
Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride - hythloday
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php
======
cageface
Actually I worked as a synthetic organic chemist in a previous life and I was
always much more afraid of the chronic systemic poisons than the things that
blew up. It's one thing to have something go boom in your fume hood and quite
another to get a drop of something on your glove that you don't even notice
and then later that week all your hair starts falling out and everything
tastes like metal. Organo-selenium, tin and tellurium compounds are
particularly nasty.

I'm much happier now with nothing more serious than RSI to worry about.

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andyjohnson0
_a drop of something on your glove that you don't even notice and then later
that week all your hair starts falling out_

Anyone who doubts this can happen should read about Karen Wetterhahn [1], who
was killed in 1996 by a couple of drops of dimethylmercury that went through
her glove. Another nasty chemical to avoid.

[1]<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn>

~~~
Scaevolus
Why do some dimethyl compounds penetrate the skin so easily? Dimethylsulfoxide
(DMSO) will even carry various other compounds into the body as well.

~~~
chm
DMSO ((CH3)2SO) is a polar aprotic molecule, which means it's neutral _and_
polar. It's easier for a small, neutral polar molecule like DMSO to pass
through the phospholipid bilayer of your cells than it is for acetate
(CH3COO-).

The "dimethyl" is not what it's important.

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Someone
Always worth a reread for the combination of gripping content with good
writing. Just to pick another one in this series:
[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php)
(about stuff that will burn sand (not: burn _in_ sand)

~~~
keithpeter
"... _every-man-for-himself exotherm_..."

Excellent, absolute hoot. I've only had to use hydroflouric acid once (leather
apron, double gloves, goggles, fan on) and that was enough...

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hmbg
So it's a no on preparing some in your pressure cooker?

<http://what-if.xkcd.com/40/>

~~~
charlieok
I'm fairly confident that comic is the reason this thread's article is getting
a bunch of attention now.

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brokentone
Here is the last discussion on this post, 3 years ago. There may be relevant
comments there: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148425>

(although it looks as though the link has changed to the main archive on this
site, but all the comments and post title refer to this article. Odd.)

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benhsu
I loved this quote from
[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/11/things_i_won...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/11/things_i_wont_work_with_hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane.php)

Synthesizing polynitro compounds is no chocolate fondue party, either: if you
picture a bunch of guys wheeling around drums of fuming nitric acid while
singing the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, you're not that far off the mark.
You really have to beat the crap out of a molecule to get that many nitro
groups on it, which means prolonged heating of things that you'd really rather
not heat up at all.

~~~
five18pm
Derek Lowe has real high class humor. I always end up knowing new things while
laughing like a maniac. It just makes things a little awkward at office
though. I always had to keep watching over my shoulder just so that no one
would notice that I was reading things which can blow up with explosive power
which will make TNT feel like baby powder and laughing like a maniac :)

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claudius
[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/)

The other articles in that category are mostly equally exciting.

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coldcode
So much stuff like this in Chemistry. It's why I gave up on my Chemistry
career and went into programming. When computers blow up, they don't destroy
the building or make you change color.

~~~
Joyfield
Unless you are programming drones with missiles.

~~~
coldcode
Then it's supposed to blow up.

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vixen99
It's many days since I laughed so much. Especially "If the paper weren't laid
out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it
was the work of a violent lunatic."

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ffmike
I passed this link to my dad, who actually spent a good chunk of his
professional career working with fluorine compounds. His comment: "The guy is
just chicken -- or ill-equipped for fluorine work."

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zopf
Seriously considered naming my band "Satan's Kimchi"

~~~
triplesec
that's what a top poster on the article's comments said

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hcarvalhoalves
So this is like 10x worse than plain Fluorine [1], which is already evil?

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw>

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ajdecon
And this is why I'm happy to be working on computers now, and not in a wet
lab. And I never even had to work with any of the _scary_ stuff...

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ippisl
After reading about the risk in the work of a chemist , i wonder: what
prevents automation for safety becoming common place?

~~~
dsl
Production can be (and often is) heavily automated, research is not. Just like
any other field, it doesn't make sense to design robots to do a task requiring
high precision that might only need to be preformed a few times. Thats what
lab assistants are for.

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jrockway
Does anyone have a link to the original paper that doesn't require me to pay
$38?

~~~
apawloski
Not necessarily for this specific paper, but in general if you want a paywall
protected paper, check your local public library's website. Most offer proxy
database access.

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m2mapps
Did anyone else find this article to be meandering waffle that has no bearing
to anything else on HN? I fear the airplane toilet incident has inspired a
host of chemists to start posting on hacker news, creating a subculture.

And yes, I'm totally expecting someone to point to the HN posting guidelines
that state that anything that may be of interest to geeks is appropriate...

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jacquesm
I won't point you to the HN posting guidelines since you obviously know where
to find them but with 11 karma I think you should work a bit harder to show by
example rather than by voicing your dissent what you feel HN should be like.

~~~
m2mapps
To be fair, the comment was downvoted, which I accept, but if you disagree
with something it's perfectly valid to voice that disagreement. If Karma is a
measure of the validity of an opinion, HN becomes a meritocracy.

~~~
hmottestad
HN is a bit of a meritocracy. Since you get down-voting power when you hit 500
points (or was it 600)?

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lostlogin
500.

