The shooter is meant to work as a Great Ball Contraption module (previously), accepting balls from an input, doing its thing with them, and then delivering them to an output. Only the (surprisingly large percentage of) balls that go through the basket go to the output.
Here's a Contraption composed of 17 of Akiyuky's modules.
...high-capacity USB hard drive attracted a comment or three on the desirability, or otherwise, of larger-than-3.5-inch hard drives in the modern world.
This picture is of six sizes of disk drive, from a one-inch microdrive to an old eight-inch monster, only one evolutionary step on from the disk packs of Sixties prehistory.
The fastest spinning-disk drives today are 10,000 and 15,000 RPM 2.5-inch units. Western Digital's VelociRaptor line, essentially high-reliability server drives sold in the consumer market, remain a good compromise between performance, reliability and capacity. They're not as fast, especially in the latency department, as an SSD, but they're at least as reliable and have higher capacity, and much higher capacity per dollar.
("1Tb" VelociRaptor, formatted capacity 930-odd gibibytes: $US320 list price, perhaps a little less if you shop around. 256Gb SSD: around $US170, if you're not too picky about brand and specs. That's about three times the price per gigabyte as the spinning disk, and you're not even looking at the even-worse-value 500Gb-plus SSDs. You can easily drop $US700 for a good-quality 512Gb SSD today; that's 1.3 times the price-per-gig of a 256, and it doesn't even buy you one of the maximum-reliability single-level-cell units.)
The small platters in these high-RPM drives are all about reducing access time. Faster spinning speed gives lower rotational latency, because the heads don't have to wait as long for the part of the platter they want to spin up to them. Smaller diameter gives lower seek latency, because the heads don't have as far to go. Smaller platters also reduce air-friction heat production, which is a problem for super-fast spinning disks, and why nobody's even sold a consumer-market 15,000-RPM drive. (The VelociRaptors are 2.5-inch laptop-sized drives mounted in a 3.5-inch-drive-sized heat sink. They need it.)
I, too, would be happy to buy an outrageously high-capacity large-plattered drive with modern data density, even if its latency was awful.
The whole drive production chain, though, is currently geared for 3.5-inch and smaller platters, and the fantastically small tolerances in modern drives might have problems with larger platters. Platter and head-arm droop caused by gravity might be an issue.
Still, just imagine an eight-inch drive with the same data density as the drive inside the Seagate Expansion box. That is, I presume, a "3Tb" Seagate Barracuda, with three platters and six heads (PDF datasheet).
The spindle holes in the middle of larger platters tend to be bigger in proportion than the holes in smaller platters, but back-of-an-envelope calculations still suggest an easy formatted capacity of five terabytes for a 5.25-inch drive, and ten terabytes for an eight-incher, with the same platter and head count.
(Some drives have fewer than two heads per platter; that means only one side of a platter is being used for data storage. This may only be some BS market-segmentation thing, but just as CPUs sold at a low stock clock speed may actually have failed to operate correctly at a higher speed, one-sided drive platters may have failed testing of the un-used side.)
And that's even before you start raising the platter count.
(Tim's a little over-broad in the above video when he says that accurate timekeeping has only really been important since the advent of the railways. Accurate timekeeping for the great majority of people was, indeed, not terribly important until a surprisingly long time after the Industrial Revolution. But accurate timekeeping for ships has been important ever since humans first managed to make boats physically able to sail far from shore. You can tell what your latitude is without knowing the time, but without an accurate clock you can't estimate your longitude, unless there's a known island or coastline in sight.)
Which isn't much, but is pretty impressive when it's only in the air because the pilot is managing, from pure muscle strength, to push enough air downwards to levitate himself and the contraption he's sitting in.
Gamera II looks like a total fake in that video, because they didn't get the whole enormous thing in shot, in this indoor testing area. (This helicopter is, of course, not likely to react well to outdoor breezes.)
Here's another test with a wide shot:
Now Gamera II barely looks as if it's getting off the ground at all. This is part of the secret of its success: Even when the helicopter's more than two metres off the ground, the four gigantic rotors are still in deep ground effect, making more lift than they would if they were even half of their 13-metre diameter off the ground.
