Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[periodiccompletionist]

Round 1, Side 3, Match 1:

Lithium (Li) vs. Xenon (Xe)

Lithium

Xenon

[siegesquirrel42]

Lithium (3) is an alkali metal, situated just below hydrogen on the table. It’s the least dense metal thanks to its low atomic number, and owing to its status as an alkali metal, it’s highly reactive, so much so that it will combust in air or water and must be stored in a vacuum, an inert liquid or a noble gas. It can be found in various minerals, but nowadays is more usually isolated from other compounds by electrolysis. Its main use, as we’re probably all familiar with, is in the omnipresent lithium-ion battery. It also has a wide variety of other applications, including lubrication and heat-resistant glass and ceramics.

Xenon (54) should in theory be altogether the opposite of lithium, as it’s a noble gas and thus by definition non-reactive. And yet, in spite of this, scientists have somehow figured out how to make a few chemical compounds that incorporate it. I don’t think any of them are useful, but it’s something. Incidentally, when you run an electric current through xenon, it glows purple. That’s a point in favor, I like purple.

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[godly-feh-edits]

(Mod Toto) Tsukumo Sana for a Vtuber collab I was part of! 😊✨

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[foone]

Friendly reminder for any other people on the autism spectrum:

It's not recommended to offer to kill someone's dad, especially if you're talking to a stranger

[thoughtfuldragon]

may I please have more context?

[foone]

Sometimes dads are terrible and should die, and you can console people by offering to rid them of this troublesome parent, but you should be friends with the person before making the offer

[tranarchistscum]

how the fuck are we supposed to make friends if not through gestures of patricide?

[foone]

Unknown. I'll provide updates if I ever figure it out

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[dinosaurguts]

happy birthday, curiosity

click for better quality

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[periodiccompletionist]

Round 1, Side 2, Match 16:

Neptunium (Np) vs. Rhodium (Rh)

Neptunium

Rhodium

[siegesquirrel42]

Neptunium (93) is the middle child of the actinides. The lowest-numbered synthetic element, it sits right in between uranium and plutonium, as the planetary naming scheme indicates, and so it’s naturally overshadowed by them. It has no commercial uses, and while studies have shown that you probably could make a bomb out of it if you really wanted to, no one has ever seen fit to do so. The only thing anyone really uses neptunium for, besides some very niche scientific purposes, is as a base for making heavier elements - shoot neutrons at it, and you get plutonium.

Rhodium (45) is a silvery gray transition metal, but like many of its kind, it has its ways of standing out. Like its neighbor palladium, it does good work in catalytic converters. It also happens to be highly resistant to corrosion by most means, so it’s not unheard of to find it alloyed with palladium and platinum in corrosion-resistant coatings of various stripes. It’s also very shiny, so you don’t need a great deal of it to get a proper glamorous coating on a semi-cheap piece of jewelry. This is good, since rhodium is actually very expensive in bulk on account of being one of the rarer elements.

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[periodiccompletionist]

Round 1, Side 2, Match 15:

Americium (Am) vs. Erbium (Er)

Americium

Erbium

[siegesquirrel42]

Americium: Okay, I know how we all like to trash America here, but y'all are gonna have to bear with me on this one. Americium is a man-made element, atomic number 95 - right after plutonium. You’d think this would be some kind of mad science superweapon material - and you would be dead fucking wrong. The main use for americium does involve radiation, but not even slightly in that way. Its radioactive properties allow it to produce a small, harmless amount of radiation, just enough to ionize air. If you set up an electrical circuit in a certain way, you can use this to detect when there’s a certain amount of non-air particles in the way. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the operating principle of the common household smoke detector, and it shouldn’t take a genius to understand why that’s important!

Erbium: Oh, boy, it’s these elements. So there’s this town in Sweden called Ytterby, and it has a mine which is famous for how many elements have been discovered there. So they named one of those elements ytterbium.

And then they named another one yttrium. And then terbium. And then erbium. Four elements named after the same village.

I understand the desire to self-promote, but that is genuinely depressing in its unoriginality. So instead of actually talking about this element, I’m going to come up with better names for it. Perhaps “rosarium,” as its salts are an interesting pink color. Or maybe “berzelium,” after Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius, who discovered cerium and selenium and contributed hugely to the science of chemistry, and in whose lab erbium’s discoverer had worked as a student. Or maybe even just “suecium” or something like that, something Swedish that isn’t just the same name four times in a row. God, it’s like US state flags.

(Do I even need to tell you it’s a lanthanide?)

