Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• My four-year-old niece Julie is working on a pair of roller skates...built from the Lego set we gave her for Christmas. Somewhere her engineer grandfather is smiling.
• Stay up too late and damage your genes. You cannot win by shorting sleep. Somebody, somewhere may be able to survive on five hours a night. It almost certainly isn't you. (Thanks to

Comments

"rare earths"

[tceisele]

As much as I like the FFC-Cambridge process for making titanium, I think that The Economist is overselling its benefits quite a lot.

The problem with titanium is that even small amounts of oxygen dissolved in the metal make it brittle and unworkable, and this process generates a titanium powder that still contains a lot of oxygen. It also does not lend itself to removing iron impurities from the feedstock, the way the existing process does. They are therefore not avoiding a lot of the expensive purification steps. I expect the process will be somewhat cheaper than the Kroll process, but 10x cheaper? I don't think so.

And the "conversion of the oxide to the metal" stage is *not* the primary cost driver for Tantalum. The big problem with Tantalum is that it is *rare*, and does not tend to form concentrated ores.

They are also kind of sloppy in their terminology. Rare earths are specifically the elements in the Lanthanide series, which emphatically does not include Ti or Ta.

Re: "rare earths"

[jeff_duntemann]

Well, that's a bummer. The Economist is usually a little more accurate than that, even in their oddball articles like "A Rough Guide to Hell" a few issues ago.

[shsilver]

jan died at 12:54 this morning after a lengthy battle with prostate cancer.

The last time I saw him was at Chicon 7, where he emceed the masquerade.

[beamjockey]

Whence comes your fondness for ytterbium?

[jeff_duntemann]

It's a rare-earth metal with a peculiar name, and (more to the point) it's the major constituent of the room-temperature superconductor alloy used to generate fractal fields in my Hilbert stardrive, as used in The Cunning Blood and the Drumlins saga. I was considering praseodymium for awhile, but it just didn't sound as peculiar.