Among Gamera II's numerous weight-saving cheats is the drive system for the rotors. You'd expect a shaft or belt, but instead there's just a cord wrapped around each rotor's drive wheel like the string around a yo-yo. The cord is wound in by the little wiry dude in the middle cranking away with both hands and feet. When the cord runs out, after only about sixty seconds, the flight is over.
Sixty seconds is enough to win the Sikorsky Prize for human-powered helicopters, though. To win fame and a quarter of a million dollars, your helicopter must have a flight duration of 60 seconds, and reach an altitude of three metres (9.8 feet), which Gamera II has now very nearly achieved.
Thanks to the yo-yo-string drive and various other ingenious tricks, the whole Gamera II weighs 71 pounds - a little more than 32 kilograms.
...famous for its countless appearances on M*A*S*H, had a maximum takeoff weight of 2950 pounds (1340 kilograms).
With its sixty-kilogram little-wiry-dude pilot on board, Gamera II's takeoff weight is 203 pounds - about 92.2 kilograms. So, about 14.5 Gamera IIs to the Bell 47.
(The Bell 47 is also the only helicopter that actually makes that distinctive "chiew-chiew-chiew..." noise that's become the stock sound effect for any movie or TV helicopter being shut down.)
Gamera II, like numerous other human-powered or otherwise-required-to-run-from-not-many-horsepower aircraft, really is huge. The Sikorsky Prize requires the helicopter to remain in a ten-metre (32.8 ft) square during its flight, but I presume that only applies to the middle of the helicopter, since the whole of Gamera II does not even come close to fitting in a ten-metre square. From the outer edge of one rotor disk to the outer edge of the disk opposite it, Gamera II is 105 feet, 32 metres, in diameter.
The Gamera II info-handout PDF has this handy little table in it:
The helicopter's plan-view footprint is indeed similar to that of a 737, bigger than the US military's biggest helicopter, and way bigger than a Black Hawk.
Forget that, though. This thing's even bigger than the sadly unpopular Fairy Rotodyne:
(The Rotodyne was a compound gyroplane that drove its rotor for takeoff and landing, but cruised with the rotor spinning freely, like an autogyro. The rotor was also driven by tip-jets, not a shaft, so the Rotodyne didn't need a tail rotor. The deafening noise of the tip-jets on takeoff and landing is usually cited as a major factor in the commercial failure of the Rotodyne.)
(I just finished watching the two-part documentary Jet! When Britain Ruled the Skies; the Rotodyne scores a mention toward the end. My favourite part of Jet! was when the narrator, who has only played the Queen once, said "Not only did Capital Airlines fly the Viscount, but they also admired its virtues, in that warming, homespun way that only Americans can fake.")
The Rotodyne's rotor had a diameter of ninety feet - 27.4 metres. That's 15 feet (4.6 metres) smaller than the Gamera II's diagonal.
If you want really big helicopters, you need to go to the Soviets.
...(probably because all the service manual says is "oil main rotor bearing every three years"). The Hind's rotor diameter is a mere 17.3 metres, though. Four-thirds as big as a single Gamera II rotor, but only 54% of the Gamera II's total maximum diameter.
...of which only two prototypes were built. Two slightly overlapping rotors (out of sync with each other, of course), each of which was 35 metres (115 feet) across.
OK, that one wins.
(For comparison, the Boeing Chinook, with its less-bizarre tandem rotor design, only has 18-metre, 59-foot, rotors.)
These comparisons are of course ridiculous; it's like comparing a dandelion seed head with different sizes of musket ball. I only did it to have an excuse to post a bunch of giant-helicopter videos.
(Some Wikipedia-helicopter-data-table writer must have enjoyed filling in the names of the three "powerplants" the Gamera II's used, and its cruise speed of "0 kn; 0 km/h (0 mph)".)
A few years ago, when these branded collections of spherical (and now also cubic) magnets were first gaining popularity, one of the sellers of such things noticed I'd written this, this, and this (and possibly they also noticed this), or just that I'm pretty high in the results for a Google search for rare-earth magnets. They offered to send me some of their "jewellery magnets", from which you can make bracelets and rings and uncomfortable earrings and so on, for review.
I said it looked as if the more complex shapes would be fiendishly difficult to create without all the magnets clicking together into a blob all the time, and asked if this was a problem.
They didn't reply. Or send me a free infuriating blob of magnets.
(Years ago, Mark picked up my Amazing Magnets ball and squished it into a coagulated impossible lump. I left it that way. It took Alan, whose lot in life it is to protect the world from the entropic influence of people like me and Mark, ages to reconstruct it.)
That constitutes the entirety of my professional involvement in the little-toy-magnets world. Perhaps I was wrong; it's demonstrably possible to make all sorts of nifty things with them:
Toy magnets like these are now banned, in the process of being banned, or at least temporarily withdrawn from sale, in various jurisdictions both here in Australia and elsewhere.
All this excitement has happened because rare-earth magnets are dangerous to swallow.
They're not a poisoning hazard. An alternative name for the ceramic these magnets are made from is "NIB", for neodymium, iron and boron, and those elements are not particularly toxic to mammals individually or in combination. (Calling these things "neodymium magnets" is actually pushing it a bit; it's the neodymium in the formula that allows it to be magnetised so strongly, but the molecule is mostly iron, Nd2Fe14B.) The fragile black ceramic of the magnets themseves is almost always covered with a protective material, usually a plating of shiny nickel, but that's pretty harmless, too.
Swallowing one or more rare-earth magnets in one go is unlikely to do any harm at all. They'll just click together in your mouth or stomach, and probably pass through your gut without complications; even the block-shaped ones have rounded corners.
But if you swallow one or more magnets, then wait for them to move down your gut a bit, then swallow another magnet or three, the separate magnets or masses thereof can stick together with some of your tissue in between. This is likely to be Bad News.
(You can probably do something similar if you inhale one magnet after another, too. The above-linked medical literature also notes that a kid who's swallowed only one rare-earth magnet, and then goes in for magnetic resonance imaging, can find himself in a world of pain.)
These problems are not actually a new thing. As the New York Times points out, previous rare-earth-magnet construction toys have also been withdrawn, for the same reason.
...which is based around plastic pieces with small rare-earth magnets on their ends and corners. And Geomag wasn't an original idea, either; people had been making sculptures out of rare-earth magnets and steel balls for years (q.v. that Amazing Magnets ball, which I reviewed in 2002).
...came out a couple of years before Geomag. It has much longer rods, and larger magnets recessed into the ends of the rods for a less wobbly connection. I bought a couple of sets years ago, and they're still on saletoday, though perhaps not for much longer.
Geomag was the first really popular rare-earth-magnet construction toy, though, and it spawned umpteen cut-price competitors.
You can lever or chew the magnets out of the ends of Geomag-type components (or, for advanced experimenters...
...dissolve the rods in acetone), and the magnets will just fall out of some of the really cheap and nasty Geomag knockoffs. And a child that eats one, waits a while and then eats another, may end up grievously injured.
"Magnetix" was the biggest Geomag knockoff brand and far from the worst-made, and it was withdrawn from sale in the USA after loose magnets killed one kid and put a few others in surgery.
Over the same period of time, bicycles killed, maimed and paralysed far, far more children, of course. But that doesn't make it OK to sell toys with small parts that fall off, even if those small parts don't have the ability to give you bowel ischemia via quantum physics.
The people who sell little round-or-square magnets under brands like...
...Buckyballs or Zen Magnets don't contest any of this. They've also previously cooperated with regulatory bodies by improving their safety warnings and complying with the usual bureaucratic labelling-law friction, like when Buckyballs said their toy magnets were suitable for children aged 13 and up, when existing local law said they only actually meet the requirements for 14 and up.
...a "Save Our Balls!" campaign, and a petition, and so on.
Their argument is pretty straightforward: There are many things which, when left unattended, and found and eaten or otherwise interacted with by a toddler, can gravely harm said toddler. Few of these things are banned, because even if humans abandoned civilisation and returned to the trees, there would still be rocks and sharp sticks all over the place.
