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.
Oh dear, I wonder how many people in panel 6 knows about Maxima’s dietary requirement and are now putting two and two together…
I would guess the mercury is the dietary requirement of her Wetworks symbiote, along with other heavy metals that would normally be extremely toxic to carbon-based biology. It’s ‘dietary’ requirements involve induced fission leaving behind gold as a ‘waste’ product. Max’s hair and nails are probably gold dialuminide (AuAl₂) which is why they’re purple.
I wonder how much Pepto-Bismol Max goes through. (Bismuth being the most common element on that end of the periodic table people ingest)
“I wonder how much Pepto-Bismol Max goes through.”
Before or after taking charge of ARC-SWAT?
Fun fact: Bismuth is the element with the largest atomic number that has stable isotopes. Anything with more protons in its nucleus is radioactive in all isotopes, but to differing amounts. An average person could hold a 23 kg CANDU fuel bundle of U-238, because its half-life is about the age of the Earth. The Americans tend to use enriched uranium, with more U-235 than found in normal baseline uranium. U-235 has a half-life of about 7 years; it is much more radioactive, and holding a fuel bundle with that stuff for any length can lead to some very interesting cancers.
700 million years, not seven. Other than the typical heavy metal toxicity, U235 is not particularly dangerous as long as it isn’t arranged in a critical or super critical geometry.
U-235 is also pretty stable, with a half-life of 700 million years. You’re probably confusing it with Pu-238 (87 years, used in radiothermal generators).
7 year half-life is INTENSELY radioactive. I got curious what it could be, and there doesn’t seem to be any known isotope that’s 7 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_nuclides_by_half-life
Cobalt-60 is just a little above 5 years, and those Sources are pretty clearly labelled: https://ionactive.co.uk/resource-hub/blog/drop-and-run-radioactive-cobalt-60-co-60-source
This was thought to be true until recently. However, it has now been determined that Bi-209 is only *effectively* stable, having a half-life of 2.01*10^19, or about a billion times the age of the universe.
Am I just forgetting someone? Who is that cat/fox girl in panel 5?
That is Varia after touching Private Ng.
Oops. I misread my reference material, which said the half-life of U-235 is 7.0E8. That is still more radioactive than U-238, but not enough to kill you with weird cancers inside a month. I apologize for any confusion I caused (again).
I wish there were upvotes or something here. Not enough do this and own their mistakes and apologize. It is great and not common enough on the internet.
At least it’s not U-505, that’s an enigma for the ages
Fission not needed. Just Neutron capture. That typically is accompanied by gamma radiation and beta as a neutron flips. The beta might be blocked if the reaction is internal, but Maxima would light up a gamma gun, for sure.
Umm… none?
And no idea what you are getting at
As to those in the panel who know:
Probably General Faulk, as Max’s commanding officer (if that’s him in the white shirt on the balcony).
Maybe Anvil (as Max’s best friend).
Dabbler *might* have figured it out at some point – but I wouldn’t put more than a few bucks on it.
As for those putting 2+2 together: I refuse to speculate.
But I wouldn’t be very surprised if Max was spoken to about sharing classified information when she gets back to Earth.
She probably ought to set up a literal table of elements and sniff each one, in case she’s deficient in something weird.
Doubt it’s anything to do with being deficient in anything, pregnant women get ‘weird’ cravings all the time
…and you don’t think a pregnant woman’s cravings have anything to do with the nutrient needs of a developing fetus?
Sydney, you continue to find new and creative ways to get under Maxima’s metallic impervious skin.
It’s probably part of the “Make MAxima say” bingo thats still ongoing.
Ok, so now both Max and Syd have an opaque container of fluid that no-one else should drink.
Neat! :D
+1 :)
Sydney’s bottle is survivable, even if you would prefer not to.
In Max’s defense, that thermometer’s fluid is red (not silver/black) so it’s a spirit thermometer, not a mercury thermometer.
I’m so early I avoided the deadly neurotoxin. I suppose those heavy cocktails could just be antifreeze and ethanol. What would you call that? The truckstop special.
If you ever have the chance to lift a cup of mercury, you’ll immediately notice it is over 13 times heavier than water. The first try would probably leave the cup on the table, and you contemplating the sudden weakness of your muscles. :)
Well, you’d notice it’s a lot heavier that water. Most people’s proprioception isn’t precise enough to zero in on thirteen.
And most people’s hand-muscles automagically adjust so they would still pick it up the first time (still leave you wondering why it’s heavier than it looks)
I’m guessing that’s why Harem is hovering over Max’s drink instead of moving it. She already knows that moving Max’s arm when she doesn’t want you to (or isn’t aware and consenting) is a vain enterprise.
I wonder if this mercury craving has something to do with her gold skin. Gold does dissolve in mercury. Maybe this counts as “water” to whatever her skin is.
I know her skin likely isn’t actually gold (or not as we know it anyway), but superpowers already laugh at physics and chemistry as we know them.
Over 13… a mug like may contain… let’s say 0,25 liter – you’d expect it to at about 0.3kg and it is more than 3kg. I’d immediately suspect a prank, you know, magnets.
Thats one of its useful properties – i have a vintage plumb bob filled with mercury, and its shocking how fast it “settles” versus a solid one.
I think the mercury in that case is used because it’s heavy but moreso because it’s liquid. The mercury sloshing around steals energy from the plum bob quickly, making it stop jiggling much faster than a solid one. Mercury is not much heavier than lead, so I doubt the weight alone would make a drastic difference.
As a general rule of thumb you get energy fusing atoms lighter than iron and splitting atoms heavier than iron, trying to do the reverse is a net loss of energy. As eggs are mostly hydrocarbons you’d want to fuse them to get energy.
Well, technically energy and matter is all interchangeable. It is just that we mere humans have no way to get energy from matter other than fusing the light ones and fissioning the heavy ones. I have no problem believing that Nth level beings can simply transform matter directly and completely into energy. This would give you truly i9mmense amounts of energy, far more than even a top-level super like Max could use, so the amount of matter actually turned into energy is
probably minuscule.
Sidenote, normally when something belongs to a person this is noted by the possesive s as in “That hat is Johns” with the s at the end of the name indicates ownership. How do you solve that when the name ends either in the letter s or as in the case of Max or Taz a letter with an s sound?
Sidenote to the sidenote, is it an s or a s when discussing the letter?
I like to write correvtly but sometimes grammar is hard.
What I do is if the word ends with an s it’s usually written as s’ with the ‘ taking he place of the ‘second’ s.
This is Tas, and this is Tas’ hat
But apparently, because this is English, it’s a lot more complicated that that.
Also, if the X or Z sounds like an S, then you treat it as an S. ie Max’
That is apparently unless when you say it there is a second S, then it’s Max’s
It’s complicated.
You’re missing some apostrophes. “That hat is John’s.”
As for a name that ends with an S sound, we usually just append an extra S, and the apostrophe indicates a slight break in pronunciation. So “That hat is Max’s” ends up sounding like “That hat is maxes”, though the meaning is usually clear from context.
And since the name of the letter S is pronounced like “ess”, it technically starts with a vowel sound, so it’s an S.
Possessive form is properly written as the word and an s and then an apostrophe, with no spaces at all differentiating the apostrohpe s format.
“Johns’ house” means the house belongs to John.
John’s house means John is the house, somehow?
Precisely backward. “Johns'” house means the house of two or more Johns. If you have just one, it’s “John’s” house, just like it’s Max’s … whatever. The only situation in English usage where the possessive of a singular proper noun (like somebody’s name) is formed by simply appending an apostrophe is for classical names, like “Socrates’ death” or “Jesus’ name”—and there’s no clear rationale for that, other than common usage.
This is almost entirely incorrect. The apostrophe precedes the s in the possessive. The ‘s’ is omitted if the possessor is plural. To say that John is the house you would need to precede ‘house’ with an article, such as ‘the’ or ‘a’.
