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| Sure been a while!Heo!
I'm still alive.
Life still sucks, but at least its still here, right?
Vote Ron Paul for President, 2008.
Seriously, I just endorsed a candidate... do you know I never thought that day would come? The Main-Stream Media loves to pretend he doesn't exist, you'll almost NEVER hear an utterance of him on any news network, but if you haven't already, do look him up. I may write more in depth later about that.
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| The Golden ProblemAny Chemists out there that can help me? lol
For about 3 years now, whenever I've taken apart electronics (particularly computer parts), I'd save the gold-plated electrical connections. Anything with gold on it, I'd rip it off before throwing anything out.
Now, I've accumulated quite a bit of it, but it's essentially useless in its current plating form. I've tried before to scrape it off, but totally failed with that. Tried to melt the entire thing but instead it just changes into a copper-color. I've since learned the electrical contacts are made of copper, and then plated with nickel (indeed I'd wondered why they were slightly magnetic), and then a portion of that surface is plated with gold. I'm guessing when I heated it, the copper migrated through the nickel and gold and formed an alloy of some sort, but just an uneducated guess.
This past week, I've devoted the most study into trying to get the gold off, and decided chemical removal would be best. I've thought about using mercury to dissolve the gold, and then drive off the Hg with heat and maybe try to condense it... but decided that approach is utterly retarded. Too much risk of Hg vapor killing me off and all... besides, mercury is as valuable an element to me as gold, and I don't have very much of it to waste. >_< Then there's the other industrial gold solvent, cyanide... yeah... that'd be worse with the whole killing me thing. Then there's Aqua Regia, the "Royal Water" which can also dissolve the noble metals such as gold. But that requires Nitric Acid and Hydrochloric acids, neither in which I have... and if I remember right, Nitric Acid itself is a controlled substance (at least in NJ) because it's used to make methamphetamine. So I thought about making that acid myself, but another likely to kill me thing if I tried that. So all of the usual avenues are pretty much not options.
Presently, I'm trying to see if I can decompose the electrical contacts electrolytically. If I can turn it into an acetate, chloride or other compound, than I might be able to precipitate it out of the solution somehow separately from Cu and Ni. Most Au compounds decompose easily when heated, so that'll be a big help. Solubility will play a big part, so I'm gonna type some values out here, more for my own reference.
Compound Appearance Cold Water Hot Water Melting Pt Boiling Pt
Copper Acetate, Basic grnsh-bl powd sl s ... ... ...
Copper (II) Acetate em grn powd 7.2 20 115 d 240
Copper (I) Chloride wh, cub 0.0062 ... 430 1490
Copper (II) Chloride br, yel, powd, hydr 70.6 107.9 620 d 993 to CuCl
Copper (II) Chloride, Basic yel-grn, hex d d 250 d red heat
Copper (II) Hydroxide bl gel cr powd i d d ...
Copper (I) Oxide red, oct cub i i 1235 1800 -O
Copper (II) Oxide blk, monocl i i 1326 ...
Nickel Acetate grn pr ... ... d 16.6
Nickel Chloride yel sc, deliq 64.2 at 20 87.6 1001 973 subl
Nickel Oxide grn-blk, cub i i 1990 ...
Gold (I) Chloride yel cr v sl s d d 170 d d 289.5
Gold (III) Oxide ... i i 160 -O 250 -3O
Those are all from the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, one of the editions from the 1960's, so it's old info... the cover and first many pages have fallen off to give an idea what shape it's in. All temperatures are given in degrees celsius, solubilities in grams per 100 mL water.
I probably should have checked to see if Gold Acetate was even in the book before I decided to try making it. I know that it exists, but no idea what its exact properties are. And Gold oxide was without a description, which sucks since I've managed to electrolytically make a black powder already, which could be copper or nickel oxides too.
Ugg now I don't feel like typing anymore. Eager to get back down in the basement and experiment some more. I think that's what I'll do.
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| Yagami Light isn't supposed to sound like...... Disney's fxckin Aladdin! What the hell!
That might be able to fly for a while since Light is 17 yet, but I don't see how it's gonna cut it when he's 23 later on in the series. Ryuk... don't like his voice either.
I'm too hard to satisfy in some areas I guess... just got used to the original Japanese voices so much, nothing else seems to fit.
But Yagami Soichiro, SHOULDN'T SOUND LIKE MEL GIBSON!! It just doesn't work!!
And L... oh L, why is your voice... sexy? IT SHOULDN'T BE! Must be awkward and unattractive! You'll never have children!
Spent too much time with Demisa last night. I don't like her, she doesn't like me (unless I give her $20 or buy her dinner again, neither in which is going t happen.) I'm starting to talk/type like her though, which sucks. lol
Death Note's English translation sucks too; their vocabulary is too... flat I guess? The words the characters use seem to all be simular, might just be me though. Seems like Ryuk doesn't sound as much like the bored/careless type, Soichiro and Matsuda (and the whole ICPO) don't speak so professionally either. Once again, maybe that's just my perception of things.
Only one person will know what I'm talking about at all with this post. Oh well.
