Happy 2013! My life is in many ways as good going into 2013 as it’s ever been; I’ve got two books in print and am working on book 3, I live in a nice house, have a decent number of friends. I’m feeling optimistic about everything but politics and my ability to update Alas as frequently as I’d wish. :-)
How are you doing? Any hopes for 2013? My big one is to finish this book before 2014.
Use this as an open thread. (Thanks for the prod, G&W!)
RonF:
Ahem. Only if you’re in custody. (And there are a few other small details.) Just FYI.
Grace
RonF:
It may amuse you to note, Ron, that you just did it yourself: you spoke of “firearm suicides”, but “suicides by poison” and “suicides by suffocation”. The parallel construction to the latter two would be “suicides by firearm”, surely?
The dirty little secret which neither fervent side of the gun debate wants to mention is that changes in gun ownership of a magnitude which it has been possible to study in the United States do not appear to affect crime much one way or the other.
However, since you bring up suicide, one thing which availability of firearms DOES effect is the rate of accomplish suicides, versus attempted ones. The reason is simple: suicidal ideation is usually brief. People who are hurting enough to kill themselves usually do so on impulse, and then, if they survive the period of time when they are willing, they decide not to kill themselves, and so they survive. Methods like gas ovens, car exhaust, overdose of medication, and hypothermia all require sustained, active intent. Methods like firearms do not. (Hanging requires more prep than firearms, particularly if you don’t know how to tie a working noose or slipknot, and is still more survivable in the actual event, but it’s more lethal than the first things I mentioned.)
Suicide-by-firearm tracks closely with rate of firearm ownership in the population. In areas with low firearms ownership, other methods do not step into the breach; that is, they do not rise enough to match the lower by-firearm rate. So, if suicide prevention were the only consideration, then it would be good public policy to ban firearms.
However, suicide prevention is far from the only consideration.
Grace
I still have t-shirts from high school, but I think only the one I got on a trip to New York, which has sentimental value. My husband still has t-shirts from middle school, and is in fact wearing one right now as he loads the dishwasher. T-shirts of a certain vintage make awesome PJs, particularly at the stage right before they become see-through when they’re extraordinarily soft after having been washed hundreds of times. Unfortunately my weight has fluctuated way too much since I was a teenager for me to take advantage of that fact.
I hang onto shoes longer than I should, though that only ends up being a couple years. By the time I find a pair of women’s dress shoes that don’t have heels, accommodate a wide foot and an arch support, and are at least vaguely cute, I’m just about ready to curl up in a ball around them muttering “My precious.”
Ron F wrote:
Good on your wife. Suggesting to your parents that they should get rid of stuff so that you’re less inconvenienced when they die is awfully tacky, in my opinion. I know that’s one of the huge and unpleasant things when family members die, but I have to feel like it should be completely dwarfed by the fact that *family members* have *died.* I mean, I want my parents to get rid of stuff too, but so they can sell the house, move further south, and be closer to me and my brother (and hopefully get milder winters in the bargain) which is their plan.
Please forgive me if I’m inappropriately ragging on your kids. I don’t know your family dynamic at all, so it’s entirely possible that I’m completely misinterpreting how that was meant. Heaven knows my family says stuff to each other that an outside observer would find cruel, when really we’re just all a bunch of chronic smartasses.
Suggesting to your parents that they should get rid of stuff so that you’re less inconvenienced when they die is awfully tacky, in my opinion.
True. On the other hand, many people would be OUTRAGED if their kids got rid of stuff that was valuable or had emotional resonance or family significance – but the same people then store it in the basement and never sort it or leave any way of knowing what was a family heirloom that (the departed spirit of) Grandma would appreciate being kept around, and what was found by the side of the road and used to store dried dog turds.
It’s taken, literally, years of increasingly aggressive and blatant statements from me for my folks to start the process. (“I hope you’ve written down a list of what’s valuable, because otherwise the day after the funeral this shit goes on Craigslist for $0.01/pound.”) They have a house full of antique glass, some with sentimental value, some without, some worth a nickel and some worth a gazillion dollars – and I wouldn’t pay a nickel for any of it, nor am I going to spend a couple years of lifespan learning the marvels of the craft. If you want grandma’s precious centerpiece with a hundred years of family history to carry on, you have to put in the groundwork.
Yeah, good point. My dad collects old bottles, and I’d have no clue which ones are worth anything or have some sort of family or local history attached. (My hometown used to have a glass factory a hundred or so years ago, so if anything had come from there, I’d want to keep it even if it’s not worth a thing, and even if there’s no family history beyond “Dad picked it up at an antique store last year.”)
Speaking of family history, my parents found an old article about Charles McKiernan, one of my dad’s ancestors (I’m thinking he was my maternal grandmother’s grandfather) who was apparently quite a character. He was a quartermaster in the British Army during the Crimean War, and got the nickname “Joe Beef” because whenever they were running low on food, he managed to acquire some. He then ran a tavern in Montreal, where he had a menagerie that included four black bears and an alligator. He was also a philanthropist and an avid reader.