Eighth comment. I’m slightly disappointed, actually.
Huh. I feel like this is the most insight we’ve ever gotten into what Max’s powers might actually be, precisely, and yet it still doesn’t tell us much. Cool.
Weirdly there are forms of Mercury that are used medicinally.
They can still be toxic, yet may not give of the insanity inducing Toxic Vapours (Mercury was used in making top hats, hence the term “Mad as a Hatter” and the Madhatter from Alice in Wonderland).
Actual metallic mercury is… you don’t want to ingest it under any circumstances, but compared to some of the organomercury compounds that have *utterly tiny* LD50s… (there’s a story about a scientist who got a little bit on her skin, and she knew she was dead, even though there’s no instant effect, once it’s in your system… well, get your will and affairs sorted quickly, because there’s no antidote)
Karen Wetterhahn and methylmercury. Tragic story. That stuff’s not just “a little bit on your skin and you know you’re dead”, it’s “a little bit on the outside of your gloves and you’re spending the next six months dying one neuron at a time”.
The biggest risk from drinking metallic mercury is mechanical damage from the weight. The digestive tract doesn’t absorb it to any significant degree.
That story is even worse: she was wearing gloves, just the wrong gloves (latex instead of nitrile). Drop of dimethyl mercury went right through the glove and the skin. As a molecular biologist, latex gloves are everywhere, you’re mostly protecting the samples from you, not the other way around.
As a child we used to keep a bottle of mercurochrome in the medicine cabinet to put on “ouchies”. It’s no longer allowed in much of the world.
In 5th grade I wanted to demonstrate for the class how a mercury light switch worked. Dad brought me a small amount of mercury from work that I put in a clear vial with two wire punched through the lid and hooked up to a train transformer and a light. By tilting the vial so the wires contacted the glob of mercury I turn the light on and off. Of course some of us put it in our palm and rolled it around. None of us were stupid enough to put it in our mouths, and after the demo I gave it back to my dad to dispose of. But I think now of the… uh… questionable action of giving a few ounces of mercury to a ten year old kid and kind of shudder at the possibilities.
People aren’t always as careful with mercury as they should be. I had a part time job in college one semester doing equipment inventory for the chemistry department. I was given a list of property numbers and a set of keys and told find everything. Being somewhat OCD I went from the tops of shelves to the bottom of the basement. I really had a pretty good time and along with all the property I managed to find several ounces of mercury, usually in old glassware. Looking back, nobody seemed that concerned.
One time I was using a sling psychrometer to measure the humidity, and I was too close to some equipment and clipped it with one of the thermometers. Needless to say, I got a face full of glass and mercury. Fortunately, my mouth was closed and I apparently closed my eyes fast enough, that I didn’t get glass or mercury in either.
Why did she even try it? Being lethal stuff, it seems like a bad idea to just see if she’s immune and hope for the best.
Also, does she go to the toilet? Because her… emissions… shouldn’t go into the general sewage for obvious reasons.
I would guess teen Max accidentally bit and ate the thermometer the doctors were using when she first started peeling, thus giving her her first taste of the stuff.
Uncle Fester did that in an episode of The Addams Family (1965) and the Mercury and the glass was precisely what he required.
“Why did she even try it?”
She came into her powers in her Teens…
Ever heard of Teenage Cravings? Or Pregnant Cravings?
They’re not “sane”… And Conquer All….
Mercury: Liquid at body temperature, with a significant vapor pressure. Not terribly toxic in its metallic form, but organic mercury compounds are hideously toxic and, as she says, insidious. Dimethyl Mercury is the gold standard for a hideous toxin, really. Makes Iocaine powder look easy to detect and safe to handle.
Gallium: Liquid at body temperature, low vapor pressure. Not terribly toxic in metallic form, can cause skin irritation and staining, and intestinal upset if you drink it. By far the safest of the liquid metals, but that’s not to say you should chug it.
Cesium: Liquid at body temperature, extremely volatile, AND violently reactive, would catch fire if exposed to air, and would burn a hole back out of you if you tried drinking it anyway. On the bright side, only toxic in high doses.
