Cody's Lab did a video series on making yellow cake uranium that got him a visit from g men. Most everything Colin Furze does has mortal danger. Styropyro is probably also on a watchlist. Williams project was dangerous, but I don't see a reason why he should be a pariah.
You can add: photonicinduction. Everybody looks crazy until they're next to this dude. The dimensions involved scare me, and his "goes to 11 is not enough" attitude makes it even worse.
Well, they’d probably need to make a law banning it - and who seriously believes anyone is going to do that anyway enough to pass a law about it? (Lol)
Also, even relatively nanny state UK probably figures if he’s only going to take himself out, why bother trying to stop him.
I also quite enjoy Edwin Sarkissian's "shoot at large/heavy/explosive stuff with very high caliber out in the desert" videos, although it's quite a bit safer than the stuff already mentioned upthread due to his simply being sufficiently far away from the impact/explosion.
Fascinating in the same way as the classic/famous Hydraulic Press Channel.
Colin Furze's videos are much worse in the way he shows not using safety gear. At least an X-Ray tube is hard to come by, hard to use and people generally know it's dangerous.
Colin Furze is basically a first world mining operation compared to the "look at how they do <insert thing here> in <insert equatorial country here>" type videos that nobody takes any issue with.
Of Course we should set a good example when it comes to working with dangerous things in our youtube videos. We should use PPE at all times and give clear warnings about the risks throughout the video…
… But Maybe if you’re too stupid to realise that a safety tie isn’t actually protective, then maybe your upcoming appointment with evolution is overdue.
Alternate option - stemming from the OP comment - if we want to get children involved in engineering and science fields, and this kind of cool shit science is how we can easily do it, they absolutely have to assume a portion of their audience won't know what is real and what isn't.
In other words, not everyone is you. Always remember that.
I don’t know what energies you need for medical imaging, but a keV linear electron accelerator is commonly called “a CRT”, and it’s already powerful enough to screw you up if you really try.
(Of course, the power supply, the flyback converter, and all the other stuff you get at immediately upon opening the case are plenty dangerous even without all the effort it takes to get ionizing radiation out of the tube.)
I believe (though my memory is foggy, so don't quote me on this) Styropyro was approached by some military/DARPA projects with an employment offer, but he reportedly turned it down.
From memory I believe the reason he got the visit was because he made a joke about creating a fusion reactor - something like "until I get my fusion reactor running I'll need to use the sun"
In contrast, I appreciate that ElectroBOOM carefully scripts every seemingly accidental fire or spark to ensure he's safe. He has had only one instant where he screwed up and survived through luck.
You're right. A parent giving children access to all of the physical equipment to make this, and leaving them so unsupervised that they can do it is fine. The bad thing is making a video of you doing it, in case people pretend you're promoting it.
This is why I will never let my children read a car manual. What if they build a car and run someone over?
It's frighteningly easy for children to get their hands on materials like arsenic and thallium. All they need is a credit card and a YouTube tutorial helpfully walking them through the dosage.
I used to share your perspective. Then I ended up with a [step]kid whose only interests in medicine and engineering keep me awake at night.
I get where you're coming from. I knew a kid who was really into making explosives, he ended up blowing himself up one night after cooking up a batch of TATP. Pretty tragic story, he was a bright kid. As I remember, I think he had a single mom who couldn't quite be there for him.
I think the best way of dealing with that sort of situation is to find them a mentor or role model that can show them how it's actually done and turn the interest into something that can be explored safely. I think if my friend had actually known real chemists that could mentor him and that he could talk to about his projects, there's a chance he might have been alive today.
There are things that have an element of danger, and then there are things that are reckless bordering on suicidal. Any real world chemist would probably just stare at you in disbelief if you told them you wanted to make TATP in your bedroom. That isn't just dangerous, it's moronic, beyond reckless.
This stuff is highly explosive and notoriously difficult to handle because of its volatility and propensity for spontaneous detonation. You don't know that if you're 15 and getting all your advice from the Internet, though. You may even hear a nickname like "mother of satan" and think it sounds pretty cool. Turns out chemists usually give substances nicknames like that for a reason.
I think what's the most dangerous is kids experimenting alone without any experience based advice from some dodgy internet forum.
Ok, but my point remains. The fact it has a bad reputation for blowing people up among people who have a bad reputation for blowing people up is pretty telling.
There is at least one vendor selling a sample of thallium in an acrylic cube as a collector's item. Unclear how much is actually present, but any perceptible amount would be pretty dangerous if removed from its enclosure.
