The Latin word for gold, aurum, is the source of the symbol Au. This most famous of all metals has been known since pre-history. People have coveted gold for as long as they had the notion to covet. I know the Bible has some notions about coveting.

Here’s the problem with gold:

This is what gold mining looks like today. The image is from a massive open pit gold mine in Australia called, fittingly, The Super Pit.

I had the opportunity to visit an open pit gold mine many years ago. It was the McLaughlin Mine near Clear Lake, California. Homestake Mining operated McLaughlin from 1985-2002 and produced about 3.5 million ounces of gold. The property is now part of the University of California system and the reclaimed land is a natural preserve. What I remember most was the gigantic scale of everything. The haul trucks were particularly impressive. They had the biggest tires I’d ever seen! The crushers, where the ore was processed, were enormous and took huge amounts of power.

Gold is a superb material for electronics and has other valuable industrial applications. But most gold—almost half of the world’s production—goes into making jewelry. What’s left becomes the bullion in bank vaults and investment portfolios.

That’s a lot of digging, a lot of energy expenditure, and a lot of big messes for stuff that is mostly useless. We impart a lot of value to gold, and we have a lot of expectations about it. It’s supposed to always be valuable, no matter what else is going on in the world. That’s it’s magic. There are folks who think we should go back to the gold standard of yesteryear. Gold is that powerful—it will fix our economy!

In the meantime the 3000 or so metric tons (tonnes) of gold that are dug up every year around the world leave a large environmental footprint. Open pit mining has a poor track record when it comes to land stewardship. I’m not so sure precious metals are all that precious.

The late Donald J. Borror was a professor of zoology and entomology at Ohio State University who penned a little book for biology students entitled Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms. The subtitle is the remarkably descriptive Compiled from the Greek, Latin and other languages with special reference to biological terms and scientific names.

It’s one of my essential references.

According to Borror beryll– is Greek for “sea-green jewel.” Here’s a picture of aquamarine, a form of the mineral beryl:

Another form of beryl is emerald, a precious stone known since antiquity. Beryl (beryllium aluminum silicate, Be₃Al₂Si₆O₁₈) is, like all beryllium compounds, toxic. You can wear your emeralds without fear of being poisoned as the mineral is an insoluble, very hard, and stable cyclo-silicate. But if you are digging the stuff up and processing it (including cutting and polishing) you have to be careful.

The pure element is not found in nature. It is a column II metal (alkaline earths) like Magnesium (Mg, #12) and Calcium (Ca, #40) and is thus highly reactive. Both Ca and Mg are abundant in the earth’s crust but only in compounds. Be is much rarer despite its worldwide distribution. And we know that Ca and Mg are essential nutrients for humans. Be and its compounds, especially the salts, can be deadly in small amounts and at low concentrations.

Beryllium is used in countless alloys and finds many applications in the aerospace industry. It makes both copper and aluminum stronger and less prone to sparking and thus is desirable for specialized tools. It is transparent to X-rays and is used extensively in those devices. But care must be taken in refining, manufacturing, and handling due to the ready absorption by the body of dust and fumes.

Only a few hundred metric tons of beryllium ore (mostly beryl) are mined annually, most of that in the United States.

It’s a long drive to Fort McMurray in Alberta. Fort McMurray is a boom town in the middle of the Athabasca oil sands. There were barely a thousand souls there in the 1950s but by the 1970s there were several thousand. The population doubled from 15,000 to 30,000 between 1976 and 1981. It doubled again to 60,000 by 2011. The 2021 municipal census says there are now 72,917 residents.

Google Maps says I should take US-97 as far as the Columbia River and then head east on I-84. From there it is north on I-90 to Spokane. Figure 600 miles for that leg of the trip.

From Spokane it is US-95 to the Canadian border where it becomes BC-95. From there you take AB-3 and AB-22 to Calgary and then AB-2 to Edmonton. That’s another 600 miles or so.

