Note: The names and places have been changed to protect the innocent.
Not often am I called upon for my "expertise." Two days ago I received an email from a good friend, Tritium, saying that her mother, Chromosome, had inherited some coins when a distant relative had died. Fortunately for all involved, Tritium's instincts to not clean the coins won out and none were harmed. Since there were some foreign coins in the mix, she inquired about reference books where she could look up possible values. The most important book to start off with when getting into coin collecting is the venerable Red Book for US issues and after a touch of research decided that the Charlton Canadian guide would work for coins from our northerly neighbors. I was also able to recommend a number of websites including NGC's new online coin encyclopedia that is a wealth of freely available information.
Yesterday she sent me a spreadsheet with the common coins by year and mint mark. Scientists have some crazy good organizational skills.
A few hours ago I finished downloading a 205 MB zip file with pictures of some of the coins and tokens. There are some really neat things in there including a tax token from Alabama, some transit tokens and some nice 19th century type coins. One curiosity that popped up was an 1859 cent. This was the first year of the Indian Head design and was the only year that didn't feature a shield in the wreath on the back. There was also an 1856-O Seated Liberty dime. I must admit I am always a sucker for the old southern mints. Most people alive today are familiar with the Philadelphia, Denver and San Fransisco Mints (and perhaps West Point, depending).
In any case, I am hoping to be able to get a good inventory of the coins prepared to facilitate the sale of any of these coins and I am excited to have this opportunity. As I mentioned previously, I've never done this before. :-)
I'll write more later as things progress.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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3 comments:
I'm a fan of Tritium.
However, I am wondering if she has kids, should she name them Helium-3 and Electron?
Just a thought.
Yes, that is a good start but you can't forget the third child: Anti-electron neutrino.
Physics puns on a coin blog = priceless.
Did I ever tell you two that I gave a Physical Chemistry homework problem that involved tritium? It was pretty awesome actually. Somehow my students didn't like it as much as I did. I guess that's because they had to solve it, and it wasn't trivial. :-)
Here it is for your enjoyment:
In Spider-man 2, Dr. Octavius (DocOc) is attempting to solve the world’s energy problems by creating a fusion device. He needs a quantity of tritium to make this device work, and he claims that there’s a very limited quantity of this substance on earth. His quest for this rare tritium (which apparently looks like a metallic icosahedron of some sort) leads to significant hijinks in the rest of the movie.
In reality, tritium (T) is not nearly so rare nor metallic. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen which has 2 neutrons and occurs naturally on earth. Tritium can also be man-made, and is used in a number of everyday applications. Because tritium spontaneously undergoes radioactive decay, it is used in conjunction with phosphors which emit light when the electrons from the decay hit the phosphors.
Inspired by Spider-man 2 (but knowing a little more about science than Dr. Octavius, since you have taken Chem 260), you and two of your classmates, Sally and Fred, decide to develop and market an emergency light source utilizing this property of tritium. However, you are concerned that your devices will become less effective over time and will need to be replaced too frequently to make them marketable. So, you run some tests and gather some data. You decide to focus on using HTO (like water, but with one T atom replacing one of the H atoms) in your devices. You divide up the work and gather the following data over 3 years time.
****data table not included here****
After the three years have passed, you meet together to analyze your data. Sally claims that her data shows that the radioactive decay of tritium is a zeroth order reaction, and Fred claims his data shows that the reaction is a second order reaction.
a) What does the data as a whole show the order of the reaction to be? (Note, you will want to use a program like Excel to produce any plots you may need, and to fit the data with equations.) What is the rate constant of the reaction at 25o C?
b) What is the half life of the decay reaction of your solution?
Then there were parts c) through e) as well....
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