h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Umm, I wasn't actually thinking of putting a wind turbine *on* the car.

If you had one sitting on your garage (f'rinstance) and it quietly chugged away filling up a hydrogen tank. Not saying it would meet all your needs but anything you produce yourself doesn't have to be purchased at the petrol (gas) station.

That would be brilliant to have a wind turbine on your car

"Come back here you punk"

Bridges and wires could be interesting though

...and therefore can't be taxed... so it'll never happen.

Actually, that's not true, I suppose they could meter it like they do the output of the smugness panels on my roof and tax you appropriately on whatever you self-generate. Could work.

Orcus


Or death.



Natch.

As a chemist you just need to know what can go bang a bit...us engineers have to know what goes bang a bit and then what that means when you've got a few tonnes of it reacting somewhere!

If yours goes bang you'll get burnt.

If mine goes bang I'll get burnt in court...unless the bang is big enough and they can;' find any evidence to look over and everyone is killed and hence can't testify..."Operator error. m'lud."



And you only need to know . much more than someone else to be an expert.

Well now it's your turn for a not quite.

If ours go bang it can indeed kill (and quite famously did in the US a couple of years back, when as student at UCLA set fire to themselves when working alone) and we can also end up in court.

We just need to know it's flammable, explosive etc. Not the details.

Or at least the boss-man can


On a safety note that still amused me to this day. A few years back a company started refusing to ship a chemical called HOBt to us because it was an 'attenuated explosive'

Isn't an 'attenuated explosive' something that's not explosive then?

Also, said company were apparently quite happy to ship gallons and gallons of hexane, petroleum ether etc. around the country.

I went to see Robert Llewelyn talk about why he likes electric cars so much. Lots of the obvious objections are already overcome in the south of England with fast charging points. Here's a video (he was very funny)

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=setn_ye9qk4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dsetn_ye9qk4

Chemists...

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/01/09/things_i_wont_work_with_azidoazide_azides_more_or_less.php

Oh yes, that's a good one

the t in HOBt does stand for TRIazole - I think this may have clouded their judgement. If it stood for TET then you could safely remove the 'attenuated prefix

Oh and azides are really cool. They're both explosive and phenomenally poisonous to boot. Awesome