The CSPC's purpose is to "protect the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death". Their full complaint (PDF here) contends that these magnets do constitute such an unreasonable risk, because no warning on the box or in the instructions can prevent these little magnets from being left stuck to the fridge or on the floor or in some other place where small kids can find them. The CSPC also contends that older children, if they do things like simulating mouth and tongue piercings by putting a magnet on each side, can swallow or inhale the magnets and end up very ill. This has actually happened at least once. (Given the popularity of tongue studs and of these magnet toys, I bet older children have swallowed one or more magnets quite a lot of times. It's only likely to be a problem if they wait a while and do it again.)
I think the most important part of the CSPC complaint, though, and the part which raises it above mere Think OfThe Children busybody nonsense, is that consumers demonstrably do not recognise the risk posed by toy-magnet products.
The CSPC are not complaining about knives, and saucepans full of boiling water, and automobiles, all of which harm and kill far more children per year than little magnets do, because it is generally recognised that children need to be protected from these things. Mostpeople with toddlers, or even without, would not leave a straight razor taped to the fridge two feet off the ground.
But people haven't gotten a similar message about little magnets.
And it's not a theoretical problem; kids keep eating the damn things.
The CSPC complaint mentions only Buckyball- and Buckycube-branded magnets, but if it's upheld, I think you can can reasonably expect all such magnets to be banned in the USA.
I'm not certain, though. It could just end up banning such magnets when they're sold as novelties or toys.
This seems to be the way it's working out here in Australia. The Western Australian ban does not apply to "magnets used for industrial or scientific purposes"; similar exceptions are made in a 2010 Tasmanian interim ban (PDF here), and in the recent New South Wales interim ban (PDF here).
I'm actually quite heartened by the NSW ban, because it specifically says it only covers magnets "that are intended or marketed by the manufacturer primarily as a manipulative or construction desk toy or as jewellery".
This is still bad news for sellers of brightly-coloured marked-up magnet packs, and still means many ordinary consumers will miss out on being able to pay the premium to buy such items in ordinary consumer outlets, and probably won't be able to find them anywhere else.
But this ban says nothing about people selling un-marked-up magnets, without any statements about their purpose, for rather better prices on eBay and elsewhere.
Spherical magnets seem to be a little thin on the ground on eBay right now. Craft yourself a round-magnet-finding search string and all you'll see are disks and cylinders. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many sellers (overwhelmingly in China, which is where I think all cheap NIB magnets are made) decided to stop listing spherical magnets for a while, in case their products all get seized by Customs wherever they send them, and they then get lots of negative feedback.
If you cease to discriminate by shape, though, it's not hard to find inexpensive "Buckycube"-type cubic magnets.
"Buckycubes" are 4mm NIB cubes in a selection of colours. The cheapest no-name eBay cubes are all plated with silvery nickel, and may have thinner plating (or may not), but very small NIB magnets like these are generally hard-wearing; even the tiny contact points on spherical ones don't wear out that fast. And if they're way cheaper you probably won't care if the nickel flakes off a couple of them.
A 216-piece pack of Buckycubes will set you back $US39.95 + $US5.95 for shipping; 21.25 US cents per cube. To be fair, it'll probably cost you a bit less, since the Buckyballs people are for some reason currently having something of a fire sale, with coupon codes and such. 20% off your whole order seems to be easy to get; if that applies to shipping as well as the item price, then you'll be paying 18.4 cents per cube.
Restrict your eBay search to 4mm cubes, and as I write this you'll find the cheapest 216-piece pack for $US26.39 delivered; that's 12.2 cents per magnet. (Make sure you do a "world" search; local-currency prices in Australia, at least, are a bit higher. It seems that even China can't believe how crappy the US dollar is these days.)
This seems to be about the floor price. If you want a thousand-piece pack, it's $US119.99 delivered, a molecule less than 12 US cents per magnet.
UPDATE: I just noticed that well-known online cheapie-shop DealExtreme is shamelessly selling a set of 216 golden 3mm sphere magnets for $US15.40 delivered to anywhere, 216 5mm black spheres for $US17.10 delivered, and 125 4mm silver cubes for $US16 delivered. These are excellent prices to start with, and there are bulk discounts if you want to buy three or more units. Just don't try to re-sell them, if you live somewhere with these anti-toy-magnet laws!
