“If I had a nickel for every time this happened, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Right?” — Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirz Friends and acquaintances recently flooded my inbox with stories about a series of sewer explosions near the north riverfront of St. Louis. It launched several [...]
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” — Groucho Marx My doctor is trying to help me identify a food sensitivity that has been causing me health problems. His list of potential culprits includes sweeteners, and he has advised against any artificial sweetener and [...]
“It’s what you do next that counts.” — Lisa Mackay One of my favorite movies is The Great Waldo Pepper starring Robert Redford as a barnstorming pilot after World War I. One scene is seared into my memory. Waldo Pepper’s friend, Ezra Stiles, crashes during an air show. The crowd surges out to the wrecked [...]
“When an engineer has built a bridge, the fact that a cat can pass over the bridge is no proof that the bridge is good. A train must pass over it to prove its strength.” — Richard Wurmbrand What do you do when working with concrete that has no water or cement? Concrete of a [...]
“Heavy metal? Like Rock of Ages?” — Isis Hainsworth in Metal Lords It’s hard to pin down a definition of heavy metal, whether you are talking about the rock-n-roll genre, or elements from the periodic table. Serious fans (of either the music or the elements) can argue at length about what is meant by the [...]
“Love is like oxygen. You get too much, you get too high; not enough and you’re gonna die.” — Andy Scott, of Sweet OSHA standards define safe lower and upper limits to the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere to which workers are exposed. The limits are a minimum of 19.5% and a maximum of [...]
“Do I mind if you smoke? I don’t mind if you burst into flames. Just don’t light that cigarette.” — Anonymous, derived from Sarah Bernhardt’s comment to Oscar Wilde Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is an idea first proposed by Paul Rolli in 1746. It seized the imagination of a gullible public. Since then, there have [...]
“In the last two decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of people have died of carbon dioxide asphyxiation near volcanoes in Cameroon and in Indonesia.” — Allison Stark Draper, in Coping With Natural Disasters Many worry about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is also a much more urgent hazard. [...]
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas.” — Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, of The Rolling Stones Ever notice how the popular media never refer to chemicals. No, they talk about “toxic chemicals.” It’s as though any material that is not toxic is not a chemical, or perhaps, any material called a chemical must be toxic. [...]
“Don’t cross the streams.” -Egon from Ghostbusters It doesn’t take much for two tasks to interfere with one another out in general industry. Work environments can be quite hectic as the end of a fiscal year approaches, where multiple goals and tasks are being wrapped up. Plant life is not much different, except some of [...]
