Thursday, March 13, 2008

Thank Gadolinium

Green Thursday TGIT Thank Gadolinium It's ThursdayBet you folks think I made up the word Gadolinium. I did not! it is one of the elements in the periodic table. It's symbol is Gd and it has atomic number 64. Kind of like client number 9 it is a powerful element but going away. It is a rare earth and its big use was in phosphors for tube TVs. This use will go by the way of the buggy whip. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GadoliniumUnfortunately this week I cannot chat for too long as my wife had a full knee replacement surgery. This is a revision to the first full knee replacement as the kind surgeon named Dr. Woolf botched the first one. He thought he was Gadolinium but he was nowhere close and my poor wife is paying the price for his mistakes.Enough about knees let's talk energy and about our friend the lightest metal in the periodic table. before you non chemical type shout aluminum, the lightest metal is Lithium. The Economist had a very useful and complete article on lithium batteries and there hope for improving vehicle efficiency by hybrid drive systems. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789409This article is well worth reading and provides additional information on the research being done to make Lithium Ion batteries nor ignite.Oil prices exceeded $110 a barrel this week and premium gasoline is almost $4 a gallon here in Northern California. The subprime crisis will have all the yuppies driving subcompacts and this is good for the country.Sam Bodman our Energy Secretary has to be the dumbest chemical engineering graduate as he is still on the celulosic ethanol band wagon. At least the Romans had fuel while Nero played his fiddle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeroActually the fiddle was only invented 1,000 years later than the fire in Rome so he was not playing his fiddle he was fiddling the books or something like that. The word of the day is rodomontade a synonym for pomposity and pomposity did not come from Pompeii the other Italian city that suffered a disaster. The governor of the great empire state was a master of rodomontade and the mover of mountains until he hit unlucky number nine.
rodomontade \rod-uh-muhn-TADE; roh-duh-; -TAHD\, noun:Vain boasting; empty bluster; pretentious, bragging speech; rant.
These are rejoinders born out of a need to deflate a balloon filled with what others view as pomposity or rodomontade.-- Corey Mesler, "Dispatch #1: Buying the Bookstore (The Early Days)",
ForeWord, August 2000
The very absurdity of some of his later claims (inventors of jazz, originators of swing) . . . has made him an easy target in a way far beyond anything generated by that other (and in some ways quite similar) master of rodomontade, Jelly Roll Morton.-- Richard M. Sudhalter,
Lost Chords
. . .the me-me-me rodomontade of macho rap.-- Nicholas Barber, "In the very bleak midwinter", Independent, January 7, 1996
But what he said -- that if any official came to his house to requisition his pistol, he'd better shoot straight -- was more rodomontade than a call to arms or hatred.-- William F. Buckley Jr., "What does Clinton have in mind?",
National Review, May 29, 1995
Rodomontade comes from Italian rodomontada, from Rodomonte, a great yet boastful warrior king in Italian epics of the late 15th - early 16th centuries. At root the name means "roller-away of mountains," from the Italian dialect rodare, "to roll away" (from Latin rota, "wheel") + Italian monte, "mountain" (from Latin mons).

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