The used tire industry has extremely small margins. They can't afford to waste space.

Also, tires don't easily self-combust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_fire They typically are due to arson as it takes a few minutes at 400 deg C before they can even be ignited.

I was incorrect, apparently when you group them together, they become far more sensitive to ignition.

"Sparkler bombs are constructed by binding together as many as 300 sparklers with tape, leaving one extended to use as a fuse. In 2008 three deaths were attributed to the devices, which can be ignited accidentally by heat or friction. Because they usually contain more than 50 milligrams of the same explosive powder found in firecrackers, they are illegal under U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regulations."

As was mentioned above, the cost of the fuel is a non-starter. Currently SpaceX uses a Kerosene / Liquid Oxygen fuel mix.

After the anomaly (the space industries way of saying accident) in June SpaceX did a complete vehicle review. They are now using a more advanced technique to cool the LOX which means for a denser LOX liquid in their tanks, which ultimately means they have more oxidizer on board for their flights now.

Coupled with the LOX improvements they have made upgrades to the engines which means 30% greater efficiency. Basically the horsepower per engine has increased.

This means they can get their payloads to orbit plus have more then enough fuel left over in stage 1 to return it to land.

The greatest efficiency comes from returning the stage(s) and then reusing them in future launches (not proven yet). ALL launchers (u.s, soviet, indian, ESA, Japan, etc) ditch ALL of their hardware into the ocean when getting payload to orbit. Bye, bye multi million dollars worth of engines and hardware.

If SpaceX can turn that scenario on its head and reuse those stages and MORE importantly the engines they will cut their costs per launch by a substantial amount. Ultimately that means cheaper per pound cost to get material into orbit.

All of the media uses the word "explosion" when describing the June anomaly which is funny because there was never an ignition of onboard fuels.

The LOX tanks have smaller Helium tanks inside them. The helium is released during launch. The helium rises in the LOX quickly, expands and pressurizes the tank to ensure the LOX is "squeezed" into the pipes in order to keep up with the turbo pumps.

One of the struts holding a helium tank inside the LOX tank failed. The helium tank shot up and blew threw the top of the LOX tank and took a good part of the top of the stack off. The engines actually fired for a few seconds after the anomaly and then sputtered out. The rest of the vehicle at this point is still fairly intact.

Without proper structural integrity the vehicle started to veer off course, dynamic pressures built up and the vehicle was essentially ripped apart by those forces.

At 3:20 the Helium tank rips off its struts. At 3:27 the remainder of the vehicle disintegrates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuNymhcTtSQ

SpaceX mentioned that in June, the dragon capsule continued to relay telemetry until it smacked into the ocean. If the Dragon had better software onboard it would have detected the anomaly and recovered with chutes. Elon said that software would be active on Dragons from now on.

God, what a badass machine.
I hope it's not for naught...
I'll put my money on the National Ignition Facility though.

That was amazing. Slowed to the point where there was no chance of flipping, then veered off to the soft stuff off of the runway where chances of friction-caused sparks that could ignite fuel spills were much lower.

Dunno if this was fully planned out but the results were superb. That pilot either has astounding skill or astounding instincts - or maybe both.

So I get they cut holes to vent smoke, reduce heat and ignition risk, but what is the guy with the poker looking for? Weak spots?

Yeah, not saying it has no value at all, but if we handled scalpels as a doc like we did in high school... /shudder X D

And definitely, there are some cool things to learn out there, or even just things (like a lot of history) that gives us context or just informs us of the big things that we missed. I like learning stuff just for the sake of knowing it as well (and promptly forgetting it, what are ya gonna do ; ).

I'm glad I've convinced my son of the value of "experiments", basic chem and physics that do cool things and have ignited his curiousity at 5 years old.

If you did high school bio, think about what you covered that has any sort of influence on medicine... =)

Frog or rat dissection? Covered that in Bio 101 in the first year of my Applied Chemistry degree (and yes, you can give a rat a Columbian necktie... . Photosynthesis? Mating?

Yeah, Bio was pretty much introducing you to broad concepts and it's nothing that doesn't get rehashed in the first 6 months of Uni via intro subjects. I think of it more as a way to dip the toe in the pool and see if the subject matter excites you enough to try and turn it in to a career.

eg. At 40 now (and having forgotten my chem degree and gone in to IT as a sys admin after working as a chef, bouncer etc), I could go back to uni barely remembering anything about chemistry and start from scratch and be none the worse for it. The keystones you talk about are literacy and numeracy, that's about it. And they are learned in primary school.

Oh sure, it helps if you can do some higher math, but English lit? Physics? Drama? Almost nothing you do at high school has any real defining affect on most of what you do as an adult. It's more like a sampler platter, and of course a way of grading students (on a curve of course, we can't have people's scores based on their own merit) to distinguish what tertiary studies they should be eligible for.

