katt, migrating 🌟 🌈 @starkatt@awoo.space

Consider: instead of getting the tail of our choice surgically or otherwise rapidly installed, it's grown in over the course of a year or two. Kinda like tits for estrogen-taking trans folk. Ever day it grows and fills in a little more. Every day, you're a little more self-actualized :)

@Felthry :nod: right, but it's not nearly as effective as a separate liquid or paste flux :)

@Felthry Yeah, about as strong as steel with the weight of aluminum. Which is *pretty great*, but it's not the super-material that a lot of public consciousness seems to think it is.

@Felthry Jewelry solders are different than electrical solders! Lead-free solders are garbage for electronics but standard for jewelry. With a torch and flux the higher melt temp and lower wettability aren't an issue, and being higher in silver content I think makes tin whiskers not a thing.

@Felthry what bugs me is how overrated titanium is. Yeah it can do some really cool stuff (lovely thin-layer oxide colors!) but in absolute terms it's not actually stronger than a good steel. Magnesium is where my heart's at for light structural metals.

@Felthry it makes me so happy that "transparent aluminum" (sapphire) is literally a consumer-accessible engineering material these days.

@Felthry There's something about shaping silver that's indescribably wonderful. The malleability and ductility are *just right* and it takes solder really well.

@Felthry ALUMINUM IS HECKING MAGIC.

@Felthry I've mostly worked with silver in a jewelry context. I know the tarnishing was hastened by sulfur, but I didn't realize it was actually forming silver sulfide.

Now that I actually think about it, it makes sense. You can oxidize silver if you heat it too much for too long, and that creates a nasty purple color that's hard to get out, unlike yellowish tarnishing.

@Felthry (Silver is pretty wonderful too, though it's a shame about the oxidization.)

@Felthry gosh it makes me really happy to find another fan of copper :)

And if you haven't heard of Things I Won't Work With, it's an (infrequently updated) blog by a research chemist on substances frightening enough that he doesn't want to be in the same lab as them. A common thread is compounds that would *really* prefer to be nitrogen gas and will energetically turn into such if given the slightest opportunity.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-with

BTW if you enjoy rocketry history or the Things I Won't Work With blog, I highly recommend the book /Ignition!/

It's an informal history of the development of rocketry propellants. Contains explosions and a whole lot of frightening chemistry.

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf

I think it's really cool that our current understanding of lighting physics is "we probably know the basic mechanism but there's still all kinds of weird shit we're trying to untangle."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UZb07imNLU

@Felthry One thing I've noticed is that the residential copper wire I use at work comes in a few slightly different colors. I'm guessing it's loose controls on purity from recyclers :)

@Felthry :D Today I learned!

Shoutout to that time a Gemini astronaut smuggled a corned beef sandwich aboard the flight https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/time-when-astronaut-smuggled-corned-beef-sandwich-space-180954749/