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Periodic Table Gets a New, Unnamed Element
koavf writes "More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of 'super-heavy' element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as 'ununbi' means 'one one two' in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name." Slashdotium? Taconium? Man, I shoulda gone into science so I could have named something sweet that kids have to memorize in classes.
Yeah, I hope they're smart enough not to have an open ballot. It would be Colbertium for sure.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
They should auction the right to name it off to the highest bidder. Use the proceeds for further research or donate it to charity..etc..
-- INTJ Geek Blog http://www.intjgeek.com
If you want to quibble about semantics, here's one for you: an atom with a half-life.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
In Europe, the general emergency call number is 112. I also like Gentoo.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
So whats the time?
Everything on the periodic tables will fade after a time.
Is it a millisecond? a full second? a year? million years?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
True. Matter and energy are transient; entropy and stupidity are eternal.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Technetium, element 43, has no stable isotopes. Do you want to forbid people from referring to it as an element? That would be kind of silly. Chemists can do reactions with technetium, form compounds with it, etc.
Or if you want to arbitrarily pick some minimum half-life, what is that half-life going to be?
Find free books.
Well since there is Uranium, neptunium and plutonium, why not call this one Jupiterium
And where do you think Germans came from? The cradle of civilization maybe? Where is that again?
503 Joke temporarily unavailable
OMG. I can't believe I did this. Clearly, separating science discoveries by nation is a stupid idea.
Well, first of all, I haven't read "Carnage and Culture". But I just looked at the Amazon summary, and I don't think it refutes "Guns, Germs, and Steel" at all.
First of all, Europeans got their asses handed to them from about 300CE to the 1480s. The Germans sacked Rome again and again, so viciously that our word "Vandal" comes from the name of one of the Germanic tribes involved. A few hundred years after the Western Empire finally collapsed, the Muslims handily conquered the Iberian Peninsula (on which Spain and Portugal reside today) and reduced the Byzantine Empire to a remnant centered on Constantinople (tellingly, Istanbul today). The only two things that stopped Muslims overrunning Europe were:
This bare survival doesn't indicate European military superiority. Instead, it reveal a fundamental weakness that nearly led to the end of our civilization.
Europeans armies weren't anything special until the Renaissance. Don't forget how we were utterly defeated time and again in the Crusades, or how Western European armies decided to sack Constantinople (greatly weakening the only thing between the Islamic world and Western Europe) because the holy land was too tough. The Chinese had a great professional military as well, and don't forget where Sun Tzu hails from.
And how can we discuss European military weakness without invoking Ghengis Khan, the barbarian who nearly destroyed Europe again. He overran Russia and penetrated all the way to Vienna before being stopped. The idea mentioned in the summary that European armies were particularly ruthless is obviously bunk: Genghis Khan had entire cities impaled. There just wasn't anything particularly exceptional about European armies.
Yes, the Europeans armies later become practically invincible, but only due to cultural changes and competition among martial nation-states. Europe's later military superiority was not an inherent property of Europeans, but instead was a result of the same forces that Diamond details in "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
Just like the rest of life, it boils down to the eternal question: "What have you done for me lately?" And 'lately' is a variable set by the question's asker defined as 'since the last time you did something for me.'
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo