My wife and I spent our honeymoon there and it's not particularly frustrating or anything, just exceptionally confusing to westerners. The only thing that really messed us up was that the signage on intersections says the same thing for both streets. As long as you're in the city though they have maps everywhere, so it's not too bad.
Fire does necessarily need oxygen to burn since it is, by definition, an oxidation reaction. The magnesium just happens to burn hot enough and have an oxide stable enough to pull the oxygen out of CO2. Great vids though, they remind me of high school and college.
My first organic chemistry lab instructor told me that in his undergraduate days, they had a bit of a roach problem in the lab. Whenever they removed the panels that housed the ventilation ducts, roaches would pour out of the wall. He had two methods of dispatching them. The first involved spraying them with acetone then lighting them on fire, which must've smelled lovely in lab. His second, more disgusting method involved DMSO (Dimethylsulfoxide). Evidently, chitin in soluble in DMSO, so as soon as you sprayed in on the roaches, they would pretty much melt like slugs. I have to wonder who got the job of cleaning up the roach sludge.
(This instructor also told me about the halcyon days when he would take a coffee can, put a huge chunk of sodium metal in it, then toss it in a lake and shoot it with a shotgun. What I wouldn't give to be a chemist in those days)
I also had a gifted physical chemistry instructor who decided one class period we would go out into the common area and spend the entire period doing the "electron ballet," a dance which involved us running around in circles orbiting each other and exchanging electrons in a weird balletic red rover game. God that class was fun.
Finally (I'm totally cheating by making this a threefer+), during a synthesis class, a classmate of mine had to generate hydrochloric acid gas. The way you do this is by VERY slowly dropping hydrochloric acid into sulfuric acid. This generates an insane amount of heat, but if you do it slowly and ice the reaction vessel, usually it's no problem. This guy turned the stopcock on flask holding HCl a bit too fast. Immediately he knew there was a problem, so he slammed his fumehood shut. Within about 5 seconds, his entire glassware setup and anything else that was under the hood essentially vaporized. Needless to say, the lab instructor was not happy.
These are just tidbits. I graduated from an engineering school, and environment which breeds just about the weirdest and most brilliant professors and classmates.
My wife and I spent our honeymoon there and it's not particularly frustrating or anything, just exceptionally confusing to westerners. The only thing that really messed us up was that the signage on intersections says the same thing for both streets. As long as you're in the city though they have maps everywhere, so it's not too bad.
(This instructor also told me about the halcyon days when he would take a coffee can, put a huge chunk of sodium metal in it, then toss it in a lake and shoot it with a shotgun. What I wouldn't give to be a chemist in those days)
I also had a gifted physical chemistry instructor who decided one class period we would go out into the common area and spend the entire period doing the "electron ballet," a dance which involved us running around in circles orbiting each other and exchanging electrons in a weird balletic red rover game. God that class was fun.
Finally (I'm totally cheating by making this a threefer+), during a synthesis class, a classmate of mine had to generate hydrochloric acid gas. The way you do this is by VERY slowly dropping hydrochloric acid into sulfuric acid. This generates an insane amount of heat, but if you do it slowly and ice the reaction vessel, usually it's no problem. This guy turned the stopcock on flask holding HCl a bit too fast. Immediately he knew there was a problem, so he slammed his fumehood shut. Within about 5 seconds, his entire glassware setup and anything else that was under the hood essentially vaporized. Needless to say, the lab instructor was not happy.
These are just tidbits. I graduated from an engineering school, and environment which breeds just about the weirdest and most brilliant professors and classmates.