To quote loginnotsecure 'So, you’re unemployed. '
That depends. It depends on your definition of 'employment'. I don't have a single, set and fixed employer. I freelance.
FUBAR-thanks for the vote of confidence mate. I have to confess, my own GP has told me that I more or less need to dumb things down for him, because I kinda...well its my 'baseline' if that makes sense, when speaking, and it kinda leaves him completely baffled a lot of the time. Its actually quite difficult to get anything done other than the likes of say, curing an infection with antibiotics, giving a muscle relaxer for the muscle cramp I have due to nerve damage in my leg, steroids for an autoimmune issue with my feet, eyedrops after an eye injury etc.
He did tell me that when it comes to anything regarding neurology, I'm way, way, WAY beyond his level of understanding.
Its a pain in the arse, a total pain in the arse. Its like...speaking loudly and slowly, trying to get something through to a pet dog. I actually do respect and like the guy, its just..he lacks the comprehension of neurophysiology and of biochemistry that I need to illustrate why a given medication ought to be prescribed or not prescribed, or an alternative to serve the same purpose found due to the original idea on his part being unacceptable for some reason.
I more or less leave him scratching his head. Its not something I do deliberately or to shame him, its just....trying to talk to him on his own level is difficult because of having to think how to put it in a way he can understand. Frustrating at best.
Woodworking ey? nice. Sounds fun. I do love making things like that myself, although my lathe is a metal lathe rather than one for woodwork. Got plenty woodwork tools around though from planes to powered sanders, routers etc. But the toolshed is more outfitted for metalwork, stuff like a capstan turret lathe, welding torch, drill press, an electronics room and all manner of things like soldering iron, heat-gun, dremel tool, all sorts of taps, die-heads, cutting and shaping tools for the lathe.
Its really quite satisfying. Used to make guitar parts a while back, although the economic situation made it not profitable to keep doing it anymore, a bit of a shite really, since I was making a few hundred quid a batch of truss rods (the bit that goes in the neck and keeps the tension in a guitar/bass neck). Used to start with just flat and round steel bars, and some brass rods and square lengths of bar, some rubber tubing, the lathe and the welding torch, plus a DIY-ed jig for the joining them together with a silver-cadmium based alloy. You kinda get into a rhythm, after the initial setup, push-drill-pull..click-clack..tap thread, click-clack..pull back...chop it off..until youv'e made 4 main parts (doing each type in batches rather than switching, using the same settings on the lathe preconfigured to make one component of the finished product) plus a screw worked in brass, thats got a three-step taper, the finest end threaded with a die-head and the other end knurled)
Then its just welding them all together, after slipping on the rubber tubing onto the round bar section, and after attaching a pair of screw threaded brass parts to each end of the rectangular-profile flat bar, sticking it in the flame-proof jig, welding on the brass retainers then sticking the rounded threaded bar through the tapped threads in the brass retaining endcap parts, adding some thread-locking compound after its all welded up and then letting it cool, before starting with the next, until there's a few hundred done, and finally, selling them on.
Was nice, both satisfying work, bit grimy, but the pleasant odor of tapping fluid in the air, the roar of the torch, the repetitive click-clack--zzzzzz of the tools biting into steel and brass, the smoke of searing steel scenting the air, and at the end of it all, a big handful of ?20 notes, often making 300-400 quid a batch. But couldn't find the buyers eventually. Economy took a shit on that particular business and I couldn't continue and make it profitable.
Now? I rely on the skills I have. I have a talent for chemistry and biotech, so I put it to good use. Makes sense, does it not? because welfare is shite and despite what the fuckers day about 'what the law says you need to live on', the law, is, unsurprisingly a load of fucking dog crap, (and enforced, as a rule, by similar dog crap, only the secondary portion of canine faecal material is a donut-scoffing fat bastard piece of dog crap with the intellect of your average example of road-kill and as malicious as the day is long and courtney love's minge is wide.) Enough to live on my fucking rectal passageway.