When my kids have to clean out my house when I go they better brush up on their biochemistry because some of it is hazardous f’ing waste.
I think I’ve still got a few grams of sodium in oil up there somewhere. Cut a gash in it, toss it in a bucket of water and stand back. Better yet, run back ….
You mean you don’t keep your explosives clearly labeled? Dude, what kind of half-assed mad scientist are you?
Well, first, a true mad scientist doesn’t presume that explosion = bad. Second, a mad scientist figures that you know that knives will cut you if you are careless, a can of gasoline will blow up if you use a match to give you enough light to look into the can, and that in general you know the dangerous properties of anything that is clearly labelled with its name – or you don’t belong in the lab in the first place.
Of course, there IS that bottle labelled “Magic God of Hellfire Cleaning Solution” – and yeah, that’s how we labelled it in the lab – that probably requires some explanation. Hopefully the label will give you enough pause that you’ll ask questions before you open it.
I can see it now when they get to that spot in the attic over the garage. My daughter, who took electrical engineering: “Jesus Christ, Dad! , get over here! What the f*ck is this $h!t?” My son: “Holy $h!t! Let me call my buddy who took Chem E to figure this out. Wait! That’s sodium! Where’s a bucket? Hold my beer and watch this!” Which my daughter will bitch about but then probably run a video that will turn up on You Tube as “$h!t we found in my Dad’s garage!”
O.K. No edit, so “[Son’s_name]” should be in front of “, get over here” above.
Hey, if the sodium is clearly labeled with its name, I retract my previous comment. I remember very little from high school chemistry, but “air + sodium = BOOM” is one of those things.
Ah, no, “air + sodium” = BOOM is not actually true.
2 Na + 2 H2O = 2 NaOH + H2 + heat
heat + 2 H2 + O2 = 2 H2O + BOOM
On a humid day, there might be enough water in the air to get some reaction, but what would very likely happen is that in such a case a sodium lump in the open air would get coated with an NaOH slime that would protect it from further reaction. That’s why aluminum doesn’t “rust” – it does oxidize, but unlike iron oxide, which has a crystal structure that flakes off of the iron, Al2O3 binds tightly to the aluminum and protects it from further oxidation.
Cut a fresh surface on that lump of sodium and then throw it in a bucket of water, though, and the large amount of water a) drives the reaction fast and b) dissolves the NaOH away. Eventually enough H2 and heat accumulates that the H2 ignites, and you get a (very satisfying) BOOM! and, if you were not clever enough to do it on your driveway, a dead spot in the grass where the now highly alkaline water sinks in because the BOOM! actually broke the plastic 5-gallon water bucket.
You want your kids to get interested in STEM, folks? Make sure there’s the occasional BOOM! and they’ll flock to it. And remember that engineering is the same as science – just louder.
Oh, it was water + sodium that resulted in the boom. Hey, at least I remembered the “boom” part.
Oh, try to weasel it now, all I know is we broke into Ron’s house and dug through a mountain of crap looking for the sodium, and the net result of the entire thing – continental plane trip, frenzied gun battle in the upper hallways, dodging the cops for hours in the swamp, having to break BACK INTO Ron’s house…was for nothing. Just a lump of slimy crap sitting on the lawn and you going ‘derr, it should have worked’.
Next time I take a STEM graduate. You humanities people are worthless.
I should have been a science teacher. Heck, just when I was going to high school I caused two evacuations – one of a classroom and one of an entire wing. I was poking lumps in a can of red phosphorous for the first one. The second one was a classic.
We are in Senior Science, a 2 period advanced chemistry and physics class. The kids in the class who were in that school from the start skipped General Science and had already taken Chemistry, Biology and Physics. My old high school made me take General Science when I was a Freshman, so I was double-booked – 2 periods of Senior Science and then a period of Physics every day. Four periods of science and math every day, I was in heaven. So – one of my buddies in Senior Science asks:
“Hey, Ron, how DO you make nitroglycerin, anyway?”
“Well, you take this and this and mix them together and then layer that over it. [The stuff you layer over on top] absorbs water, a product of the reaction, and drives the reaction to completion.” And then I turn back to what I was doing and don’t think anything more about it.
Fast forward 30 minutes. My science teacher, wearing every piece of safety equipment the lab has, is bent over a piece of glassware on a lab bench. He is alone in the room. He is alone in that wing of the school. My classmates – and everyone in that wing of the building – are now out on the front lawn of the high school. I have not joined them, however. I am now in the Principal’s office, where I will be for the next couple of hours or so. I am saying, for the first time, but far from the last:
“I thought it was a hypothetical question! I had no idea he would be stupid enough to DO IT!!!!” I came thisclose to getting expelled….