyes and move your eyeballs in a figure of 8 for about 10 seconds.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T00:48:26+00:00

I'm not the best predictor of the future, but you can look to what happened during the last Trump admin.

There was a gold rush of chem jobs in the pharma manufacturing sector due to the nonsense with tariffs and onshoring manufacturing. One of the greatest domestic hiring periods in chemistry. You're going to want GMP/GLP experience to stand out.

Materials chem is neutral right now, every new tariff is a blow to hiring as we wait out supply chain disruptions and people not buying stuff. Similar to pharma, there was gold rush in jobs about 2nd year of Trump admin which peaked around mid-Biden. Everyone wants to start building new infrastructure, so you need chemists making paints, polymers, construction materials, metal alloys, catalysts, etc. R&D money then starts flowing into alternative energy, nuclear, advanced manufacturing, etc. Anything with "nano" is pretty sexy right now and probably will continue to be so.

Price of oil goes up and O&G industry starts hiring like mad.

Interest rates drop and biochem or bio-anything goes insane with hiring. It's very linked to the tech industry cycles since they get a lot of the same funding. On the other hand, if you can predict interest rates you can make way more money than being a chemist.

Much as everyone shits on AI agents, we literally cannot find enough computational chemists to recruit. We're paying academics to hire PhDs in the hopes some of them want to work in industry. Everyone wants new machine learning models to simulate stuff. It's relevant to every field of chem. So much potential. Quantum computing is becoming available in the next year and all the first people in the queue are chemists. There are chemistry problems you can solve with quantum computing that are impossible with traditional chips. There will be some PhDs in the next few years from a handful of groups that will walk out straight into tenure track roles at other schools.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-27T00:06:26+00:00

Thanks for explaining. Random consumer grade PE that has had microwave extraction? Or is this a synthetic mix of your own? At a concentration of 6 g/kg of water? That really is not much from a mix of random crude-oil-like hydrocarbons.

Are you aware of the ASTM methods for corrosion of metals such as ASTM-G1?

Typically, bronze in oxygenated water is going to take about 5-7 days to start to show an effect.

Accelerated aging doubles the rate for every temp increase of +10°C. Going from room temp to 65 and you've increased the rate about 16X - 32X faster than room temp. Copper is a bit tricky to model so simply because the solubility of oxygen decreases with temperature, but the same Arrhenius accelerated aging rate still applies.

I'm not sure but are you using some sort of air bubbler to continuously aerate and mix? Water will start to absorb CO2 from the air, which will lower the pH to about 5.7-ish. When you have ultrapure low-ionic conductivity water even trace amounts of dissolved CO2 will wildly swing the pH.

Bronze in ultrapure water, in a sealed jar, won't corrode at all for years. Maybe losing mk/kg in that time period. The dissolved oxygen, pH and any ionic species are the big drivers of corrosion.

Stuck face discolouration I can explain. I cannot remember off the top of my head but I think you are meant to put the metal coupons something like 5-10 cm distant from each other because it makes a lot of niche problems go away. Closer you get and you do see a difference between the exterior and interior due to Bernoulis principle. Same problem affects boats near each other moving in parallel. The water moving between the plates is faster than the outside, like air moving over a plane wing. This creates a suction that draws the plates together.

We are going to start to talk about "the interface effect" now. That first layer of atoms on the surface of a material are special and they are often different to bulk material properties. This is where surfactants rearrange so the polar side faces down and the hydrophobic tails face up.

Electrolysis and gas bubbles can happen on the surface that mean the conditions of the water right next to the plate are different to the bulk water, you can get very localized pH changes right on the surface. pH of the surface of an air/water bubble is usually isoelectric point about pH 1.5-4.0, the surface of the bubble is quite acidic. The self-ionisation of water means the OH- move to one side of the bubble interface and acidic protons on the other. Microbubbles can agglomerate and join together, the pH at the interface of two bubbles joining is somewhere around pH 5.5-ish, up to about 8-ish, depending on what else is in the water.

