Recommendations

The assignment we were given for homework in class on October 17 was to make some recommendations for certain items as requested by the professor. The first of these was to go through our classmates' blogs and recommend the one that we like best. After going through all of my classmates' blogs, I decided on Christy's, which is at http://sephirosinst302.blogspot.com/. Her reasoning on the legality of wiretapping without a court order is very interesting, and she has a good point about the PATRIOT Act and also about America's view of the media.

Part two of the assignment was to find a website that we like and post it. Well, I've always been interested in science, and especially the aerospace sciences. Because of this, I would recommend http://www.spacedaily.com/. It is a site that specifically deals with news on the various space programs around the world, and also the commercial spaceflight efforts that are happening currently.

Part three was to find a picture that we liked and post it. I chose a picture from the Astronomy Picture of the Day page on the Goddard Spaceflight Center website:


The article on the Astronomy Picture of the Day page that this came from is at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060805.html.

The last part of our assignment was to find a video that we liked and post it in our blog. Being a science nut, I just had to post this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCk0lYB_8c0

His little blurb about the "rapid generation of hydrogen gas" just before the bit about caesium is only half right. The reaction ("breaking" the water molecule and attaching to the oxygen) also generates a fair amount of heat. With lithium, the heat isn't enough to ignite the hydrogen, but higher alkali metals can make a spontaneous fire.

The explosions might be rigged, though. The detonation of hydrogen requires oxygen, and most of the oxygen in a rubidium-H2O or caesium-H2O reaction goes into oxidizing the metal. You'd need an outside source, such as air. I have seen another video where the caesium reaction destroys the glass container they were using, though.