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Well, the anorganic chemistry building doesn't contain the same, but there are many things there which can catch fire as well - and send lots of nasty stuff your way.

In general, it's not a good idea to be nearby when a chemistry building catches fire.

Edit: My father is a chemical engineer, too. Among the textbooks he has kept from university is a big, heavy thing in German named "Anorganische Chemie".
 
Organic stuff generally burns in orange. All the different metal oxides and stuff you'd find in an inorganic chemistry lab would probably burn in lots of different colours. Pyrotechnicians are usually proficient in inorganic chemistry :D
 
Dr. Eddies Wingman said:
You should offer them booze. All parents in the neighbourhood would tell their kids to avoid your house for years to come!
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Funny, I was wondering to myself tonight what the reaction would be to me giving out bottles of beer to kids. :p

Halloween has been celebrated here as long as I remember, but it's become a lot bigger and more commercial over the past ten years or so. What bugged me more than anything this year, though, was that fake plastic spiders are now sparkly. Just wrong!
 
One year while handing out candy, 2 little boys happened to catch a glimpse inside my house and it wasn't very tidy at the time so they wondered what happened and thought a storm blew though my house...
 
Moon Child said:
One year while handing out candy, 2 little boys happened to catch a glimpse inside my house and it wasn't very tidy at the time so they wondered what happened and thought a storm blew though my house...
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By looking around my place, I have a feeling I know what your house looked like. ;)
 
Oh, and to round up the chemistry thing here: One of my worst nightmares during my studies was the "Gmelins Handbuch der Anorganischen Chemie". As you may know, when something is called a "handbook" in the natural sciences it's usually big enough to kill a horse, and this one took it to the extreme. It consists of more than 20 volumes! It contains data for a lot of inorganic substances, as well as methods for preparing them from more easily obtainable raw materials. We were supposed to use it for a big exercise where the goal was to prepare a given substance in the lab. Mine was a nasty chromate compound which was supposed to crystallize into needle-shaped crystals with a beautiful green colour.

Anyway: The fact that the Handbuch was in German was not a problem. I like to think that I can read German. What was worse, was that nearly every second word was abbreviated! Hell, even some prepositions! I spent more time working out what the abbreviations ment, than I spent mixing those nasty chemicals.
 
Yeah, Germans love to abbreviate prepositions in reference works. I'm not sure if I've ever worked with a 20 volume Handbuch, but some Realenzyklopädien have pretty extreme dimensions. The Reallexikon der Assyriologie has thirteen 'volumes' to date, with several subvolumes each. Encyclopaedia Iranica has 15 volumes to date, and is projected to have 34 when it's finished. Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft has 81 volumes. I can't judge the Assyriology one properly, but Encyclopaedia Iranica is pretty... uneven in its quality. The Pauly is however indispensable, despite the fact that it was written in a time frame of 80 years.
 
Black Wizard said:
Wingman, have you ever heard of Twigson?
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I had to look it up, but that was because I didn't know it was the English version of Knerten. But yes, I've heard of him, and I have also read at least one of the children's books about him.

@Perun - we should just be happy we don't live in a time where an important task of academics is to rewrite things like that by hand :D
 
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Moon Child said:
It was cute in that "kids say the silliest things" sort of way but the fact that it was my home , it was quite embarrassing.
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Kids tend to have no filter, but that's nothing. I once told my doctor that she had fat legs. :oops: In my defence, I was on some medication that made me pretty grumpy.
 
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