UPDATE 2: More DealExtreme tiny-magnet sets. If you're a real penny-pincher they'll sell you a hundred minuscule 3-by-1mm discs for only $US4.10, and they have a nicely-packaged 216-3mm-sphere pack for $US15.60. 216 "silver white" 5mm spheres (which really do look silvery rather than just polished-steel-ish) are $US20.30, as are 216 golden 5mm spheres. 216 silver 4mm cubes will set you back $US18.70; 216 5mm cubes in the same finish are $US20.80.
Oh, and here are 216 red 5mm spheres for $US17 delivered!
(And then there's this kit, which only gives you 27 spheres and 36 long rods for $US15.90. But it comes in a nice little metal box! And here are yetmore cubic ones in nice little tins. And here's a balls-and-bars set at DealExtreme that actually comes in Buckyballs packaging, which would normally mean it's a knockoff. Now, though, it may be the real thing, being sold where the product ban cannot reach.)
Again, these prices are all excellent, and you can get the usual bulk discounts; if you decided to buy a thousand of the super-cheap tiny discs, for instance, you'd pay $US33.90 delivered for the lot - three point four cents per magnet!
When I started writing this piece, I was all fired up to mention yet again that Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs with a toy inside are banned in the USA, and they're not banned in most other places, and the confectionery aisles of Australian supermarkets are not, so far as I have been able to determine, littered with the corpses of asphyxiated children, and presumably that's because all Australian shelf-stackers know how to administer the Heimlich maneuver. I also contemplated using the term "natural selection", with regard to children over the age of ten who eat their toys.
And as I've written before, I'm not crazy about preventing grown-ups from having things that could hurt children, or other adults, if used irresponsibly. Things keep being banned if they're possibly hazardous and, in the opinion of busybodies, more fun than they are useful. This is, to use the technical term, bullshit; it's the sort of Puritan worldview that bans recreational drugs for no reason other than that they are recreational drugs.
Most sane people accept, however, that it is difficult to make a case for private ownership of land mines in the civilised world.
Or, to pick a more realistic scenario, it is fair to prohibit the construction of booby traps on your own private land to catch trespassers, because even if it is your private land, you're living in a society here, and bear-trapping firemen, punji-staking tourists who wish to ask for directions, or SM-70-ing anyone who investigates the smell after you die in your house, has been decided by the rest of us to be unacceptable.
Less theatrically again, this is why the civilised world generally requires people building and maintaining structures to do so to something approaching local code standards, because you're not the only person who's going to have to deal with the place, even if nobody else busts in there until after you've died. If you want to have deathtrap electrical wiring, giant piles of fermenting garbage and guard dogs driven insane by mistreatment, get the hell out of the First World, because we've decided we won't put up with that. There's a limit to the risk to others that you're allowed to create in the name of individualism.
And so, after yet another reduction of the drama involved, we get to little shiny toy magnets.
On the one hand, they're fun, and the number of serious medical incidents they've caused is trivially small compared with those caused by skateboards, netball or hiking.
But on the other hand, they have been demonstrated to pose a real hazard, and there's no good way to mitigate it. No amount of "keep away from ALL children" warnings will make these small shiny lose-able objects actually inaccessible or unattractive to small children, and people don't seem to take the warnings seriously anyway. And even if you've no kids and no intention to have them, the little bastards are still likely to find their way into your house at some point.
And the danger isn't just of cuts and bruises. A perforated bowel will very probably kill you if you don't get serious medical treatment, whether you're four or forty.
One way to mitigate the danger of products and activities is to require licensing or other legal paperwork before someone can buy or do whatever it is. But this is for guns and cars and SCUBA and skydiving; it's ridiculous for executive-toy novelties.
We live in a world of imperfect solutions, and upon reflection, I think bans on small magnetic novelties aren't even the least perfect solution I've seen today. Especially if it's not a Ban On All Magnets.
As long as you can still buy 10,000 round NIB magnets with the same specs as the ones sold under special brand names on eBay, or wherever, or similarly buy tons of even cheaper disc magnets for the thousand and one things they turn out to be useful for, then I don't count destruction of the market for marked-up novelty-shop (or evenworse) versions of the same things to be a great injustice.