Also, it's "Kira". Not "Keera". Ugg!
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| The Cellar X-Ray ScareIt happened Wednesday afternoon if I recall right, last week.
About 2 months ago, I built from a kit a flyback transformer circuit which produced some nifty sparks about an inch across at around 15,000 volts. My favorite application for this was to wire it up to burnt-out light bulbs, and it would turn them into plasma globes. Much fun!
Also learned that the voltage was strong enough to produce cathode rays (and thus, X-ray radiation) in a select few of the bulbs. Made that discovery with the radiometer (a bulb containing a vacuum which has black and white vanes balanced on a needle that rotate rapidly when exposed to sunlight). Wiring up a needle to the high voltage supply and touching it to the glass of the radiometer made the insides glow with a pale blue plasma, but also made the opposite glass wall of the radiometer fluoresce green, casting a shadow of the vanes as if the needle tip was a light source. Could only do this for a few second at a time out of fear of melting a hole in the glass (which I've done to other less valuable bulbs), but it was still amazing that I had turned that childhood curiosity into an X-ray tube!
But I'm not stupid... usually. I had my old trusty Geiger Counter, the 1950's yellow-box looking CD-700 there to check for X-ray emissions. In spite of the telltale green glow however, the Geiger counter failed to detect X-rays from the bulb. During the course of a week or two, I'd tested several different bulbs, and discovered many more than fluoresced green, yet the Geiger counter didn't detect a thing. While small 7-Watt night light bulbs, Christmas light bulbs and the radiometer glowed green, it was one of 3 flashlight bulbs that performed the best, with the glass glowing most fully and intensely green.
Research online showed that X-rays are indeed being generated at this voltage, but they're too "soft", it takes higher voltages (around 30,000 I think) before the X-rays are "hard" enough to penetrate the glass. So the bulbs making the X-rays are the very things shielding me from them.
Months pass, and I discover an old Cathode-Ray tube from a old video camcorder. It's what powered the black and white viewfinder screen. The camcorder got zapped with static electricity around 1995 or so, I took it apart and saved only a few parts, that tube being one of them. Upon re-discovering it, I decided I'd see what 15 kilovolts could do to it. Also by this time, I'd bought a new Geiger counter. Unlike the big, old and bulky Civil Defense one, this one can fit in the pocket without trouble and also detects alpha particles. I'd made a habit of bringing it in the basement with me, so it was in my pocket while I was working.
It took about 10 minutes of trouble getting the HV clip attached to the Tube's pins just right for me to finally get a green/white fluorescence on the screen at the opposing end. Success!! However it was interrupted at that instance by a faint beeping coming out of my pocket, the one with the little Geiger counter. The tube was only powered for about 1 second, but the counter has quite a bit of lag time. When I did pull it out of my pocket though, what it displayed was very disturbing.
A very big number, plus the word "OVERFLOW".
That scared me quite a bit! That would mean I'd not only made X-rays again, but they were capable of escaping from this tube! Worse, it overwhelmed the Geiger counter's readings so I had no idea what kind of radiation dose I'd gotten for that 1 second the tube was powered. Would it be fatal? Will I get cancer? Will my possible future child have 2 heads? Lots of unhappy thoughts.
It shouldn't have been! My research told me 15 kV shouldn't be enough voltage to make X-rays that can penetrate glass! Even worse, I was doing the experiment on my lab bench on top of a plate of thick glass from a scanner, and my pocket with the detector was behind that, so it was penetrating that thick glass enough to overflow the Geiger counter... so my whole-body dose was even worse. >_< Looked online for symptoms of radiation poisoning... I'd have my first symptoms in a few hours, likely starting with intense reddening of the skin.
But still too many things didn't make sense. I was tempted to go downstairs and try the experiment again, with more shielding perhaps. This was a different Geiger counter than the previous one, was it that this newer model is more sensitive to X-rays than the old one? If so, I could've been exposing myself to plenty of radiation before with my other bulbs and just had the wrong equipment to measure it.
So I decided to go down there, and rig up my most reliable X-ray generating bulb up to the HV device, and power it on... holding a 2-Liter bottle full of salt water between my nads and the bulb, and standing several feet away. Sure enough, the pocket counter went crazy and overflowed at 2 feet away, while the old CD-700 did nothing at 5 inches away. But it still made no sense for the CD-700, with its thin glass window, to detect nothing and my new one to have detected it through much thicker glass plate. And then came the breakthrough.
At 3 feet away with the X-ray flashlight bulb powered on the pocket detector read nothing but usual background... at 2.5 feet away, still nothing... but get it within about that 2 feet boundary and it went off the scale. According to the law of inverse squares, the radiation should have increased gradually as I approached the source, not gone from 0 to Overflow in the matter of inches.
The final test was to run the HV supply with NO load at all. No Cathode Ray tube or Light bulbs, just running it on empty air. At about 1.5 feet, the Geiger counter again went into Overflow suddenly.
Made me feel a heck of a lot better!! It seems that the high voltage source actually ionizes the gases within the Geiger counter tube itself, overwhelming it. Had nothing to do with X-rays at all. My older CD-700 didn't react in this fashion most likely because of its heavily metallic design, directing the high voltage around the tube instead of through it like the plastic-shelled pocket device.
I'm slightly disappointed though that I'm still without an X-ray source. It'd be much faster to irradiate seeds with that instead of just keeping it on my uranium ore sources for months at a time. Then again, happy I don't have to worry about instant cancerous death.
Besides the Secret Mission I can't talk about yet, that's probably the most interesting thing to happen to me since the semester started.
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| The CrossroadI don't use this much anymore, as people have noticed. Just posted something I put into my Myspace blog the other night. That usually fulfills my needs now, but at least basically nobody on Myspace knows of this Xanga's existence, so to spill out things that would worry my friends there is easier here.
Got a tough decision to make, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
The choice is whether to stay in college, or to take a gamble with my life and do what I feel most interested in doing with it.
Currently my major is Biology, more specifically Botany. I tell people I'm interested in the genetics/breeding aspect of plants, and I'm particularly interested in what is called "radiation breeding", which is exposing seeds and seedlings to lots of radiation to induce mutations and to artificially select the best ones. Its results are surprisingly common, unknown to nearly all the people that consume the fruits and vegetables bred into existance by this technique. It's not considered a Genetically Modified crop, since the mutations are random and simply selected, rather than having traits surgically inserted into the plant's DNA as with the GM crops that people distrust.
But me majoring in Biology at all was just a fall-back plan anyway, more like plan F or G rather than a B. Nuclear Physics was my real passion, but my mental incapability to grasp the math needed forced me out of that. Journalism and Political Science seemed interesting too, but proved otherwise while they were my majors.
Now I fear that in the end, if I were to manage surviving college and getting degrees and all that stuff, that I'll just be stuck in a job completely different from what I expected, and live the remaining days of my life stuck and unhappy.
To continue going would be relatively low-risk financially in the long-run. It'd also mean all of the money spent on college thus far wouldn't have all been a waste. But at this point, that's the only positive things I see in it.
I'm not a normal person. My mind is definitely different, if not completely "off" from the rest of the world. I've also got unusual interests too that I generally keep down-low from most people that know me. I know before I've mentioned on this blog numerous times how I'm interested in Ghosts, and how studying them would be my dream job. Well it seems that my best chance to make that a reality is approaching quickly.
My brother's offered to let me live with him down in Florida, plus get a pretty decent job at the place he works at (he's well liked there and is moving up the ladder pretty rapidly so he's got some pull). Not that I like getting a job from connections, but that's how I got my current one too and I've earned my stay for over 2 years. So anyway, a job and a place to stay are taken care of already. The big advantage to doing this is I finally get the freedom my parents have denied me all these years. The drawback is if I choose to go back to college, I'd have to start from scratch more than likely since the odds seem slim that any of my credits could transfer, but that investigation isn't over yet.
So my plan would be once I'm down there and settled in, I'll seek out a local Ghost Research group and apply. I'll have to find a good & serious one, and even then I'll probably end up doing the traditional things like taking photographs of dust particles, getting possibly genuine EVPs and taking EMF readings and all sorts of stuff as seen on TV, investigating alleged hauntings of homes, buildings and cemeteries. That's all good and fun, but I've ranted before how doing that yields essentially no progress on teaching us any more about how ghosts do anything, and it's certainly not very scientific. But the point would be to gain valuable experience, get trained in using the equipment, and socialize with a more professional crowd of ghost researchers.
Then out of those people, I'll have to find the select few that might be willing to try some experiments never done before, to test actual hypothesis's (including but not limited to my own ideas), and other stuff at a whole new level.
I've searched the internet in vain for nearly a year trying to find someone else in the ghost community who has also come up with a hypothesis or approach similar to mine. This has actually been encouraging.
I feel powerfully compelled to test my hypothesis no matter what. It's been eating at me for too long, and if I continue with my life on the present road, then it'll never get done. Yet its there all the time, telling me that I have to do it.
I'm the only one who can do it.
It's so far the best use of my natural mental talents that I have yet conceived. Some might say my mind works the way it does for a reason. If that is so, then I believe that this is it. Anybody can breed plants or save the environment, but who else can think the way I do to solve the mystery of how ghosts can do what they've shown me and thousands of other people that they're capable of?
Of course, this is a huge risk. Its possible that I'm very much wrong about my ideas, or that I'll live a life frustrated by unforeseen road-blocks which might make testing my hypothesis impossible. I might regret having gone through 7 semesters of college and thrown it away on a loony fantasy. I might hate the job in Florida, or not be able to stand sharing a place with my brother. There's plenty of places for things to go wrong. And I've got horrible luck when it comes to taking gambles.
I'm also terribly indecisive.
Normally I take the path of least resistance (admittedly out of cowardice), but I'm so confused by this decision that I'm not even sure which choice would be easiest. My confidence in myself isn't so great as to convince me that either one could be pulled off. Yet I have to try one. Which would I be happiest with?
Ugg. I need sleep. I don't get enough of that anymore.
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