May 04, 2004
I don't like having to say "I told you so"
...especially when it involves bad things happening perilously close to me.
There's a phenomenon well known in its universality among martial artists, pilots, and laboratory investigators (and many others, though these are categories to which I can personally claim memberhip): beginners can be dangerous!
For fledgling pilots, safety comes first in collision avoidance and minimal aptitude in takeoff and landing (especially landing). Student pilots at this point truly have to be watched carefully.
For martial artists, dealing with beginners means being aware that the beginner is often not aware of how easy it is to hurt your training partner, and hence how important it is to learn how to train properly so that you don't get hurt "when it's your turn to lose" in practice. Genuinely dangerous!
Today, I had a reminder of how easily late-first-year chemistry students can be genuinely dangerous too. I'm a stickler for thorough preparation for lab investigation, which includes adequately understanding any reaction schema involved in the labwork. Today's labwork involved the generation of noticable volumes of chlorine and nitrogen dioxide gasses, the latter of which was to be generated by heating of reagents including concentrated nitric acid under a fume hood.
Well, today a couple of giggly Chinese girls (otherwise sharp but who are treating chemistry as a checklist item, a waypoint on the way to medical school) who didn't fully understand the reaction schema, were heating the nitric acid solutions at their bench! Before any of us had time to react, they'd already generated a visible cloud of white, toxic smoke. The hell of it was, they simply stood rooted where they were standing, looking embarassed. They were not embarassed that they stood a risk of death or injury, but that they'd been caught not having prepped their lab notebooks with the proper procedure! A couple of other students managed to shake them from their (not yet literal) mortification and pull them away from the danger, while my instructor and I started hitting the buttons on the emergency fume hood evacuation systems, hoping we could clear the cloud quickly and safely by drawing it across the room into the hood system (and upwards from there into the Great Dilution of the atmosphere... note that our lab building is gratifyingly free of pigeon poop for a very good reason.)
Later, I did what the instructor later noted was probably more effective and shocking coming from a fellow student rather than from him: I dressed down the girls in front of everyone else, telling them they must come into the lab prepared next time, rather than faking their way through an experiment. Funny thing was, just a few minutes before the incident I'd commented to my instructor that many of my classmates didn't seem to have any grasp of the difference between real laboratory science and ritual magic.
Oh, and several minutes later I witnessed another girl come up to the instructor asking if the open centrifuge tubes she was holding - which were continuously generating chlorine gas as a side reaction - were hazardous! Argh!
At least our labwork on Thursday of last week went without incident. You see, there was a reaction on that day which required careful control of pH in one of the test solutions containing thiocyanate ions (SCN-). We needed to maintain a particular weakly acidic environment in order to favor a certain desired product. You see, a more acidic pH would have tilted the reaction strongly to the production of HCN, hydrogen cyanide gas...
Posted by Russell Whitaker at May 4, 2004 05:29 PM | TrackBackReminds me of the time in High School Chemistry where we had to identify an unknown substance from a list of 4 or 5 possibles. One of the possibles was table salt. Other possibles were potentially poisonous. Yes, you guess it, one student decided to double-check her work by TASTING the unknown chemical!
Russell strikes me as the type of student who is either inspiring to his fellow students or secretly hated by them. Those that want to learn will be inspired by his attention to detail and intensity of study - those that want to coast probably hate him because he illustrates what they SHOULD be learning. It's probably particularly galling to them when they realize they're failing to learn material THAT THEY'RE PAYING FOR.
Posted by: Bob Tipton on May 4, 2004 09:43 PMHeh. I'm not surprised this happened at all.
Very few people have experience with genuinely hazardous materials, as it isn't something they come in contact with in the normal course of life. As such, they approach such things with a dangerous naivete, having no prior experience that makes it apparent that a serious danger exists, nor do they recognize the potential. (This can be extended to a much broader range of things than chemistry -- if they've never personally been burned by something, they automatically assume it is harmless.)
Fortunately, when you get to the advanced chemistry classes where you start to use REALLY dangerous chemicals that make the ones mentioned look positively harmless, the only people still in the program are generally quite clueful. There are some chemicals and reaction systems that allow extremely little room for error and have brutal consequences, a real Darwinian pool boy.
Wait until you start working with concentrated versions of aggressive fluorine donors, non-metallic simple nitrogen fluids (e.g. hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide, or even anhydrous ammonia), or concentrated oxidized halide acids (e.g. perchloric acid), to list some of my favorites. Some of these things are a trifecta of hazards: Shockingly aggressive corrosiveness to most materials (including glass for some of these), severe toxicity and often through simple skin contact, and a penchant for spontaneous detonation upon contact with half the elements in the periodic table and many very ordinary compounds. Fun for the whole family!
Posted by: J. Andrew Rogers on May 4, 2004 11:27 PMI'm reminded of organic chem class in high-school. We were working with ether as a solvent for something or other, and when we were done, one of the students walked over to the sink, turned on the hot-water tap, and poured his ether into the stream of running water.
And then fell over onto the floor as the prof went running for the big red button to kick all the hoods into high-gear.
The good result was that people got a lot more careful from there on out. And the not-so-bright student learned that ether gives you headaches, especially when you pass out from it and bonk your head on a tile floor.
Posted by: DaveP on May 5, 2004 06:35 AMSome of the people I studied with were a danger to themselves as well, luckily (for them) the only thing we played with were models and case studies.
They are now wreaking havoc in an enterprise near you. But it's ok, folks, they have a degree.
Posted by: Monica on May 5, 2004 07:09 AMI went the electrical route, and yes there too are the people who just don't understand that 12 volts can hurt too.
"I'll just touch it and see if it's live", just like Bob Tipton's thing with the salt.
Watching people hurt themselves in highschool shop class was the same sort of head-shaking bewilderment. "How can that still be hot, it's not glowing any more?!?"
Posted by: Curt Howland on May 5, 2004 10:04 AMRussell, something that occurred to me last night: Have the students who are so careless ever been out of school?
When I went back to tech school, almost everyone else there was also "returning" after years in the work force, as it were. The ones who were careless were the ones, regardless of age, who had the least "real world" experience.
Public school prepares people for the real world about as well as an elephant makes microchips.
Posted by: Curt Howland on May 6, 2004 05:56 AMHaving worked on fighter jet electrical systems (F-15 and F-111) for three years, then residential and commercial electrical systems occasionally for years afterward (as well as boat and car systems, and, most recently, passenger coach buses and computer networks), one does gradually develop a sense of voltage and frequency (as well as AC or DC) from feel, whether it happens intentionally or inadvertently (you know, you are wiring up a ceiling fan and the doltish customer flips on the switch without warning "just to see if its working yet", or you go to fix the sump pump in the crawl space of a condo to find that the 120 VAC going to the pump is coursing through the water... among other stories).
Frankly I'd be much more concerned about people screwing around with chemicals, unless, of course, I happen to be working on the high voltage power supply for my rail gun, or my ion engine, or my HERF car zapper.... rubber gloves, boots, safety helmet and glasses might be necessary... but hopefully all of the warning signs would intimidate the idiots.
After a certain point of care, you have to just throw up your hands and admit that it's just evolution in action.
