A: H. G. Wells. When I was a kid, at least two friends had a bottle of Hg in their garage. I don't know why. We often played with it, smearing it on pennies, e.g.. If we spilled it, we could sweep it up and put it back in the bottle. I had numerous medical relatives who kept lots of mercurochrome and merthiolate. (AKA the infamous autismogenic thimerosal.) And we all had amalgam fillings. Rich and Hilarie named their daughter Mercury! "Almaden" is still a popular place|business name around San Jose, where the natives used cinnabar for warpaint. And the paper is still Mercury News. DHS might be interested in people trying to make the fulminate, but *much* more interested in the terror potential of the nightmarish compound methyl mercury, from which even a hazmat suit might not protect you from slow, agonizing braindeath. Fear of spontaneous formation of methyl mercury probably fuels today's mercury hysteria. —rwg When bottom-feeders ingest too much mercury, they can't get off the bottom. On 2019-02-09 13:40, Henry Baker wrote:
Thanks, Hilarie!
I never read that story when I was a kid.
I presume that someone actually built such a "mercuryball" at the time to test it out?
I also presume that playing with such a ball today would cause DHS instant apoplexy. Someone brought liquid mercury to one of the high schools in L.A. a few years ago, and the officials evacuated the school and brought in people in hazmat suits to remove any possible mercury spills. Irony alert: they apparently didn't realize that a much bigger mercury poisoning threat existed within every fluorescent bulb in the school.
The problem with a mercuryball is that it isn't "smart" or self-powered.
At 10:48 PM 2/8/2019, Hilarie Orman wrote:
Cf. "Stand By For Mars", Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and the game of mercury ball.
If the ball were flying through the air, it could set up asymmetric drag and change its trajectory to some degree. Even if it weren't *guided*, it could still move in a random and impossible-to-predict manner which would thoroughly confuse even the best goalies.
Hilarie lman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun