Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Freddie Mercury - Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
When the going gets wierd and the wierd turn pro. HST
Surfing the net this morning to get my infusion of errata, i found url directions to BBC and Wired and Slate and all sorts of media blogger wannabees. BBC's 200 million dead blog factoid - well sure, if every blog ever posted is dead when the last comment runs its course. But the ideas, the themes of the blogging community are under insidious attack by the powers that be. They want to steal our voices, by putting out hard-sell bad immitations and having the lemmings think it is us. This maybe a good thing, if it takes us off the target radar - they think they have bigger fish to fry.
Then i read about the turn-out in upstate new york for the nine-one-one call about a mercury spill - a broken rectal thermometer drew a huge force (~100) of police, fire and emergency rescue teams for a small puddle of dispersed beads. I wonder what they would do with the DME that we used in physical chemistry lab? DME - dropping mercury electrode - a device uses mercury's ability to gain surface area rapidly to provide a clean surface for continuous chemical measurement.
Back in the 90's, i knew a rancher from Baker County OR that had a natural mercury deposit on his land. The DEQ supposedly showed up to inspect and then wanted him to clean it up or face an environmental citation. Two years in court finally got them off his back. He should have laughed and asked them where they would move the mine too - and if we had that capablility, doncha think the mining industry would have used it?
Mercury has three major forms that it can be found in and many others lesser forms that it has available. The puddles from the thermometer are the elemental form - as a chemist it is a fun substance to play with. Respect it in keeping reactive chemicals away and mercury is really no problem. The second form is Hg(II) - a salt forming cation that is the higher stable oxidation state. If the last sentence means nothing to you, i can invite you to visit the Electron Hotel - where i can explain these concepts by analogy. (If we add the Proton/Neutron Bar and Grill, we can explain nuclear chemisty too.) (Coming soon to a net-space near you).
The third form is the real baddie - Hg(I). Hg(I) really doesn't exist - it is two Hg sharing a pair of electrons with each other. I can't paste the proper symbol into blogger - but look at the mercury as if it were a pair of binary suns that want a divorce and each needs the other to stabilize until they can ditch the common pair. This is like having a tazer that goes off at random and pops some poor living thing with a jolt of instant electric reduction. The organic system, which lives by oxidation, then shuffles off the damage to whatever can tangle with it. This big bad dimer form - two mercury atoms together reacting to two individual mercury atoms apart is the cancer causing agent that has the government freaked.
Mercury is normally found in the Hg(II) form, which will never ever become the dimer form, unless climate change problems invert the atmosphere into a reducing environment. The elemental mercury of the thermometer type is a lot more stable than the dimer and infact the dimer would much prefer to rejoin the silver ball rather than react. But the Hg(I) dimer is such a bad actor, that death is a very likely outcome from indescent exposure. So don't go smashing old thermometers for fun, but if you do break-one, shrug and dump a bit of sulfur powder on the area, then sweep it up. The sulfur and mercury will react readily to form HgS, where Hg(II) is the chemical form.
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