Ok, time to 'fess up.... back in the 60's when I was in grammar school (high school) we had chemistry lessons last thing on a friday afternoon. Now in those days in the UK we were still on the 'old money' and our copper pennies were about an inch in diameter. We also had a coin made of nickel called a half crown - worth 2 shillings and 6 pence - which was the same diameter as a penny. Now guess what some of us lads sometimes did on a friday afternoon before we caught the service bus home - yup, you got it, we mercury plated some pennies and when the harrassed bus conductor came down the bus for our fares, pushing his way through and being jostled by a horde of kids, he would be handed one of the plated pennies. More often than not, he would just glance at it, put it in his bag and issue the ticket along with the change for half a crown. I know now that it was a rotten thing to do, but in those days when many of our families were poor, it helped us buy the latest Elvis record which would be played in the common room at school .... Funny thing is, even though we dunked the pennies in Mercuric Chloride and then rubbed the mercury plating with our fingers to dull it down a bit, I still see some of the other lads who did it far more often than me and I haven't heard of any of them suffering any long-term effects.....
Ian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
