I know of a hookup. Meet the Libyans in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot after hours. Be sure to wear a bullet proof vest.
That’s the Lone Pine mall. Some crazy looking car took out the other pine in 1955, no doubt driven by a drunk spaceman!
Old man Peabody owned all of this. He had this crazy idea about breeding Pine Trees…
It’s like half of this is a Back to the Future reference. And the other half I don’t get at all.
Look, I’m sure in the year 1985 you can get plutonium at the local drug store, but in 1955 it’s a bit hard to come by!
I’m not so sure.
Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks was quite a read.
He grew up during the blitz & had access to lots of elements. At one point he got to throw 2lbs of sodium off a bridge just to see what happens.
I checked & found this in the footnotes:
Although elements 93 and 94, neptunium and plutonium, were created in 1940, their existence was not made public until after the war. They were given provisional names, when they were first made, of “extremium” and “ultimium,” because it was thought impossible that any heavier elements would ever be made.
I try to buy my Mum interesting books for her birthday and Christmas and she always wonders how I find such gems so consistently. My secret - it’s comments like this on Lemmy or the other place, back before the great migration. So thank you - this is going straight on the list! She’ll love it 😊
This is the metal region, the non metal region, the metalloids are here and over here are the felonies.
They call them noble gasses, but I’ve never seen them owning land or anything that is typical of nobility.
pretty sure… there’s nothing illegal about buying plutonium for a elements collection. Pretty sure, also there’s a lab supply somewhere in australia that keeps the samples in stock.
Also pretty the russians are having a pretty decent sale on polonium, if you’re looking for that.
Australia has a treaty that says ALL plutonium in the country must be documented and accounted for. The country is not allowed more than 1KG in total
Every piece of plutonium is supposed to have a permit and be individually tracked
Doesn’t make it illegal.
Just, eh, “complicated”.
Is it stupid to want that stuff in your home? Certainly not without lead condoms. Is it something I’m offended at the government wanting to scoop up? Certainly not.
Did the guy deserve full on hazmat?
Well, I’d probably have pulled out the full containment tent and taken a lot of selfies riffing off the E.T. Movies, but I’m a weirdo.
They could have probably played it cool and that would have been better.
The thing is that got through customs. It was probably declared by the company, since they already got paid and probably warn people to check “local import laws”.
Probably depends on how much they tried to import. 1mg is probably no big deal, but 1Mg would be.
Out of curiosity and for strictly not-remotely-nefarious reasons, how expensive would a megagram be?
I assume they just bought Ike, a centimeter cube of the stuff. (Which is a common thing for this kind of collector. Most solids come in centimeter cubes if they’re not particularly spicy.)
1Mg @ 19.8g/cc
1000000/19.8=50505cc
³√50505 = 37cm
So a little bigger than a cubic foot assuming you could prevent super-criticality somehow
Well that’s stupid. In a couple of billion years he’ll have to get more!
God forbid men have hobbies smdh
But what is the charge? Collecting the elements of a succulent periodic table?
