From Aluminium to Anime.

[bladespark]

I have been wiki surfing, and I ended up taking such a bizarre turn that I decided to go back and trace my path though the various articles. So, come with me on a journey through wiki weirdness.

We begin with a link I was presented in #freespace: The Hall-Heroult Process, and from there we quite naturally move on to Aluminium. Further curiosity about metals leads from that directly to Gold, naturally enough, and curiosity about gold-bearing minerals with weird names led me to click on Stibnite, which looks totally awesome, go see! I then went on to check out Antimony, just because I've always liked the name, but had no idea what the stuff was. Turns out that it is, among other things, highly toxic, a lot like Arsenic. Did you know that arsenic used to be used as a coloring agent in Sweets? I didn't, but I do now. Well, I like sweets, and for some reason I felt like reading up on Marzipan, because that stuff is awesome. They make little vegetables out of it! Super-realistic candy veggies, how awesome is that? Well, I'd never quite gotten the distinction between sweet and Bitter almonds, so I went to look. A List of edible seeds looked intersting, so I looked at that. I was surprised to find that the seeds of the Monkey Puzzle Tree are edible, though I wasn't surprised to see that it was a Living fossil. (I took a side trip there and looked at every example of living fossils. There are some weird things in there.) Fossils in general are pretty neat. And so are "false fossils" like Agate, that have patterns you could swear were fossilized plants, but are actually just minerals behaving interestingly. I've owned a number of agates in my life, which means I have something on common with the Persian Magi, who apparently prized the stones. And while you may think of the fantasy magus, or the three from the Christmas story, apparently Magi were also followers of Zoroaster. His whole life is disputed, including where he lived, but the religion he founded was popular in the Sassanian Empire, which was a particular dynasty of the Persian Empire. (You tired of this yet?) The Persian Empire, of course, was once home to the original Aryan race, of Nazi fame, though the Aryans, like the Swastika, don't really belong to the Nazis, they got stolen and defamed. Hitler probably got the idea to swipe the swastika from the Thule Society, a weird little group of mystic supremacists who turn up, interestingly enough, in a Full Metal Alchemist movie.

And that's the point at which I scratched my head and looked back at where I'd been. From chemistry to anime, by way of poisons, candies, fossils, and nazis.

I love wikipedia.

Comments

[bobkat357.livejournal.com]

Bitter almounds smell like they ar burnt and cool site I am certified in Haz Mat disposil thanks for shareing

[duke-otterland.livejournal.com]

The swastika is also a Native American symbol...

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Yep, I know! (Well, after reading the whole swastika article I do.) It's interesting how many cultures have come up with that symbol.

[jtbeckett.livejournal.com]

i thought it was a mirror image of that symbol.

[silveradept]

There's a game that revolves around precisely what you just did. It spins a person out into the Wikipedia desert to a page, and they have to find their way back to a target page only by clicking on the links in the articles.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

That's rather awesome.

[silveradept]

Also a good example of the Small World phenomenon, which you can wiki to learn a few good things about social and other networks that have special properties.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

*grin* It's the Six degrees of Kevin Bacon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon) thing.

[silveradept]

Precisely, except that it expands well beyond Kevin Bacon. The Internet itself, as vast as it is, requires at maximum 18 or 19 hops, I think (or at the time that the study was conducted on it, or something) to get from one page to another. Mind you, doing it in that way requires an almost godly intuition or a top-down view that can see and chart the fastest path.

With any one of us as an endnode in a small world setting, we could all be six degrees or less apart from anyone. Convention attendance could be a bridge between a lot of people in the fandom worlds, from fans to celebrities, and such.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) (And with LiveJournal, as I found out myself firsthand, it gets positively cramped.)

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) Heh. *is reminded of a concept in a book: a medallion (probably--can't quite remember), an antinomy set in antimony*