Rare earth metals are found in almost every modern product. The Toyota PRIUS contains about thirty pounds of them and a typical wind turbine contains as much as 500 pounds. China sets the price and China is our only source. If you are concerned about Green Energy and/or American National Defense, this should worry you. Often abbreviated as just “rare earths,” these metals today are found in the world’s strongest permanent magnets, electric motors, loudspeakers, computers, hard disc drives, smartphones, lasers, batteries, camera lenses, catalysts and catalytic converters, wind turbines, smart bombs, drones, guided missiles, the best red, green, and blue phosphors for color TV screens, fiber optics, dental lasers, medical radiation therapy, military infrared lasers, naval sonar, aircraft and aerospace, spark plugs, gas mantles, metal alloys, PET scan detectors, light and fluorescent bulbs, LEDs, microwave filters, MRI contrast agents, strain gauges, welding safety goggles, and many more applications. There
In 1960 as a Princeton graduate student I took a one semester course in Quantum Mechanics from Prof. Donald F. Hornig, who was also the Chairman of the Chemistry Department. I got deeply snowed under in this course, having come from a liberal arts college and possessing a weak background in the kind of mathematics required for understanding concepts such as the Schroedinger Equation. Making matters worse, the chain-smoking Prof. Hornig was extremely high-strung, and seemed to improvise his lectures as he went along. With chalk in the right hand and an eraser in the left, he frequently changed notation in midstream, rubbing out everything on the blackboard to that point. Taking notes was nigh unto impossible. Occasionally during lectures he would light the wrong end of his Kent filter cigarettes, sending a pungent odor into the classroom. “What in the world,” I wondered, “would make this man so nervous?”
Featuring: Palermo, Torta Settevelli, Palermo Harbor, Cape Milazzo, The Aeolian Islands: Vulcano, Lipari, Panarea, and Stromboli; Raquel Romano, Bartolo Usticano, Klaus Doldinger, OceanLabs, “Toots” Thielemans.
The highway sign sucked us right in during our trip in November, 2019. Wow! Water skiers, swimmers, and palm trees — a freshwater paradise amidst the California desert? The wind was blowing at least 40 miles per hour. What a disappointment! I’ve been haunted by the memory of what we witnessed ever since. The Salton Sea, with its 350 square miles, is the largest lake in California but few Californians know about it and fewer still have ever been there. The Salton Sea, once marketed as the “Salton Riviera,” is dying and so is Bombay Beach and all other vacation facilities around the Salton. The Salton Sea was created in 1905-6 by a fluke. The Colorado River was overflowing from the snow melt of an unusually heavy winter, and spilled over into a large valley in California which is hundreds of feet below sea level. Some say it was a
Homo Sapiens had the intelligence, science, and engineering: To run faster and further in any weather than the Cheetah To fly higher and faster than the California Condor and the speed of sound To swim deeper and longer than the Blue Whale To build skyscrapers one hundred times taller than the giraffe To jump higher than the kangaroo high enough to escape the bounds of gravity and land on the moon and distant planets To outpopulate almost every other species of higher mammals What they lacked, unique among all living species was: The common sense to stop fouling their nest. And that was their doom. Jim Sudmeier January 2022
