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« Tris (One of the few chemicals we go through in buckets) | Main | Too much end-of-semester grading and too much NMR... »

Silver Iodide (Photos of ice-nine)

Category: Inorganic
Posted on: December 14, 2006 9:00 AM, by Molecule of the Day

You may have heard of a guy named Kurt Vonnegut. What you might not know is that his lesser-known little brother Bernie was the guy who came up with the idea of using AgI for cloud seeding.

From little bro Kurt's Timequake:

Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?

Answer: That is bird poop, too.

So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of
environmental calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima baby
carriage. Our underarm deodorants have eaten holes in the ozone layer.

And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can't draw
for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn't
like paintings because they didn't do anything, just hung there year after
year, has this summer become an artist!

I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the
poor man's Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and
consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable materials, such as
windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et voila! This has
nothing to do with his cancer. He didn't know he had it yet, and the
malignancy was in his lungs and not his brain in any case. He was just
farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife to ask
him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voila! Better late
than never, that's all I can say.

Sorry, it has nothing to do with AgI, but indulge me.

Silver halide has played a profoundly important role in film photography, but the late B. Vonnegut played a profoundly important role in elucidating its usefulness in cloud seeding. I've read in various places that it inspired K.V. to come up with ice-nine, but I'm not sure if it's true.

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Comments

It becomes Ag+ or something in light, right?

Posted by: Khalil A. | December 14, 2006 12:44 PM

There is no evidence that the "Ozone Hole" did not exist in the 1800s or in the 1600s. Its area and overall depletion are independent of atmospheric inputs of halogens over the past 50 years. Do you want to make ozone with sunlight? One hour after the sun rises on Los Angeles... Ozone formation kinetics are awesome. Spare Uncle Al the Luddite Enviro-whinerism.

Put a microdrop of water in a diamond anvil cell and squeeze. It will rapidly go solid with pressure (phase diagram) terminating the fun. Heat the bleb with an IR laser and keep going. Bingo! The densest and infective polymorph of water is (carefully) stockpiled by the major powers for a very credible END OF THE WORLD! scenario. Play nice, boys and girls...

...or not. Is Uncle Al spinning one?

Posted by: Uncle Al | December 14, 2006 2:46 PM

If I'm not mistaken, big brother Bernie was also the one who dreamed up the lightning strike detector system that is now deployed nationwide.

Posted by: chezjake | December 14, 2006 3:17 PM

Kurt was a chemistry major in college too!

Posted by: movies | December 20, 2006 7:26 PM

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