Lucky sir, Mr awalter, if that had been me it might have been a much shorter story, since I am allergic to penicillin and wouldn't like to take my chances with any mystery mold. Yes, husband & I have each helped each other survive our less-well-thought-out ideas, while the dear roommate fell out of a tree last month and broke an ankle.

A funny thing was, the chemistry teacher was married to the bio teacher, widely considered the most fun and cool teacher at the school. They must have complimented each other in some way like an ionic bond.

Women that fall from trees? Where is this, I need to move there. Then I only have to extend my arms and one of them will fall to my feet, very simple :-D

Their ionic wedding vows were probably "till H2O does us apart"

Rural Pennsylvania, untamed land of ATVs and maple syrup harvests. I've never been, but if you bring a net and a plate of mac'n cheese, even odds you'll catch something.

*taking notes*

We make world famous mac'n cheese over here, it's called Älplermagronen (Alpine herder's mac'n cheese)


Immigration officer: "Purpose of your visit?"

Me: "To catch women falling from trees, with macaroni and cheese!"

Immigration officer: "Nice rhyme. Don't forget to pay the $50 license fee. No poaching, understood?"

Me: "Yes yes, I only need one anyway, at the most two"

2 more days to enter, will conclude the giveaway this Friday. In the meantime, I might even finish the game if I have time. So far, 103 levels cleared and 21 left (not counting the 20 bonus levels).

Things are getting more tricky but I hope I won't get stuck, so far the difficulty seems agreeable.

Not in.

My dad is a chemist and owned a forensic laboratory that served as the crime lab for a number of small suburbs of Dallas & Fort Worth for a few decades. Whew, some stories from there. Some funny (the police officer that passed out cold on the shoulder of an interstate when shown - at his insistence [NOT by my dad] - the inside of a cooler that was transporting a head being taken from crime lab to crime lab), some not. I saw some amazing shit as a child. His lab was in an old house that used to be a mortuary - the cooler was used as the evidence locker. Once one of the rooms in the house was filled - to the ceiling - with bales of weed busted by some police agency. I've seen weapons caches, paper bags filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars, crack rocks bigger than my big-ass Irish head. I can tell you who is carrying methamphetamine on the street because the precursor chemicals are so ingrained in my psyche from smelling my dad getting home from busts in the 80s.

But I like my own chemistry story. Advanced Placement class in high school, we liked to keep things interesting. We had a chili cook-off, because mixing stuff or something. There were a few categories. I went for "spiciest." I didn't know I was the only one going for it, so I had to make sure I had what it took. I used powdered chili that hit six digits on the Scoville Scale. LOTS of powdered chili. I immediately brought choked tears to everyone that even tasted it - the judges were all teachers at the high school. My dad was a smoker for about 50 years and his taste buds were affected - he likes really spicy stuff. He said he could handle it, then it sat in the freezer for a few months, then it was just tossed. Mmm. :)

Nice work! I'm slowly working through it. At 45 complete, and there are some that are pretty easy still on the board and others I'm having to think more about before the solution comes clear.

Thanks for sharing your stories about severed heads, crack rocks, mountains of money and weapon grade chilli. Now we're talking!

It's also quite amazing that your sense of smell has become so fine tuned towards meth, you could work as a human sniffer dog for the DEA. I didn't even know meth had a smell at all.

It only takes a couple seconds to execute each level but sometimes the solution is completely non obvious meaning it can take 15 minutes or even longer to crack some of them. I only play in very short sessions, maybe 2-3 puzzles at a time then I leave it at that unless I somehow enter the "zone" and get a lucky streak in which case I keep going until my mind fizzles out.

I just passed the 8 hr 20 min mark that howlongtobeat.com lists as the average completion time and I still have about 15-20 puzzles left not including the bonus ones so either howlongtobeat.com is yet again full of crap or I'm just slow. It's not that I want to be the fastest and I wouldn't feel any sense of achievement even if I were but I also wouldn't want to be the slowest because I only have one brain and can't just go and return it at Walmart for a new one! Admittedly, games require a different set of intelligence as other things in life but in terms of gaming, more gaming skill/speed means the backlog can get reduced more quickly.

As a research chemist, the funniest thing I know in chemistry is...my own work.

Not in, but I'll relate my little chemistry story:

Way back when I was a teenager, a buddy of mine and I decided it would be fun to make our own gunpowder. He had all the ingredients at his place, so we proceeded to his basement and started experimenting with different ratios to see what we could come up with (this was long before the internet, so we didn't have access to great info on exact ratios of the ingredients). We did manage to come up with a mix that burned okay, but we weren't satisfied. Anyway, for some reason that I no longer recall, he had a small block of magnesium at his place, so, knowing it would burn, we thought it would be a great idea to mix that in with the home-made gunpowder.

