Y’all know that I’m an advocate of kids being able to get their science on. It’s great when they can do this is school, under the guidance of knowledgable and enthusiastic teachers. But sometimes the teachers are … not so knowledgable, or not so enthusiastic. Even when they are both, sometimes there are not enough school hours a week for kids to get the science they crave — especially the hands-on exploration.
According to Boing Boing, certain avenues of extra-curricular science exploration have just gotten harder to pursue. As posted today on Boing Boing:
US bans sale of chemicals to hobbyists without $1K license
Amateur science tinkering — another casualty of the war on terror? Boing Boing reader Josh says,
Popular science and chemistry supplier United Nuclear (known by many for their amazing neodymium magnets) is faced with legal action from the United States CPSC. The CPSC proposes that all people attempting to purchase a slew of common chemicals, some of which are in children’s chemistry sets, must have a current license to manufacture explosives issued by the ATF. This would extend to people who do not and will not have anything to do with explosives.
The list of controlled substances includes aluminum, titanium, zinc, zirconium, and sulfur. Link to petition for help from United Nuclear.
I’m a little torn by this one. Chemistry sets are not the benign playthings some have assumed they were, what with components that can do harm to you if you ingest them, get them in your eye or on your skin, or pour them down the drain when you’re done. My guess is that the makers of chemistry sets for kids (or older hobbyists) have gotten better and better at reducing the amount of seriously hazardous materials in these kits, and that they probably give better instructions about how to use them safely and dispose of them responsibly afterwards. Reasonably careful adult supervision should render today’s chemistry set less dangerous than a bacon double cheeseburger (or, if you prefer, less dangerous than applying mascara while shifting lanes at 80 mph).
Then again, if you’re a kid with a chemistry set, maybe you’re looking for an opportunity to do some experiments without adult supervision.
Are you going to be making explosives with the kit? Given the quantities of materials that you get in such kits, it seems to me you’re more likely to get into trouble with fertilizer and diesel fuel (sold separately). However …
… there was an incident with a chemistry set in my childhood home. One of my brothers was involved in some sort of … unsupervised experiment. As I did not witness the experiment (and no lab notebook was recovered), I cannot say with authority whether or not there was an explosion. However, he scorched the hell out of the card table.
He decided not to pursue studies in science.*
*Unless you count economics.
Getting a chemistry set back when I was about 10 was a very important moment in my life. My brother bought it for me when he travelled to the UK. I worked with that set (and later added more equipment from a real lab-ware store) for many years.
(And no, economics is NOT a science)
Yet another advance in the War Against Learning. By preventing home-learning by anyone without access to expensive school labs (libraries, computer equipment, current textbooks, etc), the moneyed class can cut down on uppity plebelets hoping to escape their God-ordained place at the bottom of the heap. ;-(
Aye, it’s well-known that chemistry is by far the most difficult science to take up as a hobby – people tend to default to the assumption that you’re making drugs or bombs. (This fits with their narrow worldview since the ones interested in hobbyist chemistry tend to be adolescent, and adolescents are ALWAYS interested in drugs and bombs and anarchy/rebellion. Sigh.)
This regulative travesty would affect far more than just sales of chemistry kits. For example, many industrial users of chemicals would also have to have the BATF license, pay the fees, have the on site inspections whenever BATF wishes (no search warrant is needed) anytime, anywhere.
This is an attempt to greatly expand the reach of the BATF in a wholely inappropriate manner. The BATF license in question requires a storage magazine located some distance from dwellings according to the quantity of materials being stored. It is wholely inappropriate to the issues of safely handling and storing small quantities of chemicals of any sort.
Now let’s be realistic about this. A chemical supply house sells things which are dangerous by its nature. They may be oxidants, poisons, carcinogens, heavy metals, etc. These come with a MSDS “materials safety data sheet” which the purpose of which is to advise of the classification level of the dangers of the chemical in question.
So we are going from intelligently advising people of the dangers of an item, to prohibiting it without their paying very expensive and intrusive fees and licensing.
I assume that all ammunition for firearms will be covered by this law, being as it already contains explosives?
Getting a chemistry set was a big moment in my life too, and I grew up to be a professional chemist. My thinking is that the most satisfying and dramatic reactions, using materials and on a scale that is commensurate with safety, should be included. The devil is in the details, but that’s the ideal I would shoot for. Educational quantities of reagents should then be exempted from regulation.
I think too much of law seems to be designed to free judges and cops from actually exercising judgment about the dangers and intentions of experiments, and that eventually, doing any experiment will be illegal. I mean, electronics can be used to make detonators and timers- how long until owning a transistor or integrated circuit is probable cause to have the fuzz in your house?
I did a lot of really foolhardy experiments as a kid. No drugs, but plenty of, shall we say, energetic reactions, for which I snibbled a gram or two of whatever I needed from the (nearly unused) chemical stockroom in my middle school. I think I would have been far better off if schools had not been so experiment-phobic, and I had been given some outlet with supervision. Curious kids shouldn’t have to become outlaws to do experiments.
The stuff I did, teaching myself Chemistry, would have me in Homeland Security’s files today.
I had an older kid (who was in high school) buy my supplies for me. Like sodium in those 1-kilogram tennis ball cans, with mineral oil between the chunks.
“scorched the hell out of the card table” — small time. I blew up the Brooklyn Heights sewer system, with many fire engines involved.
“The law is an ass” [Dickens]. The law wants students so safe, it will not let them play dodgeball, or run around during recess. We are deep into “With Folded Hands” [Jack Williamson], except we are the robots keeping ourselves safe from modest risk.
“(And no, economics is NOT a science)” — well, I’d say:
(1) “Wealth of Nations”, by Adam Smith, 1776, is to Economics; as “Chemistry” by Lavoisier is to Chemistry; as “Electricity” by Benjamin Franklin is to electrodynamics; as “Principia Mathematica” by Newton was for Physics; as “Elements” by Euclid was to Geometry.
(2) The economists get to experiment on US as lab rats. That’s the way the White House wants it. Friends of Bush and Haliburton don’t see anything wrong with the economy. The 2% of citizens who own more than 50% of all wealth don’t see anything wrong.
I think we need to fight Chemistry Set Commissars where they live, or else fight them here at home.
As a child, I remember being incredibly fascinated by chemistry. My family was willing to indulge this, and I vaguely recall owning a chemistry set of sorts, but I don’t actually remember it containing significant quantities of any reagents. What it did have, however, were test tubes and other miscellaneous lab equipment, and that was more than enough for my curious imagination. I had endless hours of fun with simple acid/base chemistry; reacting baking soda and vinegar in a test tube and quickly stoppering it before pointing the tube at some suitable target was a great way to spend the afternoon.
I didn’t get a chance to do real chemistry until high school, but in interim, I did all the scientific experiments I could find in books, and I took some summer courses on “kitchen chemistry” at the a local university. Here’s to hoping that the next generation manages to get as much out of playing with lemon juice and potato clocks as I did; even if traditional chemistry sets go the way of the dodo, I strongly doubt that frightened, irrational politicians will ever be able to kill human curiosity.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight them on the point.
This is going to be a bit of a wooly post, but anyway…
You can make poison gas from common household chemicals. A trip to radio shack, then a DIY store, and you can make a bomb or three. Merely banning some chemicals from public access will perhaps save one childs life due to them not blowing themselves up whilst making something (unlike someone at school with my dad, who did just that in the early 60’s) but will not stop any terrorists.
The problem I see is that it helps in bringing up people who are out of touch and really do not have a clue as to what is around them in the real world. If they have played with a chemistry set, mixed things together, made soap, baked, tinkered with a car, etc etc, they will have a better idea what makes things work. Whereas they are doing their best to make people raise children in a sterile environment with only intellectual learning, where they are fed everything ready packaged. We’re talking the equivalent of city kids not knowing that milk comes from cows here, except that people will not know what is in the bleach they use etc. It’s related to the fact that many people do not know that antibiotics don’t kill viruses.
Meanwhile, thanks to the idiotic legislation passed by the current UK gvt, I could be arrested for having material conducive to terrorism. This is because I have old 30, 50, 90 year old science textbooks, which, as was usual for the time, have pretty good instructions for doing lots of interesting things. I also have alcehmical books, and a garage with some interesting stuff and a small furnace in my back garden. This is beause I am interested in actually doing hands on experimenting with old science and technology, from the medieval period. I then go to re-enactments and demonstrate things like pewter casting to people, or distillation for making acid.
So I’m carrying on with what I do, but always with an eye to what people might say. So far my neighbours don’t seem bothered at all.
I’m getting a 404 from that link to the United Nuclear petition.
Oy, the chemistry set didn’t cause the problems, it didn’t have cool enough chemicals. The first explosion was actually my science teachers fault (to his credit, he couldn’t have known that I would have ready access to both hydrochloric acid and zinc (on hot-dipped, galvanized nails). I couldn’t get a good measure on the amount of zinc on the nails, so I just put several nails and covered them with acid. I filled the test tube readily enough, not really considering that there was still hydrogen gas being produced. I lit off the gas in the tube without a hitch. Then the pilot on the hotwater heater clicked on and the gas had accumulated enough to ignite. Covered everything in the laundry room with a fine layer of soot, including my friend and I.
Things got really exciting when I got into photography and fireworks. Started innocently enough, lighting black tuna fish cans of rubbing alcohol, against a blackdrop, taking black and white photos. Then I learned about making blackpowder and after discovering that adding various metal oxides changed the color of the flame, I was all about the pyro. Even made my own powder from raw materials, bat guano, carbon I scorched myself and sulfur a friend of the family brought me from a cave. My dad drew the line at magnesium incendiaries. Not that he didn’t let me make them, he just made sure to supervise.
Boys and fire, what can I say? Except that nothing more volatile than sulfur and carbon came in my chemistry set. And those in small enough quantities to be of little consequence.