I accept that the current magnet bans are much more likely to lead to truly onerous and irrational magnet bans than, say, the acceptance of gay marriage is to lead to people marrying farm animals. If and when someone tries to ban strong magnets in general, even huge ones that pose a serious danger to grown-ups, I will stand up and be counted in opposition.
But even as a quite serious appreciator of weird and wonderful toys and gizmoes, I see no strong grounds for complaint in bans on little magnets sold as toys.
In the comments of this post about chemistry sets and science education, gwdonnelly asked:
As a kid I loved playing with tools, fire, magnifying glasses, etc, etc. Along with some mates I made thermite and even had a go at some very small touch powder (could do with more practice at growing crystals there!)...
Anyway, I would like to get my kids into doing experiments in a slightly more controlled, and safe, way - any recommendations on what to get a 4-5 year old started with?
I've made this a new post so that other commenters can chime in with ideas. Here's what I managed to think of:
1: As mentioned in that post, growing crystals, including sugar crystals so you end up with rock candy:
4: Go for a wander and collect and identify rocks, plants and other people's unattended property. (Strike out whichever does not apply.) You can build a collection of a wide variety of rocks you can't find in your own neighbourhood quite cheaply via eBay, too. Just bear in mind that if a mineral sample seems too good to be true, it's eminently possible that it is.
5: Tumbling your own rocks has been a popular hobby for ages, too; all sorts of ordinary-looking rocks come up lovely when highly polished:
You can makeyourown tumbler (or "ball mill", which is only a ball mill if you... put balls in it) from a plastic container and a scrounged-up motor. All you're likely to have to buy, besides perhaps a grab bag or two of guaranteed-impressive un-tumbled minerals, is some "tumbling media", so you can have fast abrading of rough stones and fine polishing later on without just hoping a handful of sand will do both jobs. (There are some other inexpensive tumbling-media options, too.)
(And even then it's no big deal, unless they swallow more than one. This has recently turned into a problem for people who sell small rare-earth magnets as toys in the USA, because apparently you can't trust an American child under the age of 14 not to eat everything they touch. See also the American Kinder Surprise ban. Apparently something magical happens between the ages of 14 and 18, which transforms American children from Lego-eating lackwits into citizens responsible enough to be trusted with a firearm. But not a beer until they're 21, of course!)
[UPDATE: A less snarky version of the above can be found here. On reflection, I found that the tiny-toy-magnet bans now spreading across the globe are actually quite defensible.]
Do make sure you stick with small rare-earth magnets for toys. Obviously really big rare-earth magnets can crush your hand, but much smaller ones can snap together hard enough that they break. Don't get any very thin ones, and don't get anything with a diameter much more than a centimetre (half an inch, say), and their field is small enough and their momentum low enough that they'll last a long time.
If you want safe big magnets, get simple and cheap black ferrite ones instead; they're much weaker than rare-earth magnets. (It's theoretically possible to lever the big ferrite ring magnet off the back of a speaker driver, but only once have I managed to do that with a magnet of any size without cracking it.)
10: Looking at stuff under a microscope. A proper lab microscope would be best but those sell for pretty large prices, and the cheap small ones for kids are, I think, usually pretty crappy quality. Instead, you could go for one that plugs into a TV:
Everybody seems to like the Eyeclops camera-microscope.
A cheap alternative is, of course, your basic magnifying glass, or a "loupe", which is either a small high-powered magnifying glass, or a monocle-style mad-scientist magnifier.
(One of van Leeuwenhoek's greatest, but least helpful, achievements was concealing how easy it is to make his microscopes' tiny lenses. Everybody thought he ground them with fantastic accuracy, when all he actually did was melt the end of a glass rod and allow surface tension to pull it into a sphere.)
Leeuwenhoek microscopes aren't the easiest to look through, but can effortlessly resolve the tiny beasties in pond water.
Oh, and then there's the quickest microscope ever, provided you have a digital camera with a very small lens, like the camera in a phone: Just put a drop of water on the lens, turn the phone over carefully...
There's a BBC News piece called "Whatever happened to kids' chemistry sets?", which makes the same point that many people have before, that zero-tolerance for any possible risk to children does not actually do those children any favours. It's hard to gain anything without at least exposing yourself to the possibility of pain; kids should be able to learn and have fun in ways that are at least a little dangerous.
