Ever Wonder What Happens when You Combine Secretaries, Blow Torches and Magnesium?

By Uncle Dave Sunday January 24, 2010

Don’t ya just love those science and car crash movies they showed in school back in the 50′s and 60′s?

33 Comments

sargasso says:

1/24/2010 at 9:30 pm

#19. “Whats this World coming too.” Answer: 42

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gooddebate says:

1/24/2010 at 9:53 pm

#20 So, what was the question, really?

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RBG says:

1/24/2010 at 10:20 pm

18. Oh I get it. What is this: WordPress? It interprets greater-than & less-than signs for its own purposes, often truncating. Once more for the gipper:

“Plutonium is graded by proportion of Pu-240: weapons grade (less than 7%), fuel grade (7–19%) and reactor grade (greater than 19%).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium

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RBG says:

1/24/2010 at 10:58 pm

To prove that I don’t know everything, I’ll admit now that I have no idea what the fear of fearing you’re turning into Cliff Claven is called.

RBG

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sargasso says:

1/24/2010 at 11:12 pm

#21. I have to think about that, get back to ya.

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Gary, the dangerous infidel says:

1/25/2010 at 12:15 am

#22 RBG, for future use, this method should still work for producing the < and > characters you wanted to use. Now I’ll expand the 4-character code combinations I used with spaces between the characters:
“& l t ;” & “& g t ;” minus the spaces = “<” & “>”

By the way, learning that bit of trivia only takes you further toward turning into Cliff Claven (especially if you repeat it frequently). Sorry about that

.

#14 Father, it’s a little odd that you challenged just about the only aspect of my silly little joke that’s completely defensible. As the thousands of physicists who regularly use the phrase “weapons-grade plutonium” will attest, it is not redundant.

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Uncle Dave says:

1/25/2010 at 5:47 am

#19: We are not a news site.

#22: Those characters are interpreted as html code, so, as Gary said in 25, you have to enter the code combos.

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pedro says:

1/25/2010 at 6:51 am

#4 No because that’d be terrorism. Education like that is not PC these days.

#13 Indeed.

#14 No, is not.

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Winston says:

1/25/2010 at 7:02 am

Probably a magnesium industry film, not a high school one.

Mary’s my favorite. For some reason, all of their blouses look like preggo blouses. Excuse me, “with child” or “expecting” blouses.

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Buzz says:

1/25/2010 at 7:32 am

Sooo… THAT’s how milk of magnesium gets rid of heart burn.

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pedro says:

1/25/2010 at 8:26 am

#29 I thought you were going the extra mile and ask if that’s how milk of magnesium was made

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Ballenger says:

1/25/2010 at 9:00 am

Four secretaries might not be able to get magnesium to burn, but I know of one sculptor who succeeded. He confused a piece of magnesium bar stock with aluminum and fed it into a molten crucible of aluminum. The new foundry was much nicer than the one he burned to the ground.

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Mr. Fusion says:

1/26/2010 at 6:54 am

This was just a propaganda piece by the magnesium industry trying to downplay the dangers of magnesium.

Anyone who understands the concept of heat transfer would know why they couldn’t light the ingots. The same experiments could be done using wood and have even poorer results getting a self sustaining flame. Does anyone discount the flammability of wood?

As pointed out above, it is the fine particles that are dangerous. The same as wood dust can be explosive and wood shavings readily catch fire.

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