So...well...something has to be done about the situation in question. Because buggered if I'm going to go hungry (if I could properly feel hunger, neurologically speaking), go without food anyway. And buggered if I'm freezing my dick off on the streets, getting piss wet through when the weather is shite, and buggered if I'm existing in any space without access to good ventilation and privacy and both a benchtop, power supply and pressurized water supply. Oh and a fridge for my volatiles and things of a less than stable, or otherwise not very nice nature and escapist tendencies, such as for example, bromine, iodine monochloride, chromyl chloride, generally things that are both excellent at going from their container and eating people's faces off. Iodine, too, I keep that in the fridge too since it is pretty good at permeating containers over time and slowly escaping.
(no, if anyone is wondering, that fridge, its NOT the one that is used for the food to inhabit, I've a separate fridge that I use for nasties and for solvents, and occasionally it comes in useful for organisms, if cultures need to be exposed to colder than ambient temperatures). My old man also keeps his fish bait in there, when he is using maggots and needs them for a day or two later, or turning them to casters.
Otherwise, its completely full to the brim of the likes of jugs of dichloromethane, THF, cans of ether, bottles of acetonitrile, tubs of iodine, bottles of nitroethane, iodine monochloride, isopropanol (I keep one bottle of iPA in the freezer just for those moments I need it really, really cold for something to avoid having to wait for it to cool), couple of bottles of benzaldehyde, 2-pyrollidone...
Quite a few other things besides. *wonders to himself if he should stick the borohydride in there just to lengthen its storage life by delaying oxidation, even though the bottle of sodium borohydride prills is purged with argon, and that is stuck in an argon-filled can with some bubble-wrap stuck over the top like a sort of giant, syphilitically-warted NaBH4-dick-condom.*
Lets just say, in this house, you do NOT want to be a guest and wake up in the middle of the night and search for a midnight snack without knowing to only eat from the fridge in the kitchen, and to avoid the little container full of purplish-blacky curved fungal sclerotia that at one point were harvested from parasitized grain ears since those would be ergot fruit-bodies and the result of consuming them would be either seizures and psychosis, or gangrene and excruciating muscle spasms. Not pretty. Really not pretty.
As for school...wish they had offered woodworking classes, but they didn't. But when it came to science....although my lab was better than theirs, of all the classes in school, science was the one that I never cut in the entirety of my time at that school.
Although I did scare the fucking shite out of the class students and teachers, classroom assistant etc. at times....ever seen what happens when you chuck a lump of potassium metal about the size of a golf ball into a fishtank full of water? (no, I wouldn't have done it if there were fish in there, it was just water).
Neither had the science teacher from the look on her face after she got back up from under the table with the students and classroom assistant; only to get a bit of a shocker as the potassium which didn't instantly and violently explode, began to start, whilst still molten, dripping off the ceiling and back down into the water in a long stream, causing detonation after detonation after detonation, spraying flaming, hissing, spitting cracking potassium metal everywhere. It was hilarious, I was the only one standing at the bench at the time, watching the show, whilst everybody else was underneath it.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised, if there was still a mark on that lab ceiling that would be shaped exactly to the dimensions of where the molten, flaming potassium was launched up onto it, burning all the time whilst it dripped back into the water, to be sent up to the ceiling again, and again, and again....and again...and again........
Lol even if that had been the sodium metal the teacher thought it to be, that would still have made a hell of a bang. Lithium is fairly tame, sodium does like to make a bang though, potassium on the other hand, K really doesn't fuck about, and a piece the size of the chunk that went into that fish-tank...I'm surprised, looking back on it, that the tank actually survived in one piece. The force must have propelled it straight up, rather than the brunt of the shockwave blasting the sides out.
Never blown any rubidium or caesium up by throwing it in water though, but thats because both Rb and Cs are exceedingly expensive. Rb especially from the samples I've seen for sale. And unless I can get the hydroxides in bulk cheap (far cheaper than the metals themselves, but I can refine them, such as by electrolysis, although I bet the magnesiothermic reduction of RbOH or CsOH would work, followed by extraction of the powdered slag remaining into boiling 1,4-dioxane) then I'm sure as hell not spending ?100 or more for a couple of grams, only to blast it sky high in such a way as to make it irrecoverable.
