The crime rate correlation with lead tainted gasoline is fascinating.
Could it be that in lower socioeconomic areas have older cars that produces lead in to the air, and the population ends up breathing a lot of it?
The fatal attraction of lead
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Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#22I wonder if leaded gasoline is playing any kind of role in the continued unrest in the Middle East? FTA: Chronic lead exposure causes depression, headaches, aggression and memory loss. .... [M]any academics now believe leaded petrol was responsible for a global crime wave that peaked in the 1990s. ... Amazingly, a handful of countries - Iraq, Yemen, Burma, North Korea - continue to use leaded petrol.
"Unrest in the Middle East" is a blanket phrase so broad as to be meaningless. What specific conflict do you have in mind? Keep in mind that the number of vehicles per capita is much lower in Iraq and Yemen (the only two countries you mention) than in the United States. Your comment rubs me the wrong way since it speaks to a mindset where complicated geopolitical problems can be solved or explained by a simple hack.…
I quite like the idea of solving complicated geopolitical problems with a simple hack. Sadly the twitter and elections don't seem to be doing the trick in the middle east though. The EU and similar worked quite well in Europe which was pretty much constantly at war previously.
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#23I wonder if leaded gasoline is playing any kind of role in the continued unrest in the Middle East? FTA: Chronic lead exposure causes depression, headaches, aggression and memory loss. .... [M]any academics now believe leaded petrol was responsible for a global crime wave that peaked in the 1990s. ... Amazingly, a handful of countries - Iraq, Yemen, Burma, North Korea - continue to use leaded petrol.
"Unrest in the Middle East" is a blanket phrase so broad as to be meaningless. What specific conflict do you have in mind? Keep in mind that the number of vehicles per capita is much lower in Iraq and Yemen (the only two countries you mention) than in the United States. Your comment rubs me the wrong way since it speaks to a mindset where complicated geopolitical problems can be solved or explained by a simple hack.…
There's no law of the universe that says big problems must have complicated solutions. Checklists have prevented countless mistakes in aviation and medical care. Scurvy plagued sailors for centuries, but the cure was vitamin C. Until the mid-1800's, doctors killed many of their patients from infection because they didn't wash their hands after performing autopsies.[1]
Of course, banning lead in those countries will have a beneficial effect, but I don't think it will quell much unrest. The middle east was unstable well before the introduction of leaded gasoline. And as you said, car ownership isn't as common there.
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#24And it tastes so so sweet... When my friends and I were children we found pieces of lead while dumpster diving. Probably 5 pounds of it. We taught ourselves how to make plaster-of-paris molds and tried to counterfeit the most important thing to us - video game tokens from the local arcade. We made only a handful of tokens before we realized the effort was more than the payoff. We had to rebuild the mold each time and…
I did the same thing as as a kid with my brother (we broken open batteries instead to get the lead). I never tried to spend the “money” we made, but just used it to impress other kids in the playground. I guess this is where some of the appeal of physical gold comes from - the weight of these coins when held in the hand sure impressed.
We avoided breaking the mould by casting the plaster of paris in two sections. The first you cast to halfway up the side of the coin lying flat and once it sets you rub grease over the top of everything and then cast the over half. Once everything has dried the two half split apart easy. We put in little sticks into the first cast sticking up 5mm so that the two halves could be aligned again after removing the coin. You could use this mould as many times as you liked. I do agree that the effort far out weighed the financial reward though :)
Someone should start making and selling gold plated tungsten coins as a cheap replica of gold coins - I know this sometimes happens as forgeries, but it would be nice to have a few hundred of these to play around with and impress your friends.
Edit. It looks like there is a company in China that actually does this. I have contacted them to see what they cost as I would love to have some of these.
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#25I wonder if leaded gasoline is playing any kind of role in the continued unrest in the Middle East? FTA: Chronic lead exposure causes depression, headaches, aggression and memory loss. .... [M]any academics now believe leaded petrol was responsible for a global crime wave that peaked in the 1990s. ... Amazingly, a handful of countries - Iraq, Yemen, Burma, North Korea - continue to use leaded petrol.
This was debunked in an article I saw recently, where it turned out that the data was cherrypicked pretty dramatically. Let me try and locate it.
