Canon ball floating in mercury!

Meanwhile, I have to admit, seeing a pool of mercury has been an ambition of mine since high school

"Alas poor Torricelli,  I knew him well"...(well at least I knew one of his his barometers kinda well)

This brings to mind an event during my high school days when we were in the physics lab and for some reason the teacher was absent and we were examining the mercury barometer.

At the base ot this particular barometer there was a screw device with a knurled knob on it so that the column of mercury could be adjusted.....Now one of my classmates, (a friend of mine) decided to screw the adjuster up as far as he could, the end result being that the chamois washer supporting the column, either ruptured, or turned inside out, causing all the mercury to spill out all over the floor and surrounding benches..

There was still mercury in the cracks of the benches and the floor when I left the school a few years later and it is probably still there... As far as I am aware the barometer was never repaired (due to the cost of doing so) and even though there was a big inquiry at the time, they never discovered who wrecked the instrument..

Mercury is great stuff to play with and we had no idea in those days just how harmful the stuff can be.

There is a little bottle here somewhere containing about a teaspoonful of the mercury from the aforementioned device.. But all this happened a very long time ago, in a galaxy far from here..

ROFL!!

Yeah, all we got to play with were a few droplets of it in a little jar like thing.

The teachers in our day were a bit psychotic about mercury thermometers. Before we got our hands on them, there'd always be this whole 'safety' talk, drilling the need for caution etc when handling the thermometers. They used to go absolutely mental if someone broke one.

And someone usually broke one in each session

It's funny you know, how we used to play with the stuff in those days.. We used to get the old bronze pennies and halfpennies add rub mercury into them (with our fingers) till they were shiny like one or two shilling coins and it was only years later that we discovered that the stuff was poisonous..... No one ever got sick from it, or if they did, no one realised why they were sick..

LOL Yeah...

In our time, the teachers were mainly concerned with safety and cost. So they'd do a demonstration of most of the experiments, instead of letting us have a go.

The most fun we had was when we had this relief teacher take over, and he let us burn strips and strips of magnesium and stuff. He's the one who convinced us to taste something.... lime water maybe it was.

Ah, the innocence of youth...or as George Bernard Shaw said.."Youth is wasted on the young"...

Nah.... Youth was fun!

They key is to keep it as you grow old!

*goes to search for magnesium strips*

I'm thinking that lime water wouldn't have been very tasty..

The brain doesn't get old, but the body does..I was watching a Billy Connolly DVD recently and he said that he was just a child trapped in an adults body....Well I understand how he feels.... you are still the same person as you were then, but you have to act differently because you are older and supposedly know better...

I'd like a bit of metallic sodium that I could throw in the water...

LOL!

MEE TOOO!!!!

We were never given the opportunity to play with mercury.

I've got a barometer story similar to Andro's.  Perhaps it's a "boy in school" thing.  No-one worried though.  I remember after I started work I came across some mercury switches and the health and safety rules (even back in the 70's) surrounding them were excruciating.  I remember someone saying that it was a bit dangerous using them as a trembler switch on booby trapped explosives...

HAHAHAHA

Love it!

We were never given the opportunity to play with mercury.

We wern't supposed to be playing with mercury either, but (as with other things) if the opportunity presented itself then we grasped it with both hands....Much the same as any kid would I imagine...and this business with the barometer happened in the mid 50's..

They didn't let us play with mercury, yet they were overly enthusiastic about stuffing it into our teeth

>[

You're absolutely correct there, Deezee.....How come no one got mercury poisoning from that?

The don't use it these days and I would still have some of those old amalgum fillings in my teeth..

Yeah, my sis and mum (I think) suffered from mercury poisoning cos of that.

So we were all marched off to one of the few dentists in Singapore who did ceramic fillings.

Why not get gold teeth, then you could pretend to be pirates 

If gold were less expensive I mean...

Ai, me dad has gold fillings....

I used to make him open his mouth and stare at it when I was young.
Yes, gold fillings were a worthwhile ambition to a 5 yr old

Oooh ohhh

This is even more cool!

From Boing-boing

This enchanting little short was produced at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, at UC Berkeley in 2007, and has won a number of awards at film fests since. Snip:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?.

that was rather hypnotic....if a little freaky.

kinda reminded me of the ring when the little girl is crawling out of the tv.

hahahaah

Now that you mention it....

Oh oh, And I've just remembered I recorded the prequel to the Ring. Guess what I'll be watching tonight?

They made a prequel?

I wonder what the "cheapsquel" would be called...?

Yeah dr dec, there was a sequel and then a prequel, and then more sequels I think

Ah yes, 2 seqs, 1 preq - Wikipedia

ooh...there's a ring three?

Unless it has been whitewashed and Americanized, I'm not gonna watch it

Americanized??

Oh no drdec, I'm talking about the Japanese originals. Never watched the Hollywood version, and don't plan to. Not even sure how many they made.

The later Ring films weren't too scary. I guess once you get used to the creepy kid crawling out to you, there's only so much they can do with it.

i've seen the japanese & hollywood versions of the ring and though i'm not a big fan of either of them, i think the japanese version is the better one.

Most definitely. Goes for all the Japanese horror shows redone.

I love japanese tv.. its so funny i can sit for hours on youtube just watching things in japanese cracking up laughing... they really are hillarious and love mucking about I so want to be on japanese tv one day it'd suit me perfectly..

I prefer Japanese horror

In the lines of "Things that were good and then re-done by Hollywood", did anyone see 'Let The Right One In'?

'twas a kinda coming-of-age vampire romance film from Sweden... I don't know how to categorise it properly but it was really rather good. Now I hear that it's being remade with an American director (same guy as did Cloverfield), english-speaking actors and it's going to be set "somewhere in Colorado" (as opposed to the suburbs of Stockholm).

On the one hand, I hope they don't butcher it. On the other, I want the original to remain better, so I can continue telling people to go see the original.

I think I've watched that one... will need to hit YouTube to confirm

On a side note, Cloverfield was such a crap movie. I dunno why people were raving so much abt it. So I wouldn't expect much for the Swedish remake

I do not see the reason for the fuss around Cloverfield either... I remember watching it, slowly realising that I did not in any way care about any of the characters. What they were doing seemed totally illogical and I was just waiting to see which was going to be eaten by a monster for dramatic effect.

Didn't even remember their names... just gave them nicknames of my own invention like "Mr ThatGuy" or "Douchey McCameraMan". So the plot reduced to the following:

"Monsters or something, so Mr ThatGuy heads out to find ... someone ... and all his friends devote themselves unthinkingly to the same mission. CameraGuy comes along to record everything with ShakeyCam™ except when something visually impressive happens, at such times the camera is mysteriously dead level and fairly steady. Tension builds in the group and one got infected or something and dragged off by hazmat guys to explode behind a screen but no-one seemed to care and they didn't stick around after that and then ... then I imagined it being a better movie for a while and I think I missed the big monster reveal in that period and then there were only 2 left, I'm not sure where the other one went. I think there were some trees... and then it was the end."

I can't believe I sat through 15 minutes of Cloverfield before I realised it wasn't even being good at being totally hopeless.  The only redeming factor was that it was on the Sky movie channel and I hadn't specifically paid any money to watch it.

that channel is hypnotic and it scares me a little.

agreed with SK and Mr Dent. I would rate  it as one of the worst movies of all time

I just kept hoping they'd all die

wasn't it supposed to be 'the film that Godzilla should have been'? (or something similar).Which doesn't really say much for Godzilla.

hahahaha.... erm.... mmm....

*shrug* no idea...

then again, I never managed to sit thru Godzilla, so maybe

come to think of it.. neither did i...