Tree hugging gone mad

[Andrew Gabriel]

I wonder what happens if you try standing in a bath of mercury (assuming you won't sink far enough for your feet to reach the bottom)?

[Mary Fisher]

It's taken a long time to work!

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

And their technicians and lab workers in many other industries!

Quite.

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

You can't. Your centre of gravity would make you fall over :-)

Mary

[Roger]

The message from [e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) contains these words:

Theoretically possible to stand upright. I think you would sink perhaps to somewhere about knee level but maintaining balance would be extremely hard. Ever tried to balance on a unfirm clump of grass in a quaking bog? I imagine mercury would bee far far worse.

[Julian]

Hyped out of proportion? I've had a gob full of mercury amalgam for the last

40 years.....

Julian.

[Tony Williams]

Is that because punt-3.mail.demon.net is holding 15,590 emails, for cucumber.demon.co.uk? :(

[Andrew Gabriel]

[e-mail] and some older mailboxes I used to use got around 1600 spams/day when I last measured it a couple of years ago. I stopped downloading the mailboxes I haven't used for ages, to cut my spam filtering load down, so they just timeout on demon (looks like they account for around 500/day from the figure you gave, which I don't need to scan any more). andrew@... is still downloaded, but then scanned against a whitelist which discards 99.8% of it. I have also done an experimental (manual) whitelisting against Subject: fields I've posted to usenet, and I notice I am getting occasional direct emails genuinely related to those articles, usually including in the quoted part my signature block with the "email address is not usable" ;-)

Demon isn't really my ISP for years now. I keep it just for a few other mailboxes, and the very occasional the dialup (like about once a year;-), but mostly because I've never got around to cancelling it.

[Dave Liquorice]

In mercury much lower than knee level as that is about how far you can get into the Dead Sea before you start to float, well fall over actually as you can't maintain your balance.

Mercury has a density of 13,579kg/m^3, a 14 stone person (88kg) will only displace 1.4 gallons of Mercury. So I reckon that'll be somewhere just above ankle height, both feet in the Hg.

Mercury is very dense, lead will float on Mercury. Lead only weighs

11,340kg/m^3...

[Clive George]

How fat are your feet? If your 14st person is 6' tall, and has the mass evenly distributed top to bottom, it comes out at about 6" deep (just under) - ie yes, somewhere around ankle height. But for most people (and especially skinny ones like me), the legs are rather smaller in volume than the trunk + head, so you'd get rather further in...

cheers, clive

[Richard Tobin]

The vapour pressure from abraded amalgam is about 1000 times lower than from liquid mercury, if I interpreted the pages I found correctly.

-- Richard

[Richard Tobin]

Much the same as happens when you try to float an empty bottle upright in water.

-- Richard

[Mogga]

But cremation is responsible for lots of mercury release. Is it very expensive to install filters to stop it getting out (I assume its distasteful to pull people's teeth out before cremating them)

[Andrew Gabriel]

Also, after 40 years, you will only have the silver left in the fillings. The mercury will have mostly left the amalgam and is to be found in other parts of your body (that which hasn't completely left the body), but it is believed remains quite harmless.

[Owain]

I don't see why it would be more distasteful than pulling out pacemakers etc.

Google this group for the tasteless but excruciatingly funny joke about the corpse in a blue suit and the corpse in a black suit.

Owain

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Still worthwhile marking them. Some numpty might think they'd look good in a candelabra. Not that the said numpty would know or care about energy rating...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Tell that to victorian hatters.

[Roger]

The message from "Dave Liquorice" contains these words:

I think you have got that rather wrong. What is the specific gravity of a saturated salt solution?

Just done a little experiment. One foot immersed in a bucket full of water, depth 9". Foot removed and bucket topped up to the brim again with marginally under 3 pints of water. So for this 12 stone (in normal clothes) weakling who should, pro rata, displace 1.2 gallons of Hg would only displace 0.75 gallons in sinking 9" deep. I reckon my lower calf plus foot would displace significantly more than the remainder of my lower leg so I will be sticking to my estimate of knee deep.

Thank you but I was already aware of the approximate figures for the relative density of mercury and lead. What I didn't know was the figure for the Dead Sea but a quick google suggests it is 1.166.

[PJ]

That is what was puzzling me. Scientists used liquid mercury on a daily for many years with apparently little or no damage.

The text book examples of the hazardous effect of mercury always mentioned hatters or cosmetic make up compounds.

Chemistry teachers would frequently demonstrate the reduction of mecuric oxide heated on a carbon block using a blowpipe and a bunsen flame. This would presumably produce large amounts of mercury vapour as well as the liquid form.

[<me9]

A friend worked in a lab (originally used by the inventor of the incandescant lamp) in which there was a mercury still. The vapours caused him time off with mercury poisoning, and the end of the use of the still in the lab.