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#26Lead paint and lead gasoline are shocking examples of corporate misbehavior. Interior lead paint was banned in many European countries by the 1920s because of the obvious health risks. But in the US the lead manufactures responded to health concerns with "Dutch Boy" lead paint, deliberately marketed to appear safe enough for a child to use. They actually had advertising campaigns promoting lead paint for childrens' t…
Interesting, I hadn't realized the first bans were as early as the 1920s. Researching a bit now, it seems like concerns were raised by at least the 19th century, and were pretty solid by the early 20th, which is not at all how I've heard it presented previously. I had previously assumed that it was not really known to science until the 1960s or so, which seems untrue. From what I've found in some quick digging, it se…
Lead paint was recommended by the Federal government and required for many projects for much of the 20th century. This is a (admittedly biased, just look at the URL) page discussing some examples of the history:
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#27The use of leaded paint indoors and of leaded gasoline were particularly dangerous, but there are still numerous potential sources of lead exposure, especially in certain industries, but also for the average person.
Exposure has decreased, but the safe blood lead level has also been reduced as we become increasingly aware of the harms of sub-clinical lead poisoning.
Two interesting properties of lead's toxicity that weren't mentioned in the article are its potency and its ability to accumulate. A blood lead level of 10 ug/dL is often listed as a threshold for concern (though for children 5 ug/dL or less is more appropriate). A typical blood volume for an adult is around 50 dL (according to Wikipedia), so 10 ug/dL would mean that there are 500 ug of lead in your blood. Lead has a density of 11.3 g/cm^3, so 500 ug has a volume of 44.2 nL. If you have every used a 2 uL pipette, you would have an idea of how small of a volume 44.2 nL is (for those who haven't, it's somewhere in the range of a grain of sand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28volume%2...). Although not all the lead we ingest is absorbed and lead is distributed throughout various organs, this should give a sense of how potent of a toxin lead is. Lead is also cleared from the body fairly slowly, so the amount of exposure per day needed to build up to a toxic level is even lower. These two properties, combined with the ubiquity of lead in our society, the long timescales over which it causes harm, and widespread ignorance of or apathy towards its harms are why I find it a particularly frightening toxin.
One source that could be relevant to some in the HN crowd is electronics solder. Although Europe banned the use of lead in electronic components and solder in most applications in 2006 with RoHS, leaded solder is still mostly legal and common in the US (it looks like CA has partially adopted RoHS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substa...). It is fairly easy to use leaded hand solder safely, but it is also entirely plausible that a child with inadequate training or supervision could ingest a significant amount of lead while soldering, from the small flakes of solder that accumulate on your workbench, dust, or lead oxides on a sponge. I had no idea how toxic lead was when I taught myself to solder in high school, and I'm glad I didn't do it much then for that reason.
I have recently started using Sn96.5Ag3Cu0.5 (lead free) solder, and although it is somewhat more expensive that leaded solder, with proper tools, plated PCBs, and correct technique it is really quite easy to use. I have some aggressive rosin-activated flux on hand (that requires cleanup) but I haven't needed to use it so far. I would highly recommend trying out Sn96.5Ag3Cu0.5, especially if you're sharing a workspace with children, who are far more susceptible to lead for various reasons.
A fair number of materials that you might encounter can contain lead as an additive, including plastic, brass, bronze, steel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_machining_steel), and metal/hobby/industrial/artist paints. It's always worth looking up what hazardous compounds may be present in something before putting a grinder to it (again, something I hadn't mastered in high school).
More along the lines of the article, here is another particularly egregious historical use of lead as a color in candy. In this case the compound, lead (II) chromate, also contained hexavalent chromium, another particularly hazardous chemical (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aC9NAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA93&dq=%...).
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#28You know, we really ought to rename Tantalum->Lead, and Lead->Tantalum.
Can someone clarify what the last part of the article was saying?
In some hotspots - downwind from old smelters, or where
miners dumped their spoils - it can be as high as 3%.
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#29I wonder if leaded gasoline is playing any kind of role in the continued unrest in the Middle East? FTA: Chronic lead exposure causes depression, headaches, aggression and memory loss. .... [M]any academics now believe leaded petrol was responsible for a global crime wave that peaked in the 1990s. ... Amazingly, a handful of countries - Iraq, Yemen, Burma, North Korea - continue to use leaded petrol.
"Unrest in the Middle East" is a blanket phrase so broad as to be meaningless. What specific conflict do you have in mind? Keep in mind that the number of vehicles per capita is much lower in Iraq and Yemen (the only two countries you mention) than in the United States. Your comment rubs me the wrong way since it speaks to a mindset where complicated geopolitical problems can be solved or explained by a simple hack.…
Gasoline and diesel generators are all over the place.
I think the question of whether lead is a contributing factor in a seemingly endless cycle of violence is one worth answering.
Re: The fatal attraction of lead
#30In Romania they used to still use lead plumbing until the early 2000s! As a kid, I loved that stuff, so maleable, you could do so many things from it, and it melted so easily. I loved to melt it and cast into into various shapes.
Lead pipes are very common in american cities for connecting residential service lines to water mains. Lead flux was also commonly used to seal drain pipes.