The site performance has intermittently suffered a lot from badly behaved crawlers, so if it's slow when you visit I apologize in advance. (Edit: current load average on server is 63. Ugh.)
I have another much more active account here but Sciencemadness so easily reveals my IRL identity that I don't mention this site on the other account.
The bad actors were much less prevalent back in the heyday of small phpBB style forums. I have run a forum of this type for 20 years now, since 2002. Around 2011 was when link spam got bad enough that I had to start writing my own bolt-on spam classifier and moderation tools instead of manually deleting spammer accounts. Captchas didn't help because most of the spam was posted by actual humans, not autonomous bots.
In the past 2 years fighting spam became too exhausting and I gave up on allowing new signups through software entirely. Now you have to email me explaining why you want an account and I'll manually create one for the approved requests. The world's internet users are now more numerous and less homogeneous than they were back when small forums dominated, and the worst 0.01% will ruin your site for the other 99.99% unless you invest a lot of effort into prevention.
Not in the United States. I run a web site that publishes information about the making of explosives, chemical weapons, and even restricted nuclear materials. It's all perfectly legal. Most of the information comes from government publications, patents, scientific journals, and books that you'd find in any well stocked university library. Even far less scholarly (and far less accurate) books like the Anarchist Cookbook or Poor Man's James Bond are legal in the US, despite the fact that both books contain instructions for activities that would be federal crimes if successfully carried out.
The OCR text beneath the page image is there to make it easier to search. I used ABBYY FineReader for the OCR process. I didn't do any manual reviewing or correcting of the automatically generated OCR text. I ran additional scripted tools of my own to optimize the PDF that I generated from FineReader for small file size.
I'm glad that it was so inspirational for you! If this is the only thing you've ever seen from sciencemadness, you should also check out the other books in the library:
It's kind of a grab-bag of old scanned texts that I compiled from random third party sources in the earlier days of the web plus those that I scanned personally.
Also see the Los Alamos Technical Reports collection if you might be interested in oddball chemistry, physics, and material science publications from America's premiere nuclear weapons laboratory:
Like "Chemistry of Uranium and Plutonium" -- containing both theoretical and practical documentation for the handling, processing, and analysis of plutonium in the laboratory:
I didn't realize that one was rare and expensive! I have it sitting on my shelf next to the 1965 Model Rocketry manual from Estes Industries. But it looks like archive.org already has a scan, so I don't need to scan it myself:
This was a favorite book of mine as a child. It was one of the last books that I scanned and uploaded to sciencemadness.org. That's probably for the best, since I was still learning how to make good scans and PDFs with the early books.
When I first started scanning and uploading books, Google Books did not yet exist. The HathiTrust did not yet exist. Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders did exist, but their focus on perfect text transcription of non-technical writing did not really suit the books that I wanted to share.
I stopped scanning books because the world largely caught up and surpassed what I could do. Between HathiTrust, Library Genesis, and sci-hub, there has never been a better time for doing deep-dive reading from the comfort of one's own living room. But I'm proud that so many people have enjoyed my scan of this book over the years.
My site is sciencemadness.org. I started it when I was still an undergraduate some 20 years ago now (!). It's mostly about chemistry and nuclear technology. My personal interests include chemistry, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, materials science, and post-fossil energy in general. I don't get to do much with those interests at my job, though. I'm a software engineer like many others here.
Content on my site has been linked from here a bunch of times [1] -- most often, my scan of the book Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John D. Clark:
It used to be very simple to register but I got tired of the endless cat-and-mouse games with link spammers. Now you'll need to email to get an account, and I deal with the registration requests at irregular intervals. But there's no gatekeeping. You don't need any particular qualifications or background to join.
I mostly participate here on HN under another account name that I don't want linked to this one. My real life identity is easily derived from my web site and I don't want that linked to everything else I say on HN.
When I was a kid in the 1980s it didn't seem harder than my other hobby, programming a Commodore 64. The relative difficulty is probably higher now, and of course your friends/neighbors/postal carrier may be more paranoid that anyone with chemistry equipment is a "drug cook."
My hands-on work with chemistry started by growing crystals when I was in the second grade. By third grade I was making very simple fireworks. I remember showing some of them off to classmates at my birthday party when I turned 9. By the time I was 10 I had taken over half of the family garage for my home lab.
I double majored in chemistry and computer science in college. I went on to graduate school afterward, working with computational chemistry and HPC. That's where I faced up to the reality of the job market. I didn't want to be an overworked, underpaid postdoc. Competition for academic tenure is brutal. The job prospects for non-academic chemists did not look promising. Since I had already been writing software for 15 years at that point, it was easy to transition to software as a career when I was done with school. I still love chemistry and would work in it or an allied field if it offered pay/perks comparable to software development.
