Back to the Dark Ages

[crimresearch]

So after reading that the local school board is going to insist that all children be taught that evolution is only a theory, and that 'creation science' is the real deal, I come across this story:

" A Florida high school chemistry teacher was arrested Monday after students told authorities he taught his class how to make explosives, the Orange County Sheriff's Office said....

Authorities said in Pieski's classroom, they found information, including the chemical breakdown, for an explosive predominantly used by Middle East suicide bombers."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/a...ke_bomb/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+National+News


Imagine that!!! A high school chemistry class that actually contains information on chemicals...


And the teacher actually had the nerve to teach these kids the top secret formula for that terrorist explosive....black powder!
And then he had the gall to have them actually blow something up!!

 

[LW]

And the teacher actually had the nerve to teach these kids the top secret formula for that terrorist explosive....black powder!

In case you didn't notice it from the article, he had two kinds of explosive stuff: black powder and some hyper-super-ultra-terrorist explosives.

Chalk me up the list of repressive oppressors who don't think that it is a good idea to teach high school students how to make potent and unstable explosives.

Of course, they can find the information easily enough from other sources if they are interested in blowing stuff up but I don't see any need to explicitly plant that idea on their heads.

A little over two years ago one Finnish high-school graduate exploded a bomb inside a large mall. Seven dead (including the bomb-maker) and about 80 wounded. It is not know if it was intended suicide or did the bomb go off prematurely. (He had learned his chemistry from Internet, not from school).

 

[Magyar]

I have to ditto LW sentiments here. Arresting the guy maybe a bit too much, but really CS, are you saying that the ONLY project a qualified chemistry teacher can come up with for a class project is a bomb?

 

[Random]

This sort of thing has always been a good argument against home schooling. Do you conservatives out there really want the leftists down the street giving their kids the Anarchist’s Cookbook for chemistry class, Das Kapital for economics, etc. At least with public schooling, we can try to keep an eye on what the teachers are teaching kids, and intervene if we don’t like it.

 

[pgwenthold]

I have to ditto LW sentiments here. Arresting the guy maybe a bit too much, but really CS, are you saying that the ONLY project a qualified chemistry teacher can come up with for a class project is a bomb?

Probably not the "only" project, but certainly one that will keep their interests.

Explosives have some great and interesting chemistry involved with them.

The teacher HAS come up with a way to get students interested in chemistry, and is relating it to topical, real life stuff.

It's actually a great lesson in how easy it can be to create something extremely dangerous.

Chemistry knowledge doesn't kill people. Terrorists kill people.

 

[crimresearch]

I'm surprised to see that 'Don't you dare teach my kids that stuff in school, they can learn it on the Internet like everyone else' sentiment applied to science..it is more usual for for sex ed debates.

But let me be very, very clear...I not only have no problem with a high school chemistry teacher teaching chemistry, including the chemistry of rapid oxidation of chemical compounds, I would want to see evidence that this particular teacher was telling these kids to go blow up *people*, or was teaching without regard for basic safety precautions, before I considered him anything but a teacher who had found a way to engage disaffected student's interest in an important scientific discipline.


This 'some scientific knowledge is too dangerous and should be kept away from kids' is exactly the sort of Dark Ages mentality I was referring to in the thread title.

 

[BPSCG]

I would want to see evidence that this particular teacher was telling these kids to go blow up *people*, or was teaching without regard for basic safety precautions, before I considered him anything but a teacher who had found a way to engage disaffected student's interest in an important scientific discipline.

As a matter of fact, I read a book last summer that dealt with that issue. The Radioactive Boy Scout tells the true story of a suburban Detroit kid, not a particularly good student, who somehow became obsessed with building an atomic reactor. His family didn't spend much time with him, and his teachers didn't engage him and direct his interests down a safe path. The result: He ended up actually building a working nuclear reactor in his back yard (working in the sense that he was able to start a nuclear reaction, not in the sense that he was able to control it). The EPA had to come along and clean up the mess.

Fascinating book, even if the author's anti-nuclear energy bias grabs you by the lapels and screams in your face on practically every page.

 

[punchdrunk]

This sort of thing has always been a good argument against home schooling. Do you conservatives out there really want the leftists down the street giving their kids the Anarchist’s Cookbook for chemistry class, Das Kapital for economics, etc. At least with public schooling, we can try to keep an eye on what the teachers are teaching kids, and intervene if we don’t like it.

Funny, I read the exact same article and thought this sort of thing was a good argument for home schooling. This happened at a public school, correct? At least with home schooling, parents can have greater control over what their children are exposed to. Like, say a horrific fireball resulting from an ill-conceived science project on the 5th hole of a golf course.

 

[pgwenthold]

As a matter of fact, I read a book last summer that dealt with that issue. The Radioactive Boy Scout tells the true story of a suburban Detroit kid, not a particularly good student, who somehow became obsessed with building an atomic reactor. His family didn't spend much time with him, and his teachers didn't engage him and direct his interests down a safe path. The result: He ended up actually building a working nuclear reactor in his back yard (working in the sense that he was able to start a nuclear reaction, not in the sense that he was able to control it). The EPA had to come along and clean up the mess.

Where'd he get the uranium? Kind of hard to start a nuclear reactor without the appropriate radioactive materials. It's not something you can get in the local hardware store.

I do remember an article from Readers Digest many years ago titled, "How I Designed a Nuclear Bomb My Senior Year at Princeton" about an engineering student who designed a nuclear bomb while at Princeton. The scary part was that he was able to get highly classified details about nuclear bomb design just by calling a guy at Los Alamos (or one of the government labs). He asked the guy about his idea for the explosive sheath, and the guy is all like, no, we haven't used that approach for a long time. Now we do this...

 

[BPSCG]

Where'd he get the uranium? Kind of hard to start a nuclear reactor without the appropriate radioactive materials. It's not something you can get in the local hardware store.

I'm fuzzy on what the details were, but going to junk shops, getting old clocks and watches with radium painted on the hand faces, old radios with vacuum tubes that might have tiny amounts of radioactive material. He was quite patient, but the book made it quite clear that what he did was not at all beyond the capabilities of a suitably-motivated and driven high-school student.

 

[Random]

I'm fuzzy on what the details were, but going to junk shops, getting old clocks and watches with radium painted on the hand faces, old radios with vacuum tubes that might have tiny amounts of radioactive material. He was quite patient, but the book made it quite clear that what he did was not at all beyond the capabilities of a suitably-motivated and driven high-school student.

Well, first he started out with really low-grade radioactives. He knew that if you bombarded thorium-232 with neutrons, you could create uranium-233, a fissionable material. He needed a neutron gun, so he bought a bunch of broken smoke detectors, which each have very small amounts of americium, took out the americium and put it in a small block of lead. He bought a bunch of gas lantern mantles, which are coated in a compound that contains thorium, and blowtorched them to ash. He then separated the thorium out using lithium from a bunch of lithium batteries. He pointed the neutron gun at the thorium and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, the americium wasn’t strong enough to transform thorium to uranium, so he went to a bunch of antique stores looking for old clocks painted with radium. It was taking forever, but he got really lucky when he found an old clock that actually had a small vial of radium paint in the back. Dried that into a salt, put it in his neutron gun, pointed it at thorium ash and found he was making very small amounts of uranium.

He managed to get some pitchblende, an ore containing small amounts of uranium, and crushed it to dust with a hammer. Then he had a friend steal a strip of beryllium from chemistry class, and put that in front of his neutron gun. He pointed the gun at his new, improved pile of dust, and waited. He was really cooking now!

He then got the idea of taking all of the radioactive material he had, and building a breeder reactor, which could produce its own fuel. He got the basic diagrams out of a college physics book, and fashioned one of his own using foil and duct tape.

When he started detecting elevated radiation readings a block away, he realized that this probably wasn’t the brightest idea he ever had, and set about dismantling it. He was trying to dispose of the material when he got pulled over by a cop, who asked to see what was in his trunk.

One national emergency later, his project and his mother’s shed were shoved into some lead-lined containers and shipped off by the Feds.

