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March 26, 2013
Tuesday's Stack Is Off the Track
- Sippican Cottage: Ancient Posts Currently Under Assault By Skeevy Spammers For Some Reason: This Old Cave
- Charles Krafft and the Conundrum of Nazi Art : The New Yorker
- Get that tune out of your head - scientists find how to get rid of earworms - Telegraph
- Mussolini's final secret bunker discovered in Rome
- iMeanwhile, The Left's Enemy is Anyone Trying To Keep This Culture From Spreading
- Crime-fighting security guard who is losing job now jailed “In two weeks, it’ll be back to what it was when I got here: (expletive) crazy!” he said. “The drug dealers will be back, the prostitutes will be back …”
- The Tremendously Explosive Power Of Flour
- Scientists: Marijuana causes global warming - National Libertarian | Examiner.com
- Read This Blog or the Puppy and Kitten Get It
- China's Testing Woes Remind That Developing Carrier Planes Is Hard
- "Think twice before you set your snake on fire."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at March 26, 2013 2:08 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
Back in the 1980s, I was a staff officer of XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, NC. The state found itself with a building that needed to be demolished, a pretty big one - IIRC, it was a large obsolete school building.
Somehow, the Corps' 20th Engineer Brigade managed to get the job. So they flew an exercise air assault out a demolition platoon out there and they blew the place down.
They used flour bombs throughout.
Flour bombs are actually simple to make. Ordinary flour is of course the main ingredient. When I learned to make them they key thing was using an igniter; we used powdered magnesium, which flashes very quickly. Mix it with the flour.
Flour ignites as an "aerosol," when it is suspended in the air. You can't stick blasting caps into a bag of flour and get an explosion. When the flour-magnesium mix is suspended in the air, you ignite a flame source and whoom. (A Special Forces NCO told me that he always just left a lit candle on the other side of the room. When the "aerosol" got there, the magnesium powder lit and it chain reacted just.like.that.)
One thing that makes flour bombs so good for demolition is that they are low explosives. If calculated correctly, the building simply crumples rather than blows apart. This is what the engineers did. And they have enormous "pushing" power.
All in all, a very effective device.
Posted by: Donald Sensing at March 26, 2013 7:26 AM