*PROMOTE HEAVY METAL !

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, July 13th, 2012 8:39am PDT - promote requested by BoneRemake.

Really hope what's in that tub doesn't start asking for John Connor.

Fuck yeah

Anytime you see people working with mercury these days, they are decked out in full-on hazmat suits, masks, etc. My dad had a bottle of it, and we poured it into a plastic container and played around with it with our bare hands at least 2-3 times while I was growing up. We were careful with it, but not like to the extent that any modern video you see with it would show.

Big Brother / Public safety gone mad? Crazy / cavalier / irresponsible dad? Bit of both?

Messing around with it was fun, and I think other kids (or at least teens or young adults) should have that opportunity unless it really is as dangerous as all that. I seem to have managed to get by unscathed though.

--edit--
Information like this make it seem like a real bad idea to encourage people to handle mercury without gloves/mask/goggles. I know (and knew at the time) that the gas form was bad news, but I've heard enough anecdotes of people handling the liquid stuff in ways similar to my experiences with it that it seems like it could be done safely in a High School chemistry lab sort of environment -- even with brief bare-handed handling.

Then again, I remember a student in my chem class taking a big direct sniff of the vapor over a test tube of sulfuric acid when he was specifically told to waft it just to get a sense of it. That resulted in a profusely bloody nose. I suppose the worst-case scenarios with mercury are worse than that, and maybe the positives don't outweigh that even though it is an interesting case of a metal liquid at room temperature.

Upvote for completely unnecessary sound effects.

@MilkmanDan Saying that kids should be able to play with Mercury, even though it is shown to be a very dangerous substance (mostly via it evaporating and being inhaled, not through direct contact) seems a little naive.

What do you get out of it that makes it worth the pretty horrendous possible side effects? Sometimes 'big brother' isn't really that at all, just society at large realising some of the dangerous side effects of things.

My own experience with mercury? In grade six someone had a vial of it, and it got spilled all over the wood floor in our classroom. So little bits of mercury ended up falling in the cracks between floorboards. There were a bunch of us 11/12 year olds trying to fish balls of mercury out with pieces of paper. Not really safe at all. None of us suffered any ill effects that we know of, but why risk it?

That's exactly what I expected. Why so many upvotes?

Upvoted for the Eagle Scream LOL

For some reason I read the title as "pooping in a mercury filled balloon"

@spoco2 The most dangerous kinds of mercury are compounds. Mercury in the raw can be easily handled in bare hands or light gloves. Short term use and exposures like this will not likely result in any toxification. More great is the risk of toxification by mercury compounds from coal fired power plants. Their methylmercury is far more toxic and very widely consecrated in food stuff now via bio accumulation.

Your childhood experience most likely didn't result in any serious contamination. Life is full of risk, driving a car is hugely risky, you just have to ask yourself what are the risks vs the payoff. Short of ingestion, the risks from this activity are very low. Greater your risks would be from sunburn which over time can cause skin cancer than mercury poisoning from this type of activity.

What would be nice, however, is an online guide of ways to handle chemicals safely. The problem is such things usually go kind of overboard and error on too much caution. Remember those "this is your brain on drugs" commercials? They were basically lies; cautionary tails that were overblown for the "don't risk it" mentality. I think a better strategy is full disclosure and personal responsibility. To much fear and dishonesty, and people just blow you off...and complete lack of guides and rules is about the same level of chaos. Some middle ground of rational behavior for dangerous substances should be the goal, but I haven't found a good mechanism for implementing such a system, and to that end, better safe than sorry like you advise is a good policy.

@GeeSussFreeK : Surely the answer to that very conundrum would be a website (or mobile app, or both) devoted to listing as many potentially dangerous substances and safe handling guidelines, with plenty of diagrams and things broken down into bite-sized chunks of info.

Just a big old search box or iconographic collection of symbols to click on and quickly see how you might handle the substance. Have all the pertinent stuff right there and quick to scan, with lots of links for further information and deeper understanding of why you must do x or y.

Man, I'd love that site/app.

Why doesn't it exist damnit?

>> ^spoco2:

@MilkmanDan Saying that kids should be able to play with Mercury, even though it is shown to be a very dangerous substance (mostly via it evaporating and being inhaled, not through direct contact) seems a little naive.
What do you get out of it that makes it worth the pretty horrendous possible side effects? Sometimes 'big brother' isn't really that at all, just society at large realising some of the dangerous side effects of things.
My own experience with mercury? In grade six someone had a vial of it, and it got spilled all over the wood floor in our classroom. So little bits of mercury ended up falling in the cracks between floorboards. There were a bunch of us 11/12 year olds trying to fish balls of mercury out with pieces of paper. Not really safe at all. None of us suffered any ill effects that we know of, but why risk it?


I looked into it further on my own, and found out that as @GeeSussFreeK mentioned, elemental Mercury is actually rather safe, even compared to standard Chemistry lab-type things that we let kids handle or have access to. However, that information is often glossed over with blanket warnings about exposure to any sort of mercury, including the legitimately nasty compound forms like what can come from coal burning, etc. As you said, the main danger from the pure elemental form is vapor from evaporation, which seems to be manageable with any sort of proper ventilation or limited exposure time.

I wouldn't suggest that we just allow kids to play with the stuff at will unsupervised, but I think that some level of interaction with it (more than what is common now) can be safe, educational, and worth doing given proper safety practices and other restrictions. On the other hand, there isn't a whole lot to be gained, and there is a lot to lose -- albeit I think the chances of very serious accidents with it are very slim given proper precautions.

I kinda lament the fact that it is harder for schools to do anything even a tiny bit out of the everyday routine because they all have to have massive insurance policies to cover their asses in the event that some freak occurrence happens and they get sued. It is harder to have a woodshop; somebody might cut a finger off. Sports sometimes come under fire for injuries or even the occasional freak accidental death. The loss of those sorts of things makes me wonder if we've gone too far down the "Big Brother" road in some ways. Then again, I think most of that is due to our lawsuit and litigation-happy culture rather than Big Brother...

@MilkmanDan When it comes to mercury I'm of the opinion that the educational benefit of playing with it is fairly slim compared to the danger, so why risk it.

On the other hand, my kids are doing awesome things in science now that I never did at their age in school (grade 2/3/prep). They've had dry ice to see what it does (of course, I've done that with my kids a number of times too, too much fun), they've had balloons filled with hydrogen exploded in class, and a few other things I've forgotten. The main thing is that I thought that they may well be limited in what cool science they get to do at school, but at least at our kid's one they seem to be doing plenty of awesome stuff.