 

[BPSCG]

Well, first he started out with really low-grade radioactives.

(...snip...)

One national emergency later, his project and his mother’s shed were shoved into some lead-lined containers and shipped off by the Feds.

Random, you maniac, what have you done? Now everyone here is going to be making backyard breeder reactors!

 

[Mycroft]

Random, you maniac, what have you done? Now everyone here is going to be making backyard breeder reactors!

His mistake was in not shielding his breeder reactor. We can correct that and do this...

 

[BPSCG]

His mistake was in not shielding his breeder reactor. We can correct that and do this...

Oh.

Well, okay, then.

Carry on.

 

[Random]

Random, you maniac, what have you done? Now everyone here is going to be making backyard breeder reactors!

Well, the version I read left out several key details, and the version I just posted left out key details from that story, so anyone trying to do it themselves with what I just posted isn’t gonna get very far.

David Hahn was able to get as far as he did by pretending to be a teacher and writing fairly believable letters to people at the NRC and certain private companies asking for help with his various “class projects”. This was all before 911, and the NRC learned quite a bit from that mess. They have almost certainly put a couple of lines of code in various computer programs to alert the Feds if someone starts to make certain purchases that should be easily traceable these days.

You can pay cash to get the materials you would need though, if you were willing to make a hundred odd small purchases that wouldn’t be detected however. Don’t think that many people at this site will try it on a lark though once they realize that it would cost thousands of dollars and take months.

 

[crimresearch]

Funny, I read the exact same article and thought this sort of thing was a good argument for home schooling. This happened at a public school, correct? At least with home schooling, parents can have greater control over what their children are exposed to. Like, say a horrific fireball resulting from an ill-conceived science project on the 5th hole of a golf course.

Not just a chemical reaction, but a 'horrific' fireball?

Then that big yellow ball of fire that magically appears in the sky every morning (until the dragon eats it up at night), must really scare the crap out of you.

 

[corplinx]

So after reading that the local school board is going to insist that all children be taught that evolution is only a theory, and that 'creation science' is the real deal, I come across this story:

Memphis City Schools? Jeez, you'd think they have enough problems with schools sinking in the ground, a corrupt elected school board staffed by barely literate people, a mayor who honestly wants the system to collapse so he can pawn it off on the county, crime in the schools (both teachers and students), drugs, unteachable students in inner city elementary schools, and countless other problems without having to teach religion in a science class too.

 

[LW]

But let me be very, very clear...I not only have no problem with a high school chemistry teacher teaching chemistry, including the chemistry of rapid oxidation of chemical compounds, I would want to see evidence that this particular teacher was telling these kids to go blow up *people*, or was teaching without regard for basic safety precautions, before I considered him anything but a teacher who had found a way to engage disaffected student's interest in an important scientific discipline.

Making gunpowder: OK in my books.

Making a modern unstable explosive: big no-no.

Unstable explosives should not be made by anyone for any purpose. Those who need large bangs can purchase modern safe explosives.

As far as anecdotes go, one of my father's childhood pals blew his fingers off with a 15-year old detonator cap.

 

[crimresearch]

From the Memphis Fish Wrapper:

"The same school board member who helped establish a Bible class in Shelby County Schools is pushing for a creation message on high school biology books.

County school board member Wyatt Bunker, who believes the Bible is the inerrant word of God, said he's concerned that students are being taught only scientific theories such as evolution and the Big Bang....

...Still, several board members have been dismayed that no state-approved texts teach the religious creationism approach along with scientific theories, Bunker said Wednesday"

http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/local_news/article/0,1426,MCA_437_3553964,00.html

 

[punchdrunk]

Not just a chemical reaction, but a 'horrific' fireball?

Then that big yellow ball of fire that magically appears in the sky every morning (until the dragon eats it up at night), must really scare the crap out of you.

Well, I'll quote the article:

Police were called to the golf course after residents heard the loud explosion and saw a fireball on the fifth hole.

So maybe it was small and cuddly fireball, I don't know.

And everyone knows that God drags that yellow ball of fire across the sky as part of his daily weight-lifting regimen. Magic indeed....