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[periodiccompletionist]

Round 1, Side 2, Match 14:

Lutetium (Lu) vs. Iridium (Ir)

Lutetium

Iridium

[siegesquirrel42]

Lutetium: The 71st element, lutetium is the last of the lanthanides, and is somehow even dumber than most of them. It has few uses and isn’t all that common, and its Wikipedia page reads like a transactinide - by which I mean the most interesting thing about it is the drama over the name. Yeah, that’s right, lutetium was a proxy in international penis-measuring before it was cool. See, it was discovered in 1907, but both a French scientist, Georges Urbain, and an Austrian scientist, Carl von Welsbach, claimed credit for having discovered it independently of one another. Each accused the other of copying their work, and each put forward their own name for the element. Welsbach went for “cassiopium,” whilst Urbain selected “lutetium” in reference to Lutetia, the Latin name for Paris, where he lived and worked. Urbain had released his results first, so his name won. Publish or perish, people! Nevertheless, scientists in the German-speaking world kept calling it cassiopium anyway until the 1950s. IUPAC was founded in 1919, and I can’t help but wonder if this sort of drama was part of why.

Iridium: I have mixed opinions on this element. It’s not as though it isn’t useful - despite its rarity, its immense toughness makes it a great choice for certain niche applications, and you dinosaur enthusiasts may recognize it as the element whose abundance in Late Cretaceous rocks gave rise to the theory that an asteroid impact ended the Mesozoic Era. But iridium is also central to a scientific “controversy” somehow even stupider than lutetium. Back in the day, it was thought iridium was the densest element, and it really is the second-densest. But for decades, people would just cite each other without ever going back to recheck the densities. It wasn’t until the advent of X-ray crystallography in the 80s that we were able to get better measurements, and it turned out we’d been doing osmium dirty this whole time.

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[periodiccompletionist]

Round 1, Side 2, Match 13:

Barium (Ba) vs. Tin (Sn)

Barium

Tin

[siegesquirrel42]

Barium: Element #56, an alkali earth. Very reactive, and thus very difficult to obtain in pure form, as it much prefers to form compounds. Barium sulfate is somewhat infamous for its use as an enema, but the pure metal has its uses as well, such as exploiting its readiness to form chemical bonds to get air out of a vacuum tube. Other barium compounds, meanwhile, are poisonous, and see some use in the pest control business. Barium sulfate is used to make green fireworks. Barium is also a component in certain superconductors - more on those when we get to yttrium.

Tin (50) is, along with gold, silver, copper, iron, lead and mercury, one of the Seven Metals of Antiquity. It is also one of very few elements to have been referenced in a Bill Wurtz video, as “history of the entire world, i guess” naturally brings up the Bronze Age, and bronze, as it so happens, is 7/8ths copper and 1/8th tin. Being common, easily workable and generally non-toxic, tin remains in use to this day, in soldering, protecting iron from rust, the making of glass, and of course the ubiquitous tin can, not to mention another alloy, pewter, which is 85-99% percent tin. (The rest is mostly antimony.) Tin is not what anyone would call a flashy element, but it does good work.

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[periodiccompletionist]

Round 1, Side 2, Match 12:

Europium (Eu) vs. Gadolinium (Gd)

Europium

Gadolinium

[siegesquirrel42]

Gadolinium (64) does not see much use, save in MRIs, shielding for nuclear reactors (it makes a good neutron-absorber and isn’t toxic like lead), and certain alloys. It’s actually pretty good at that last one, though - even as little as 1% can significantly improve the durability and oxidation resistance of iron or chromium.

Europium is element #63, making this the first match of the tourney between two neighboring elements. Unfortunately, they’re two neighboring lanthanides, meaning there’s only so much fun to be had with them. Europium is the most reactive, the least dense and the softest of its group, enough so that it can be cut with a knife. Lanthanides are sometimes also called “rare earths,” but europium is one of the few that actually is pretty rare. Some of its compounds glow, and that constitutes its chief use: if you have an old CRT television, there might be some europium in it, used to produce the red part of the RGB.

[Nothing is Cringe. Everything is Permitted.]

[periodiccompletionist]

Round 1, Side 2, Match 11:

Uranium (U) vs. Lead (Pb)

Uranium

Lead

Matchup of... (checks notes) fucking kill you

[siegesquirrel42]

Uranium: By now, we’ve really started getting into the elements everybody knows. Uranium is obviously radioactive, and at atomic number 92, it’s the last element you can find in nature, but it’s hardly too hazardous or too rare to be without its uses. Indeed, US law permits one to own up to 15 pounds of the stuff before needing to get a license, so long as it’s for “educational or industrial use” and isn’t the more radioactive “enriched” kind. That being said, I would personally recommend against actually doing this, unless you’re starting an element collection. (And if you are, that’s based and I’d like to see it.)

Lead: Where uranium is the last naturally occurring element, lead (82) is the last stable one. As all those radioactive elements we’ve talked about decay into smaller elements, most of them eventually wind up as lead, which makes it a reasonably common element. While not radioactive, lead is nonetheless hella poisonous, and is nowadays discouraged from most applications. A shame, really, as it’s a very dense and sturdy element that’s been used in all sorts of things over the years. Most famously, lead poisoning may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, as they made their water pipes out of it - Pb stands for plumbum, which is the source of our word plumbing. A few of those pipes are so durable they’re still in use today, although they’ve been mostly phased out since we really started catching wise to the problems with lead in the 60s.