The ancients were able to predict eclipses. That’s because they aren’t random. Rather, they are periodic. They occur in cycles.
The current eclipse is part of Saros Series 139. A saros is 6585.3 days long which is 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours. Eclipses separated by one saros have a similar geometry. A series will typically last 12 to 13 centuries and contain 70 to 80 eclipses. This particular series began on May 17th in 1501 and will end on July 3rd in 2753. Saros Series 139 is 1262.11 years long.
Saros was a Greek word chosen by Edmund Halley to represent 222 lunar months (another way to express 6585.3 days).
Here at home it was just a wee bite. You had to travel to see the total eclipse. I hope the eclipse-chasers got to experience totality, wherever they were.
If you can’t grow it then you have to mine it. We’ve all seen what mining does to terrestrial landscapes. Can you imagine what it would do to the seafloor?
Environmental damage and ecological disruption are costly. In actual dollars. If capitalism is to be dissuaded from its lust for short-term profits—which results in the degradation of the quality of life for all—it has to be dissuaded on its own terms. Making a mess has to be bad for business. It has to hurt the bottom line. Only then will our corporate overlords take the time to do things properly.
We don’t have to mine the seafloor. We can get what we need up here. And we can reduce, reuse, and recycle. The innovations we develop to exploit an exotic new landscape like the seafloor could just as well be used topside, too. I say we need to tackle the e-waste problem. Imagine the heaping piles of old TVs, computers, and phones we’ve thrown away in just the last few years. It’s a treasure trove. An unexploited resource. Let’s climb that mountain instead of the ones on bottom of the ocean.
Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the existence of Gallium when he created his first periodic table. He expected to find an element similar to aluminum (and in the same column, group 13). Mendeleev called the element eka-aluminum, meaning “beyond” aluminum, and his prediction was confirmed by a French scientist in 1875. Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran named the new metal after his native country (Gallia is Latin for France).
Gallium is surprisingly abundant in the earth’s crust but it is too reactive to exist in its native state and it forms no significant minerals by itself. It is obtained as a by-product from the processing of aluminum and zinc ores. China and Russia have the largest reserves.
Only a few hundred tonnes of gallium are produced worldwide but it is nonetheless an essential material in the semiconductor industry. Gallium arsenide, gallium nitride, and indium gallium phosphide compounds are critical parts of integrated circuits, logic chips, diodes, pre-amplifiers, lasers, and solar cells.
If you had a chunk of gallium it would melt in your hand (much like chocolate!). Gallium has no known biological role but clearly we can’t live without the stuff.
When I watch a sporting event on TV I have to remind myself that I’m not watching a sporting event. I’m watching a television program about a sporting event. It’s not the same thing.
The Super Bowl is the obvious example. I was interested in yesterday’s game, and it was a compelling contest, but it was a small part of the broadcast. For some time now people have shown more interest in the commercials than the result of the game, for example. And the halftime shows often generate more excitement or controversy.
Modern TV is as immersive as cinema and sufficiently convincing that we forget it is manufactured. TV presents a particular, organized view of things, something scripted and controlled. The outcomes in the game are still subject to chance (I don’t believe NFL games are rigged!) but the TV show is prepared for that.
There has always been this layer between the event (the game on the field) and the TV show (the experience of the viewer). Now it is more sophisticated. The technology is better, certainly. And the show-makers now have decades of practice (and audience feedback) to more expertly craft their products. The modern filter provided by our media makes the event seem more real and gives us the illusion of greater involvement. But it requires a more elaborate system to come between us and the thing and thus makes it even more remote.
Watching sports on TV always makes me think of a phrase I learned in school (attributed to Alfred Korzybski): “the map is not the territory.” And that remark always makes me think of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images:
The translation is “this is not a pipe.”
Now let’s get on with some TV shows about baseball games!
Magnesium is an essential nutrient for plants and animals. Plants need chlorophyll to photosynthesize, and chlorophyll molecules contain magnesium ions. ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the energy molecule, binds to magnesium in order to get its work done. Hundreds of enzymes that are necessary to metabolism need magnesium to function. In the human body most of the magnesium is stored in the bones. Magnesium deficiency shows itself in a myriad of ways, reflecting its crucial role in so many processes.
For that alone we should know something of magnesium. The highest dietary sources are leafy greens, beans, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Magnesium is in fact found in almost all the food we eat and so deficiencies are rare in well-fed places.
