The scariest stuff

Hello and welcome to another Eccentric Sphere.

Today we talk about the craziest chemical I have ever heard of. It's so weird that it actually fits this blog really well.

It's called Chlorine trifluoride. If you ever see a sign with those two words on it, walk the other way.

Chlorine trifluoride was invented in the 1930's by German scientists who called it N-Stoff, or Substance-N. The Nazis were actually considering using it as a weapon, but ultimately thought it was too scary to use. Wrap your head around that....

Okay, so what's so dramatic about this gunk? Well, it burns what can't burn, while gassing the entire area and corroding what's left. I could copy-paste a lot of chemical jargon here, but the payoff is that this stuff is nuts. Chlorine trifluoride can be safely stored in containers made from steel, copper or nickel but that's about it. The stuff reacts with the metal and forms a surface of fluoride, which makes it safe. If you try to store it in anything else, you are screwed.

What Chlorine trifluoride does is burn. It burns everything, including glass, concrete, asbestos and things that have already burned – like ashes. It explodes in contact with water, even just moist air. It is so combustible that it ignites without an ignition source. The only recorded spill leaked out 900kg of the horror which burned through 30 cm of concrete and 90 cm of gravel underneath.

Once Chlorine trifluoride is on fire, only noble gasses like helium or nitrogen can put it out. Oxygen suppressors like halon or CO2 are useless as N-Stoff merrily keeps burning anyway, it produces that much oxygen on its own. Essentially, it burns better than pure oxygen.

This nasty stuff boils at 11.75 degrees Celsius (53 F) and it burns at a temperature of 2400 C (4352 F). 2400 Celsius is more than it may sound. Lava is about 1300 C, an steel melts at 1370 C. These temperatures combined with its ability to easily burn the nonburnable, means that a Chlorine trifluoride fire can't be contained.

To make matters even worse, (I told you this was bad) when Substance-N burns, it releases large amounts of acidic gas, namely hydrofluoric acid and hydrochloric acid. Both of these acids are extremely dangerous, and when released in gas form, will corrode or kill everything in the area. Everything that's not on fire, that is. It even corrodes gold, platinum and iridium, which are all extremely resistant to corrosion.

So, why does this chemical horror exist? Well, as I mentioned above, the Nazis wanted to use it as a weapon, but couldn't figure out how. Then, after the war, they considered using it as rocket fuel, since it burns so very well, and with no ignition time to speak of. NASA quickly decided that accidents when using rockets are dangerous enough as it is, without adding Chlorine trifluoride to the mix. One rocket scientist was asked what the best thing to use was when Substance-N spills. His answer: “A good pair of running shoes”.

Chlorine trifluoride is however used as a cleaning agent in the semiconductor industry, as well as a cleaning agent in Uranium power plants.

There we go, and that's all for today. Join me again next time and until then, have a great (and safe) week!

Does it exist?

Today we are looking at things and concepts thought to exist that actually don't.

Let's start off nice and easy with a woman called Lillian Virginia Mountweazel. Mountweazel was a fountain designer turned mailbox photographer, who died tragically in an explosion while doing a piece for the Combustibles magazine.

If you've never heard of Miss Mountweazel, it's because she was invented in 1975 for the New Columbia Encyclopedia, as a trap for anyone who just copies and reprints the encyclopedia with another name.

This kind of trap placing is common amongst map makers, who like to invent towns that aren't there.

Educators have argued for years how best to teach children. Some say that one way is best, others argue that it's highly individual. New research shows that while children (and adults) have a preferred way of learning, i.e. visual, spatial, verbal, a combination of several etc, no way is actually better or worse.

A study done tested a bunch of kids and no matter which way they were taught, they learned and retained the information at the same rate. So, the notion that you learn better one way may not exist.

In a similar vein as the children above, it seems that there is no such thing as true multitasking. While some people are better than others at splitting their attention between different projects at the same time, they are just giving each project less attention overall.

There is only so much brain power to go around, and the more you split it up, the worse you do.

In a fascinating twist, listening to music can help you concentrate with reading and writing as long as there are no lyrics. Pure music and language are processed in different parts of the brain, so they don't compete. But add song, and the text you're reading gets harder to process.

Speaking of the brain, photographic memory is also a myth. Some people have better memories than others, but that's it. One of the most famous tests of photographic memory was conducted by a scientist who refused to replicate the test and instead married his test subject, so make of that what you will.

Finally we get to a controversial subject. Gluten free diets.

While it is medically proven that some people have celiac disease and can't eat gluten without getting sick, tests indicate that being intolerant to gluten without having celiac disease is not possible. In-depth tests have been done with groups being fed diets containing high, medium and no amounts of gluten. The subjects did not know when they were eating which diet, and when interviewed they reported feeling ill at any stage of the test, even when eating the gluten free food.

It would seem the multibillion dollar gluten free market is more interested in keeping people buying their products than telling the truth... Go figure, right? In any case, eat what you want, it's no business of mine.

That's that. Until next time, have a great week, and keep on existing!

Big does not mean Smart

It's been a tumultuous start of 2019 for the biggest boys in the video game playground.

EA's flagship Battlefield V had undersold like crazy, with pre-orders lagging 85% behind its main competitor Call of Duty, and that's only the start of that games problems, as player numbers are reportedly abysmal.

