>Despite reading and re-reading this post, I have no idea what you are saying. Pour liquid nitrogen in your mouth?!?
You seem to have a pretty good idea after all. Yes, you dump it right in. The Safety People will run you out of town with pitchforks and torches for this sort of thing. But I’ve tried this, and stuck my fingers in it and held it in my hands and so forth, seemingly without harm. I worked with somebody who developed lots of liquid nitrogen and LOX and liquid air equipment, like fuel pumps for rockets and firefighter protection gear, and he taught me how to do these things. There are certainly, though, pretty innocent moves you can make that will sour you on the experience in a hurry. Touching cold solids, for instance. You know how bad it is to get your tongue stuck to a cold flagpole? Imagine the damage if the temperature differential driving it was a hundred times bigger. For all I know, your brain would freeze before they could chip you apart.
My father used to swallow it and belch visible mist clouds. This is a bit rich for me - I’m not completely sure I could belch under any and all unusual circumstances, and don’t want to pop.
>How do you ‘piston’ liquid nitrogen?
I mean, you slide your tongue forward so the LN is forced into the air stream leaving your lips. Like you’d do with water, if you wanted to spray the biggest misty cloud you could by blowing a lungful of air out your mouth while you also work a mouthful of water out simultaneously, so they mix vigorously on the way.
>What’s King Hell?
A descriptive term for emphasis, meant to suggest something memorable in ways that most memorable things don’t approach.
>Do I have to say this?
Not sure. How many of you are wary of trying the LN2 foolishness?
>Dumping Liquid Nitrogen Into the Mouth is DANGEROUS!!!
Yes, you certainly want adult supervision. In fact, I think you should want close, focused, one-on-one coaching from somebody with extensive laboratory and engineering experience with cryogenic technology. Which, I can report, does not necessarily rule out finding somebody who will coach you.
>I have known people who “gargled” with LN2, but I don’t recommend it. If you do anything to upset that delicate Leidenfrost effect that’s keeping a vapor barrier between your soft moist tissues and that ultracold liquid nitrogen, you’re in for a severely bad trip.
I’m curious what you could do that would transfer heat rapidly out of your membranes into the nitrogen without vaporizing it. This isn’t rhetorical or argumentative - maybe you can upset the effect - I just don’t know how, and haven’t heard of anybody doing it. But, then, as I said, I do feel pretty skeevy about swallowing it. “I didn’t inhale.”
>“If you do this and mess up, Napier is not likely to be any help at all”. doesn’t begin to cover it.
Yes, I have to go along with this one. Your mileage could vary quite a bit. A vivid imagination would be a big aid in interpreting this comment to its full usefulness.
Even so, what constitutes safe behavior is a broad and debatable subject. For years I noticed that when chemical spills happen, younger workers go running for the alarms and gas masks, and older workers come running the other way with rolls of paper towels. They used to teach chemists that if a hazardous droplet comes at your eye, your blink response would protect you - not all the people who learned this in school have retired yet. A chemistry textbook from when I was a child shows children looking into glassware while they pour sulfuric acid in, no goggles, no gloves, no fume hood. These things are nice, and I use them, but a sense of balance and humor could still have its place, I think.
Fire is an interesting and better understood test case. You should not reach your bare arms into a fire, right? I mean, nobody would do that, right? This is a clear cut, black-and-white case, right? Well, if your 3-year-old did a running dive straight into the campfire, you’d choose to reach right in, even jump right in, and pull him out again, believing you could complete the rescue, and you could expect to survive, and if you thought about it you would even expect to be in good enough condition right after you did it to try to take care of him. This is a horrible situation, but fire is a familiar enough hazard that here and there around the world, the situations that can take advantage of this kind of familiarity are common enough that we’re glad we know what it’s like to reach into a fire. It’s useful to be able to reach into a fire occasionally, like when the cat ignites his tail in a candle. It’s not that hard on a human to grab the tail and put it out, and much harder on the cat to just race around the room fanning the flames and making it worse. So there’s a practical side to knowing where the edge is.
I’m sorry if talking about playing with LN2 strikes anybody wrong. Make no mistake - if you’re scared by the idea, I’m not trying to talk you into anything. That being said, while there are all sorts of things I think are too dangerous for me to do, like drive without seatbelts or ride a motorcycle, I enjoyed getting more familiar with cryogenic liquids and think understanding what they feel like has helped me use them for practical purposes more effectively.
It’s a matter of taste.
And some LN2, by the way, can leave a taste of grease in your mouth, depending on their purity.