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  • PSYCHO CHEM TEACHER

    Filed at 5:36 pm under by dcobranchi

    I have a theory that all chemists down deep are really firebugs. This guy’s down deep apparently starts at skin level.

    A high school chemistry teacher was arrested after students claimed he taught his class how to make a bomb, authorities said.

    I know a little bit about this subject. As a kid I was “honored” to be a pallbearer for a friend who blew himself up with a pipe bomb. At DuPont my job was to study high energy and explosive reactions. I worked with RDX and even have a program on my laptop that can calculate the exact ratio of AN to FO to maximize the explosive punch.

    Bombs are nothing to be playing around with.

    8 Responses to “PSYCHO CHEM TEACHER”


    Comment by
    Tim Haas
    February 16th, 2005
    at 5:48 pm

    Oh, good — now we’re on the NSA watchlist.


    Comment by
    Daryl Cobranchi
    February 16th, 2005
    at 6:22 pm

    Don’t forget the ATF.


    Comment by
    Jeanne
    February 16th, 2005
    at 7:47 pm

    Have you read The Radioactive Boy Scout? My 16 yo son, who is working on his Eagle project, is reading it now. “David Hahn, a 17-year-old aspiring Eagle Scout, had constructed the rudiments of a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard and had contaminated himself and the immediate area with potentially deadly radioactive material….For David to get so far, …he had to be the victim of carelessness and neglect at all levels of society. David Hahn’s parents were divorced, and David used the separate households to conceal the magnitude of his work. His school teachers paid little heed when David, nicknamed Glow Boy by fellow students, suggested he was collecting radioactive substances. Most alarmingly, corporations and government agencies blithely supplied David with the materials and information he needed to expand his work to dangerous levels….David was left with little in the way of mentorship other than such one-sided testaments to the benefits of science as his trusted Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.”
    amazon...388127

    Sorry, I don’t know how to make my links active in this comment box. But, the rest of our family is anxiously awaiting the turn to read the book.


    Comment by
    Chris
    February 16th, 2005
    at 7:59 pm

    I thought that book sounded interesting…but the reviewers on Amazon are just pounding it. Is it really as anti boy scout as the reviewers make it sound?


    Comment by
    Daryl Cobranchi
    February 16th, 2005
    at 8:00 pm

    I recall reading about it several years ago (Reader’s Digest?). He collected old alarm clocks with glow-in-the-dark numbers. He used the radioactive paint to eventually build his reactor.


    Comment by
    Daryl Cobranchi
    February 16th, 2005
    at 8:05 pm

    Reader’s Digest March 1999.


    Comment by
    Jeanne
    February 16th, 2005
    at 9:24 pm

    I just asked my son who said, well, a lot of people have negative stuff to say about scouts; it goes with the territory. Then he said, it’s still interesting to hear how this kid managed to do this. My son is interested in both the technical end of this as well as the fact that this kid seemed to have parents so little involved in his life — and that somehow, the kid was in his own way very bright and resourceful — with no guidance. He isn’t that far along in the book yet. I’d have to say, it’s probably not a literary masterpiece, but of interest to those of us who know or once were boys with certain geeky tendencies and gifts. (My other son, who hasn’t read any of the book said, if the kid was creating havoc today, he’d probably be a hacker).


    Comment by
    Jason
    February 17th, 2005
    at 9:23 am

    Hey, any chance of getting that AN –> FO program? I would be very interested, and so would some of my colleagues.