...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...
