Journal of No. 118

by Yunte Huang.

For some reason, I made a lot of Kindle highlights, so this will probably get long.
( it did )

I just had a simple question and I already suspected the answer. But look where it led.
( The Trigger Effect )

In Gore Vidal's Myron, he 'honored' the Supreme Court Justices involved in Miller v. California (and anti-porn activists Father Hill S.J. and Charles Keating (yes, that Charles Keating)) by substituting their names for profanity.

"He thrust his enormous Rehnquist deep within her Whizzer White"

OK, the two things...

toren_atkinson mentioned that today marked the release of the DVD of Thundarr the Barbarian: The Complete Series.

Wikipedia informs me that Ookla the Mok is named after my alma mater:

The name Ookla actually comes from University of California, Los Angeles (commonly known as UCLA). Gerber and friend Martin Pasko were having dinner in the Westwood area one night during the time Gerber was writing the bible for the series. Gerber commented to Pasko that he had not yet decided upon a name for the Wookiee-like character the network insisted be added to the series, over Gerber's objections. As the two walked past the gate to the UCLA campus, Pasko quipped, "Why don't you name him 'UCLA'?"

He is dressed for the Undie Run.

I'm listening to the 3rd episode of toren_atkinson's (and friends') podcast, Caustic Soda, which focuses on the dangers that the universe has to offer and providing the relevant science and pop culture. This episode is on radiation, and I waved my hand in the air when their tame expert (an MD knowledgeable about radiation medicine) wanted to defer a question to a physicist. Sadly, there was no way for anyone to call on me.

But that's neither here nor there. As the conversation drifted to radiation protection, my mind drifted considerably further. To stop your gammas, everyone uses lead. Lead, lead, lead. Sure, it's dense, and cheap. But what if money was no object? Everyone knows osmium is the densest element. Lead is about a buck a pound. While osmium is more like $400 an ounce ($6400/pound). So you can see the practical advantage of lead, even though the density of lead is a mere 11.3 grams/cc compared to osmium's beefy 22.6... twice as dense as lead.

But a couple things struck me about the list of elements sorted by density. WTF, dude, osmium's not at the bottom! Several manmade elements have 'estimated' densities that put osmium to shame. Hassium (Z=108) tops the list at 41 g/cc. Nearly twice the density of osmium!

But it seems awfully fishy. No references, and a rather ridiculous jump from osmium to these 'estimates' for these hypertransuranian elements that hardly exist in measurable quantities for measurable times.

Gosh, dubious information on Wikipedia? Alert the media.

Anyway, the other thing I learned from glancing through the table was that a couple months ago, ununbium officially became copernicium.

(And, while I'm being chemical, I note in passing the discovery of ununseptium was announced last week. [ununoctium was discovered earlier, and remains the current champion of Z])