On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 23:15:06 -0800, (Floyd L. Davidson) wrote:

"NSM" wrote:
"Mac" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 10:14:41 -0500, Mike Berger wrote:

The freezing point and boiling point of water are both have
a clearly defined intrinsic meaning to a chemist.

[snip]

Well, "intrinsic" may be a bit to strong of a word. Boiling and freezing
points very considerably with pressure.

And purity and other factors.

Not to mention with *what* it is!

I knew a fellow one time who put together a nice little
experiment where he bolted everything together with nice shiny
nickel-cadmium plated screws.

He then proceeded to boil the ni-cad coating off the screws,
which plated the expensive ceramic insulators and shorted out
his thermionic diode.

Danged, several weeks of work shot because it just hadn't
occurred to him that ni-cad would boil at room temperature.

I doubt that it *boils* at room temperature; evaporates slowly, maybe. At least, not at
the temperature of any rooms I've been in.


He eventually made it work though, using stainless steel
hardware, and when he wrote a thesis about what his diode did
and didn't do, they awarded him a PhD in Nuclear Engineering.