That was a big thing in the 70s—outfitting your car with “mag wheels.” They were originally made from magnesium but they are mostly aluminum now. Magnesium is lighter than aluminum but it corrodes more readily and is more flammable. The image above is from an F1 site. True “mag” wheels are expensive.
Magnesium alloys are ubiquitous. There is hardly a place where they can’t be found. The world produced one million tonnes of magnesium metal in 2022, mostly from magnesite and dolomite ores. Magnesium compounds are also extracted from seawater. One million tonnes does not seem like much when compared to the annual production of copper (~20 million tonnes), chromium (~40 million), and aluminum (~70 million) but it’s still a heaping pile of stuff.
In the lab you could get strips of magnesium to ignite and they produced an intensely bright white flame. The old flash bulbs of yesteryear had magnesium in them.
A guy named Scott Dewing writes a technology column (Inside the Box) for the Jefferson Journal. In the latest issue he talked about Artificial Intelligence* (“AI Gets Personal”). He’s not optimistic, or rather, he’s not optimistic about current versions of the technology and sees this for our future:
. . . the universe will descend into a morass of machine-generated content that will self-optimize until genuine human creativity is obliterated and all art becomes a bland panoply of monotonous mediocrity.
It’s hard to state it more plainly and it’s hard to argue with! A capitalist system will always seek to optimize profit, and any new technology will ultimately survive only if it makes money. AI is very expensive. It’s going to have to pay for itself at some point. Absorbing all of human knowledge into a gigantic silicon Cuisinart and then spitting it out as personal “knowledge smoothies” for everyone on the planet ain’t gonna be cheap. And it may not be what is best for us. See above quote.
In the article Mr. Dewing expounds a notion of a more “personal” AI. That is, the current “generative” AI should exist to complement us, to enhance our work, and not to replace us. In fact, it ought to help us be better people. As Dewing says “generative AI learns about the world while personal AI learns about you.”
Indeed. All our inventions ought to help us. And if our gadgets don’t help us be better people, maybe we ought to stop making them.
*Artificial Intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent. But the term “AI” is what we’ve got so we are stuck with it.
A half-inch of rain is a lot! The NWS has a collection of videos that give you a feeling for different rates of rainfall. Take a look.
Our little burg has its own funny little climate. But if I had to say what the climate is closest to I would say “high desert.” We get rain and snow, but only intermittently. The rain lets up in May and doesn’t return until November. Except for summer thundershowers, of course. The snow comes in December and quits in April. We average about foot of snow and about two feet of rain per year. It’s hot and very dry in the summer and it’s cold and dry in the winter.
But at this moment I’m in the midst of a deluge. It’s a biblical amount of rain, man. The snow is being washed away here in town but it is still clinging stubbornly to the hillsides.
We need the water, naturally. Well, we need the snowpack, to be precise. So let’s hope it is cold enough in the high places for this stuff to pile up. All I see out my window is runoff. And puddles. And my rain gutters clogged with melting snow!
The lanthanoids, or rare-earth elements, are essential to the modern world. We interact with these substances but we don’t know them. We know about copper pipes and iron railings and aluminum cans and stuff like that, but the little bits and pieces of our high-tech world are mostly invisible to us. Nonetheless there is a growing global demand for elements 57 through 71.
Neodymium (Nd, #60) is a little different as most of us have heard of neodymium magnets. These were discovered in the 1980s at a couple of corporate labs and are currently the strongest commercially-available magnets. The alloy is a combination of neodymium, iron, and boron and is called NIB or Neo or NdFeB (the formula is Nd2Fe14B).
They are used in computer hard drives and electric motors and countless other places. You’ve seen them around because they can be purchased for home use:
You have to be careful with those things. Two NIB magnets will snap together suddenly and with a lot of force and good luck getting them apart! If you stick something to the fridge you can expect it to stay in place.
The northern Coast of California and the southern coast of Oregon have some of the best wind resources in the United States, and development of these resources can contribute to meeting the clean energy goals of California, Oregon, and other western states.
Yay for us! But there’s more:
Because the existing transmission grid infrastructure that serves these coastal regions is limited in capacity, major investments in new transmission grid infrastructure will be needed.
There’s always a catch. You have to get the electricity that the turbines generate off-shore to facilities on-shore. And once there the power has to be distributed to the grid. That’s going to take new transmission lines of the 500-kv size. They look like this:
We all know what it is like to travel to and from the Southern Oregon or Northern California coasts—mountains, rivers, canyons, and winding roads. New transmission lines there won’t have the wide-open spaces of the Western deserts like the photo above. It will be a more challenging undertaking. Speaking of that, here’s another bit:
We note that some of the necessary technologies for large-scale development of floating OSW power are neither fully developed nor commercially available at this time.
