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josephdunphy

Last seen: 14 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •




    [ continuing my Tesla_coil_intro review ]



    Liquid oxygen is dangerously reactive stuff, so much so that in Thermodynamics class in undergrad a standard warning was given about the explosive consequences of dropping anything made out of plastic into the stuff, producing a rapid, highly exothermic reaction in anything that can be set on fire. Great stuff to stick your skin into, right? Care to take your chances with a trip to the burn ward if you've poured out a little too much N2 and let it sit a little too long? The author continues:



    Sensation is like a cold breeze and no discomfort but I am not pushing the boundaries here. Of course touching a solid,



    Like, say, the walls of the container - but of course, that would never happen, because nobody ever accidentally bumps into anything, especially if he should be startled by somebody yelling "what do you think you are doing" or something like that



    particularly metal, at liquid N2 temperature will give rapid severe frostbite and it might stick to you.



    Or if, maybe, you were sweating a little more than you thought you were, and the sides of that container weren't as smooth as you expected them to be. Fun fact: anywhere outside of the orbit of Saturn in this system, water ice is hard enough to qualify as a rock - at temperatures that will, in places, be well above that of liquid nitrogen. Picture yourself bonded to something, your fingers immersed in that lovely fluid, maybe panicking a little as you find yourself needing to either yank yourself off and rip some flesh away in the process ... or, wait ... maybe you could wait for help that you know is coming soon. I mean, what could that do to you?



    To treat warts and other skin lesions it is applied with a cotton bud and will rapidly kill tissue.



    Oh, right. The skin lesions, on brief exposure, turn into something that crumbles away. The would be daredevil might very well, in a moment of panic induced misjudgment, lose his fingers.



    Advice from the 'experts' for this somewhat risky stunt say not to get the liquid N2 in any crevices in your fingers or clothes as the liquid N2 gets forced in contact and freezing occurs."



    Look at your own hands. What do you see a lot of, and even more of with age? Crevices. I'm not convinced, at least not on a brief reading, that the author did what he claimed with as little damage done to his person as he says, but I am convinced that this would be a fantastically stupid thing for anybody to do. This isn't "somewhat risky", this is absolutely insane, even as a half second dare, and the author gives us no sign of getting that.

    I'll take a look at more as time and resources allow, but on any such page, one does have the question of how good the author will be at alerting the visitor to the possible dangers of what he is about to do. On this occasion, he has fallen distressingly short of doing just that. We would be most unwise to forget that as we read the rest of his site.