Even software-in-the-field-of-chemistry underpays: when I started applying for software jobs Schrödinger made me an offer, but the pay was a third less than an entry level backend developer position for a West Coast startup. And they wanted me to relocate to New York City at my own expense.
Even though I am glum about the employment prospects for chemists in the USA, I still love chemistry and encourage any interest I find. If you are looking to encourage a child -- or even take it up as a hobby yourself -- a good place to start is Robert Bruce Thompson's Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments:
For more advanced hobbyists there are still a few forums around like that on Sciencemadness. (I think that Sciencemadness is probably the best one in English, but I am biased.)
You'll need to send an email requesting an account if you want to sign up. Trying to keep up with playing whack-a-mole against automated link-spam bots was too exhausting.
It's always a pleasure to see Sciencemadness linked here. The link is usually to this book, and with good reason. It's a classic. You don't have to be a chemist to enjoy it (though that helps). I have a main account here but I never comment on Sciencemadness submissions through it because the site so easily reveals my real-life identity.
I first discovered Ignition! on the shelves of the Medford, Oregon public library when I was 10 years old. I was hooked on my first reading and would go on to read it several more times before I entered my teens. It was tied with Tenney L. Davis's The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives as my favorite non-fiction book.
I started the Sciencemadness library [1] a long time ago, before the big book-scanning initiatives like Google Books started. The library still contains a large number of books that are unremarkable except for the fact that they were among the first digitized books covering certain facets of chemistry to be made available online.
The library does contain a couple of books less famous than Ignition! but also potentially interesting to non-chemist readers:
Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?
This is an anecdotal, autobiographical sketch of Max Gergel and his adventures as a young (then older) mad scientist building the business Columbia Organic Chemicals.
Columbia Organic Chemicals and its founder, Max Gergel, had the unusual honor of mention and praise by name in Kary Mullis's Nobel lecture [2]:
"I never tired of tinkering in labs. During the summer breaks from Georgia Tech, Al Montgomery and I built an organic synthesis lab in an old chicken house on the edge of town where we made research chemicals to sell. Most of them were noxious or either explosive. No one else wanted to make them, somebody wanted them, and so their production became our domain. We suffered no boredom and no boss. We made enough money to buy new equipment. Max Gergel, who ran Columbia Organic Chemicals Company, and who was an unusually nice man, encouraged us and bought most of our products, which he resold. There were no government regulators to stifle our fledgling efforts, and it was a golden age, but we didn't notice it. We learned a lot of organic chemistry."
The chicken coop lab full of noxious chemicals isn't far removed from how Max Gergel got his start in the chemistry business either.
In this humorous, anecdotal chronicle of Max's life from high school mad scientist to successful operator of a chemical supply business, you'll learn where metallic potassium should NOT be stored, how to prepare perfectly alcohol-free n-dodecyl bromide, and why one man would be crazy enough to want a preparative scale procedure for methyl isocyanide. You'll also learn, humorously but quite clearly, how the golden age of "no government regulators" contained the seeds of its own destruction, as horrendous odors, accidental poisonings, dumpings, fires, and miscellaneous accidents and occupational hazards take their toll on Gergel and his employees, neighbors, and surrounding environs.
The Scientific Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace
Famed Harvard chemistry professor Louis Fieser's personal history of development of incendiary weapons during WW II, including the infamous Bat Bomb, plus development of cortisone, antimalarial drugs, and educational material for students.
Louis Fieser joined the American war effort before America had even officially entered World War II, as one of 20 professor invited to the house of Roger Adams in October 1940 to join the National Defense Research Committee. He was instructed early on to work on chemical vesicants but, considering them inhumane, quickly made a lateral move to begin development of gelled gasoline incendiary weapons. He led the research effort behind napalm, several other components of large-scale incendiary ordnance, and smaller special purpose incendiary devices for use by spies and saboteurs.
Fieser's strangest project was development of the Bat Bomb: a cluster-bomb arrangement of hibernating bats carrying time-delayed incendiaries. As the bats fell from bombers over enemy cities, they would rouse from hibernation mid-air and seek shelter in attics of the city below. Their incendiaries would then start concealed, hard-to-fight fires. The project was surprisingly successful for one never deployed, and included the own-goal immolation of an administrative building during testing.
When Fieser was not working on setting fires he also had time to begin work on the first edition of his organic chemistry textbook, research cortisone chemistry, and work on antimalarial drugs. The information given late in the book about getting cats to pose for photographs with chemical apparatus is invaluable because it comes from real experience.
https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/
Check out the library too (this started before Google Books, Internet Archive, and Hathitrust were offering scans):
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/index.html
The site performance has intermittently suffered a lot from badly behaved crawlers, so if it's slow when you visit I apologize in advance. (Edit: current load average on server is 63. Ugh.)
I have another much more active account here but Sciencemadness so easily reveals my IRL identity that I don't mention this site on the other account.