Well, then. Infrastructure is do-able. It will take a while (more on that later) but the primary technology is not ready. Yet. We all know that wind turbines work. And they work on land and on sea. Offshore wind power is big stuff in the UK, for example. They have developments in the North Sea that can deliver at a gigawatt scale. Unfortunately in the Northern California and Southern Oregon offshore regions slated for wind development the continental shelf plunges rapidly away from the shore. The water is too deep and thus you need floating platforms. That tech is still experimental.
To sum up:
The development of tens of gigawatts of floating OSW power generation on the West Coast will not occur quickly; a successful effort would take decades, and the associated transmission upgrades would also take place over decades.
The Greeks called it “water-silver” or ΰδραργυρος which the Romans converted to hydrargyrum and thus the source of its symbol, Hg.
Mercury, or quicksilver, is weird stuff. It’s a liquid at room temperature, the only such metal with that property. The only other element that is a liquid at room temperature is the non-metal halogen Bromine (Br, #35) . Its lighter sister elements Fluorine (Fl, #9) and Chlorine (Cl, #17) are gases while the heavier Iodine (I, #53) is a solid.
Mercury was of course known to ancient peoples. The Almadén Mine in Spain is at least 2500 years old and mercury was part of Chinese medicine for at least a thousand years before that. There’s evidence of long-ago mercury and cinnabar (mercury sulfide, HgS, the chief ore) use in the New World as well. Here’s cinnabar:
Cinnabar was mined extensively in California. Gold and silver readily combine with mercury to form amalgams and so it is used to extract these metals from their ores. Mercury can be quite a significant toxin and you can imagine the exposures these early miners were subjected too. I had a chance to tour a modern, open-pit gold mine (McLaughline Mine in Lake County) many years ago. Mercury was a major by-product. Mercury does not react with iron and so it is stored in iron flasks. These are standardized to hold 76 pounds of the liquid and that is the international unit by which mercury is bought and sold.
In our day we’ve been warned about mercury contamination of seafood. Industrial waste dumped into our waterways ultimately finds its way to the ocean and into the fatty tissues of fish. This is a serious concern for people who depend on a fish and shellfish diet. The infamous Minamata Bay poisoning in the 1950s that decimated Japanese fishing communities was due to methlymercury, a particularly nasty organo-mercury compound. It wasn’t until several years had passed that the source of the contamination was pinned down—a nearby chemical plant run by Chisso Corporation.
It is possible for a metal to exist in different compounds that have entirely different metabolic effects! Tin is a good example. The metal and its oxides are non-toxic but the stannanes, organo-tin compounds, are quite poisonous.
Most mercury pollution is due to the burning of coal in power plants. In fact, we get more radioactive material dumped into our atmosphere from coal-burning than we do from all the nuclear plants and nuclear facilities in the world combined. Coal is a critical fuel for electricity generation but it comes with an enormous environmental cost.
Many of the uses of mercury compounds, like batteries and fluorescent lights, are being phased out. I still have a mercury thermometer but you don’t see them much any more. The main industrial use these days is as a catalyst for processes like making polyvinyl chlorides (PVCs). About 40 million tons of PVCs are made each year which is the third-most of any plastic polymer. Polyethylene (100 million tons) and polypropylene (80 million tons) are the leaders.
Mercury compounds have been used in various medicinal formulations for millenia. Some of those practices have been thankfully discontinued as they were of dubious value and most likely harmful. Preparations containing micro-doses of mercuric substances have a longer history, especially in Asia, and some of these treatments are still used and have garnered modern medical interest. As Paracelsus famously quipped “it’s the dose that makes the poison.” Funny thing, a mercury preservative (thimerosal) is used in many vaccines at a rate of about 0.003 to 0.01%. For the larger number, that’s 25 micrograms of mercury per 0.5 milliliter dose. Thimerosal is a big sticking point for the celebrity-fueled anti-vaxx crowd. I suppose it’s OK to chase after “traditional” and “holistic” Chinese cures that contain mercury but god forbidyou put it in our vaccines!
Mercury is the god of commerce and financial gain. Partridge says that his name comes from mercor (-ari, -atus) the Latin verb meaning “to trade.” He is also the god of thieves and tricksters. Does anyone else find it interesting that merchants and liars are grouped together? Maybe the Romans were on to something.
Mark C. O'Connor 
