Where There's Smoke, There's Fun

With the Independence Day celibration coming up, I thought I'd see if I could find something that would be fun for the kids. I had some potassium nitrate lying around, so I figured I'd see if I could find a nice smokebomb recipe. Naturally that was an easy thing to find on the internet, so I mixed up a batch real quick.

The instructions mentioned that the mixture could be used as a powder, but was generally better when bonded, so I decided to do a test without bonding it. That was a bad idea, if it isn't compacted, it burns very quickly and doesn't make much smoke. Its more like rocket fuel really, and its good for scorching the hair off of ones knuckles.

For the next attempt I mixed up a smaller batch and went ahead and bonded it into a solid mass. I rolled it a bit and gave it a fuse. Heres the result.



The foil was there as an experiment, I wasn't sure if containment would make any difference in smoke production. I don't think it does. The fuse is a bit of paper coated in the smoke material. It burns at a nice reliable rate, and gives plenty of time to get ones hand out of the way of the higher rate burn (which is pretty impressive).

Unfortunately it was pretty windy today, so the test was less than awe-inspiring. It made a good trail of smoke, but not a huge cloud. It really did a nice job though, much better than commercial toy smoke bombs, although the smoke wasn't quite as dense.

I did a little bit of research into colored smoke, but that requires a bunch of other exotic chems that I don't have and don't really want to mess with, so I'm sticking with the old stand-by. It's quick and easy to make, and requires only two ingredents, both of which can be procured locally. Most drug stores carry potassium nitrate for around $5 for a 100g bottle. I have no idea what kind of affliction one would treat with it, but it is a convienant, although expensive, source.

For the second test I decided I'd need to go bigger to get a reasonable result on this blustery day. I used the remainder of my 100g bottle and mixed up what turned out to be about a 150g smoker. Here it is:



What a beauty, eh? It's about the size I was looking for, but quite a bit smaller than what I'm hoping to make for the 4th. The test was impressive. It burned completely in about 30-45 seconds, and even in the light wind made a huge cloud of smoke. I lit one of the commercial giant smoke bombs just before it as a comparison, and while the dense purple smoke was pretty, it wasn't very impressive because of the light wind. My smoker produced such a huge volume of smoke that even with the wind it completely obscured the street while it burned.

For the 4th I'd like to make one about 10 times this size. I'd like it to burn about 3 times as long, and produce more smoke. I'm looking forward to it.

Quantum Accounting

An interesting article was linked from Slashdot this evening. It seems that some guys with some background in quantum physics have come up with a possible way around the grandfather paradox. In the article it is reported that they think that since the math seems to indicate that time travel is possible (under some pretty extreme conditions), there must be a solution to the grandfather paradox. Because quantum mechanics deals with probabilities, they are proposing that anything that has a probability of one when you leave will be something your presence in the 'past', for instance, you won't be able to prevent your own conception by killing your grandfather before you or your father is born.

This idea has a cool feel to it. It gives me the impression that time and thus causality as we see it isn't what we think. That time is not an immutable march forward, and that maybe everything, past and future, is really all the same thing, linked in a way we don't see because of the way we exist.

It has been proposed that the reason all atomic particles appear to be identical is because they are in fact the same particle, interacting with itself along a time-like dimension. When traveling in one direction through this dimension we see the particle as normal matter, when traveling in the other direction we see it as antimatter. This doesn't explain why antimatter seems less robust than normal matter, but its still an intesting idea, and fun to consider. If the idea has any truth to it, its probably at a much more fundamental level than we currently understand. For example, I'd expect that it would have to explain how virtual particle flux comes about, why there are so many kinds of quarks (I really expect that if there is a 'fundamental' particle, there is only one kind, all these different kinds of quarks doesn't seem very elegent to me. Maybe we're just looking at them the wrong way).

Its kind of sad to know that we'll never know for sure. I surely hope that the 'everlasting life' folks are right, but thats not where my money is laid.

Mmm, beeer...

Some creative sole came up with this amusment:

TOP 10 REASONS WHY BEER IS BETTER THAN RELIGION!

10. No one will kill you for not drinking beer
9. Beer doesn't tell you how to have sex.
8. Beer has never caused a major war.
7. They don't force beer on minors who can't think for themselves.
6. When you have beer, you don't knock on people's doors trying to give it away.
5. Nobody has ever been burned at the stake, hanged or tortured over their brand of beer.
4. You don't have to wait more than 2000 years for a second beer.
3. There are laws saying that beer labels can't lie to you.
2. You can prove you have a beer.
1. If you've devoted your life to beer, there are groups to help you stop.

I'd add:
You can switch beers any time and nobody cares.
Nobody thinks you are strange when they see you without beer.