It wasn't.

That shit burns hot! Luckily, we had sense enough (or the fates decided to be kind to us - probably this is the real explanation) to go outside. We'd loaded our mixture into an old die-cast metal model plane he had and proceeded to light it up with a fuse (just some string as I recall. Something like that, anyway). So we were standing a fair distance away when it went up. It was pretty spectacualar. But the drawback was we'd set the plane on his father's tool box (don't ask me why - I can't recall what the reasoning was). Needless to say, there was very little left of the plane and the tool box didn't fare much better. His father was not pleased. That ended our home chemistry experiments.

At least you're still alive and haven't lost your humor (and, I assume, no body parts).

:D

Not necessarily a bad idea if effect is what you wanted, at least you had the good sense to lay a fuse so no one got hurt. Sucks for the model plane but science requires sacrifice, and a plane is a worthy sacrifice!
We lit up magnesium in class but didn't mix it with anything, it's one of those basic experiments for demonstrating an exothermic reaction but with gunpowder in the mix the whole point surely comes across in a much more memorable way.

Ahh, magnesium, always good for some pyrotechnic fun. Intentional or otherwise :D

Your story actually reminds me of an incident from back when I was doing military service. We were at a large firing range, one of only a few places in Denmark where we could train with heavy weapons, it having only fields and water in the immediate vicinity. That wasn't why we were there, though. We were there in the dark, and one of the things we were drilling was lighting a battlefield, using a combination of everything from signal guns, over flare rockets, to mortars. As it happens, a lot of those things rely on magnesium which, as you observed, burns hot.

Besides it being night, it was also windy, early summer, a quite warm and dry, but the range master considered the wind no problem since it was blowing -away- from the only town in the vicinity. All good.

As it happens, though, flares launched by a mortar can get up quite high, and last quite a long time. When it is windy, this means they can travel quite a long distance. Such as, for example, into a neighbouring field. A neighbouring, very dry field. Which will promptly catch fire. Leading to a full platoon of soldiers who would really rather be in bed, but were willing to make an exception in this case on account of getting to play with guns and fireworks, instead being pressed into service as firefighters.

It took us a good hour to put out all the fires we'd inadvertedly started. But at least we managed to light up the battlefield.

One week has passed -> conclusion time!

Congratulations to Zhade and thanks again for sharing your enlightening tale, or in that case not enlightening as the whole thing ended in black snow instead of nice flames.
What do we learn from this? That if you want to combust an unsaturated hydrocarbon which is a total sausage fest of carbon atoms, one would have to do it in an atmosphere where you could bring many oxygen atoms into it so that they can make friends with the carbon atoms. But under normal atmospheric conditions such as in a classroom there isn't enough oxygen and once all the oxygen atoms have bonded with a carbon friend, you still have way too many unhappy forever alone carbon atoms who will fly around as black snow ruining the teachers shirt (and make him forever alone if the wife gets too angry).
It's like a reversal of the find a chair game but instead of only one person being left over, many carbon atoms are left. So sad!

And thanks to everyone else -in or not in- for your chemistry stories. This is how chemistry should be taught: By practical examples from life, cautionary tales but entertaining because it happened to others and all the more educational if something happened to you :)

edit: I couldn't find any acetylene levels in the game but there are quite a bunch of methane levels, a compound of the same family

Took a bit of a hiatus from playing Sokobond - came back for about 40 minutes tonight and knocked off a few more and hit a wall with a few others.

62 complete of 75 unlocked now.

There are quite a few levels that seem unsolvable at first but thanks to the super compact size of each level one doesn't lose hope as the solution can usually be found with a little trial-and-error & patience. Fortunately there's no need for too much raw computing power like Spacechem where a laid back approach hardly yields any results. That makes Sokobond a much more relaxing and easier game but I still find it challenging. Haven't been motivated to continue in the last 1,5 weeks so I'm still at 105 out of 124 levels. Progression has slowed down quite a bit and total playtime is 8+ hours so far. Since I got it on sale I definitely got my money's worth but even at full price ($9.99) the game is within the "$1 per hour of playtime" rule, I'll definitely be somewhere North of 10 hours once I'm done.


At the end of this game, I'll know everything there is to know (useful or otherwise) about hydrogen peroxide, keeps coming up in the game: