Basically, all legal free speech is allowed. We will assist the authorities in dealing with illegal speech. You are each other’s moderators. Have fun. And don’t forget to MAGA at nuclear levels.
Citizen U
Day 19 – POTASSIUM.
OPEN THREAD 20191125
Published
The U Tree 
Okay, then…..
Potassium is K. K is for Kookie, is good enough for……oh, wait……K is for Kalium, its name in neo-Latin.
Neo-Latin is amusing enough to deserve a digression, so….. it seems that scholars between about 1375 and 1900 were frustrated by publishing in a language that nobody had ever heard-of and having their discoveries and observations ignored. “Well,” they reasoned, “the world is largely Catholic, so there must be someone around ‘everywhere that matters’ that speaks Latin.” Mind you, Luther’s 95 theses were supposedly posted on October 31, 1517, so the supposed primacy of Latin in Europe might initially have had some basis. And, given, if some 1642 paper in Slovakian had declared that E=mc^2 and that mass warped space-time, it might not have gotten the attention it deserved.
So they proceeded to invent a bunch of new terms, like ‘Kalium’, to use in pseudo-Latin science papers, that even clerics of the day couldn’t make out. There was a certain Esperanto-like doom hovering over the whole enterprise. Newton published, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” in 1687, when neo-Latin was still in vogue. Maxwell published “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” in 1865, when neo-Latin was dead. While Neo-Latin faded, there was a certain tension as to whether papers in German or English would have greater distribution…..but facility in both languages was widespread. As to the Slovakian Einstein, he could have published in either language, but not Slovakian.
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Nice! The missing puzzle piece of Neo-Latin just makes all that post-Roman Latin make SENSE!!!
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Additional info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Latin .
And….ready to have your mind blown? The whole “Kalium” nonsense…..is because potassium is an alkali metal. An al-kali metal. It’s a construct from Arabic, just like algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, alcove, and alembic.
So the international symbol for Potassium is based on taking one of its characteristics, “alkali”, which is derived from Arabic……then making a fake Latin root out of it — “Kalium” — so you can write chemistry texts in butchered Latin for priests who don’t grok chemistry.
I have a bunch of pre-designed scripts for people I manage on subjects like, “I want you to value and show dedication to this job, but if it is in your top five life priorities, you are a psychopath and I want nothing to do with you” or “computers excel at certain tasks and humans are better at others. It’s always a bad idea to assign each to do the other’s job” or “if you design a workflow that has a ‘department of f***ups’ and a ‘department of fixes’, all of the enterprise’s resources will be sucked into that loop and nothing useful or worthwhile will get done.”
And one of them is, “if you’re trying to explain to someone how to explain something to someone else, you’re doing it wrong.”
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Mmmmmm. So glad I retired! 😉
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I guess anatomy is another branch science with neo-Latin terms. Learning anatomy terms would have been a lot easier if I had known that first.
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The name potassium is similarly a fraud. It’s a pseudo-Latin rendering of “potash”, from which it was originally derived chemically. And potash is just pot ash — what you get when you burn vegetation heating a pot.
Chemically, potassium (which I will now use K for for typing’s sake) is very similar to sodium. In fact, people have long used potassium chloride as part of a substitute for sodium chloride (table salt) [OTOH, it is also used as part of some lethal injection protocols]. It forms gazillions of compounds, is essential to both plants and animals, is one of the three elements listed on fertilizer bags [fertilizers list N-P-K. That’s Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium. A general-purpose landscape fertilizer might be “triple 16” or 16-16-16 for N-P-K. A lawn fertilizer might be 21-0-2, or mostly nitrogen].
If you’re a chemist, you might see it in its actual metal form — which can easily be cut with a knife and oxidises rapidly when exposed to air. When flamed, it appears violet.
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And, following our Dear Leader, I have to do isotopes…..
Three natural ones — 39, 40, and 41. That’s at 93%, trace, and 7% respectively. Even though just a trace, K40 is the most common radioisotope in most human bodies….unless you live downwind from Oak Ridge, Fukushima, or Chernobyl.
As noted below in the Argon thread, there’s a weird inversion in the prevalence of argon and potassium isotopes that makes the average atomic weight seem out of sequence.
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The K-40 radioactivity bit leads to a lot of in-jokes, like the “banana equivalent dose” of radiation (ridiculous because the body flushes extra potassium it doesn’t need, unlike such crowd pleasers as polonium and plutonium, which the body retains even though it emphatically needs neither).
I’ve heard tell of trucks full of bananas tripping radiation detectors at customs stations (utterly unconfirmed by me; it may be an urban legend).
Apparently all of the argon in our atmosphere (almost one percent) is actually K-40 that has already decayed. With a billion year half-life, working backwards there was originally more than 20 times as much K-40 in the earth’s crust as there is today–the >95% that’s not around any more has decayed away.
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Potassium helps alleviate high blood pressure, assisting the kidneys from removing salt via urine and relaxing the blood cell wall.
Eat a banana, drink your orange juice.
I tried planting bananas one year……… big mistake.
https://www.webmd.com/diet/foods-rich-in-potassium#1
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I ❤ Potassium ! 😀
so do these….
Gardening Tip : if you want to harvest 'maters like those, toss in a few of these….
…the next time you plant yr tomatoes.
whole bananas, overly-ripe bananas, or even just the banana peels.
just push them down into the earth around the tomato roots.
🙂
and watch what happens !
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How To Plant Tomatoes With Banana Peels
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/plant-tomatoes-banana-peels-26200.html
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We used to have a bunch of cymbidium orchids — you can grow them outside in Silicon Valley. One trick I picked up over the years is to take a banana peel, cut into 1″ squares, and let dry. Then use one in the orchid bark when potting cymbidiums.
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I didn’t know that ! great tip…thanks ! 🙂
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A-Damn-Shit Waffles On Impeachment and Dem Debates Tank…Pastor Marty ! 😀
latest !
(above emphasis and hubris, mine) 🙂
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I have to take a potassium pill every morning with my water pill or I get really bad cramps.
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And you need oxygen to live.
Between the two, you are OK.
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Poor child.
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They have lost their minds.
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Progressivism has no introspection.
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Note who is doing the questioning…
SWALWELL.
Is this the “lying to congress” that got a jury to determine Mr. Stone needs to spend 50 years in prison? I wonder what is going to happen on appeal?
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Yeah, this is BS. There but for the grace of God go I. Why? Because I WANT to say that I’ve never deleted a tweet – but who knows – maybe in the very beginning I did delete one. Might have just been a spelling change, or a tipped graphic – doesn’t matter – I could be WRONG.
But seriously – there are a lot of Dems who are in it DEEP, and FAR WORSE THAN STONE!!!
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Is it still today yet?
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T3
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follow-up to your reply to my post the other day.
Enjoy…
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Thank you.
Excellent illustration of the concept.
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