There is a rumor/urban legend about military throwing knives with mercury-filled handles. Don’t ask me where I heard this – I just have a mind like a vacuum cleaner that sucks up everything and spins it around. I think Bill means to refer to the neighborhood/place is short for Almaden Quicksilver. There is a good amount of mercury ore (cinnabar) in that ground and during the gold rush, several small mining towns were built to process it. At that time, there were no vents to prevent the processors from inhaling mercury fumes and the symptoms of mercury poisoning (losing teeth, hair loss, “softening” mind) were a known hazard. I used to take homeschooled kids into Almaden Quicksilver park and have them pick up the reddish rocks to see how heavy they felt and to see if the red could be scratched. There is also a defunct mercury processing plant within the park that closed down in the 1970s. And there is also an Almaden Lake (a separate park) in which you can fish but are strictly warned not to eat the fish you catch because the lake was a former cinnabar quarry naturally filled in by rain and run off (though the public – including myself – can and do swim in the lake). Carolyn From: mathfuneavesdroppers@googlegroups.com <mathfuneavesdroppers@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Bill Gosper Sent: Monday, February 11, 2019 4:23 AM To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Subject: Re: Q: Where do we get mercury? On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 3:47 PM Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com <mailto:billgosper@gmail.com> > wrote: 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, correction: dimethyl mercury from which even a hazmat suit might not protect you from slow, agonizing braindeath. Fear of spontaneous formation of di 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
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