asciilifeform: mice belong in mousetrap, yes. but the kitchen remains filthy.
asciilifeform: TLS/SSL bug... hasn?t been found for over 16 years << don't blame the fscking mice...
asciilifeform: (anyone seriously thinking about bidding up Ga should remember that it is a strategic metal - radar sets live and die by GaAs diodes. so anyone who fucks with the supply is liable to Can Also Have Problems)☟︎
asciilifeform: why do any of this - is 'exercise for alert reader' of course.
asciilifeform: if you have two electrodes, put a current through it, while surrounded by electromagnet, it will move x cm up the ring in response to Y amps...
asciilifeform: you could weigh the metal purely electronically
asciilifeform: of course, resistor could be trivially exposed with frequency sweep / bode plot (skin effect on Ga blob != impedence of ordinary resistor)
asciilifeform: but in that case the ampoule could not be full. you must be able to tilt it, to expose electrode (perhaps a scammer simply placed a resistor there)
asciilifeform: that's actually the part that intrigues me - how do we fake gallium
asciilifeform: the only reason no one would even try this crap is the point mentioned earlier (100% of present-day use is industrial, mostly as GaAs semiconductor, fluctuating demand)
asciilifeform: so plenty of simple tests, once you pick a suitable container.
asciilifeform: at any rate, Hg has >2x the density of Ga. and the latter, unlike Hg, won't boil on a gas flame.
asciilifeform: there was something like wood's metal that did 80, i think
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if you can find me a eutectic solder that melts anywhere near 30C (but not liquid at room temp like Hg) i'll buy it right now.
asciilifeform: jurov: and it can stay in the bottle.
asciilifeform: jurov: so it'd be best stored in glass containers..and how do you ascertain it wasn't amalgamated with mercury << there's the beauty. melting point. no way to fake Ga melting point and have anything like the density.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: see kodak/silver relationship for example.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: re: metals: in practice, metals for which demand is almost entirely industrial make poor 'trading sardines'
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: in principle, it would make a pretty good 'low tech testable' precious metal. simply determine melting point.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: why silver is the white metal everyone seems to horde and not gallium << Ga is typically found in bauxite, so it had to wait for cheap Al refinement.
asciilifeform: tbh, i wasn't properly banned from any of them.
asciilifeform: (lw is another reddit clone that makes hn, etc. look sane. inhabited by folks terrified of robo-apocalypse. i was drummed out of lw as a 'future genocidal criminal' for... considering resurrecting doug lenat's 'eurisko.')☟︎
asciilifeform: removing the miscreants from the universe of Things That Matter
asciilifeform: for a turdmeister, wielding the banhammer isn't really satisfying unless he imagines that he's adding heretics to an all-important 'index librorum prohibitorum'
asciilifeform: all i can surmise is, pg would rather not.
asciilifeform: 'reddit' may be a cesspool, but hn is a very special kind of echo hell.
asciilifeform: the interesting thing isn't that pg & co. zap posts they aren't particularly fond of. rather more interesting: the elaborate gymnastics to maintain a pretense of being an uncensored forum.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it's also an inescapable fact of life for idiots who insist on maintaining appearance of 'democracy!' while keeping the signal to noise ratio within some bounds
