The old Caveman Chemistry website (1996-2000)

by marcodiego • 1 year ago

85 16 1 year ago

From the Stone Tools project page...

> If you have ever seen the fracture which results when a BB hits a glass window, you have seen the conchoidal fracture.

mock-possum• 1 year ago

Wow the instructor sounds extra, but this would’ve been a great course to go through in a summer as a kid. It’d be fun to audit as an adult really.

mrKola• 1 year ago

How is it that the new website is uglier than the old one?

quibono• 1 year ago

I think chemistry is one of those subjects that should be the easiest to teach in a captivating way and yet most school/university level treatments tend to be quite dry. I imagine most of this is due to cost, safety and effort required but one can dream.

pstuart• 1 year ago

A chemist once told me the two paths that bring people into chemistry are learning how to blow shit up and how to get high.

But yes, regardless of those two it should be easy to frame it as a magical adventure.

le-mark• 1 year ago

I always thought breaking bad should have brought a lot of people into chemistry, but I’ve never seen stats that support that.

devilbunny2• 1 year ago

I was a chemistry major. This is basically true.

There was one guy in my class that we all pegged as a recreational pharmacologist within the first week or two of freshman year. He's a good chemist; if he offered me something, I'd trust that it was both pure and exactly what he said it was.

riffraff• 1 year ago

I heard from reputable sources that modern "little chemist" kits[0] have become quite boring, mostly for safety reasons (there's some nice single-use kits like Mel science but that's different).

Still, looks like you can still make a bunch of fun experiments in school? I've tried to engage my kids in some simple experiments (ph identification with cabbage, showing how bones can become brittle or rubbery depending on which components you remove, the classic soda&vinegar experiments etc).

University level treatment, dunno, seems like it should be fun but I had one chemistry class and balancing reductions is not that entertaining and that's most of it.

[0] I'm not sure of the actual English name, I mean those kits with a dozen things to combine, a becher, a Bunsen burner etc.

AngryData• 1 year ago

Well that and both government and businesses don't make a lot of amateur chemistry that easy. Many chemicals have to either be bought second hand out of someone's bulk purchase for a licensed lab, extracted out of consumer products, or bought off shady amazon dealers at massive markups with uncertain purity standards. God forbid somebody finds you doing random experiments suspicious and calls the cops or something who are going to automatically assume you are being bad or dangerous or making meth.

JKCalhoun• 1 year ago

Tried a few links and found them broken.

For example, Dunn's book on soap making. Nonetheless, Googled it:

https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Soapmaking-Chemistry-Cold-...

The lead me to his Caveman Chemistry book on Amazon as well:

https://www.amazon.com/Caveman-Chemistry-Projects-Creation-P...

globalnode2• 12 months ago

The batteries page states "Current is defined as the rate at which electrons flow from anode to cathode" but is that true? Don't the electrons flow towards the anode?

globalnode2• 12 months ago

I've come back to report that after researching this, Electrons do flow from cathode to anode. Conventional current goes the other way if you're measuring ion (hole) flow in redox reactions for example. But I'm reasonably sure the electrons go the way I described.

The old Caveman Chemistry website (1996-2000)

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