You know the drill, though. Playgrounds, unsupervised play in general, chemistry sets; all neutered in the name of safety. For some reason many kids are still allowed to ride a bicycle, but heaven forfend you give your ten-year-old a pocket knife.
The video at the top of the BBC piece...
...shows some experiments you can't do with modern kits. These experiments are as un-dangerous as they look.
The classic potassium-permanganate-plus-glycerol fire reaction (with some glucose added to provide additional fuel) does not have to be done in a fume hood. Just doing it outdoors and not deliberately inhaling the smoke will do.
You can still get the ingredients for that one quite easily, too. Glycerine and glucose powder are in many supermarkets, and potassium permanganate is still used as a disinfectant and general-purpose purifier of anything that benefits from being exposed to a moderately strong (by sanepeople's standards) oxidiser. So it's probably not illegal to send it through the post where you live (though there may be some ridiculous restriction having to do with drugs), and there are plenty of people selling it on eBay. (Check the Readily Available Chemicals lists, if you find yourself unable to locate some reagent or other. )
The only other old-chemistry-set "experiment" in the above video is even less alarming, simple flame tests. Again, salts that create brightly coloured flames or sparks aren't very hard to find; the one stop shop for them is a firework-supplies place, and you shouldn't need any fancy licenses or expensive special shipping to get them, since they're just the stuff that colours the fireworks, not the stuff that makes fireworks go bang. (And, again, Readily Available Chemicals can help.)
Oh, and that bit at the very end of the video with the squeaky test-tube sounds just like lighting hydrogen, which you can easily make electrolytically. But the tube seemed to be mouth-upwards, so it may have been some other flammable gas.
So the video's a bit boring, but OK. The actual BBC article, though, contains several mistakes.
The author says, for instance, "some chemistry sets of bygone ages even offered instructions and materials to be able to blow glass at high temperatures".
Well, yeah, of course they did. Making your own simple glassware - which pretty much only means bending and stretching tubes, not much in the way of actual "blowing" - is not particularly dangerous. You can do it on a kitchen gas stove if a proper burner is not available. Just stretching a glass tube lets you make very fine dropper nozzles; add some commercial flasks and beakers, some stoppers and a cork borer, and you can make a reasonably effective condenser, with a wet cloth and a fan standing in for the proper water jacket.
"Rosie Cook, assistant curator at the Chemical Heritage Foundation", is quoted as saying "You are letting a 12-year-old blow glass, there was uranium dust with a stereoscope where you could see the radiation waves..."
Bending glass tubes is not a task for toddlers, but any 12-year-old who cannot be trusted to do this is a 12-year-old who should also not be allowed to make themselves a sandwich. OK, the dangerous part of a bread knife is easier to tell from the safe part than is the case with glass (the First Law of the Laboratory: Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass), but this is no reason to presume that a 12-year-old has no more sense than a toddler.
And as for the "uranium dust" part... oh, man.
First, if any chemistry set ever came with actual uranium dust, I'll eat a whole shop full of hats. What chemistry sets came with was some bits of uranium ore or, at the very most, yellowcake.
And they didn't come with a "stereoscope"; you can't view ionising radiation with a View-Master. They came with a spinthariscope. (Perhaps the original piece as written had this right, but a sub-editor helpfully "corrected" it.)
That's a simulation, via Theo Gray, of what a spinthariscope looks like to a dark-adapted eye. (Actual video of the very dim twinkly lights tends to look rather underwhelming.)
And the "radiation waves" thing is a mess, too. I think you can see wave/particlegamma photons with some kinds of spinthariscope, but I'm pretty sure the chemistry-set ones - which you can still buytoday - only respond to the alpha and maybe beta particles that decaying uranium and its daughter products emit on their way down the line to lead.
And then there's a neat-o little table at the middle of the BBC article, listing the interesting ingredients chemistry sets used to have and why they don't have them any more:
Chemistry sets of old
Chemical
Why was it included?
