Tell them that you're a rail enthusiast, and start going on (and on) about how they use it to weld together train tracks. The more detail you go into about the trains, the more likely they are to want to get away from you.

Thermite is basically a quick, low-tech welding compound.

Unless you actually work for the railroad, talking about welding railroad tracks may trigger "he's a terrorist planning to cause a train derailment" thoughts in the law officer.

Heatgen is a new company that is selling self-heating aluminum cans. As I understand it, it uses a thermite reaction as its heat source. So who knows, maybe having a thermite charge in your pocket might become more common!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSpuTwEOpOg

https://www.poweredbyheatgen.com/

https://www.highbrewcoffee.com/products/self-heating

That is an objectively terrible design. The video through the first link demonstrates that, if you remove the liquid before activating the charge, it gets so hot it melts the aluminum jacket for the charge. Seems then trivial to cause an insane amount of destruction, even accidentally. Definitely one of the more surefire ways to commit arson, especially in wildland settings.

IIRC, the last attempt at self-heating cans had to be recalled due to fire hazards.

Edit* - https://www.engadget.com/2006-05-05-self-heating-wolfgang-pu...

Makes me wonder what happens if you remove the liquid and replace it with more thermite.

Edit: Come to think of it, it might just absorb the heat and do nothing.

Aluminium+Rust thermite is pretty difficult to ignite. Maybe other mixtures have lower activation energy.

> So who knows, maybe having a thermite charge in your pocket might become more common!

Makes me think of the weird looks you would get if you tried to pay with your phone a decade ago.

Oh dear LORD NO

I've designed a lot of dumb things in my life, but that beats me, hands freaking down. Can you imagine the complete clusterfuck a crashed semi trailer full of these things would cause?

Teenagers. 3 step process for fun.

1. Empty can.

2. Twist heating element.

3. Toss at target to burn.

Yeah. Given the propensity for people to be as shitty as possible (Kids, teenagers and adults all apply here) I always try to design with regard for a high base level "people being malicious and / or stupid." It's accidents that always keep me up at night asking "What happens to bystanders caught up in this mess?"

It's funny that all their sales material is very very careful to avoid talking about the reaction and then you read the patent and it's "iron oxide, an oxidiser, and an aluminium can" and I guess if you need to melt tank tracks or have a warm coffee you're set either way.

But if you do tell them about your thermite, make sure you have a small stash hidden away on your person so you can melt the prison bars and escape.

On or In? Yikes!

Thermite on, ignition source in.

Never heard of this site before but it has a pretty fun catalog. Caffeine Soap!

https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...

Not very convenient though:

> leave on for at least 1 minute before rinsing.

Why's that not convenient. I usually turn the water off while I apply soap and then turn it back on when I've finished to conserve water. That wait time is around a minute anyways. From talking to international friends this seems to be the norm around the world though I wouldn't be surprised if the average American doesn't practice this.

Not me. Water is on the whole time. I will move the body part I'm washing out if the stream long enough to apply lather, then immediately rinse it and then repeat. I would be surprised if there aren't at least a large minority that are at the two extremes here.

And caffeinated soap has been around a while, and I've been using it off and on. Some are good, some are not.

What prompted you to use caffeine soap when oral ingestion is so much more common/readily available?

Why not both?

Seriously, at the time, I was drinking gallons of coffee per day, and I appreciated the smell of the caffeinated soap. So, I actually did both.

These days, I'm decaffeinated on the coffee I drink, and I'm trying a variety of soaps, some of which are still caffeinated, and some are not.

You’d have to wait at least a minute after applying the soap.

That is begging for a story, although I'm guessing the summary might be more entertaining.

I think United Nuclear was Bob Lazaar's company

edit: yep https://www.justice.gov/civil/cpb/case/us-v-united-nuclear-s...

What does it mean to place a company on probation? I tried looking it up, but can't get away from results about employee probation...ddg and Google both are ignoring my -employee and various other negations to filter the results...

Does he still own it? I would never buy something from a con artist like Lazaar.

Sounds like an interesting story, care to share it? :)

Back in the early 2000s me and a few friends were playing with thermite in a parking lot, igniting tiny piles of it and watching it burn into the asphalt.

Somebody across the street called the police and all of a sudden two cop cars and a fire truck showed up. They saw we were just kids and pretty much just told us to fuck off, which I would have, except I had just put down a sizable pile of thermite on the ground.

Being both a genius(moron) and civic-minded, I asked if I could clean up my pile of thermite first so as to avoid any danger to others.

Then I was asked what that is, so I happily told them about how it creates extremely hot iron slag that can melt through lots of things.

And then me and my friends were interrogated about being bomb-makers, terrorists, or if we were planning on doing another Columbine. They called in the local FBI (who thankfully knew what we were talking about and didn’t really give a shit), we got a long speech about the PATRIOT act, and at the end they said we’re all going on “a list”

Ruined my entire evening and I never got to ignite the big pile :(