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Welcome goonlings to the Awful Book of the Month! In this thread, we choose one work of Resources: Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org - A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best. SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/ - A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here.  For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM the moderation team. Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2018, refer to archives] 2018 January: Njal's Saga [Author Unknown] February: The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle March: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders April: Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria May: Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov June: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe July: Warlock by Oakley Hall August: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott September: The Magus by John Fowles October: I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara November: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard December: Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens 2019: January: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky February: BEAR by Marian Engel March: V. by Thomas Pynchon April: The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout May: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman June: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann July: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach August: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay September: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay October: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado November: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett December: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 2020: January: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair February: WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin March: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini April: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio May: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Dame Rebecca West June: The African Queen by C. S. Forester July: The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale August: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire, by Howard Pyle September: Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride October:Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (怪談)("Ghost Stories"), by Lafcadio Hearn November: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) , by Matthew Hongoltz Hetling  Current: Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark Book available here: https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-History-Liquid-Propellants-ebook/dp/B076838QS2 Apparent free ebook: http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf About the book quote:In a comment to my post on putting out fires last week, one commenter mentioned the utility of the good old sand bucket, and wondered if there was anything that would go on to set the sand on fire. Thanks to a note from reader Robert L., I can report that there is indeed such a reagent: chlorine trifluoride. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time Leperflesh posted:
https://twitter.com/DJSnM/status/956309715251732480?s=20 This book was long out of print, to the point that physical copies were selling for multiple thousands of dollars on Amazon (still are, in fact: https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-informal-history-liquid-propellants/dp/0813507251/) About the Author quote:John Drury Clark, Ph.D. (August 15, 1907 – July 6, 1988) was an American rocket fuel developer, chemist, and science fiction writer. He was instrumental in the revival of interest in Robert E. Howard's Conan stories and influenced the writing careers of L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, and other authors.[1] Pacing  Read as thou wilt is the whole of the law. Please post after you read! Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Materials This blog is similar in tone and references this book a lot: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/?s=things%20I%20won%27t%20work%20with Suggestions for Future Months These threads aren't just for discussing the current BOTM; If you have a suggestion for next month's book, please feel free to post it in the thread below also. Generally what we're looking for in a BotM are works that have 1) accessibility -- either easy to read or easy to download a free copy of, ideally both 2) novelty -- something a significant fraction of the forum hasn't already read 3) discussability -- intellectual merit, controversiality, insight -- a book people will be able to talk about. Final Note: Thanks, and we hope everyone enjoys the book!
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Dec 5, 2020 15:33
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I'm already like halfway through this and it's a joy to read. It has some of the same charm that the James Herriott stories did -- that sense that these are stories this guy has been polishing over drinks with his friends for forty years and is only just now finally bothering to set them down.
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Dec 5, 2020 23:44
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Oh, I'm definitely in. Lowe's Things I Won't Work With posts were a huge draw for me as an undergrad learning OChem. Crossposted over to the Dangerous Chemicals thread in PYF, where there may be some interest as well.
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Dec 6, 2020 01:49
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Always glad to see new readers. This book is deeply fun to read, even if you know basically nothing of chemistry, and it only gets better the more you know. Give it a spin and enjoy.
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Dec 6, 2020 02:20
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Read this many times. Truly excellent, both for its content and Clark's style.
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Dec 6, 2020 14:00
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quote:Handling liquid hydrogen, then, has become a routine job, although it has to be treated with respect. If it gets loose, of course, it's a ferocious fire and explosion hazard, and all sorts of precautions have to be taken to make sure that oxygen doesn't get into the stuff, freeze, and produce a murderously touchy explosive. And there is a delightful extra something about a hydrogen fire — the flame is almost invisible, and at least in daylight, you can easily walk right into one without seeing it.
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Dec 6, 2020 14:02
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Not really related to this book, but ... you may be familiar with Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers stories, which feature a men's dinner club that solves mysteries (or rather, they argue about mysteries until the waiter steps in and solves it for them). One of the Widowers is an industrial chemist named James Drake, and after reading the introduction, I have to wonder if Asimov based Drake on Clark.
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Dec 7, 2020 00:04
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I remember a friend of mine asking me, about one of these substances, "How do you have something you can't have, because it explodes itself out of existence?"
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Dec 7, 2020 19:52
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It is fairly interesting to see how early the complex fuels arose, given that the most famous early rocket (the German A-4/V2) was so simple.
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Dec 9, 2020 01:00
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I'm about a third through having started yesterday. I am really impressed with this book. I can't remember names for poo poo, let alone chemical compounds, but Clark threads the needle and makes pages of specific chemicals and mixtures fly by in a way that it doesn't feel like I'm missing something not having a phd in chemistry.
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Dec 11, 2020 02:48
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This is a fun book. It's a serious history about all the labs involved and all the chemical compounds, mixed with anecdotes about mad scientists:quote:We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it--the acid valve is leaking!"