It’s a mere 450 km (whoops, I mean 280 miles!) north on AB-63 to Fort McMurray. The whole thing is not quite 1500 miles. That’s at least 24 hours of driving.

Do I want to drive to the Athabasca oil sands? Well, no. I’d like to go there, but I don’t want to drive. But other than airplanes and helicopters the only way to get to remote, northern Alberta is via automobile. Perhaps I can take a train to Calgary or Edmonton and get a ride from there!

I’m drawn to the Athabasca, in part, because of the oil sands. It’s one of the largest construction projects in the world. I feel like I have to see it. I can’t run my fingers across a plastic keyboard and not think about what it takes for that to be possible. It takes oil to make the plastics, for one. Extracting, processing, refining, shipping, and distributing all have to happen before consuming!

The oil sands project may be really big, but it is dwarfed by the vastness of the surrounding wilderness. I would very much like to see northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. And to continue northward to the Great Slave Lake and through the boreal forests and tundra of the Northwest Territories to Great Bear Lake and the MacKenzie River. It looks like magnificent country.

Wetlands are only a small portion of terrestrial land area, perhaps 4-9%. But in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region a little over half (54%) are fens, bogs, swamps, marshes, and shallow water areas. Wetlands, in other words.

Wetlands are unusually bio-diverse. They also sequester 20% of the world’s carbon.

The Athabasca Oil Sands are one of the largest, if not the largest, deposits of crude oil on the planet. Three million barrels per day are produced and mostly exported. Canada supplies the bulk of the oil our country imports. The USA consumes about twenty million barrels daily. The largest oil tankers in the world (ULCC, ultra large crude carrier) can carry about two million barrels.

There are 142,000 square kilometers of Oil Sands, mostly in Alberta. That’s about 54,000 square miles or roughly the size of North Carolina. The current mining footprint is under 1500 square kilometers (less than 600 square miles). That’s what they call the oil recovery—mining. Of course it takes a lot of people and infrastructure to support a large-scale mining operation and those impacts aren’t as easy to measure.

The way we live demands a lot of energy. Most of that energy comes from long-buried fossil carbon. And despite our recent enthusiasm for renewable sources we will still require hydrocarbon fuels and other petroleum products in very large quantities. That demand will continue to grow, especially in developing nations, and we will have to “mine” oil somewhere.

Where’s the best place?

Athabasca is a word from Cree, one of many languages in the Algonquian family that are native to North America.

The confluence of the Peace and Athabasca Rivers in northern Alberta forms one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world. These rivers converge on Lake Athabasca which spreads into Saskatchewan. South of the Lake are the Athabasca Sand Dunes. There’s a town called Athabasca in Alberta, it’s in Athabasca county, and there you’ll find Athabasca University. Jasper National Park has Mount Athabasca, Athabasca Pass, and Athabasca Glacier.

Those are just a few of the things called Athabasca. The word could mean something grand like “the meeting place of many waters” or merely “where there are reeds.” It’s an old, aboriginal word that’s been translated, transliterated, and anglicized and its earliest meaning is lost to us.

Here’s the first piece of my late mother-in-law’s triptych Athabasca, called simply Athabasca I:

The artist, E.B. Rothwell, included Athabasca in her Spiritus Loci (“spirit of the place”) series. She could trace her ancestry to French fur trappers and an indigenous great-great-grandmother named Marie Caribou. Caribou is an Algonquian word as are moose, raccoon, chipmunk, skunk, moccasin, hickory, toboggan, succotash, squash and many more.

That same area of Canada is also home to the Athabasca oil sands. Petroleum extraction started in 1967 and continues, controversially, to this day. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest producer and exporter of crude oil. Most of that comes from oil sands. The biggest customer is the U.S.

In 1957 a paper* by oceanographer Roger Revelle and physical chemist Hans Suess discussed the connection between mass fossil fuel consumption and atmospheric carbon dioxide, offering this sobering thought:

“Thus human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”

Think of the time scales Athabasca evokes. You can count the decades, even a few centuries, of my mother-in-law and her ancestors. Those centuries add up to millenia when you think of the native peoples and their tongues. But the fossil carbon of the oil sands requires a real mind-stretch. Geologists say that stuff is from the Middle Cretaceous period—115 million years ago!