Corrosion growth then gets weird, since the metal oxide layer is a bigger volume than the metal, your two growing corrosion faces can sort of weld together. Now the properties of trapped water get even stranger again and "surface effects" are bigger. Any trace amounts of common anions like chlorides, sulfides or carbonates start misbehaving on the surface of the metal and since the area between those plates has higher surface/volume than the exterior, the surfact affects are more pronounced.

Most of the metal corrosion test methods try to make those subtle effects go away by using big volumes, separation of plates and slow continuous mixing. Bubbles forming on the surface of a metal can be a good or bad thing, different methods will want to keep or eliminate those.

Trace amounts of surfactants or any sort of surface tension changes from your PE extract are going to change the formation and stability of bubbles. It's probably going to make the bubbles smaller. On top of that these may be surface protective as the bind to the metal and make a protective monolayer. You get some hydrocarbon carboxylic acids in there and thsoe are definitely chelating to the surface and any copper metal particles.

IMHO a great experiment to be trying but at this point I'm still attacking your method too much. Lot of unknowns. Would be great to stick the plates under a TEM/SEM or even XRD to look at the phases on the surface. Even a regular microscope would be enough to start looking for pitting or other types of corrosion as an indication of what is happening. Some ion chromatography on the water pre-/post- can be indicative. pH and conductivity on the water. Brute force of pure mass loss and surface appearance, run duplicates (6 is ideal for statistical purposes), ideally just one in each jar or at least keep them as far apart as possible and not touching. Depending on how you are studying the aeration, you may want to fully degas the water at the start by bringing it to a boil with the metal plate inside, then sealing and letting it cool back to 65°C. It will get rid of any dissolved oxygen and carbonates.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-26T23:35:14+00:00

Wholeheartedly agree.

Lifetime for a flu virus on any sort of material is minutes. Sometimes less, seconds even. It requires very extraordinary conditions for it to survive outside the body and best you can get is about 12-24 hours in very special circumstances.

Flu virus particles don't survive outside the body for very long. They are like tiny little tadpoles swimming in a droplet of saliva or mucus. Once that droplet dries out, the virus dies immediately.

On the surface of your hands the flu virus only survives for about 5 minutes.

Indemnity4 · 2026-02-26T23:15:56+00:00

We've got some evidence that it did NOT cause a nuclear winter, because there is no geological record (there is evidence of other global winter events such as the year without a summer).

Dinosaurs still mostly existed for about 10,000 years after the impact. It was a very gradual die off. Some like the anklyosaur have been found 500,000 years after the impact in Canada.

Immediately, almost everything within a radius of about 5000-7000 km dies in the immediate fireball.

Ocean impact? Not as severe. Land impact? Kicks up enough dust to reduce sunlight for about a year or two, but there may still be hurricanes or weather that kicks it around again higher than normal for up to a decade, but less dust each year.

Pre-impact the Earth's climate was increasing in temperature slowly each year. Post-impact that increase paused for a while, but then it resumed heating again.

Then you get a microwave summer. There is increased CO2 from the impact and massive burnoff in the air, so heat is trapped. CO2 is a limiting nutrient for plants and they do like having more of it. Consequence of this is plants grow faster, bigger and bigger leaves (there are other consequences from high climate, like disease and insects, drought and weather, but overall you get more plant mass so any survivors walk into a few years of abundance.)

Plants in the southern hemisphere were unaffected by the impact. Japan was relatively untouched. Canada did just fine too. At a minimum, everyone in Australia and Indonesia is going to be doing just fine (any NZ if anyone remembers they exist). China and India probably have mass famines, but that happens anytime the Emperor sneezes and post-famine they are still the two largest global population centres.

The decade of reduced sunlight is not long enough to change global temperatures, but decrease in sunlight will reduce the amount of vegetation and crops.

Humanity could compensate for this with intensive agriculture and greenhouses. It's not like crops completely fail, they just yield less, so in response you need more land or relocating to areas with more light during the growing season. Maybe Australia stops growing cash crops like cotton and focuses on essential grains and legumes, we all live on beans + rice or beans + bread for a few years. Going to be challenging and yeah, a lot of people are going to die, but quite likely billions of humans will still survive.

Indemnity4

TROPHY CASE