Dangers
Uranium dust
It was "unofficially encouraged by the government", said chemistry set creator AC Gilbert, to help public understanding of
atomic energy
Radiation exposure is today strictly controlled due to wide range of damaging health effects including risk of cancer
Potassium nitrate
Combined with sulphur and charcoal to create gunpowder
Can be used to make a fertiliser bomb
Lead acetate
Used as a dyeing agent
Toxic when eaten, as are many other lead compounds. Blamed for death of Pope Clement II in 1047
Ammonium carbonate
Used in coloured fountain experiment where solution turned from red to blue
The main component of some smelling salts, it can be dangerous if used in high doses regularly
Sodium hydroxide
Used in colour-changing experiment
Burns skin on contact
It says the intended purpose for potassium nitrate in chemistry sets was to make gunpowder, but it's not there any more because you can also use it to make a "fertiliser bomb":
Well, yeah, I suppose potassium nitrate could technically count as a fertiliser-bomb component, but I think they've actually confused it with ammonium nitrate. "Can be used to make gunpowder" would be a perfectly good thing to put in both the "original purpose" and "why it's no longer available" columns.
(I also love how the table lists one of the "dangers" of lead acetate as "Blamed for death of Pope Clement II in 1047". I don't think that fact actually played a major role in the thought process that led to the removal of lead salts from chemistry sets.)
And the only "why was it included" reason for sodium hydroxide was "used in colour-changing experiment".
That was it, huh? That's all it's good for? That's the sole purpose for a strong base? Makes you wonder why it was in there in the first place, doesn't it?!
It really does look as if nobody who had anything to do with the creation of the BBC article knew what they were talking about.
I found the BBC piece via this Boing Boing post by Maggie Koerth-Baker, which discusses the BBC article but does not dissect it. I suppose this proves the point; even Maggie, excited about science even by Boing Boing's standards, didn't notice the glaring errors. Perhaps I wouldn't have, either, if I hadn't spent a lot of childhood hours in the little workshop/laundry melting, boiling, reacting and distilling things.
And, of course, setting stuff on fire, more than once with the permanganate/glycerol reaction.
Among other things, I discovered that zinc burns with a pretty blue flame, and produces copious white fly-ash:
And yes, a kid can do this, in the kitchen, with very little chance of winding up dead:
(I'd also like to rehabilitate mercury's image. It seems almost nobody these days knows the difference between organomercury compounds - which are very very poisonous - and metallic mercury, which isn't good for you, but which is not actually very dangerous.)
...if you make a respectfully minuscule amount, and wear eye protection. Which should be your habit when doing anything with chemicals or power tools, for the same reason that it's sensible to train yourself to use your indicators, by reflex, while driving. Yes, that does mean you'll occasionally feel silly because you indicated for, say, a turn in a road that isn't actually any kind of intersection. But it's better to indicate when you don't need to, and wear eye protection when reacting vinegar and baking soda, than to forget to indicate when it does matter or leave the goggles off when playing with explosives.
...until I was a grown-up, but I now champion that as an excellent experiment for kids, too.
Actually setting the thermite off definitely requires adult or responsible-teenager supervision, but the components of standard iron-oxide/aluminium thermite are quite inert and non-toxic (again, the kids should wear eye protection while mixing the ingredients, even though it isn't really needed), and the mixture won't light without a high-temperature fuse - a sparkler or magnesium ribbon. So small children can mix up thermite all by themselves, quite safely. And they should.
(One caveat: If they mix anything else into the thermite, especially water, then it will flash to vapour when the thermite burns and throw blazing thermite all over the place. This shouldn't matter unless you're setting the thermite off in an unsuitable location - q.v. - or standing unwisely close, though. You also don't need to panic about one drop of water or a couple of hairs in the thermite; it's not that touchy.)
If chemistry sets and, increasingly, schools no longer provide any real hands-on experience with chemistry, parents and kids themselves need to step up and do it, even if all you do is growsomecrystals.
There's a lot of fun, and entertainment, to be had in the wide area between the kindergarten-science of dumbed-down chemistry sets and the truly hazardous experiments that, for instance, produce copious amounts of highly poisonous fumes, or have reaction products that are illegal to throw away.
Teaching kids that "chemicals" are dangerous is as stupid as teaching them that all drugs are equally, and enormously, bad. You let 'em ride a bike; you should also let 'em make some stinks and bangs.
if you shop around. 256Gb SSD: 
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