Life is full of uncertainty.
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Armstrong’s Explosive is more likely. If he was playing with red phos and matches he could have made something he didn’t understand. When you scrub a safety match across the red phos and glass strip, you’re making a minute quantity of Armstrong’s explosive on demand. Also used in toy cap guns (if they still sell those.) The explosive is very sensitive to shock and not really used for much except in small quantities.
I feel bad for the guy. Nothing about his story strikes me as anything but sad.
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This relates to what @Chesterfield said as well.
Hahn became depressed after the scandal, a problem exacerbated by the breakup with his girlfriend and the death by suicide of his mother in early 1996. While he did graduate from high school, he lacked any direction or plans thereafter.
David Hahn - Wikipedia
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In anycase making something quite dangerous out of matches is a lot easier than make nitroglycerine. IIRC Nitro requires mixing together both concentrated sulfuric acid and concentrated nitric acid to make. That just screams all kinds of handling problems and issues with cooling just to get stuff mixed together.
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That’s a funny way of spelling Lise Meitner…
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My coworker served on the enterprise while Hahn was on there… He confirms that Hahn was nuts.
Edit: My friend was a nuke on the ship and I guess they had to keep an eye out for him…
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When I was a kid, my friends used to take a nail, a spark plug, some feathers or ribbon, and a box of matches. We’d empty out one end of the spark plug, (I can’t remember which end came off easy, I think it was the terminal side) and tie a ribbon or feather to the other end. Then we’d break off match heads into the hollow and stick the nail inside. You’d throw it high into the air and the ribbon or feather would make sure it landed nail first. It would shock the match heads and you’d get a loud bang.
It wasn’t really dangerous per se, because you could only fit so many match heads in and spark plugs are pretty robust, but I learned fairly early in life that perchlorates are shock explosives. They are also a lot of fun in huge quantities:
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as a 39 year old, I resemble this…omfg…I plan on living another twenty years, at least.
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radiation poisoning… what does it look like?
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They do still sell cap guns, or at least the caps. There are also little spring devices that you put under a heavy object and that set off a cap when it’s removed. I have two friends who LARP and were college roommates- a significant fraction of the coffee mugs, textbooks, etc. in their room would have one of these under them at any given time.
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Thank you for reading it so we didn’t have to
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Live at the Bataclan, last saturday.
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I’ve always wondered what the bodycount is for kids who drank/inhaled/doused themselves in dangerous substances in hopes of gaining Marvelesque super-powers…
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It’s the funniest element.
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We used to stuff tennis balls with strike-anywhere match-heads and wrap them in duct tape. You then just toss them at least twenty feet away for a pretty good boom. It was a fun shopping list. We’d always throw a loaf of bread in the shopping basket with the 20 boxes of matches, duct tape, and tennis balls just to make it look like a normal checkout. It was a fun weekend project (several hours cutting off match-stick heads) for incredibly stupid teenage boys.
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Not true.
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Hey there. I’m from Frankfurt too 
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Gude!
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Thanks for clearing that up, friendo.
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“Died in his/her home” for people who aren’t elderly is like newspaper code for “committed suicide.”
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