OT: Fun things to do with Mercury - Any?

Wow, that was a clever piece of electrical hardware. I had no idea they were that sophisticated.

-- Ed Huntress

If it were the same thing I would protest. Eric

Deaths are deaths. No matter if you were killed with an RPG or a SUV

Gunner

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple,

You take one lousy week off to join Thorax at the Elvis concert, and this is what happens: Eric R Snow writes on Mon, 09 Jan 2006

It is interesting how the Media is sparing us the Horror of the images from September 11, 2001. Nice to know they are so considerate of our precious feelings.

As for "fun things to do with mercury" - it corrodes aluminum something fierce.

tschus pyotr

-- pyotr filipivich TV NEWS: Yesterday's newspaper read to the illiterate.

You take one lousy week off to join Thorax at the Elvis concert, and this is what happens: "jw" writes on 9 Jan 2006 12:12:30

-0800 in rec.crafts.metalworking :

Most heavy metals, when ingested, tend to just pass on through the system, and continue on to contaminate the sewer treatment plant :-) The hazards might be from interacting with stomach acids.

the difference is, in the intestines it is essentially "outside" the body. (we're basically a meat doughnut.) Once absorbed through the skin, it is inside the body, where it can muck up the chemistry of metabolism.

tschus pyotr

Unless you're Cliffie, who more closely resembles a Klein bottle.

Regards, Marv

Home Shop Freeware - Tools for People Who Build Things

if it can go through the skin so easily, why isn't it absorbed through the gut lining, which is designed to be semi-permeable anyway?

snipped-for-privacy@ix.netcom.com (Marvin W. Klotz) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.west.earthlink.net:

A Klein bottle "filled" with guano.

Only if you're an insurance actuary or a government statistician.

For normal people, there are sad deaths, and peaceful deaths, and unnecessary deaths, and infuriating deaths, and tragic deaths...and probably a dozen other kinds.

-- Ed Huntress

Ayup..but they are all worm food in the end.

Gunner

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple,

That was basically my question. Also considering it will have a lot longer "contact" time.

Does it have something to do with the mercury staying "clumped" so it does not have intimate contact with the membrane?

JW

Wow, what wit. Especially the quotation marks. Why don't you submit that to a comedy company in France? I understand they might appreciate wierd humor. ;)

dennis in nca

selectively semi-permeable. I don't know the mechanism that excludes Hg, but the epithelial lining has a big thick furry coat of proteoglycans, glycoproteins, and other hydrophilic polymers that might act to fend off something hydrophobic like Mercury.

How it's kept out of the lipid absorption process, I don't know (I never looked.)

Skin is fatty, but it's also thick and probably doesn't very readily allow Hg to pass.

I imagine breathing the vapors is VERY bad... I think Carroll's Mad Hatter used Hg in the felt making process. There's no barrier between the air and the receptive phospholipid bilayer of the lung's cell lining.

er

I had a dentist talk it down, too. I attributed it to exposure to other people doing the same, and enlightened self-interest.

Every chemical reaction has a rate constant and an equilibrium. If some process assures that Hg moving from the amalgam to the surroundings is removed (water table?) then more will be released.

And is, apparently. Hence the Hg in fish. It's present there in "organic" form, having been methylated somewhere along its path of migration down the poop-soup and finding its way into the ocean and the food-cycle.

I wonder about this one as well. Dismissal of toxicity because of low vapor pressure is predicated on the absense of any concentrative process, and doesn't consider that an equilibrium / rate constant process may be present. For example, if there's a nerve sitting under the filling, collecting Hg on its membranes, converting to "organic", passing it up the axonic transport mechanisms to the cell body, and from there into the trigeminal ganglion... I think looking for associations with related structures in the brain (hypothalamus, pituitary, other thingies associated with the TGG) might be informative. There may even be enough computational oomph available to do such a complex analysis.

er

Funny. I used to walk the half mile along the residential streets with my gun over my shoulder to the orchard. I wonder how that would go over down here in the Big City.

er

Funny. I used to walk the half mile along the residential streets with my gun over my shoulder to the orchard. I wonder how that would go over down here in the Big City. snip

I used to stroll onto the San Francisco Airport flight line and up the airstairs on the tail end of Boeing 727's with my .22 target rifle in it's wooden case in one hand and my shooting box containing several hundred rounds of Ely match ammo as well as my spotting scope in the other hand. I'd stow the rifle and box in the overhead locker and fly down to Los Angles to a weekend match. Same deal for the return trip. Never had the slightest trouble. May D.B. Cooper roast in hell.

I'll take your word for it :-)

You take one lousy week off to join Thorax at the Elvis concert, and this is what happens: "Charles Spitzer" writes on Tue, 10 Jan 2006 14:58:29 -0700 in rec.crafts.metalworking :

Good question, and one I don't have an answer to. That's one reason I'm skeptical about pure mercury being absorbed through the skin. Mercury compounds, or vapors, on the other hand ...

tschus pyotr

Yea and you cant even pick one of them up without getting it all over youself since it only has one surface. ...lew...