Yah, no shortage of suppliers for thallium, I was just surprised you could find it on Amazon since its not really used for any consumer product I was aware of
The idea of children having access to a credit card strikes me as dangerous and irresponsible for many more reasons than just the odd chance that they use it to buy chemicals online.
If you want to buy something as a child, you use cash or get a parent's permission.
(Preempting the "ok boomer" responses, I'm 22 this year)
It's possible they have access to the credit card without permission. Most people don't keep their credit cards locked up in a gun safe.
Mine could be retrieved right now out of my wallet lying on a tray in my living room. I also don't have children, so I'm not particularly concerned personally. I haven't caught my dogs buying anything online yet.
If your kid can and will do things like steal your credit card, make unauthorized purchases and buy explosives.. the problem is not that William Osman didn't wear PPE.
I remember my own experience with "youtube explosives" as a kid.
I'd watched NurdRage's video [1] on how to extract lithium from a certain type of battery and thought that sounded like fun, so I asked my father to help me get the batteries needed. When he then asked me why I needed this specific type of (not cheap) battery, I showed him [1] and he said "That looks dangerous and fun, let's do it together" (or something to that effect).
One hour and some needle nose pliers later, we're down one battery and a burn hole in our bathroom tiles (as a result of a lithium fire that my father immediately suffocated), but up a bonding experience.
Had I tried to disassemble the battery alone (ignoring for a moment how I'd have gotten my hands on it in the first place without my father's knowledge, perhaps by stealing a credit card or with an Alexa's assistance, as other posters have suggested might happen), I probably would have attempted to extinguish the burning lithium by pouring water on it, which I'm sure would have gone excellently :).
I guess the moral of my story is that it's probably more effective to try to earn your kids' trust and ensure their safety yourself, rather than attempt to child-proof the rest of the world (with the assumption that your children will be going behind your back in their attempts to earn Darwin awards in new and exciting ways).
Stealing your parent's credit card strikes me as the more pressing issue here, rather than a youtube video that shows you how to do something dangerous.
Where and when don't we allow children to wander around the city by themselves?
In many large cities, kids are expected to use public transit to get to/from school. It's not unknown for parents to send kids on errands. And, how does the kid get to the park?
This "kids can't go anywhere alone" idea is very new.
My Mom complained that the one route that I never used to go to/from school is the one that she showed me.
It seems to be a recent development in some larger American cities.
I work in a company in Berlin that has job applicants from many different countries, including the US. Common question during the process (we generally require relocation at this point) are:
- "Can my 12yo children go somewhere alone? I'm from Portland/similar and this is not the case here and it's why we're moving."
- "We've been looking and it's really hard to find an apartment in Berlin. We have this ground-floor option, but they just shot the ground-floor windows in across the street here again this morning. Is ground floor safe in Berlin?
I'm no longer surprised when it comes up, but it's quite sad.
That's because they're from Portland. There are only a handful of cities in the US where people do not feel safe to let their kids run around, and Portland is one of them. Even there only certain neighborhoods are unsafe. Your view of America is the same as an American who believes that women can't go outside without being sexually assaulted in Germany because of the 2015-16 New Years attacks, i.e. incredibly out of touch.
YouTube Kids is mostly safe, but there's a small chance kids could see nudity, violence, or just weird stuff, as well as ads for stuff like junk food. Our study found that 27% of videos watched by kids 8 and under are intended for older target audiences, with violence being the most likely negative content type. . . . On the plus side for parents, YouTube offers fair warning that kids may see something that you don't want them to see and you can block and report inappropriate videos.
I checked out all of Alfred Morgan's books from multiple public libraries (a platform accessible by children!!!) in the seventies and early eighties. Probably saw the golden book of chemistry experiments at some point too - it looked very familiar when I got a copy of the pdf as an adult. I think the difficulty of obtaining model T spark coils, chemicals ("ask your druggist") etc kept me out of a lot of trouble.
And nukes! Its been a while since I read "The Radioactive Boy Scout" and after rereading it I'm defintely going to keep my kid close as he goes through TCOR's black powder and other experiments.
The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother’s potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
[...]
David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.
[...]
David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom—the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out—Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.
[...]
Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted his base of operations to his mother’s potting shed in Golf Manor. Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that “what he told me went right over my head.” One thing still sticks out, though. David’s potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. “He’d say, `One of these days we’re gonna run out of oil.’ He wanted to do something about that.”
Its an amazing story, shows what you can achieve if you put your mind to it!
If someone has excellent knowledge of science and us willing to spend years of effort on a project, normal societal guardrails can't stop them. Whethervfir good or ill
