For me, NI3 to me is the very embodiment of the dawn of the internet: in the late 80's a friend of ours said he was over BBSes and wanted to get on this new thing, the internet. Which was Usenet trickle-fed via modem, and all of rec.pyro could fit on one floppy. NI3 was one of the things they listed. Even in pre-internet Australia, you already couldn't get iodine crystals anywhere, but he eventually found some (he told the pharmacist it was to make an explosive) and we got to see some little brown/purple puffs of smoke where the little blobs he'd laid out to dry got set off by falling drizzle.
PG
On 30/12/2011, at 9:18 PM, David Griffith wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Dec 2011, Dylan Smith wrote:
>
> > El 29/12/11 22:33, Leon Heller escribi?:
> >> When I was about 12 I made some nitrogen tri-iodide, another very
> >> unstable and powerful explosive, and left it to dry on a piece of filter
> >> paper.
> >
> > We did that at school, putting it around things like door frames so when
> > someone closed a door there would be a very loud bang. It all sort of
> > backfired when the head of Chemistry happened to be the one to close the
> > door one time, it wasn't exactly hard for him to figure out what it was,
> > and he had a pretty good idea who was responsible...
> >
> > Today in our increasingly paranoid and scared society you could get put
> > in prison due to anti-terror legislation for making the stuff, I think :-(
>
> I remember a story in which someone dipped the ends of a pair of pencils
> in the stuff. The pencils were owned by a student who was well-known for
> playing "Wipeout" with them.
>
> --
> David Griffith
> dgriffi@...
>
> A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> A: Top-posting.
> Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
>