This is a bit off-topic, but if you enjoyed his writing on this, I would also recommend perusing the category "Things I won't Work With"[1], but maybe only if you have the afternoon free. It's a hilarious compendium of chemicals that are simply too unpleasant to work with for his tastes. For values of unpleasant including explosive, smelly, corrosive, or some combination thereof.
I'm not a chemist, but his tellings of not just how things could go terribly wrong once you have the substance, but the myriad ways it can wrong merely trying to make the substance had me in stitches for the better part of an afternoon.
Then again, I was always the one setting stuff on fire, breaking glassware, or trying the reaction with more reagents in high school chem lab, so maybe it only appeals to me...
Yep, [the stable-to-explosion sensitivity was] below the detection limits of a lab that specializes in the nastiest, most energetic stuff they can think up. When you read through both papers, you find that the group was lucky to get whatever data they could - the X-ray crystal structure, for example, must have come as a huge relief, because it meant that they didn't have to ever see a crystal again
I'm not a chemist, but his tellings of not just how things could go terribly wrong once you have the substance, but the myriad ways it can wrong merely trying to make the substance had me in stitches for the better part of an afternoon.
Then again, I was always the one setting stuff on fire, breaking glassware, or trying the reaction with more reagents in high school chem lab, so maybe it only appeals to me...
[1] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...