For me, research is easy and hard: easy, because I find everything interesting; hard, because... I find everything interesting. I keep telling myself to stay on topic, but it rarely happens because there is so much stuff out there to distract.
Today's example: I'm looking into suppressing electrical fires and find CO2 works fine and water is a really big no-no. But CO2 is also toxic and not quite what I need, so there must be another way and I look up the shuttle accidents and find a list including all space-faring accidents. Ooo, German rockets in World War II - my mother as a child experienced the terror of the V2 - and Max Valier, an Austrian pioneer of rocketry. Of course, then I had to follow the link to the rocket car and the JATO rocket car and then entirely off subject to The Darwin Awards where I happily spent an hour or so smirking at those trying to leave the gene pool.
I'm sure a lot of them thought 'it was a good idea at the time', but you could see disaster from a long way off. So, moving on. One had a link to Mythbusters. I love that show, though sometimes, the science doesn't seem logical to me. But I like 'things that go boom' as much as Adam and Jamie, especially the episode where they blew up the cement truck... and on I went to the Discovery's Science Channel checking out the kids games and interesting articles on Black Holes, singing icebergs, Saturn's moons and ten quick questions with theoretical physicist Micho Kaku, who I find fascinating.
It's about this time I realise I've kind of deviated from my original task: electrical fires and how to put them out if you're in space.
I really should try and settle down to find what I need, learn discipline. But there's always something new to learn and the advent of the internet is a blessing and curse. Knowledge is never wasted, merely stored away for future use. Anyway, back to electrical fires... oh, there's just that one item on supervolcanoes...
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