An Irrelevant Thread of Irrelevance

So I heard other forums have a thread for when a topic isn't quite worthy of a full discussion but is worth a mention nonetheless - far from clucking our tounges and be-monocling ourselves at what the rest of humanity does I thought we too could have such a thread. Feel free to post the flotsam and jetsam of unimportant yet vaguely interesting news, odd occurences in real life or anything you think remotely bears a mention and also comment on other people's inconsequential nonsense. As a start here you go:

This news article. I overheard this listening to people whilst waiting to purchase large gloves for chemistry purposes outside of stores and I thought to myself "Naah, no way, no where could possibly get a commercial license to use liquid nitrogen - those likely PhD students must clearly be retards", and yet I checked tonight and there you go. The reason I found this so unbelievable was that I've seen a lecturer pour liquid nitrogen over his hand, and on Monday (not for the first time, but shhh!) I dipped my fingers into it momentarily myself - any slight amount of heating of the stuff turns it instantly into gas (as you'd imagine it would for something that is a gas well below freezing). So how they hell did a pocket of this survive in her drink to reach her stomach? If the liquid surrounding it was that cold it would have turned into ice, liquid nitrogen could not (as far as I have seen) survive intact in a drink.

Secondly, in this day and age how the hell did someone get licensed for this? It is a health and safety nightmare, and I can't see any reasonable government condoning this practice for the use of a spectacle (the use of liquid nitrogen in my labs is very stringent to say the least). It is just completely unfathomable to me that someone would be allowed to drink such a thing. Personally, I think she must have drank some liquid nitrogen neat to make it have that effect on her stomach and someone is keeping it hush hush to not get the blame - a small amount of something that likes to be a gas would not last very long as a liquid in someone's nicely warmed stomach; even if it did a small amount in my amazingly accurate scientific opinion would definitely not cause significant enough freezer burns to necessitate the removal of an entire stomach. I call bullshit.

Lastly sometimes in labs I like to blow on liquid nitrogen, watch it fog and believe for just a moment I'm a wizard. Hey, I said it was an irrelevant thread.

 

i like nice fog also,have you done the bz reaction?!
quite trippy!

 

No I've not, the only thing I use it for is to condense solvents before they get back to my vacuum pump (as if you reduce pressure - i.e. as in a vacuum - boiling point also drops and liquids evaporate at much lower temperatures). It's the most dull use of liquid nitrogen you could possibly think of, certainly far less interesting than causing irrevocable stomach damage.

 

Well it shouldn't have been able to be physically in the drink anyway, it would have evaporated entirely by the time it reached her lips. And it is impossible for something that is mostly water to get below 0 degrees Celsius at atmospheric pressure - so the fact that the water was too cold wouldn't have been the problem. And as for if the liquid nitrogen did somehow remain in the drink - the gas wouldn't jump to room temperature in an instant but it would probably equalize significantly and also I wouldn't think gas is as good at keeping contact with tissue than a liquid is.

I think she must have just swigged it down as soon as it was poured with there being liquid nitrogen visibly in the glass (maybe the cocktail only took up half the volume of the glass and so there was a significant amount of liquid nitrogen), still what kind of idiot would do that? And why was this scenario ever allowed in the first place? It baffles the mind.

 

Even weirder - for the liquid nitrogen to survive more readily, she may have installed her own feeding tube. There'd have to be a lot, though - the phenomenon you describe in which you put your hand into some liquid nitrogen and it evaporated around you, preventing your fingers from being frozen? it's called the Leidenfrost Effect. If you left your hand in for just a bit longer you would be much less unharmed. That her throat wasn't damaged by the amount supposedly left in her stomach scarily lends credence to a feeding tube. Whatever way this is put, I think she did it to herself. Probably at the spark of hearing of the Liquid Nitrogen Diet.

 

Again not worthy of an entire thread, but this is pretty hilarious. Though I guess if people can get sued for that now, it's bad news for Smuel (jks jks).

 

What I got out of that article is;

"I married my wife out of love. But when I found out she used to be ugly, I hated her for it. Also, (figuratively) fuck this innocent baby."