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Poll: Which is your year of birth?
before 1940 --- 2 (0.72%)
1940 - 1949 --- 7 (2.51%)
1950 - 1959 --- 19 (6.81%)
1960 - 1969 --- 23 (8.24%)
1970 - 1979 --- 21 (7.53%)
1980 - 1984 --- 30 (10.75%)
1985 - 1989 --- 43 (15.41%)
1990 - 1994 --- 36 (12.9%)
1995 - 1999 --- 71 (25.45%)
2000 - 2004 --- 23 (8.24%)
2005 - 2009 --- 4 (1.43%)

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bfesser
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[*] posted on 21-6-2013 at 17:36


More young'uns than I had expected. I don't know if I should be dismayed or delighted.

Dismayed, because young chemists will <em>always</em> do stupid things&mdash;I know I did&mdash;and we're encouraging them!
Delighted, because there may be hope for a future generation of chemists, despite their parents' chemophobia.

[Edited on 6/22/13 by bfesser]




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[*] posted on 21-6-2013 at 17:43


Both, it depend on who you are talking about. For some member, I would be "dismayed" and some "delighted". Depend more on the guy, than the age.



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[*] posted on 21-6-2013 at 17:53


As for you, <strong>plante1999</strong>, I'm dismayed, and frankly, a little worried. :P

Quote: Originally posted by plante1999  
Depend more on the guy, than the age.

Perhaps you could that it depends more on the <em>individual</em> than on the age of that individual. We need to encourage young women to become interested in chemistry and the hard sciences, not exclude them. (Yes, I know that people casually refer to people of either sex as "guys". In writing, it's poor practice.)

[Edited on 6/22/13 by bfesser]




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[*] posted on 21-6-2013 at 17:53


Quote: Originally posted by bfesser  


Dismayed, because young chemists will <em>always</em> do stupid things&mdash;I know I did&mdash;and we're encouraging them!

[Edited on 6/22/13 by bfesser]


I do my best not to do anything stupid.:)




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plante1999
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[*] posted on 21-6-2013 at 18:00


Quote: Originally posted by bfesser  
As for you, <strong>plante1999</strong>, I'm dismayed, and frankly, a little worried. :P

Quote: Originally posted by plante1999  
Depend more on the guy, than the age.

Perhaps you could that it depends more on the <em>individual</em> than on the age of that individual. We need to encourage young women to become interested in chemistry and the hard sciences, not exclude them. (Yes, I know that people casually refer to people of either sex as "guys". In writing, it's poor practice.)

[Edited on 6/22/13 by bfesser]


Sorry, I'm not a pro at writing English yet.

Not sure it is a good thing that you are dismayed about me... But I find that if you are worried, it means I have some value as a chemist ha ha ha ha.




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[*] posted on 5-8-2013 at 23:50


Quote: Originally posted by ParadoxChem126  
I'm 12, born in 2001.

You are not the only 12 year old here. (Im 12)

[Edited on 6-8-2013 by prof_genius]
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[*] posted on 6-8-2013 at 05:08


Quote: Originally posted by hkparker  
I'm just turning 18! I feel pretty young for this forum and know I know far less then the senior members here, but I'm pretty sure I'll be here for quite a while :D


Wow, you feel young! I'm 12.




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[*] posted on 25-8-2013 at 01:47


Quote: Originally posted by bfesser  
We need to encourage young women to become interested in chemistry and the hard sciences, not exclude them. (Yes, I know that people casually refer to people of either sex as "guys". In writing, it's poor practice.)

[Edited on 6/22/13 by bfesser]

Just as an interesting fact: I hear that nowadays the gender discrepancy in biology can be greater than that in Phys/chem because so many women end up doing biology. Surprising!




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[*] posted on 26-8-2013 at 09:12


Quote: Originally posted by bfesser  
More young'uns than I had expected. I don't know if I should be dismayed or delighted.

Dismayed, because young chemists will <em>always</em> do stupid things&mdash;I know I did&mdash;and we're encouraging them!
Delighted, because there may be hope for a future generation of chemists, despite their parents' chemophobia.

[Edited on 6/22/13 by bfesser]


For the record, I'm somewhere between 25-30 years old..

As has been pointed out, age is not necessarily the big factor here. Certainly, maturity has a lot to do with this (I work in a military environment, and you should see the 18 years olds that I have to deal with. They are like 12 year olds....), but kids can be safe and smart just like adults.

However, I think EDUCATION and UNDERSTANDING has the biggest role here. If you don't actually have a real understanding of the chemicals you're working with, you will not have as great of respect for them safety wise. And, our average teenage-chemist is simply not likely to possess much in the way of formal chemistry lab education.

Still, I would NEVER trust any SMART teen under 16 year olds to work with concentrated acids/etc. without proper supervision. I mean, they may be smarter than the average teen, but they are still KIDS! Just my 2 cents... :) And for your average typical kid, no serious chemicals without supervision until at least 18...