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Dec 13, 2020 18:52
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I picked this up and read through the first chapter. I forgot about how much difficultly I had in my high school chemistry classes. I don't have the excerpts on hand at the moment, but there was an interesting note where the gist was, "Scientists realized you could tun gases into liquids so they spent a century figuring out how", and I thought it was so novel that there was a period where curiosity was the prevailing reason to figure out how to do something, and it wasn't led out of a desire of venture capital or militaristic demand... ...and then I got to the end of the chapter, where funding of liquid propellant came from the military. 
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Dec 14, 2020 16:24
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You can be heartened by the fact that sometimes the scientists just wanted to waste military money:quote:One is led to suspect that some of the fancier amines were synthesized, not because there was any reason to believe that they would be an improvement on the ones they already had, but to demonstrate the virtuosity of the bench man, who wanted to prove that he could do it.
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Dec 14, 2020 16:39
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One later chapter discusses purchasing 10 pounds of "play around and find out" chemical at $540 per pound. In 1955 dollars. No pure-science or even industrial program could push like that.
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Dec 16, 2020 07:42
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I picked this up on a whim a few days ago after finally noticing this thread and I'm really glad I did. I just finished it, and I'm really surprised by how much I managed to at least kind of understand (mostly thanks to the writing, I'm pretty sure) even though I've never even taken a basic chemistry class. It's really interesting to see how some of his future guesses/predictions about fuels have played out in the forty or so years since this was first published. I was also both unsurprised and horrified by how apparently lax a lot of safety parameters were back then. Even just the short anecdote of him and some other scientists casually eating lunch in a chemistry lab WHILE processing chemicals just a few feet away (one container of which exploded, of course).
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Dec 22, 2020 18:31
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DurianGray posted:I was also both unsurprised and horrified by how apparently lax a lot of safety parameters were back then. Even just the short anecdote of him and some other scientists casually eating lunch in a chemistry lab WHILE processing chemicals just a few feet away (one container of which exploded, of course). lol if: you have done for-real research in a chemistry lab, and if: you have had a desk of your own in that lab then: you have eaten food at that desk it's like a metaphysical certitude
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Dec 22, 2020 18:47
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This is how artificial sweeteners were discovered IIRC. Either that or a dude licking his hands.
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Dec 22, 2020 18:59
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Every lab on Earth has clandestine food. I once worked in a biotech lab, in the food-safety division that was explicitly working on mycotoxins, and found a bag of Craisins just chilling in a drawer when I was setting up my bench. Of all the foods to risk contaminating yourself for, why Craisins?
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Dec 22, 2020 23:15
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We'll start the New Year with Curse of Capistrano.
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Dec 30, 2020 05:01
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Neat, maybe I'll actually finish that one. I'm slowly working through Ignition, but it's not holding me the way I had hoped.
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Dec 30, 2020 06:24
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FlowerRhythmREMIX posted:Neat, maybe I'll actually finish that one. I'm slowly working through Ignition, but it's not holding me the way I had hoped.
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Dec 30, 2020 07:08
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Oh, and I gave this book to my father-in-law for Christmas. He's a retired chemistry professor and as told him some of the example quotes from the book he kept chiming in with "oh yeah, we used to do that!" e.g., Apparently the hydrogen flame burners he used to use, you could never tell if they'd actually ignited or not, so you'd just wave something over them to see if they were on; if a pipe cleaner didn't catch fire when waved over the burner, it wasn't on!
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Dec 30, 2020 07:15
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NGDBSS posted:I take it you haven't reached the halogens chapter yet. Clark has some choices words there about fluorine in general and chlorine trifluoride in particular, which is best described as hellfire but in real life. I don’t think I have! I’m about 20% through
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Dec 30, 2020 17:27
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Yeah I'm stalled at about that point too. Going to push through though! I'm chalking it up to weird holiday times messing with my reading schedule, and finding Clark's writing just a tad bit less interesting than I had hoped. Might join in the reading of the Zorro book, my only experience with that franchise is the Antonio Banderas movie(s?).
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Dec 30, 2020 17:51
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Just a heads up, for anyone who liked Ignition!, another excellent book in the same vein is Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like To Buy A Kilo Of Isopropyl Bromide? by Max Gergel.
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Feb 1, 2021 05:17
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Tsilkani posted:Just a heads up, for anyone who liked Ignition!, another excellent book in the same vein is Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like To Buy A Kilo Of Isopropyl Bromide? by Max Gergel. Well now I know what I’m reading this week. Thank you
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Feb 1, 2021 06:52
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| # ? Feb 15, 2025 19:07 |
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Tsilkani posted:Just a heads up, for anyone who liked Ignition!, another excellent book in the same vein is Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like To Buy A Kilo Of Isopropyl Bromide? by Max Gergel. Thanks for this. I loved Ignition! (didn't see it was a BOTM unfortunately) and could use something similar.
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Feb 6, 2021 20:40
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