School should be about igniting curiousity as much as practical skills for life. I did "Home Economics" (ie. cooking/sewing/budgets etc) and typing (on real mechanical typewriters no less) as opposed to wood/metal shop ( I was awful at shop). My home ec teacher was always interested in making different food, so we tried some pretty out there things in grade 8 (~13 years old), and I've always been interested in cooking since. Similarly, learning to touch type has made my life radically simpler, particularly in IT (try writing a 40 page instruction manual hunting and pecking).

Most of the high school grads we see as cadets or trainees are essentially useless and have to be taught from scratch anyway. Most of the codified BS we have these days doesn't prepare kids for life, doesn't encourage critical thinking or creativity, it a self justification to keep schools open.

To think I was going to make a flippant comment about a fire at a water park... Isn't that stuff basically coloured corn starch powder? So yah, dust explosion.

Also, if you're spraying that stuff that thick isn't it gonna cause all kinds of respiratory problems regardless of whether it ignites?

Because.. it is trivial. (not to rag on your very sweet comment tho)

In effect, the gender segregation is still present and will be for quite while.

Not to mention, UFC President Dana White's long-standing assertion that "Women will never fight in the UFC. Those types of fights aren't interesting enough".

So yeah, the decision to include women in bantam/lightweight divisions is purely business driven.


The UFC first gained Bantum & Light divisions when they absorbed the WEC in 2010/11.

This was part of Zuffa, UFC's parent company, consolidating their assets following the decline of MMA's popularity. 2005/06

So essentially; Dana & Zuffa realized the easiest way re-ignite interest in the UFC was to include female fighters on the same card.

The alternative being:
Create a separate "Women's UFC" franchise with all the low-draw problems from before + the notorious low-draw attached to women's franchises i.e. - WNBA, LPGA, etc.

Any groundbreaking policies here are purely PR benefits for a company struggling to stay relevant. And moreover, solvent.


So yeah, UFC isn't all-of-a-sudden concerned for the plight of women fighters..

It's just another gimmick to sell seats/PPV.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

I actually did this as my final chemistry experiment in High School. We used rubbing alcohol (75 and 99%) and got many different results.
Sometimes it would be a jet. Sometimes it would make a 'plane' of fire that hovered 1/2 way down the bottle. Sometimes it made a ball of fire that bounced below the neck. Sometimes it flashed repeatedly, igniting the entire bottle at once and repeating. Different results could be gained by rolling the bottle around, spreading the fuel and creating a denser vapor load, or blowing O2 into the bottle before lighting.
We used a glass 5 gallon bottle (it got HOT). I was surprised he only seemed to get the jet reaction.
(EDIT: I forgot, at the end the teacher brought out some liquid ether for me to try. Everyone (except me) stepped back for that one, afraid it might blow the bottle up)
Almost downvote for the last one...WTF guy?

"Cooked" rounds only happen in automatic weapons where the chamber becomes hot enough to cause the propellent to spontaneously ignite. That cannot be the case here.

Of course, it could be some sort of defect, but it's pretty clear to me watching the video that he wasn't handling the gun with anything like the respect something so dangerous deserves.

This reminds me of something that my high school Chemistry teacher told us one day. He told us about how gasses require a certain percentage of oxygen to ignite, so, that if you were to fill up an airtight room with 100% hydrogen, such that no oxygen was present, you could open a door to that room and light a match at the threshold without fear of an explosion. Theoretically the gas in the room would only burn at the door-shaped barrier between the hydrogen and the oxygen on the other side. I remain dubious and I want to see Adam Savage risk his life to bust that myth.

Also, actually related to this video: the guy doing the demonstration,Theodore Gray, has an awesome website if you're into chemistry.

The problem with Anita Sarkeesian is that she's essentially, a hack. The whole gamergate incident has been one ugly affair, and absolutely there are valid points on both sides. But Sarkeesian is still someone who knows nothing about games, doesn't like games in the slightest, but tries to pass off as a gamer. And there are videos of just 4 years ago, of her saying to an audience she doesn't like videogames, she's not a fan. This person who doesn't even like or play videogames comes in, and starts pointing fingers around saying that this and that are wrong and that this and that must be changed. That, I think, more than anything is what pisses gamers off.

You wanna know what I think is the problem? What REALLY made this happen? Not the Zoe Quinn scandal. That was just the event that ignited the powder keg. A terrible event obviously. Her private life is nobody's business (unless it was absolutely true she got reviews from sleeping around with game journalists, which it wasn't).

The actual powder keg, was the CONSTANT barrage of pseudo-feminist and patronizing articles on sites like Kotaku. Day in and day out. A site for gamers who was, essentially, constantly offending their target audience.