Things that surprised fivemack
Jan. 13th, 2010 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Should I be more surprised that you can buy light-weight hiking mugs made out of titanium, or that there are two sellers on Amazon of mugs branded as 'titanium' with the first entry in their description reading 'made out of porcelain' ? 'Titanium' appears to be a marketing term meaning 'shiny and slightly brown'.
There appears to be a gap in the market for people who want cutlery made of titanium (because who would not want a titanium spoon?) which isn't irredeemably ugly.
There appears to be a gap in the market for people who want cutlery made of titanium (because who would not want a titanium spoon?) which isn't irredeemably ugly.
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Date: 2010-01-13 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-13 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-13 06:10 pm (UTC)It's actually a lousy beer mug; too conductive, too much surface area from all the detailing. So your beer warms up far too fast. On the other hand, that might be a selling point in England :-).
A good part of the joke is that it doesn't have a handle. If you want a handle, you attach an AR-15 carrying handle to the rail system.
You can also attach various optical sighting devices to the rail system. They call them "beer goggles".
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Date: 2010-01-14 10:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 10:22 am (UTC)It's clearly too late for the heavy-rare-earths trade, China's already announced substantial export restrictions and I suspect the prices are speculatively enormous.
I'd have thought palladium was the obvious candidate, it's about the oddest metal that's traded and it has substantial chemical use. It's already bouncing up after a bubble in 2000, but I'm not sure how to get hold of it in decent bulk: buying a futures contract and insist on physical delivery might work, but a futures contract is for 100 troy ounces at £260 per ounce.
A lot cheaper than Aldrich's £250 per 4.8 grams of 0.5mm Pd wire - I imagine you might be able to borrow money to buy it and then pay the interest by selling off scraps to the chemistry department, though that requires owning tools for manipulating palladium - but not a very convenient scale to invest on.
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Date: 2010-01-14 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 10:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-15 12:25 am (UTC)