Pick a reaction

OK, so I was watching The Relic — I know, I know, but after collapsing from exhaustion on Friday, I decided that a lazy weekend was more than called for — and I found myself wondering about the climactic scene where Margo Green sets fire to the specimen storage area.

Finding herself pursued by the monster, she runs into the storage cage knocking jars of pickled specimens off the shelves and opening the taps on the carboys containing the preserving spirits. She briefly breaks off her chase to grab a pair of jars, filling the smaller with liquid and putting in a the larger jar along with a quantity of a white crystalline material. Thus armed, she ensnares the monster in the storage cage and, at precisely the right moment, shatters the two glass jars causing them to ignite.

I wonder what reaction she used? Something extremely exothermic, obviously, but also, given the ease with which she triggered the reaction, something with a low activation energy and something that could be cobbled together from a handful of easily available laboratory chemicals. And all done in five seconds flat. Impressive. Someone was obviously paying serious attention in chem class...

Oceangoing Utopias?

Yesterday's Guardian Weekend contained a feature (which I can't currently find online) on sea cities — vast ships intended to act as as mobile city states, the majority of which seem to have been dreamt up by libertarian americans in order to avoid paying tax. What amused me most was the way that all these schemes seemed collapse into a morass of bitter recriminations and financial problems — not so much a Nozickean framework for utopia as a recipe for disaster...