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Weird & Wonderful Web


deanb
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Loving the classic professor. Also there's £197billion there. Holy fuck. Ouch, two stone a block. That's pretty damn heavy. Also going by todays rates n such, you probably are (over your lifetime of income) worth your weight in gold. Kinda surprised how little gold there is in the world.
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Nice. I've seen some of that video series before... I disagree metals don't smell - steel can smell rather flinty, especially when burned or vaporized. (kinda nice, IMO...) I also made a chainmail t-shirt out of aluminum rings and it smells... metallic, like a metallic taste, for lack of better description. Gold is pretty inert though, so I don't expect much. (Then... a researcher who made plenty of cash making fragrance analogues found smell seems related to a vibrational frequency of molecules, so... who knows what the rules are? I could probably find that - it was on TED talks.)

 

I'm a bit divided when it comes to gold:

 

I like gold the material - it makes good tooth crowns, great conductive plating for contacts, good thermal reflector, nano gold can serve as a catalyst apparently, etc... it's very useful stuff.

 

I hate gold as a commodity - not so much the market itself, just that it's been used for such gaudy displays of wealth and so many people have senselessly lost their lives for it. I almost never wear gold. Sometimes I make an exception for my replica "One Ring" From LotR, but it's really an atoms-thick coating of gold over a core of tungsten carbide...

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That's quite possible, though I wonder at what point you'd consider it "not" the metal... I'd think iron(III) oxide hydroxide (rust) and aluminum oxide are part of the standard package on Earth. When I took welding in high school I wondered if the smells might be things like skin oils burning off, but it really doesn't seem so to me - for one thing you can get the same smell grinding a piece of steel that's already had the surface freshly ground off.

 

I can't say anything about it authoritatively, but "metallic" is definitely a commonly understood sort of smell and taste, even if it only applies to a tiny fraction of a subset of the periodic table. Fairly opposite to "heavy" or "rich," but definitely not quite "tart" or "sour" either, even if it's similar...

 

(edit: To take a tangent of a tangent here... I said steel can smell "flinty" before, but one should definitely not try smelling the "flint" from a lighter, as it's actually ferrocerium and the fumes can have toxic effects.)

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It's likely the compounds, of which gold doesn't form many, you are experiencing. Compounds formed through the combinations of chemicals in your saliva (which has many solvents) or created through high heat of welding/grinding with the gases in the air, notably oxygen. As he noted most other metal elements rather rapidly oxidize and react. One of the most common "metallic" tastes is blood, which is a form of iron oxide.

 

Also don't attempt to eat/chew kitchen foil, especially if you have a filling. Your mouth is acidic enough to form a simple battery and all that entails.

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I agree that something smelling/tasting "metallic" is a very definite sensation, I'm just saying I don't think that's actually caused by the metal itself but rather associated compounds. It's just those compounds are (nearly) always present so as a practical matter it makes little difference.

 

It's like how even though water itself is odorless you can still smell water because of the way the moisture in the air affects the way you smell the other things that are already in the air, like dust, etc. You're not actually really smelling the water itself, but from a practical, day-to-day standpoint it doesn't make any difference.

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