Grrl Power #1449 – The Danbury Oreo Shake
I know what we’re all thinking. If we could eat metal, we’d all like to try Gallium. For the few of you who weren’t thinking that, and wondering why the rest of us were, it’s because Gallium’s melting point is 85.5°F (29.7°C). So you could keep it in the fridge, probably in the cheese drawer, then pop some in your mouth, and it starts to warm up, then it gets all melty and you could suck on it like a hard candy. Yes, I know Cesium melts at 83.2°F (28.5°C), but Gallium just sounds like it would taste better than Cesium, am I right? Although… I do hope Cesium has its place in the spice rack of metal eating species, because I want Cesium Salads to be a thing.
I thought drinking Mercury would be odd because metals conduct heat really well, so it would feel like a cold drink even if it was heated up quite a bit, but I looked it up, and it’s a terrible conductor of heat. So good news, I guess you could make Mercury coffee and it would stay hot, though I suspect very few foods are Mercury soluble. So you’d probably wind up with a bunch of coffee grit floating on top of a mug full of hot Mercury.
So Max does have some odd nutritional requirements, but it’s perhaps even odder than 98% of her diet is still just normal human food. Her sense of taste is basically the same as it used to be as well, although it is slightly expanded so the odd elements she craves taste good to her. The fact that she can have an omelet florentine for breakfast, and then shoot out a petajoule of energy before lunch seems like a pretty solid indication that it’s not proteins and complex carbohydrates that powers her power. Though maybe it is, and her body is able to fizz regular food. (By fizz, I mean fission, but it doesn’t sound right to me to say “her body is able to fission regular food.” Like, if you’re talking about fusion, you can fuse two things together, but you have to fission them apart? No, there should be a “fuse” equivalent. So, fizz.) Of course, I have no idea how much nuclear energy is in the average omelet, even one with spinach in it, and non-fissile material is, by my understanding, not easy to chain-react, meaning it would be absurdly energy inefficient to extract all of the fission energy from it, so again, the theory is that Maxima’s, and indeed probably no Super’s power source is regular food.
Okay, the new one will be up today. In a mostly complete form. Or maybe finished. I thought I’d have finished it over the weekend but I stupidly put 5 characters in it, so it slowed down the rendering a lot.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Even if you can eat metals, I wouldn’t recommend eating pure cesium, since it explodes when exposed to water. Even the water vapor in the air can set it off, if I’m not mistaken.
Sounds like the opposite of magnesium
Why does Max say “Don’t just grab my drink”? Harem never grabbed it. Unless it happened off-panel, which would make no sense because she sniffed it first and Max’s reaction should be quicker than letting the sniffing plus human-speed grabbing happen. Also how was Harem getting hurt? Was it the vapors?
But the Axe reference was awesome! XD
She yelled not to sniff it first, and was just saying not to grab it and waft it the vapours
My guess is that when Max yanked it away the rim clipped the tip of Harem’s nose.
Fun fact – older Etch-A-Sketch toys (up to say the 1960s) contained a blob of mercury and some metallic powder, forget which one. You restored a clear screen by turning the thing upside down and shaking, the mercury spread a thin layer of the powder over the screen. If you have one of these toys find a SAFE way of disposing of it, preferably by handing it over to a recognized chemical waste disposal facility (most cities have one somewhere) since they tend to leak. More recent ones substituted a ball bearing to spread the powder but that didn’t work nearly as well, eventually the company went to a completely different system.
Some other sources of mercury include mercury barometers (a couple of kilos per barometer) and the big power-handling mercury switches in coin-fed electricity meters. She doesn’t have to eat thermometers, and remembering how difficult it was to extract mercury from broken thermometers – I used to be an educational lab technician – for safe disposal that’s probably a good thing for her.
I also found out exactly what gold looks like if exposed to tiny amounts of mercury in that job – I inherited a gold watch and wore it to work, and a couple of days after getting it had to set up a mercury column barometer for a physics lesson. A drop got on the watch, leaving the metal looking grey – if I’d seen it without knowing the cause I would have assumed that it was gold-plated and the plating was wearing off. Cost me about £30 (a lot of money in the 1970s) to get it cleaned off. So the Grimtooth thing might work if you could release a small amount of mercury vapour rather than liquid.
Finally, Iain M Banks has a fun scene in one of his Culture novels where someone throws a gold coin into a stream of mercury and it floats and stays golden – I was at an SF con just after it came out and got to be the guy that told him why it wouldn’t actually work.
“someone throws a gold coin into a stream of mercury and it floats and stays golden”
Never mind whether it absorbs mercury, it won’t float. Gold is about half again as dense as mercury, so it would sink pretty fast.
If the coin were iron or steel it would definitely float. Gold? No.
Maxima must have used to get jitters near lighthouses… yes lighthouse keepers would go mad specifically because of the massive mercury baths the lights float on. Mercury is dense.
You do not want to eat Cesium Salad, Dave. It will blow your mouth up. Violently. Gallium is probably safe in very small doses but I wouldn’t advise you to just go and eat some.
As for the fission energy, yeah – turns out it’s not just inefficient to extract fission energy from less dense atoms, it’s actually a net loss of energy.
Max is forgetting things have weight (again – call back to comic #329).
For most people, steel/iron (~7.8g/cc) is their normal metric of “this is something heavy”, lead (~11.4g/cc) is “this is *REALLY* heavy”, and mercury (~13.5g/cc) is “What the fuck is in this container?”
Mercury’s not the densest material of course (Osmium tops out at 22.6 g/cc, but that’s pretty darn rare to come across. Tungsten and Gold at 19.3g/cc are more likely to be encountered, but also usually not in large quantities), but as “heavy” doesn’t usually slosh about, mercury is definitely one of the weirdest sensations to handle a container of.
(Although, in fairness to her, I guess she is usually around a lot of people with super-strength – particularly so people like Stalwart and Anvil whose powers have some degree of inertial/kinetic damping).
Ethanol is a neurotoxin too. Which is what I thought of first.
BTW, many “analog” thermometers these days use gallium, because it melt at around 30’C, which is very handy for something used to measure body temperature.
A person who subjectively has lived 4 times longer then everyone else around her has got to love the person who is so random they still surprise them. Harem loves being around Sydney so much.
Maybe you could grind up the zinc and mix it into milk like chocolate milk mix or protein powder?