Actually, Sg, I think it would rather depend on the period in history. Theres plenty of them that would more likely have seen me burnt at the stake for heresy.
As for the dragon, lol....actually, the term 'chasing the dragon', means to smoke heroin off foil, by holding a small lighter flame underneath a few folded thicknesses of foil, folded into a V shape, with a portion of H placed a little from one end, and 'chasing' the blob of molten diamorphine base as it tries to escape from the heat, whilst the person doing the chasing holds a tube in their mouth, and inhales the copious clouds of vapour. The 'dragon' is the skittering little blob of H, and one chases it because it moves once melted, in the opposite direction from that at which the flame is positioned, and thus one needs must move the flame to keep caught up with it and keep it giving off a good quantity of vapour.
And, as for the prince, I've read the books, the 'prince' WAS snape, in his own school days, wasn't he?
As for my refills, they are done automatically, and besides, I have insurance, pain med wise, in the sense of backup resources. In fact I'm making use of the methadone, as my main pain med, I find it better compatible with the way my bodily quirks are wired up than the rx meds. The H...thats just a rare treat, decided to splash out for once, as I could get an 1/8th oz that was guaranteeable not to be contaminated with fentanyl in it.
Don't know about a famous chemist...or legendary one..that would be an overstuffed boast if I were to say such a thing. I have no claim to be so, although I do my best to contribute to the clandestine chemistry and hobbyist chemists and biotech online scenes. And, yes, not by all, but by a fair number, and in various places and areas, I am indeed respected. I'm no genius, I just do what I do because...well...its what I DO. Its in my blood, you might say, just something that I've known I could hear calling me since my very early childhood. Autie thing, of that much I am sure. And you know what those can be like. Autie/aspie interests, they just decide to be that way and bugger anything that would have it otherwise.
I've just always been comfortable around the roaring flame of a gas torch, the refluxing contents of a flask and condenser, distilling this that and the other, and have always liked engineering type work, so building various bits and pieces of custom equipment as and when, often disposable since my glassware wouldn't like to be ill-treated by being put into a searing hot furnace, etc., I've enjoyed taking things apart, putting them (back) together ever since I was little.
Or, on occasion just taking them apart. Such as one of my mom's flower-vases, that was taken apart with extreme prejudice as a child, when I very first experimented with electrolysis to try and produce alkali metals like sodium, potassium etc, it got lifted and spirited away to my lab, had a pair of holes drilled into it, one each side, through which a pair of carbon electrodes torn from zinc-carbon batteries was inserted and set in place, and the ends of these were pressure-fitted to a pair of metal endcaps, containing some solder, for good contact, and the metal melted, the caps forced into place, and then the solder being permitted to cool and lock the endcaps on.
Which, and bearing in mind this was when I was only a nipper, dipping my toes in the waters of science, so the clumsiness was to be expected, having no teacher but myself, textbooks of theory and big library books full of basic information about all manner of a vast selection of chemicals, that was what I had to go on, that, experimentation, and the willingness to devote a lot of my time to such tinkering.
Anyhow, the endcaps on the graphite rods set into mother dearest's flower vase, were soldered to the live and neutral terminals of a modified rewired plug, the fuse taken out and replaced with a cast slug prepared from some lead metal I had lying about (some kids might be stupid and eat lead paint, I just had the Pb on hand as sheet and as fine shavings for experiments involving lead and lead chemistry, it came in handy as easy to melt cast to the size and shape of an electrical fuse)
Which I did, stuck it in there, filled the vase with caustic soda, then using a broom handle and wearing rubber gloves, pushed the 'on' switch for the mains current.
The result, rather than making Na I could harvest, was that the vase more or less detonated, with a tremendous thundering great bang, blasting a tidal wave of caustic soda up into the air like a volcano, if one could contrive to flush a volcano down a chemical toilet cubicle. The vase was just....well the words 'ground' and 'zero' come to mind when I think of what happened to it, along with all the house circuit breakers tripping and shutting off every electrical device in the building other than those powered only by batteries.
Tried it again, and this time with molten caustic rather than aqueous (like I said, I didn't know then, I just read about the alkali metals and knew that I was determined to make myself the possessor of them, for their multifarious (and indeed, occasionally NEFarious) uses.
Again, didn't realize that I had to rectify the current to DC, and again, mommy dearest had another flower-pot die a rather valiant, if horrifically violent death to the furtherance of my scientific learning. Another mains trip, and one whopping motherfucker of a bang, and a blast-wave of molten caustic being splattered all over the wall, at over 300 degrees 'C.
After that I switched to using a rectified power supply and a blowtorch to accomplish the heating, combined with the ohmic heating due to the integral resistance of the electrolyte. Then I started to get my first bits of sodium metal.