Rubidium: Liquid at body temperature if you have a fever. Think of it as expensive Cesium.
Another fun fact about mercury is that Ancient Chinese Medicine said that you could make immortality potion from the stuff. Specifically from mercury sulfide HgS, commonly known as cinnabar. (Not to be confused with Synnibarr.)
Qin Shi Huang is thought to be the first emperor of China to have tried this immortality potion. But not the last. Astoundingly, none of the people who tried to obtain immortality by ingesting cinnabar have survived. You’d think this would have stopped the second person from trying, or the third, or the fourth, etc. but apparently belief in mercury immortality persisted for two millennia despite a track record of 100% failure.
To be fair, that’s no worse of a failure rate than any of other immortality attempts, at least in the long term
On the one hand, yes.
On the other there’s a lot of real medicine (and herbal) that’s pretty persnickity about the right mix, too much is toxic, etc so it’s not entirely unreasonable to think you just need to adjust a few things.
And mercury is CLEARLY something to do with life, at least if you’ve got a prescientific view of the world. It moves around, it’s an actual liquid metal. The European term “quicksilver” is “quick” as in living not as in fast. Point is, people were well aware it was toxic as hell, they just knew of other stuff in their medical lore that was also toxic at the wrong dose and assumed mercury may be similar. Also, most of the people who tried the immortality potions were a) really damn old so they figured why not give it a shot, and b) pretty bonkers anyway.
or Cinnabonn? (or however its spelled. im feeling too lazy to look it up right now….probably one of the few good things about malls these days…)
Gallium has appeared in the movies! One of Bob Hope ones I think. Pirates?
That cartoonish bit where the tea is poisoned and the spoon looks like it was dissolved in acid.
You can actually buy a kit with gallium and a teaspoon mold. $99 plus shipping.
That melting spoon also featured in an episode of Ellery Queen
Cesium also has a huge number of isotopes, only one of which is considered stable. I suspect that most purified cesium is somewhat radioactive.
And even alpha radiation is nasty from something you have ingested.
Definitely not recommended. No Sydney, it’s not spicy in the way that you’re used to.
Don’t believe you need to worry about the toxicity of Cesium: you will be dead anyway from the hole you just created from swallowing it
Obligatory Derek Lowe Article – https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/there-s-toxicity-and-there-s-toxicity
Hmm is that Beth Smith from Rick and Morty?
yep, definitely her
Knew she looked familiar, much thankings to you
Just horse doctoring it up.
Maybe that’s how she maintains her metal skin?
Desantis continues to have no manners at all – and much less skill at dissembling than she thinks.
I worry about the particulars of Maxima’s body chemistry. 0_õ
So just to be clear, is the fighting tournament still going on? Is there more rounds that max is going to fight in?
Yes, I believe there is one more 8v8 semi-final round followed by the 8v8 championship fight. This page is maybe an hour or so after the first elimination round. Time to get to Cora’s ship, swig the healing potion, take a shower, and sit down.
I would want to keep watching, if only to see who Max’s opponents will be in the next round. An event like that would probably have hours of expert analysis and color commentary even if they had only one major match per day.
I’ll have some beryllium Bologna and cesium salami.
I have a strong urge to post Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements.” But I will resist it.
I kinda love that he hated that he’s better-known for his music than his math.
Suddenly, I’m concerned about her… excretions.
Public sewage systems are not capable of dealing with this sort of thing. Unless her body converts 100% of her ‘special milkshake’ into inert… materials, she must be the Biohazard Portapotty Queen of the world.
There is mercury in some of my tooth fillings, but it is still considered safe, well safer than having a hole in my tooth. Hopefully, excess mercury comes out of her in the form of mercury amalgam, which is regularly removed in sewage treatment plants, as opposed to mercury oxide, which is highly soluble and highly toxic.
She may even have special ARCsparq gear in her personal quarters.
