Pure gas vs E85

[Frank]

Moonshine is raw distillate that has not been aged in charred barrels.

Fore-shots of the distillate will contain some lower boiling methanol and must be discarded.

A chemistry professor told our class that during prohibition he would run analyses for bootleggers to make sure the booze was safe. He said there were more people with blindness due to methanol contamination going to the hospital then there were pregnant women delivering babies.

I heard a caution on TV this am that a lot of hand sanitizers from Mexico contained methanol and should be discarded. The hazardous warning is mainly aimed at alcoholics who may drink the stuff.

A shot of methanol can kill you and a little less can blind you. Trace amounts present in a lot of alcoholic beverages and food will not harm you.

[danny burstein]

Damn, we're old...

[Scott Lurndal]

Which is still a small fraction of the number of people that they had to interview to find a sucker. As I said, all it indicates is that you can find ignorance if you look for it hard enough. It doesn't say anything about environmentalists as a group.

[T]

Picked up two bottle two weeks ago, but none since.

[Scott Lurndal]

I've got a 5-gallon can of optical grade (used to clean optical fibers) isopropal that I use as a solvent for shellac. Should last forever.

[Frank]

It is a good idea if you are going to use it often to add something to it that helps your skin from excessive dryness.

I see also that a bit of water is needed:

Reminds me in my student days swiping a bottle of 200 proof alcohol from the lab.

I showed it to a friend and he took the top off and took a swig. I though we were going to have to take him to the hospital.

I also recall an incident years ago with a 5 gallon can of isopropanol found sitting around in storage. There was a big concern of peroxide formation. Our safety people carefully transported it to a remote area on the grounds and shot it up with a 22 rifle starting at the top and working down in case the peroxides at the bottom exploded. Fortunately nothing happened.

If your can of isopropanol has had a lot of air exposure you might be alert for this problem.

[gfretwell]

If you are distilling fermented sugar, there shouldn't be any methanol. The prohibition introduced denatured alcohol and they added methanol as the denaturing agent. You could try to distill that out but the boiling points are so close it was hard to do.

[gfretwell]

If they got the people who organized the rally and the people who spoke, it does point out how easily that crowd was swayed. It probably had more to do with the mindset of the people who go to these things. They were there to be pissed off about anything that was presented and this was presented in that venue. I do find people who identify as environmentalists are quick to condemn damned near anything if it is presented right. It is more like a cult religion as opposed to the science of ecology.

[Clare Snyder]

Up here you just need to ask the pharmacist and he'll dig out a bottle for you. They will NOT put it on the shelf untill the supply catches up

[Clare Snyder]

Either way it says about the same about Americans as Environmentalists. You have a certain portion who are educated, another portion who are uneducated, and the rest who are badly missinformed -- The proportion varies a LOT depending on what part of the country you are in, among other "variables"

[Rod Speed]

Bullshit.

More bullshit, it is in fact trivial to do with a reflux still. You discard the first run from the still and do that by volume if you cant analyse the alcohol.

[Frank]

I would not have thought of that either until looking it up.

[Frank]

Google says:

"In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy."

I'm c "Only 5 percent of members of Congress have backgrounds in science and engineering. Yet, everyday they make decisions that impact the scientific community."

The same percentage applies to the general US population.

[gfretwell]

The last point is somewhat meaningless since most congress people are some kind of lawyer. They have arts degrees, not science degrees. As for the first stat, if you looked at the demographics of the illiterates and said it out loud, you would be called a racist although you could also point to the economic strata and pick up the rest of them. Those lines do coincide to a great extent tho. If you follow an illiterate kid home, an illiterate adult will open the door.

[Rod Speed]

And yet the best of the trial lawyers handle forensics fine.

Only by fools.

Not necessarily. One of the grand kids of mates of mine shocked everyone speechless when he dumped a pile of high school certificates and marks on his grandmother when he was getting her to do his resume after his job disappeared due to our lockdown. He didn’t bother to tell his druggy illiterate dad or mother about any of those.

[Cindy Hamilton]

Of course. Being read to as a young child and presence of reading material in the home are essential to fostering literacy.

When I was young, I babysat for the kids next door. There were no children's books in the house, but there were movie magazines. They moved away so I never found out what became of the kids.

These were ordinary white hillbillies. Well, former hillbillies, since this was a downmarket Detroit suburb in the 1970s.

Cindy Hamilton

[Xeno]

Your header states E85. Do you realise that E85 is *85%* alcohol?

[trader_4]

Trump demonstrates he's part of all of the above regularly, like when he said that his DHS people would begin testing using household disinfectants to treat Covid by cleaning people's lungs with it. His supporters demonstrate that they are part of the uneducated that he loves by continuing to support the moron.

[gfretwell]

That is not exactly what he said but roll with it.

[Scott Lurndal]

Close enough that a bunch of trump supporters actually tried drinking bleach on Trumps recommendation.