We have all given ourselves Nitric Acid tattoos in our freshmen-level university labs, but hopefully, most of us older people have moved on from this stage... :)


[Edited on 26-8-2013 by MichiganMadScientist]
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[*] posted on 26-8-2013 at 09:33


Quote: Originally posted by MichiganMadScientist  

Still, I would NEVER trust any SMART teen under 16 year olds to work with concentrated acids/etc. without proper supervision. I mean, they may be smarter than the average teen, but they are still KIDS! Just my 2 cents... :) And for your average typical kid, no serious chemicals without supervision until at least 18...
[Edited on 26-8-2013 by MichiganMadScientist]


Since a very early age I worked with concentrated acid, halogen, oxidizing agent etc.. I'm also reputed to be a bit mad. I never feared chemistry at all. And I have almost nothing of all theses year then some permanent face burns from a small mistake, especially that I was without ANY supervision for all these years.

Some of my more "mad" experiments are not repertoried on the web too, but be assured I am safe in my experiments, more so then most graduating chemists.

Look 50-70s chemistry video, and how chemist worked back then. Its mostly like that that I work.

I don't believe in restriction of uses in lab of dangerous chem, nor fear of them, and especially not from people that never worked like real chemists.

Just my 2 cent ha ha.

[Edited on 26-8-2013 by plante1999]




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MichiganMadScientist
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[*] posted on 26-8-2013 at 11:04


Quote:
[quote=296857&tid=16170&author=plante1999]I'm also reputed to be a bit mad. I never feared chemistry at all.


We are all a bit mad, :P:P. Chemicals are nothing to be feared, but they must always be respected

Quote:
And I have almost nothing of all theses year then some permanent face burns from a small mistake, especially that I was without ANY supervision for all these years. Some of my more "mad" experiments are not repertoried on the web too, but be assured I am safe in my experiments, more so then most graduating chemists.


Quote:
Look 50-70s chemistry video, and how chemist worked back then. Its mostly like that that I work.


Hmmm....How do you mean? If anything, people were less safe with chemicals in the past. Today, we now know that a lot of the heavily used chemicals of yesteryear are carcinogenic. I often joke that all usefull chemicals (e.g. benzene, etc.) are eventually found to be somehow cancerous.

This is also a good reason to practice caution when dealing with even seemingly harmless chemicals like acetone. Limit skin exposure, wear gloves, etc. Who knows? We may discover acetone to be harmfull 50 years from now...

Quote:
I don't believe in restriction of uses in lab of dangerous chem, nor fear of them, and especially not from people that never worked like real chemists.


Again, I feel its more of a respect thing than a fear thing. From your posts, it pretty much sounds like we are on the same page here regarding this. :) "Real" chemists can get careless, too. Safety practices are super enforced in undergrad teaching labs, but I happen to know that in the research labs, safety goggles aren't always worn as much as they should be. Having said this, people who work in these labs have already developed a very thorough set of safe chemistry lab practices... :)

A Good Example:

Don't get me wrong, I'm ALL for letting teens experiment with chemistry. It just needs to happen in a proper enviroment. In the US, we often take young children deer hunting. We teach them how to shoot a firearm even at a young age. But we start them out by first heavily emphasizing safety issues. Guns are not cool toys. They are machines designed to do little more than Kill. A 12 year old simply hasn't lived long enough to appreciate fully the meaning of dangerous. An older child (a teen) has a better grasp on the seriousness of a firearm, but still cannot be universally expected to have the ability and maturity to ALWAYS make safe decisions. And with guns and chemicals, there is NO ROOM for even ONE TIME mistakes. That one mistake could mean acid in one's eyes or shooting oneself in the head. That's why we have adults. Adults may never need to intervene because the child is responsible enough, but the Adult should still be there in most cases, just in case.

[Edited on 26-8-2013 by MichiganMadScientist]
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[*] posted on 26-8-2013 at 11:08


70s chemist were less careful, but much better, and didn't had that much more harmed then modern ones. Everything is toxic anyway, its simple logic of how an organism work. As such I use general care with everything, not caring there toxicity, unless it is extreme, like hydrogen cyanide. I feel it is the way to go.



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[*] posted on 26-8-2013 at 11:38


Im 17, from '96
My mother is always worried about me blowing up stuff and my dad encourages me!

I come home very happy one day with the bottle of P4 (Late for dinner) and at the dining table I show them my nice white P4 and explain what it is and how I made it.
My mother says: ''are you sure its safe? you need to be careful not to drop it! you'll burn the boat down one day!''
and my dad says:''Cool, you going to make a grenade and use it in the sleepstraat (a street here where all the non-whites live)?''

and my chemistry teacher doesn't even think I should be experimenting with I2 or HCl!





all above information is intellectual property of Pyro. :D
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[*] posted on 26-8-2013 at 14:18


Quote:
you'll burn the boat down one day!''


Lolwut? :o:D Does your family live on a boat or something???