Argh! I goofed my chemistry again. Methylmercury is highly soluble and highly toxic. Mercury oxide is slightly soluble in water but highly soluble in strong acids, which makes it quite toxic if eaten by many animals.
Doubt it’s any worse than Sydney’s excretions…
Sparky’s point is exactly correct. Just to add onto it with some relevant nuclear chemistry facts: Mercury (atomic number 80) is past the cutoff for expected fusion vs fission energy. None of its isotopes have really significant excess mass where you’d get a serious amount of energy from fizzing it, certainly not enough to maintain a fission chain reaction. But some synthetic isotopes are unstable and spontaneously break down over time, releasing some energy. Mostly this involves the release of energetic positrons or the capture of electrons (which are absorbed to convert protons to neutrons), and the resulting element that comes out the other end of the reactions is … gold.
Huh.
Yep. Further, one fusion startup, Marathon Fusion, has proposed using the neutrons emitted by fusion to irradiate a mercury isotope (Mg-197) that then decays to a stable isotope of gold (Au-197).
Even weirder, it’s possible to irradiate Au-197 with protons (hydrogen nuclei) or deuterium nuclei to gain a nuclear isomer that emits gamma rays and decays to… Mg-197.
You could handwave that whatever strange physics is containing all that energy is like a fast-breeder reactor. The cravings come when Maxima needs a topup of fuel.
Mercury fulminate can cause a good bang, hence it’s use for many years in detonators and blasting caps, but never as a main explosive. Phased out these days in favor of other compounds that are much more stable.
Cesium is an alkali metal and might be corrosive to human tissues, like sodium or potassium.
Funny you should say that…..
You do realise that we literally run on Sodium and Potassium?
Used to actively maintain the electrochemical potential across the cell membrane to Do Stuff.. Do LOTSA Stuff…
Which happens to include nerve signal propagation, without which… y’know…
As with everything Biology, Paracelsus has a Big Stick, and he’s not afraid to knock some sense into you…
Yes, but not in metallic form.
That’s typically why elemental poisons are poisons: They look enough like an element we use to get used, and are different enough that they don’t work properly.
Then there’s a long list of elements that are toxic in significant amounts, and essential nutrients in very tiny quantities, like selenium.
Consuming metallic sodium or potassium would result in serious injury at best, death at worst.
Ah! Mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.
Fun Fact: Mercury sticks to gold, making it look fake. This is in one of the Grimtooth’s Traps books (Hollow Gold coins filled with Mercury which, when dumped into an adventurer’s money pouch, will leak mercury all over their normal gold and make it look like counterfeit coins.)
Huh, haven’t read that one.
If Grimtooth’s said that, it is likely wrong.
The thing is that mercury *dissolves* gold, and you end up with a solution of the two. If there’s only a little bit of mercury it might still be solid and look fake. If there’s more, you basically end up with mercury that looks weird.
I guess it’s actually an alloy not a solution if it’s solid.
Anyway, mercury-filled coins with gold on the outside very quickly become a mercury soup, no jostling required. This trap won’t work, or at least not without much more complexity.
E.g. an impermeable membrane surrounding the mercury, a jostling sensor, and a needle to puncture the membrane. In each coin. And all these elements are somehow being hidden so the coins look real. Where non-magical stuff is on a medieval level of technology.
Grimtooth’s was always about making traps that look plausible and were funny to read about. I bought and read one of the books when they came out; they were funny.
I sure hope no DM ever put one in a game; it would have been a deal-breaker for me as a player.
I suppose they are in the same league as the rolling boulder and other traps at the start of the first Indiana Jones movie. Don’t think about durability or plausibility, just enjoy the ride.
I love running Grimtooth’s traps as a DM! They are dangerous enough that they can generate a lot of bad vibes if handled poorly, but I like to start with a promise of enormous treasure and a description of a super dangerous dungeon that has killed a giant list of competent adventurers. I try to give clues about what the adventurers were good at and then the players can even be clever and find gaps in their predecessors preparation.