Bethesda keeps floundering about like a drunk elephant. Back in December, I talked about the bag controversy, their refund issues and their accidental leak of sensitive customer information.

Now, it keeps going. In the new years patch, they broke essential parts of the game, though they are now fixed, but not before tired players dubbed it Y2K19.

Then there is the Nuka Dark issue. In Fallout there exists a drink called Nuka Dark, which is essentially a 35% alcoholic coke, and in November (I believe), they announced the real world Nuka Dark product, a bottle of rum that looked like the in-game bottle. Together with shipping it clocked in at about $100, but when fans finally got it, they were outraged to find that it was a cheap plastic shell around a normal bottle, containing an equally cheap rum. Maybe not a case of false advertising, but certainly misleading. It wasn't stated anywhere that this was the products true nature, so in the absence of contradicting information, it was natural for people to assume the bottle itself would be glass in the iconic Nuka-Cola shape. Needless to say, but I'm saying it anyway, no one is happy about this.

Then we turn to Blizzard-Activision. Within a week (more or less) both parts of the game giant lost their Chief Financial Officers. The Activision CFO left to take up the same position at Netflix and shortly thereafter, the Blizzard CFO also quit. One wonders why?

Then came the big shocker: Bungie split with Activision and took the Destiny IP with them. In case you didn't know, Bungie developed the (mostly) beloved Halo franchise with Microsoft, before starting their multiplayer sci-fi shooter Destiny. They then partnered with Activision, and the controversies started rolling in.

Now, free from Activision, and popping champagne bottles in the office, Bungie is free to do what they want. However, they would do well to remember that they can't hide behind Activision anymore so any and all screw-ups are theirs to own.

Last year at the controversial Blizzcon, they talked about their E-Sports scene and how well it was doing and how it would grow in 2019. Six weeks later they axed all support for Heroes of the Storm. Preceding this move was a survey that looked at what people felt about the game. Now, a survey is circulating concerning Hearthstone, their Warcraft themed card game. Is Hearthstone next on the chopping block? In either case, Blizzards now former CFO warned before she left, that costs had to be cut. Ominous news for Hearthstone fans.

Finally, fans of the Alien franchise were excited when the official Twitter account started teasing a new game in the franchise. The tease seemed to hint at a sequel to Alien: Isolation, but then the bomb dropped when it was announced that the game in question is Alien Blackout, a mobile game. Naturally, people were pissed again. Apparently 20^th Century Fox is as clueless as Blizzard-Activision when it comes to the western video game market: we don't want mobile games. By all means, sell them in Asia and to whoever else wants them, but stop announcing them as a big deal to PC and console gamers, please.

That's that though. Join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres and until then, have a great week!

The good old days

Here we are in 2019, and it's time to get Eccentric!

Have you ever heard someone say stuff like “Oh, I was born in the wrong century”, or “I wish I could go back in time and live a simpler life”?

The next time someone says stuff like that, you can pull out some neat facts about how bad things were back in the “good old days”. And I do mean old...

Let's start with the good old tradition of having a beer with a friend. Back in Mesopotamia, sometimes around 1500BC, in the region that is roughly in Kurdish Iraq, people didn't get a drink of their own. Instead you got a straw of your own, and everyone drank from the same urn at once. Imagine going to the bar today, ordering a nice beer and instead of being served a drink you get a straw and the bartender points you to the table that's drinking out of the barrel you like. Yeah, I'll take my own glass, thanks.

This communal drink sharing did stop eventually and everyone got their own containers to drink from.

A common fear in people today is being contaminated or poisoned with toxins and harmful substances. It may surprise you that this is something that has basically always happened. It's a well known fact that the Romans were often exposed to lethal lead poisoning from their amphoras and water lines, but lets go back further.

250.000 years ago, the Neanderthals suffered very hard winters and autumns, and evidence left in their preserved teeth show that they ingested high levels of lead. Exposure from both contaminated water and fires would have made them extremely ill, with no way of understanding why, as they sought shelter in caves that amplified the lead poisoning.

Imagine you are a scientist. You've studied hard, worked hard and now you spend your days analyzing 700 year old poop. Not exactly glorious work, but we now know thanks to them that people in Lubeck, Germany had bad parasite problems. Improperly cooked fresh water fish is rife with worms and evidence gathered from medieval outhouses show that they had worms in spades. Interestingly, this research also shows that society shifted towards a more meat based diet around 1300, probably due to a rising demand for leather goods.

A lot has been written about how bad sugar is for your teeth, which is true. But did you know snacks like potato chips (crisps) are worse? Sugar is easily dissolved in water or saliva and washed down, but the starchy snacks tend to stick to the teeth and feed the bacteria that causes cavities.

This phenomena is known to have been a problem as far back as 15.000 years ago, when early settlers managed to cultivate domesticated wheat and barley. Grinding down these early grains together with nuts, legumes and made into porridges and flatbreads caused the same dental problems as modern chips. This has been proved again from teeth, these ones found in Morocco, but back then they didn't have dentists with modern pain killers to fix teeth far nastier than those found today.

Four good reasons to be happy to be alive today in 2019.

That's that, join me again next time, and until then, have a great week!