Quote:
and my dad says:''Cool, you going to make a grenade and use it in the sleepstraat (a street here where all the non-whites live)?''


...Lolwuuuuuuuuut???:o:o

Seriously. Europeans crack me up.... Over here in the U.S., we tend to think of Canadians as being a cutesy, gentle people with a slightly-odd accent. Canadians just seem so harmless. But you Europeans are like, "Elemental Iodine?, Jolly Good Fun!!":cool::P

I wish I could play with Iodine crystals and not get arrested over here...:mad:

[Edited on 26-8-2013 by MichiganMadScientist]
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[*] posted on 26-8-2013 at 15:08


78...



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[*] posted on 31-8-2013 at 05:40


Sure we do, there is already a GL45 sized I2 stain on the ash floor :( been there almost a year, so I guess she might be right. (I thought the cap was clean and put it on the floor in front of the heater to dry.

Lol, you know how many people who first hear about my interest in chemistry ask if I can make a bomb for the allochtonen (basically non whites and Romanians and such)

What exactly would you like to do with I2 crystals? stain you fingers? stain other things?




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[*] posted on 31-8-2013 at 13:18


19 here, born in 94'.
@Michigan Pssh playing with iodine isnt a big deal you can even buy it on ebay (just dont mix it with sulfuric acid :P) but coming across some elemental phosphorus like pyro over there now that would really be something! Guess were stuck in the mud until meth becomes legal :\




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[*] posted on 22-3-2014 at 22:22


This poll is pretty interesting. I would have never expected that my age group (I'm currently 16, born in '97) would be the largest group on the forum, at least as of now anyway.
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[*] posted on 22-3-2014 at 22:54


Quote: Originally posted by Oscilllator  
Quote: Originally posted by bfesser  
We need to encourage young women to become interested in chemistry and the hard sciences, not exclude them. (Yes, I know that people casually refer to people of either sex as "guys". In writing, it's poor practice.)

[Edited on 6/22/13 by bfesser]

Just as an interesting fact: I hear that nowadays the gender discrepancy in biology can be greater than that in Phys/chem because so many women end up doing biology. Surprising!


Yes!! I agree here, not just biology, medicine especially too, our school has an entire academy dedicated to working in the medical field.
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[*] posted on 23-3-2014 at 03:40


Quote: Originally posted by zts16  
This poll is pretty interesting. I would have never expected that my age group (I'm currently 16, born in '97) would be the largest group on the forum, at least as of now anyway.

Me niether although now I'm guessing in five or six years my group (2000-2004 I'm 13 with only 4 people in my age group as of now judging by the poll) will be the dominant group. What do you all think this poll will look like in a few years?




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[*] posted on 13-9-2014 at 19:43


Interesting, it appears that although there haven't been any more replies to this thread in a long time, the 1995-1999 age group has continued to pull ahead by a wider margin, unless I'm misremembering the number of votes that were placed last time I looked at this thread.



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[*] posted on 14-9-2014 at 06:06


'95 here(19 at the time of posting). I'm actually surprised there are so many older participants here. You pull up a chemistry youtube channel and the majority of the time you're being taught syntheses by a 15 year-old, it seems.



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[*] posted on 14-9-2014 at 08:46


I started doing chemistry experiments in my back yard in 1995, I was 12 at the time. Aside from a few posts to sci.chem on the Usenet I was working completely solo. I didn't have anyone to brag to or ask questions from so I read and read and read. The internet was considerably less useful at the time, at least for me.

Within 2 years I had a supply of nitric acid I had distilled. Copious quantities of solvents, bases, halogens (I was stockpiling bromine) and quite a bit more. By the time I joined the forum in 2003 I was making phosphorus, alkali metals, and plenty more. Again, to that point I had been working in a vacuum. I wish I had taken better notes on everything I did, for nearly a year I was making and decomposing acetates to see what I would get. Nothing from that time is recorded here.

The point of all of this is, just as mentioned above, maybe there are some 12 year olds that do not have the maturity for this, and I was likely one of them. Consider the scars on my hands and arms from strong acids / bases or my bad eyesight from my sodium hydroxide electrolysis cell. But then again I am much better for it, I was able to breeze through chemistry in high school and most of college. I feel as long as you are actually learning what you do, taking the time to read up on the reactions and the hazards and understand them then age should hardly factor in at all. But if you are just copying something from youtube you get significantly less out of it and might not fully appreciate the true hazards of the reaction.




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[*] posted on 5-10-2014 at 15:35


Wow! I'm surprised that my age group ('95-'99) is the biggest! (I'm 17, born in '97.)
I'd expected the biggest group to be slightly older.
I'm glad that this is the largest group. Even this poll is only a small percentage of the total members of the forum, it is good to see that there is still a good number of younger people interested in science.
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[*] posted on 5-10-2014 at 16:27


Yeah - I've always kinda felt that there's a few groups at Sciencemadness that we all fall into, and the teen chemist group seems to be the biggest.



At the end of the day, simulating atoms doesn't beat working with the real things...
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