Although I've seen Cs go off, thrown into a bath-tub. There wasn't a bathtub at the end of it. Just a whopping great THUMP!!!!!!, like a fucking cannon shot, and a plume of water from the bath being launched into the air to a couple of meters high.
The bath itself? reduced to tiny little pieces. Didn't look like much Cs either. Bloody christ though, the blast from that was astounding. I've been meaning to prepare both rubidium and caesium metal, since of course, they will be needed for my element collection, and all I need is magnesium dust (got at least a kilo), magnesium ribbon to ignite the mixture (got a roll of Mg tape) and 1,4-dioxane for the separation of the metal from the oxide slag, as well as the hydroxide of the alkali metal to be liberated, as well as a crucible.
The only thing I haven't got right now, is the dioxane (its a cyclic diether, basically two oxygen atoms, bridged by a two-carbon chain either side, linking the two in a ring. Think of it like piperazine, but with the nitrogen atoms replaced by oxygen atoms, its a useful solvent, of the ether type)
But I can make that out of antifreeze concentrate (the kind with no added water, for people to make their own mixes with) and concentrated sulfuric acid to serve as a dehydration-condensation agent which abstracts water and condenses two molecules of ethylene glycol antifreeze together with loss of H2O and then the result is distilled to afford dioxane, dried, redistilled and its ready for use. works well enough with OTC antifreeze concentrate from a hardware store/auto store like halfords, and bog-cleaner grade sulfuric. Since the product is distilled it comes over nice and clean. Some polymeric shite left behind in the still pot that needs cleaning out, but other than that, it works really well.
Really cheap, cheaper than buying commercial 1,4-dioxane, and the ingredients are as close to OTC as it can get (bog unblocker, antifreeze, and ebay for a length of magnesium ribbon, which costs about $2-$2.50 a roll give or take ten-twenty cents, and some magnesium powder. Again cheap as fuck)
Well..and the hydroxide of the alkali metal one is seeking to obtain. The main caution being that molten lithium, unlike other alkali metals, attacks glass, so the separation cannot safely be carried out in glassware, although Li is easier to just buy, so the dioxane step to liberate the metal from the oxide slag, it involves melting out the metal from the MgO/Mg(OH)2, and the crucible needs to be capped/sealed just before the mixture of hydroxide and magnesium dust ignites, and the cover weighted down with a brick or something similar, whatever is heavy and keeps the vapor of the alkali metal from being driven out in the searing heat of the reaction. Also not to look at it directly, without welding goggles on, because otherwise it could cause something like arc-eye
due to the intense bright white glare that comes from the burning Mg. Even the outside of the crucible begins to glow red hot, even close to white hot.
Have always enjoyed woodworking loginnotsecure, although my first love is definitely working with chemicals and glassware, secondarily, the science of mycology and botany, and then metalwork, but if I need something done in wood, I can make it and I'll have fun doing it.
One thing I've wanted to do since I was about 5yo though, is learn to properly blow glass, with a real talent. I just KNOW I'd be great at it, if I could only find a source for tutoring. If I have to though I'll go online and find me some PDFs, build the tools, buy a suitable pair of torches for lampworking and an annealing oven, then get to work teaching myself. Its pretty much the way I've always learned-by throwing myself into it and being my own teacher.
I always have done things that way. Did with chemistry, biology/biotech, mycology, physics, and my interest in particle physics and condensed matter physics again are both entirely self-taught. (I SO want to build myself an isochronous cyclotron)
Laser physics is another interest of mine. One thing I'd really love to try, is to build a SASER (sonoacoustic laser, basically a phonon-equivalent of a laser, emitting extremely coherent, directionally aimed sonic waves....I'm just wondering....hmmm....*sonic cannon for LC* and grinning evilly)
Polariton lasers look interesting too, for their high efficiency in terms of output to power.