Most roleplay or combat encounters start with a ton of built in “traction” for the players. Things the player can see, inquire about, touch. attack, or otherwise interact with and not suffer horribly for it. Poorly handled traps turn are completely hidden and turn into a saves/checks and taking some damage, which just aren’t in depth encounter and offers no play or counter-play. Simple traps have a role but not as a centerpiece, they can eat away at the morale or resources of a party, make them feel less prepared for some more significant encounter. But a centerpiece trap, like many of Grimtooth’s, need a lot options for their interaction. A good DM will have their player’s options (gear, skills, saves, etc) and use them produce a collection of things the players might try and have a bunch of precomputed DCs. Then when the players are exposed to something anomalous they can all stop and dig into a trap centered encounter and the DM can rapidly ask clarifying questions or let the players know about the checks they would need to make to try things.
For example, Grimtooth had a trap with three deep and dangerous pits block a dungeon tunnel that needed to be jumped over (best to do at low levels before everyone can fly). Each a pit little wider than the last and deep enough to injure, maim, and finally decommission a player. The Grimtooth trick was that there was an invisible wall over the center of the third pit causing jumpers to hit it and fall. A wizard with a fly spell could fly over the pit under the invisible wall, then back up onto the far side but it isn’t obvious to start. If the players know that a world famous long jumper died here they would have cause to question jumping. If they see skeletons at the bottom of the third pit but not the first two that says more. The empty dust covered on the far side of the third pit might indicate centuries without footprints, while the landings between earlier pits has refuse from previous expeditions says even more. I would have jump DCs, a DC/chance for the rogue to kick off the invisible wall back to safety, composition of the walls for climbing gear/pitons, ways out of the pits, and ready in depth description for each piece here and any minor set pieces that I might be using to integrate this into a larger story.
Then it would be on me as a DM to keep up tension. There could be pursuers, an ancient curse that punishes but not prevent backtracking, or maybe they know another less prepared group will try this and die if they don’t succeed. They can turn back but need to weigh that against the unknown risk of going forward. What kinds of climbing, jumping, rope use, magic, or countless other things the players might deploy impacts their options. I would want to make many of those difficult, a few easy, and a very few impossible. I try to provide clues and options that feel plausible in the story and to empower the players to experiment at the edge of their resources and skills. But mostly I make sure that only the most extremely dumb of player actions leads to save-or-die situations and manufacture warnings andone time outs if I misread the situation.
Would that still be a deal-breaker for you? Most of players have enjoyed my trap themed dungeons, but they aren’t for everyone.
So… if Maxima burps or farts she could kill everyone in the room?
Without actually looking up the etymology, I would expect the verb to be fissure
I keep thinking the conventional verb would just be “split”.
One potential “benefit” of harem’s outburst could be people thinking she’s talking about the planet.
Still gets people thinking about Max In Space, but far more local.
Fairly sure everyone in that room know Maxi is off-planet, that’s why they are watching the tournament
With that shocked face Harem could have said: “Freddy is alive?!”
Except at the time this is set, he was.
… Freddy Mercury died in ’91, twenty years before this story is set
D’ohh! I remember Prince and Bowie died in 2016 and conflated Mercury with them
Sad time all around :(
The greats keep dying and we are left with ‘artists’ like Hairy Piles and Sam “What’s my gender today?” Smith
Sabaton, Miracle of Sound, Wind Rose are all very much alive.
Rolling Stones are all still alive as well
Point was, they are still getting old and leaving us with trash like Hairy Piles (which says more about the current generation… or would that be ‘less’ about them?)
And my point was that there are great new music coming out of the bands I mentioned .There were crappy bands back in the day too. Hanson, anybody?
Still amused by Variya enjoying Kitty Time.
THANK YOU. I was trying to figure out who that was
So theoretically we can depower Max if we starve her?
Considering Harem outed Sydney’s vegetarianism in exactly the same way, I’m surprised Max told her… but yeah – don’t drink the ‘kool-aid’.
