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40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

nytimes.com

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Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#41

Post by pyre »

praptak wrote: post #13
AlexMuir wrote: post #2

A brilliant story, well written. There have been a few horrific stories of cultural backwards attacking women with acid in the UK press. It's made me far more cautious when handling automotive batteries. I won't move a car battery ever again without wearing safety goggles.

Acids are dangerous indeed. In case of hydrochloric acid you don't even need to splash yourself to get hurt. The fumes are enough to damage your eyes or respiratory tract - gaseous hydrogen chloride dissolves in the moisture covering eyes and mucous membranes, producing hydrochloric acid.

To be fair, I remember handling HCl in chemistry and the fumes didn't dissolve my eyes, though I could tell that the fumes weren't nice either. It would depend on the concentration of the gas, which would also be a function of the concentration of the HCl that was vaporising.

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#42

Post by Mz »

pyre wrote: post #40
Mz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that depends on how you frame the problem. It helps to start with wondering why they do things instead of labeling them "mentally ill" from the get go. But I am sorry to hear of your frustrations. That is intended to be a helpful observation, not a criticism.

Well, labelling someone as mentally ill is at least a step up from the people the believe stuff like, "I was depressed once, but pulled myself up by the bootstraps, therefore all this depression stuff is a bunch of hogwash!"

Perhaps. Except that much mental illness would be the equivalent of being hit by a car and needing emergency care and possibly months or years of intervention, not getting any of it and then being blamed for their inability to walk. Like they are merely lazy or something.

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#43

Post by pyre »

_delirium wrote: post #37
monochromatic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there were cries for acid bans in the wake of this.

If it happened enough I could imagine there being some kind of controls. Bulk purchases of certain kinds of fertilizer were controlled post-Oklahoma-City, for example. On a lower level, some jurisdictions have restrictions on spraypaint sales, in an effort to combat graffiti.

E.g. in Portland, Oregon you have to show ID to buy spray paint.

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#44

Post by pyre »

unimpressive wrote: post #29
pg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I added one about an hour ago. This is an interesting suggestion but it would not be on our top 100 things to fix.

>Actually I added one about an hour ago. What was it? I'm genuinely curious.

Most likely related to behind the scenes algorithms (e.g. combating spam, ranking the front page, etc).

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#45

Post by pyre »

gnosis wrote: post #14
dschobel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard would it be for HN to filter posts like this? There are only so many permutations of "Why is this here? / What does this have to do with HN?" possible...

To my knowledge, HN hasn't added any new features in years. I think the people who run this site are pretty happy with it the way it is and don't want to change it, despite many suggestions for improvements. So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to do anything about it.

You just have to be around for some of them. Sometimes pg has done things to the UI of the site, then there is a large thread of community commentary, then it's kept, modified, or removed. If the feature shows up, and then goes away over the course of a day or two, you might miss that anything happened.

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#46

Post by monochromatic »

_delirium wrote: post #37
monochromatic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there were cries for acid bans in the wake of this.

If it happened enough I could imagine there being some kind of controls. Bulk purchases of certain kinds of fertilizer were controlled post-Oklahoma-City, for example. On a lower level, some jurisdictions have restrictions on spraypaint sales, in an effort to combat graffiti.

There are all kinds of caustic chemical that can be bought in small quantities though. We're not talking about needing a truckload of the stuff to do something horrific.

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#47

Post by XorNot »

About 6 months ago in my lab we had an acid attack. One student took offense to another telling him what to do, grabbed a hammer and the nearest vial of sulfuric acid and chased the guy down, knocked him down, and started pouring acid on him.

About the only lucky thing about the attack is that the victim didn't get any his eyes, but months on he's still recovering after multiple skin-grafts.

There isn't really a lesson that we can fathom from this really. It happened about 24 hours after an incident when the perpetrator had gotten angry and thrown a beaker on the floor, and literally 5 minutes before the acid attack happened (when the previous events were related to me) I commented that we should take it more seriously because if someone's not in control that's how acid gets thrown on people.

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#49

Post by localhost »

praptak wrote: post #13
AlexMuir wrote: post #2

A brilliant story, well written. There have been a few horrific stories of cultural backwards attacking women with acid in the UK press. It's made me far more cautious when handling automotive batteries. I won't move a car battery ever again without wearing safety goggles.

Acids are dangerous indeed. In case of hydrochloric acid you don't even need to splash yourself to get hurt. The fumes are enough to damage your eyes or respiratory tract - gaseous hydrogen chloride dissolves in the moisture covering eyes and mucous membranes, producing hydrochloric acid.

HCl is not particularly dangerous, as it is fairly easily washed off. Concentrated sulfuric acid, on the other hand is particularly bad. It is very viscous, extremely difficult to wash off as water just heats up the stuff. See: http://fscimage.fishersci.com/msds/22350.htm

Re: 40 Years After an Acid Attack, a Life Well Lived

#50

Post by pg »

unimpressive wrote: post #29
pg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I added one about an hour ago. This is an interesting suggestion but it would not be on our top 100 things to fix.

>Actually I added one about an hour ago. What was it? I'm genuinely curious.

Better detection and banning of abusive crawlers.
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