I have to confess though, the flower pots were fun experiments. Clumsy, child's experiments in the lab he was teaching himself to craft with, but fun nevertheless. The bang those attempted electrolytic cells made was absolutely terrific. And (from behind goggles of course), I daresay that I was always grateful to be way out of range of both the resulting shower of searing superheated caustic alkali and the shower of caustic-coated pottery shrapnel as my mom's vases and flowerpots began to disappear at intervals, very, very rarely ever to be seen again.
And then there were the likes of igniting tin cans filled with thermite compositions for my early forays into pyrometallurgical processes, liberating metals from their oxides, using more reactive metals mixed with the oxides of the metals sought (or other, nonmetallic elements, like the semimetal/metalloid, silicon), or by heating metal compounds with carbon powder to reduce them to the metals and smelt them out. On the garden path, leaving various blobs of slag, molten metal and cracked stone slabs from the searing, intense heat given out by metallothermic redox reactions of the thermite type (the typical thermite, is aluminium powder and iron oxide, mixed together intimately, and ignited by placing a piece of magnesium ribbon into the powder and lighting that like a fuse, since (MOST, not all but most) thermite compositions are really stable stuff, Al/iron oxide thermite you can pound with a hammer until christ himself shows up to watch at the second coming without it doing anything, a match or lighter would do nothing, and even a propane torch must be trained on a thermite of this type for a fair while, keeping it at red heat before ignition.
BUT, once it DOES ignite, it doesn't go out. It just burns like everfucking fury; because the way they work, is that the more reactive, more electropositive metal (or carbon in some such reactions although these seem less violent than metallothermic reductions) donates electrons to the less reactive, more electronegative element's oxide, in exchange, violently ripping off the oxygen atoms and the more reactive metal becomes an oxide itself, forming a slag, while during the extremely exothermic, selfsustaining reaction, the oxide one started with is reduced to the metal itself (or semimetals, I did a silica gel thermite once, and got some nuggets of elemental silicon out of it), which happens at such an extremely high temperature that the metal comes out molten and showering sparks. Or for low boiling point metals, potentially exploding, as in the case of copper thermite, since the copper just vaporizes and it goes off with a flash and a shockwave, and cloud of boiling hot copper vapor.
They use iron oxide/aluminium thermite for welding railway line sections together, by positioning a mold over the area, holding a charge of thermite, igniting it and the molten iron drops out of a hole in the bottom of the mold, into the gap in sections of rail to be welded together.
And it can be used for cutting too, for cutting through things like steel plate, since the reaction goes at thousands of degrees 'C, and will easily burn through steel if the geometry of charges, molds etc is optimal. They make grenades with it for military use too, for destroying equipment (such as say, sabotage of a tank, stuff a thermite grenade down the muzzle of its cannon, and that cannon is, in a word, going to end up buggered in short order, welded closed).
A useful reaction all round, really, especially for preparing samples of metals, in ore refining on a lab scale, for casting, isolating elements, or if someone was so inclined, for breaking things permanently with a shower of blazing white hot steel running like lava. Welding, all sorts.
Back garden pathway flagstones however do not seem to like it much. Or the occasional oozing lake of boiling lead slithering across them when they are cold to begin with.
And its near impossible to put them out, because thermite, once ignited, supplies its own oxygen, the more active metal ripping it right off of the metal oxide, so it can burn in the absence of air once lit, even under water apparently. And they will tear CO2 to pieces, if a CO2 extinguisher was used, just adding more fuel to the fire, and the likes of halon extinguishers would break down to produce highly toxic gases. The best you can do, is bury it with sand and leave it to burn itself out in as controlled a manner as possible, or disperse the charge, if it were in a simple heap, by making sure that its all over the place, but only a tiny bit in any one place, so it can't just keep sustaining the burn. Otherwise, once thermite starts, it finishes. And if that is a problem to you, then you better get out of its way, because IT sure as hell won't do so. And I for one, wouldn't want to end up covered in molten steel
Or molten anything for that matter. Well, unless it somehow involves an autistic girl, and a candle. That'd be fine enough with me
Sg...I guess..well....I've just always had a creative streak in me that demands that I feed my thirst for science. Can no more help that than I can help the fact that I was born with two eyes, two balls, one dick, two arms and two legs attached to me, or help the fact that I use my nose to smell things and my ears to hear them. I was, I suppose, destined to be a bit of what many would call a mad scientist from the day I was hatched. I wonder sometimes if I came from a womb, or if I hauled my ass out of a distillation flask and popped out of the condenser instead
I wouldn't say I'm a mad scientist (in seriousness that is) though. Eccentric, certainly. Different? no shit. Odd? well I'm fucking autistic so what can anyone expect me to be? and creative? absolutely, but not mad. At least not in the sense of mentally deranged. Just resourceful, creative and a trifle spazzified and quite firmly set in my ways of liking it that way.
But then again, who wouldn't
