Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride

Actually I worked as a synthetic organic chemist in a previous life and I was always much more afraid of the chronic systemic poisons than the things that blew up. It's one thing to have something go boom in your fume hood and quite another to get a drop of something on your glove that you don't even notice and then later that week all your hair starts falling out and everything tastes like metal. Organo-selenium, tin and tellurium compounds are particularly nasty.<p>I'm much happier now with nothing more serious than RSI to worry about.

Always worth a reread for the combination of gripping content with good writing. Just to pick another one in this series: <a href="http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php" rel="nofollow">http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...</a> (about stuff that will burn sand (not: burn _in_ sand)

So it's a no on preparing some in your pressure cooker?<p><a href="http://what-if.xkcd.com/40/" rel="nofollow">http://what-if.xkcd.com/40/</a>

Here is the last discussion on this post, 3 years ago. There may be relevant comments there: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148425" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148425</a><p>(although it looks as though the link has changed to the main archive on this site, but all the comments and post title refer to this article. Odd.)

I loved this quote from <a href="http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/11/things_i_wont_work_with_hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane.php" rel="nofollow">http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/11/things_i_won...</a><p>Synthesizing polynitro compounds is no chocolate fondue party, either: if you picture a bunch of guys wheeling around drums of fuming nitric acid while singing the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, you're not that far off the mark. You really have to beat the crap out of a molecule to get that many nitro groups on it, which means prolonged heating of things that you'd really rather not heat up at all.

<a href="http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/" rel="nofollow">http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...</a><p>The other articles in that category are mostly equally exciting.

So much stuff like this in Chemistry. It's why I gave up on my Chemistry career and went into programming. When computers blow up, they don't destroy the building or make you change color.

It's many days since I laughed so much. Especially "If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic."

I passed this link to my dad, who actually spent a good chunk of his professional career working with fluorine compounds. His comment: "The guy is just chicken -- or ill-equipped for fluorine work."

Seriously considered naming my band "Satan's Kimchi"

So this is like 10x worse than plain Fluorine [1], which is already evil?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw</a>

And this is why I'm happy to be working on computers now, and not in a wet lab. And I never even had to work with any of the <i>scary</i> stuff...

After reading about the risk in the work of a chemist , i wonder: what prevents automation for safety becoming common place?

Does anyone have a link to the original paper that doesn't require me to pay $38?

Did anyone else find this article to be meandering waffle that has no bearing to anything else on HN? I fear the airplane toilet incident has inspired a host of chemists to start posting on hacker news, creating a subculture.<p>And yes, I'm totally expecting someone to point to the HN posting guidelines that state that anything that may be of interest to geeks is appropriate...