Thermite

M o o d : Haha, thermite. :D
R e a d i n g : Nothing, at the moment. Lost my copy of Ulysses to the Library
L i s t e n i n g T o : "Sine Reality" by Sanxion7
Clouds with some sun peeking through
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Yep, I've jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon, if you haven't already noticed. And no, I could stop Twittering whenever I want. I swear.

Okay, I can't go without a day of Twittering. It's addictive. I know. And being able to access Twitter by a mobile device makes it worse. But hey, it's only because humans are egocentric. And I'm egocentric. Thus, I am human. You can't deny that logic, haha.

Oh, I promised to post up some pictures. Posts and posts back I did.
Haha.

This is what I was working on last Wednesday that prevented me from posting up the picture that was supposed to go along with the Towel Day post...



It's my (Not-so-)Weighted Companion Cube (Wannabe Aperature Handheld Portal Device)-slash-Egg Drop Device.
I'm very proud of the name, since I realized that the two compartments that held the four eggs in place (to be dropped from the roof of a three-story building) made it look like a Weighted Companion Cube from the ultra-awesome game Portal. :D

Anywho, on to the main point of my post...

After seeing an uber-cool experiment my AP Chem teacher did with thermite, a couple of us AP Chem students wanted to buy some for ourselves since...well, it was an explosive. That could melt ironclad ships. And well, it was an explosive. So that'd be kinda fun. :D
I just found it so amusing that we could make it at home. With some rust and finely powdered aluminum and possibly a strip of magnesium ribbon wire, it could make a nice homemade explosive, haha.

And yeah, that made me consider: If this was so easily accessed, why didn't we have tons of terrorists go out and buy thermite and blow up buildings with that? I mean, thermite is an industrial mixture used for many different purposes (aside from melting ships and whatnot, that is). And considering how aluminum is so common and iron oxide is well...rust, it's relatively cheap, no?

But I suppose there's a risk to acquiring such items--one, you could potentially kill yourself, since these explosions are quite...exothermic. And if you didn't plan it too well, it would probably suck for you, since you may be within the radius of the explosion...and yeah.

And perhaps it's more of a matter of subtlety--by using thermite, you're pretty much shouting to the world, "HELLO THAAAAAAAAR! I ISH HERE TO BLOW YOU DUDES AND DUDETTES UP INTO NOTHINGNESS!!" Yep, it'd be an easy way to expose yourself to the world, especially if the people you bought the materials from could probably track you down or something.

Or even some empathy for everyone else--the whole idea that since they wouldn't want to die in a fire, they should spare everyone else as well and go with something that's probably quicker...and not-so-noticable-and-unnatural--hence the biochemical warfare scares...?

Just my two cents. Not that I'm going to make my own thermite and blow stuff up, I swear.
Okay, even if I did, I'd probably just make a little bit and then pour it into a bottle to see if it could melt down my cousin's old bike into a blob...and then I'd probably add some sand to the mix to make glass or something. Haha. Alchemy at work.