Sodium can throw itself farther than you can throw sodium

I realize we haven't been very serious on the blog, lately. I'll get back to politics and the weighty issues of the day in a little while. I'm a little burnt out on all things political, so I'm just staying informed and lying in wait for an issue to strangle to death with my prose. In the mean time, let the strange blog posts continue! Via Rusted Sky, check out the Sodium Party:

This is quite alarming: The longest time between impacts, timed on the videotape, was 3.12 seconds. If you do the math, this means the chunk was thrown almost 40 feet high. Fortunately it was going reasonably close to straight up and down, and we were quite far away (about 200 feet). But this skipping behavior, which so far as I know is documented here for the first time on the internet, clearly gives the whole thing far greater potential reach. It's easy to imagine a chunk skipping hundreds of feet.
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If someone were to throw a chunk like this (about three ounces) by hand into a lake, it could very easy come back and hit them. This video tape clearly demonstrates that sodium can throw itself farther than you can. And more ominously, you can clearly see on at least one of the jumps that it tends to come back at the direction it was thrown from. My theory is that when it hits the water it forms a cavity as it plunges down. This cavity acts like a cannon barrel to direct the chunk back in the direction it came from, when the steam and evolved hydrogen explode.