It’s easy to think of the spirits that inhabit a place, but it’s hard to imagine what came before. Those carbon atoms that make up the tar sands at one time inhabited a living thing. Probably marine algae, not a dinosaur, and not what we imagine as a sentient being, but alive nonetheless? Do they leave behind ghosts when we dig them up and burn them?

*https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3402/tellusa.v9i1.9075

Niobium is another one of those elements of the modern world. High-strength steels—like the kinds used to make car frames—need a small percentage of niobium in the alloy. It is also used in superalloys which is the stuff they use to make gas turbines and rocket engines.

If you look at the periodic table, you can see that niobium is in the same family (column) as Vanadium (#23) and Tantalum (#73). Both are used in a variety of alloys. These are hard, shiny, corrosion-resistant, high-melting point metals and they contribute those characteristics to steels and other mixtures.

Niobium is used in jewelry and coins. The Royal Canadian Mint has a series of moon-themed sterling silver collectibles that feature niobium on the reverse:

You can get different colors. A thin film of oxidized niobium is anodized (electrically deposited) on the coin. The thickness determines the amount of light diffracted and the resulting interference patterns, thus the color. Varying the voltage of the anode (hence “anodizing”) in the circuit varies the thickness of the layer.

Cool coin, eh?

Worldwide production of niobium is about 80,000 tonnes. Most of it comes from Brazil. If you want to imagine 80,000 tonnes that’s about how much one average-sized oil tanker (AFRAMAX class, empty) weighs. And just for comparison the world produces annually about 70,000,000 tonnes of aluminum!

Crypto-currency has generated quite a bit of interest over the last few years, and quite a lot of money was dumped into crypto-schemes. The collapse of FTX and other crypto-related companies shined some light on the whole mess and now we can see things a little better.

Crypto-currencies are based on a piece of technology called a blockchain. It’s sort of like a database just slower and more cumbersome. In fact almost every use of the blockchain has proved to be a failure. Existing technologies like databases are orders of magnitude faster and more secure. Nonetheless interest in blockchains remains high.

That interest is mostly ideological. The idea behind crypto-currency is that the system requires no oversight. It is trust-less. Individuals can send and receive crypto-currency payments without resorting to a bank or other institution. The transactions can happen “peer-to-peer” and thus escape government oversight. This has a very big appeal to libertarians, anarchists, and of course criminals.

Just about every transaction we make in our society involves a trusted third-party service. If you buy a house you need a title and escrow company. If you use a credit card the merchant knows the bank backing the card will pay. The bank backing the card also protects the buyer if the card is stolen. Refunds, reimbursements, and cancellations are easy with credit cards. The system is set up that way and we are willing to pay the fees to the big banks to keep it going.

Complex deals require lawyers and contracts. This protects both parties. Our society relies on this trust-mistrust dynamic. Because we engage in so many transactions we have to place our trust in institutions (like the legal system, or the banks, or the F.D.I.C). We can’t possibly trust every person or entity we deal with so we have to have backstops and fail-safes to protect our interests.

Crypto-currency does away with all this. Many people don’t trust the government to protect their rights so they’d rather do things outside the government’s reach. This is not unreasonable as governments often betray their citizens’ trust. People don’t trust the banks or the entire global financial system. This is not unreasonable either. I remember very well the S&L scandal in the 80s and our most recent shit-storm in 2008. Bankers don’t look out for the little guy. It’s not crazy to be suspicious of Big Finance.

Enter the blockchain and its spawn, Bitcoin. Finally there was a way to send and receive money without relying on all those crooks and creeps! Alas, crypto-currencies failed almost immediately as currencies. You couldn’t buy anything with these digital tokens. You couldn’t pay the rent or the water bill with them. You couldn’t buy groceries with them. You couldn’t buy weed or ecstasy at a concert with them, either. All the existing forms of money were far, far superior. In fact, most people found that they had to exchange their digital tokens for real money, and this is where it all fell apart. The “exchanges” that grew up around crypto-coins were run by rip-off artists. They were the high-tech version of check-cashing places.