Oh, and you don’t really want gallium in your kitchen (yes, yes – I know it was just a piece of whimsy), because it will absolutely f*** up any aluminium. Seriously – gallium has been likened to cancer for aluminium. It literally turns the stuff brittle and crumbly. It’s fun to see as a Youtube clip on a Coke can, but considering all the supports and fixtures that are made of aluminium, you really need to play it safe.
We use Gallium as the metal target to generate X-rays at work, much easier to cool liquid than the solid Copper, Silver or Molybdenum which give suitable energies for X-ray diffraction. Cooling a large pool of liquid is much more effective than passing cooling water through a solid target and means less power is needed.
The top-up bottle has a do not use air-freight warning as it will corrode any modern aircraft it might be flown in if it leaks. It is possible to send it by air, but the expense of the necessary spill-safe packaging makes it difficult.
It is also a bugger to clean up if it spills as it basically solidifies on contact with any surface but can be dissolved in, for example iso-propanol.
Your question is a classic E=mc² problem. Assuming a 150g omelette (a pretty average two-egg omelette), 150g * c² = 1.35×10¹⁶ Joules, which is 3.7 terawatt-hours, or roughly 1/3rd of all the electrical energy consumed by the USA in a day.
We run on sodium and potassium ions. Their chemical properties are entirely different from sodium and potassium metal.
In the same way that electric cars run on motors. :) The Na-K pump is how muscles are actuated, but the immediate _energy_ source — the batteries, as it were — is an ATP->ADP cycle, where the phosphate bond removal provides the actual energy.
Entirely inadequate for Max’s attack on the Fel attack target.
You say that, but the measured output of her beam was several hundreds of peta Joules, which is >=2*10^17(I don’t know how Adam does the floating number) and <=10^18 Joules.
This means she just needs to consume 1500g of food, while this's unrealistic in pure omelette consumption for somebody it's believable in a total consumption pattern.(I personally once did this in a single meal)
For that matter, Harem’s self-duplication would require mass/energy equal to about 50 kilograms (guess based on 5’8″ height).
Superpowers might be more channeling energy than generating it.
Assuming it’s completely synthesizing the new bodies, that works out to roughly the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun in a minute. In explosive terms, it’s about 1 gigaton of TNT, or approximately 20 times the yield of Tsar Bomba (the largest human-made explosion).
That said, Dave has waved at the fact that a lot of the “magic” in the comic comes from wormhole-like shenanigans, including concepts like pocket universes and similar (which is kind of key to the hints at a mystery additional body that Harem has in store). So probably not this. :)
I wonder if the mercury content in fish makes them taste better to Maxima. Maybe she’s just constantly munching on swordfish and halibut at Archon HQ.
Also, trying to drink caesium would be a… pretty bad idea.
So Maxima can drink mercury without dieing like a normal person would.
But her dialogue and behavior this page, and her eyes and expression on panel one – she gets tipsy from drinking insidious neurotoxins?
While alcohol hardly fazes her?
Methinks Maxima will win the unlimited class drinking contest – by drinking the competition right under the periodic table!
“I know what we’re all thinking. If we could eat metal, we’d all like to try Gallium.”
No, thank you. Have you *seen* pictures of people holding gallium in their hands? Looks messy as all get out.
The gallium itself? or what’s left of their hands?
Little mention has been made of mercury’s use as a remedy for constipation—take a dose and the body will do anything to expel it. It’s said that archaeologists have been tracking the campsites of Lewis and Clark by the “blue mass pills” they made their personnel take to relieve themselves.
I love the side eye the horse is giving the thermometer.
Worse things. Some places use a cattle prod to get a urine sample. Of course, a side effect of that is that if you come at a horse with a specimen cup, he’ll try to kill you.
It makes sense to a degree, Max’s body was chemically changed, and since her skin is metallic, that she’d desire something soft and flexible to help maintain that. Never mind that in a normal non-mutated Earth creature it’s both a neurotoxin and distorts DNA, her metabolism is completely changed from that fluid she was coated with and swallowed. I suffered from lead poisoning when I was a boy, I developed a stutter and a slur to my speech. Any of the heavier metals can do that, including uranium. My cancer in 2004 was because of that, when they tested my kidney they removed, they found lead that was in there since 1972. Mercury is the same, once it’s in your system, it stays.
