FWIW, one day in my high school physics lab a kid decided to take a big swig of mercury just to see what it tasted like. The teacher was totally unconcerned. On the other than, that particular kid didn't remember the '60s when he was _in_ the '60s, so the amount of additional damage it was likely to do was negligible.
Yup. Same problem. It started a week or so ago.
-- Ed Huntress
I'm not sure if it is my ISP or others - but a number of news group files like this are blank. They (my isp) isn't pulling from the header or the other (perhaps a link) isn't providing.
Is anyone else having problems ?
Martin
Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder
Gunner wrote:
No probs here. You guys didn't play with mercury many years ago, did you?
-- Jeff r.
Do you know that if you stand in a bucket of mercury, you only sink in halfway up to your knees?
They just don't let kids have any fun these days.
-- Ed Huntress
According to Martin H. Eastburn :
Yes -- I am getting headrs only fro time to time. My ISP is covad.net, and the news server is actually hosted by maganameservers.net.
With newsguy.net, I was instead having articles expire too quickly.
I wish that I could get my news feed running again, so I could run my own server. But -- the previous ISP dropped all news servers.
Enjoy, DoN.
Ohhhh... I'm much more dense than that. I'd be up to my thighs, easy. My waist on really dumb days.
-- Jeff R. (Your SG May Vary)
If I went in head first I'd go to my waist and be Very stable!
FWIW, the Emperors of China used to sleep in a mercury bed. This might explain a good deal about Chinese history. One wonders if the Romans had the same luxury.
Ed Huntress replied:
In that case, I reckon our government have been drinking the bloody stuff!!
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Try putting mercury in an aluminum bowl, put the AL bowl in a plastic bowl. Now try to guess why mercury manometer aren't allwed in airplanes. Pat
Or mercury altimiters, or mercury wetted relays, or mercury switches. It has been explained to me as follows:
Aluminum is slightly soluble in mercury (0.003 wt%). The reason that mercury can behave like cancer with aluminum is due to the reactivity of the aluminum in the amalgam. One doesn't ordinarily think of aluminum as a metal that amalgamates but by definition it does.
Aluminum is normally protected by an oxide coating which inhibits oxidation. If that oxide coating is removed aluminum is a fairly reactive metal and rapidly reforms the metal oxide on the surface. Mercury will not usually penetrate that coating but once mercury gets contact (by a scratch or nick) with the aluminum it can be devastating as the mercury dissolves an extremely small amount of aluminum and the aluminum in the amalgam reacts with moisture to form an oxide or hydrous oxide. This latter reaction depletes the aluminum concentration in the amalgam so over there at the aluminum-mercury interface a little more aluminum dissolves and the reaction behaves like an aluminum pump. The process is kept active because the mercury is preventing the fresh surface from forming the protective oxide coating. Even though there is very little aluminum in the amalgam at any given time the process keeps kicking a small amount of aluminum from the metal to an oxide.
Note that you are not going to end up with a whole bunch of aluminum dissolved in mercury. The mercury is just a conduit to transfer aluminum from the metal to an oxide.
I've got an RAF engineering training handbook on corrosion. In the section on mercury and its hazards, it has a lovely picture of a mercury manometer made of brass and steel parts, that was assembled incorrectly with an aluminium crush washer to seal it, not a copper crush washer.
Even from this minor contact over a tiny area, the aluminium washer has disappeared and turned into a "christmas tree" of aluminium amalgam fronds, maybe 2" diameter from what was originally a 1/2" washer.
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