Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/08
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:34 AM 9/8/00 -0700, Chuck Albertson wrote: >The stuff rots your brain, especially kids' brains---take a look at the >back-of-the-book photos in Minimata for examples. If mercury is still being >used in flourescent lights, it's probably due to a lack of alternative >materials at the moment (or the political clout of the flourescent light >manufacturers). There are alternatives to its use in batts, however, which >is why it can and should be banned in them. In all of the contaminated >landfill cases I've been involved in the past 10 years, mercury is one the >most common (and persistent) contaminant in most of them, and it's generally >put down to discarded batts in household waste. > >Chuck Albertson >Seattle, Wash. Aa Ha! This explains why I am like I am. I played with mercury by the hours as a kid. We coated all of out coins, giving them that slick glossy silver look. Cool! I made a mercury barometer as my science project in high school. I still have the pound or two of mercury I used as the well. Still in the same container with a hole in the top for the glass tube to stick through. I guess I won't drink it though. I've always wondered why the many many tens of thousands of kids that grew up in the hundreds of years before the EPA, who played with metallic (liquid) mercury and grew up to be CEO's Scientists, Business moguls, etc, never had a rotten brain problem? Perhaps it is the form, pure liquid Hg vs a particular mercury compound ingested, that caused the Minimata problem. Jim Brick, ASMP Senior Scientist Agilent Technologies Imaging Electronics Division jim_brick@agilent.com