But ideology is powerful. The appeal of doing something outside of the mainstream remains strong. The crypto-enthusiast is not much different from the back-to-the-land hippie or the 60s radical. Those folks mistrusted the modern world and wanted to create an alternative. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The problem is that the blockchain and crypto-currency are poor solutions. Hell, they aren’t solutions at all! They don’t solve any of the problems presented by government over-reach or the massive power of financial institutions. They just created a playground for criminals. And the gargantuan energy requirements of these crypto-schemes makes them a global environmental disaster. (The same can be said for “AI” or machine-learning systems.)

These days investors in crypto-currency don’t expect to actually use the stuff as money. A crypto-token is a collectible, like a Mickey Mantle baseball card. You are gambling that it will increase in value over time. Of course I’m gambling that my traditional, regulated securities (stocks and bonds) will increase in value over time, too!

There are lots of people who’ve made money on these un-regulated crypto-securities. But there are way more folks who’ve been cleaned out. Not all of them bought into the crypto-ideology but they got burned by it nonetheless.

We have a tendency to imbue our technology with characteristics it does not possess. We seem to project our desires and our values onto the technology and that can blind us to what’s happening. Crypto-currency can’t do what its makers envisioned. That’s not surprising as most of our inventions fall well short of our expectations.

Promethium (Pm) is named for Prometheus. In the myth, the god of fire shares his knowledge with humanity. Zeus punishes him for this transgression by having him chained to a rock. An eagle eats his liver but it grows back, only to be eaten again on and on in eternal torment. Herakles (Hercules) ultimately sets Prometheus free. The gift of fire is a metaphor for all the arts and sciences that were once the exclusive province of the gods. Prometheus took a liking to people and tried to help them out, earning the wrath of his fellow deities. When wealthy, aristocratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to help poor people during the Depression, he earned the hatred of other rich people because he was a traitor to his class!

A team of Manhattan Project veterans (Jacob A. Marinsky, Lawrence E. Glendenin, and Charles D. Coryell) isolated the first sample of promethium at Oak Ridge in 1945. It was found in the decay products from the experimental graphite reactor. Their results were confirmed in 1947. The name was suggested by Coryell’s wife Grace Mary. The Promethean myth symbolizes the benefits and the perils of technology.

Element 61 was found after #60 Neodymium and #62 Samarium. The obvious gap in the Periodic Table led to predictions of the element’s existence and its properties. Several people claimed to have found what eventually become known as promethium, but the analytical techniques available at the time weren’t good enough to know for sure. The urgency of nuclear research during WWII produced a lot of improvements in the separation of isotopes. All the isotopes of promethium are radioactive. Only about half a kilogram of natural promethium is thought to exist on earth, possibly as a result of the decay of uranium minerals. Promethium is produced in the lab by bombarding U-235 with neutrons.

I visited the site Neural Love (https://neural.love/) to find out about AI-generated art. I told it to create an image, photo-style, of a hard-boiled detective walking in the rain. Here’s what I got:

The suspended, no-hands umbrella is pretty cool, don’t you think? And the guy looks more like a banker than a shamus.

Then I asked it to make a painting with the prompt alcoholic novelist slumped over his typewriter. Here’s what I got:

I love the fur! And I suppose a drunk would use his typewriter backwards.

Anyway that took about five minutes.

In computer science class in college I learned about GIGO which stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. We were taught that computers were dumb machines that needed to be told what to do. The instructions had to not only be clear and specific but also syntactically correct. Anything else was just GIGO.

I’m sure that a careful, hard-working person could use Neural Love to create something that looked good and more importantly looked real. That is, the final product would be close enough to human-made art that the audience could not tell the difference. And that’s the big thing with so-called Artificial Intelligence or AI. It’s a big game of fakery. We don’t care if a machine has actual intelligence, we only care that the machine seems intelligent. If that machine can fool people into believing it has intelligence then AI has succeeded.

In today’s big data world you can’t do science without computers. Machine learning is an essential component of almost all contemporary scientific research. These big, complex programs are “trained” by their human users. The stuff they feed the computer determines the stuff the computer will spit out. If you train the system on crappy data then it probably won’t help you solve your problems.

We live in a sea of pop culture. We are drowning in content. Almost all the stuff we know as “art” (TV shows, movies, books, songs, etc.) is controlled by a handful of media conglomerates. Multi-billion dollar trans-national corporations like Disney and Apple and Universal are our artistic gatekeepers. They decide what is worthy. If they take a turd and give it enough hype we will eventually be convinced it is not a turd but a work of art.

Artists of all stripes (musicians, actors, writers, etc.) are chronically under-employed. They can’t find enough work to make a living. A tiny percentage of creators produce the majority of what we consume. The individual artist is at the mercy of that great fiction, the marketplace, which is just a cute name for billionaires’ playground.

Ultimately AI will create most of our popular art. Pop songs will be the easiest to fake. An AI has, potentially, the entire corpus of human musical output to play with. An AI never gets tired (these systems, by the way, are enormous energy hogs) and thus can crank out thousands of new combinations which will be called “songs” and we, the audience, won’t be able to tell them from songs written by actual songwriters. We’ve already seen the proliferation of digital art that computers generate. Right now, like the above images, it is easy to spot. But soon it won’t be. And even experts in the visual arts will be fooled. Again, that’s the goal of AI: fake it ’til you make it.

I welcome our machine overlords. I hope they bury us in crap. I think it might just be the thing we need to open our eyes to real art made by real people. If we assume that everything is noise, then we might get better at tuning in the signal.

Perhaps that’s a silly notion. Maybe AI will just make everything worse. In the meantime, go out and find some real artists and support what they do.

Arsenic is a famous poison. It is still used to kill insects and other pests but many of those compounds are being phased out. The other big use is as a wood preservative. Chromated copper arsenate (CCA) treatment gives construction lumber that pale green color you see mostly in outdoor applications. They used to make picnic tables and playgrounds from it but the EPA put a stop to that.

Arsenic can kill you by repeated exposures to very low doses. Groundwater (and thus well water) can often have high concentrations of arsenic. It is found in sulfide minerals which are widely dispersed throughout the American West. Mine tailings are a particularly troublesome source of arsenic but many aquifers are contaminated by natural processes from natural sources.

If you drink well water you should test it for arsenic. You should test it anyway, just to be on the safe side, of course. Municipalities are required to test their water and report its chemistry to the users. I have just about every one of the annual City of Yreka water test results. Water that has too many minerals or other such problems can usually be treated and made safe.

Arsenic is used in the semiconductor industry. Two spaces to the left on the chart is Gallium (Ga, #31). You can see that arsenic is one column to the right of the carbon family (the column with C, Si, Ge, Sn, Pb, Fl) and that gallium is one column to the left. Silicon, like carbon, has four valence electrons. What we call the Information Age could be called the Silicon Age. Elements to the left of silicon have three valence electrons and elements to the right have five valence electrons. This means that both arsenic and gallium work as dopants or impurities that are deliberately added to silicon to change its electronic properties. Arsenic and gallium also combine to form gallium arsenide (GaAs) which is used in many integrated circuits, diodes, and solar cells.

Arsenic is added to the lead used in car batteries. Imagine how many millions of car batteries there are. And I mean the old-fashioned 12-volt starter-type batteries, not the new-fangled EV batteries. Just think about how many cars there are and how many of those have had multiple batteries. That’s a lot of lead and thus a lot of arsenic.

Arsenic in the global food supply is a matter of international concern. Contaminated irrigation water can cause arsenic accumulation in cereal grains and particularly in rice and rice products. Arsenic also gets into the air from the burning of fossil fuels.