So, where is Harem’s Depressurization brand iced tea or Alien Attack root beer? Come to think of it, Cora’s crew would likely have carefully examined Harem’s carry-on for such hazardous materials.
Well, if we want to get into the weeds about it, and the scientists studying Maxima definitely would, the logical place to look for how her system works would be in her urine and feces, and her exhalant.
There’s a good reason doctors take those samples, they give a huge window into what’s happening inside, yes for microbial load, but also for processes that are or aren’t happening inside the body.
If she is fissing her food, that would… be kinda awkward actually, as food is mostly composed of Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon, which *cost* energy to undergo fission, but *release* energy by undergoing fusion.
Hydrogen Fusion is the primary driver of stars, and produces Helium.
Carbon Fusion produces Neon, Sodium, and Magnesium, with by-products of Hydrogen and Helium, Gamma radiation, and free Neutrons. Neon is again a gas, and would be exhaled, but Sodium and Magnesium would be present in other waste.
Oxygen Fusion produces Silicon, Sulfur, Phosphorus, and Magnesium (again), with by-products of Hydrogen, Helium, and Neutrons again, but also Deuterium.
All other elements in food are traces compared to those three, but some of the fusion products feature in higher-order fusions, Helium fuses with itself to produce Beryllium and Carbon, with Carbon to produce more Oxygen, and with Neon to produce more Magnesium and Oxygen.
Silicon Fusion via Photodisintegration is the next step, for super massive stars, with a wide variety of elements being produced: Sulfur, Argon, Cadmium, Titanium, Chromium, Iron, and Nickel, but this process occurs only in extreme conditions, and I would say is… unlikely to be something you want to write into the story here, 3 billion degrees is HOT, even by the standards of stars, and the process burns out stellar cores in mere days, compared to the billions of years it takes to burn through the lower order elements.
So… she should be expelling those elements as waste, depending on how high and order of reactions she is undergoing. Assuming her human parts still need the same basic materials as regular humans, she could in fictional theory use the Oxygen by-products of Neon fusion to metabolize sugars, and thus survive without breathing, so long as she is able to eat.
How Mercury plays into this is… it doesn’t.
Mercury is well beyond the Nickel cutoff for stellar fusion, but isn’t massive enough for energetic Fission, just the old fashioned radioactive decay.
Mercury IS however, denser than Lead, and so could be used as a radiation shield, if it’s being incorporated into her body, since if she’s doing nuclear reactions for power, she’s either radiation-shielded or is emitting lethal doses to everyone around her. And radiation shields need replenishment over time, which would explain her need to consume Mercury.
TLDR: If she’s doing nuclear processes for power, she should be expelling some fun non-toxic elements.
A while back I thought about a high-energy theory that could be called Total Conversion for lack of a better name. Basically the entire mass of atoms gets converted to energy. While this would produce several orders of magnitude more power than even fusion or fission, there are two conditions needed to perform total conversion. {1} You would need a way to trigger matter to basically unravel. This might work with introduction of antimatter, provided that antimatter has positive mass. A better solution would be a catalyst that causes matter to simply destabilize and convert to energy through rapid entropy. {2} You would need a containment method that can withstand all aspects of the process. This means a delivery system immune to your antimatter or entropy catalyst, and a power collection system that can handle the massive output.
My point is, I would suspect that Maxima would get energy for her attacks from a catalyzed entropy total conversion method, rather than a fusion or fission method. It would let her powers draw energy from basically any matter type, without consuming enough material to affect her measurable mass, and without generating hazardous or radioactive byproducts. It would also explain why her body tissues need to be reflective. (Mercury might contribute to that reflective nature.)
The Nth tech orbs could ALSO get energy from catalyzed entropy total matter conversion. In this case the orbs probably store power in capacitors, rather than spending it immediately.