OT: Mercury (Was: BBS software for the PDP 11)

[jim stephens]

On 5/23/2017 5:56 PM, William Sudbrink via cctalk wrote:
>   Mercury
> "bouncing around" in her body for almost a year before she finally passed.
> It also "went through" the back of her hand without making some awful
> lesion.  1.3 grams?!  I've always gone with the mental crutch that a paper
> clip weighs about 1/2 gram.  So almost three paper clips "slipped" into her
> body.  Wow.
Useful to note this is not metallic mercury.  It was dimethyl mercury, 
which meant that the methyl radical tagged on the mercury was very 
friendly with the material on the gloves she wore, and with her skin and 
dragged the heavy metal rapidly to her blood stream. And eventually to 
lots of places and killed her.

Metallic mercury isn't anything you want to ingest, but it won't go thru 
your skin unless it has some other compound to drag it, or unless you 
are very unlucky and jam it into an open wound.

Thanks
Jim