Aluminum

A-lu-min-i-um
- People always argue that -num isn't a legitimate way for the name of an element to end, but I never see you guys talking about Platinium.
  
  All words are made up and language isn't real
  
  Then we also need to talk about Sodum, Potassum, Magnesum, Plutonum, Uranum, Cadmum, Chromum, Titanum and a bunch more. Why should Aluminum be the outlier?
  
  Because platinum is also a concept. Nobody has gotten an aluminum record, or an aluminum medal. Some metals have ascended beyond mere utility into superficiality. Aluminium isn't there yet.
- Pronounced aluminyum
  
  Halloumi, yummy.

Team aluminum all the way. A higher up where I work is obsessed with stainless steel, he gets these monstrous heavy duty tables made out of SS that hold objects 1/3 of their weight. Makes lab rearranging a nightmare lol.
- STEEL IS AN ALLOY, YOU PHILISTINE
  
  The actual aluminium that people work with in actual real life are also alloys.
- Aluminum is where it's at, and where it is, is everywhere.
  Your cans? Aluminum. Your car? Mostly aluminum. Old wiring, you better believe that's aluminum. Your fucking phone screen is aluminum, sand paper is aluminum, half the birth stones are all aluminum let's fucking goooo baybee
  
  Most cars are still steel. Source I work on cars in New England. So much rust, even on the ones with aluminum bodies, at least wherever it can touch a dissimilar metal and becomes a battery.
  And crucially the important parts that keep it from exploding (cylinder liners) and save you in a crash (crumple and bumper cores) are almost all steel. Because it deforms better with simpler engineering.
  See also iron brakes in most cars hardened steel bearings everywhere.
  
  It's alumina. Which is aluminium oxide.
- If you really want to stop the stainless steel obsession, you could start cleaning the benches with bleach and not rinsing again afterwards. The corrosion will set in quickly.
  Aluminum will stain, but it won't start rusting.
  
  I'll just get a spray bottle of mercury and fuck your aluminium assface right up.

Two punches for calling it Aluminium
- Us Americans are too excited about making stuff with our Uh-loo-min-um that we just skip pronouncing some of the vowels
  
  Guy that named it called it Aluminum
  Weirdo types that decided they were in charge of naming things decided to name it Aluminium so it "matched" the likes of other metals like titanium, iridium, etc
  
  'MINUM!
- IKR I'm so glad I can pronounce Aluminum the right way.

Mistborn moment
- Aluminum is F grade allomantic material.
  
  unless you need to block the allomancy

Always been more of an iridium man myself
- Are you dense?
  
  Not as bad as those osmium-heads, plus we've got sparkle and color!
- I prefer all my farm tools and weapons to be made out of iridium personally, but that’s just me

I can't think of many things you encounter every day that just use straight iron. Only alloys that use iron
Meanwhile, you'll use very pure aluminum all the time
- You as a human use pure iron. But non-animate objects, yeah mostly alloys
  
  Uh, I hate to break it to you, but literally all the iron in the human body is either part of a protein or bound to other molecules. It's not an alloy per se, but it isn't exactly pure iron
- Sounds like aluminum is a loner and iron plays well with others. I'd bet there is still more iron encountered every day than aluminum even if the aluminum is pure and the iron is alloyed.
  
  Pure virgin aluminium vs chad alloyed iron
  
  I was super confused when I read "loaner", I thought you meant loaning as in like borrowing. But then I realized you meant "loner". Lol
- Pure aluminium is only used when you need to have very little reactivity.
  General construction steel has >98% weight iron. Around the same as most aluminium alloys.
  
  Really now? I thought most steel had way more carbon & chromium/nickel/manganese than that. I guess I underestimate how little is needed to make iron no longer mushy.
- sounds like a good argument for iron.
- Perhaps so, but one might argue that human tech relies more on iron than any other metal - because of its magnetic properties. We need iron to generate and manipulate electricity.

dwarf fortress taught me that aluminum is basically mithril
- That's because the only way to get aluminum, historically, was to find nuggets of it. The process for extracting it from bauxite wasn't invented until the mid to late 1800s. This is reflected in Dwarf Fortress, as aluminum metal has the same value as platinum and bauxite is a near-worthless construction material.
  
  I've never played that game but that's so cool

Love a good ferromagnetic metal but how about that electric conductivity of copper
- I'm a tungsten alloy man myself. Although it's not nearly as flexible as some other metals, god damn is it strong.

Non drinkable metals are just lame. You cannot even make a good cocktail without Mercury or Gallium.
- Every metal is drinkable as a hot soup

He's right, though. I can't think of a metal more versatile than aluminium
- Titanium perhaps - but that is more different to get.
- Pity it's been suggested it's a cumulative neurotoxin that contributes to Alzheimer's disease. That's the one thing I don't like about aluminium.

I saw something the other day where a dude talking about a car they were fixing up said they used aluminum for the finish because it looked better than steel and I'm just like "that sounds like how I've heard girls prefer eggshell to off-white. They're the same color!"
- Car guys are just the male equivalent of horse girls
  
  I would have said centaurs were closer

At least we can all agree that diamond is the hardest metal.
- Dragonforce is the hardest metal known to man, it is the metal you use to break diamond
- Pretty sure neutron star matter is the hardest metal buddy
- Found the astronomer.
- I’ve often heard that Diamond Is Unbreakable
  
  but the love it's supposed to represent is not
- I thought carbon fibre was the hardest metal
  
  With the right definition, carbon fibre might indeed be a metal. But it's never the hardest.

Team Stainless Steel all the way. Strong and tougher than that weak aluminum shit.
- ...anodised aluminium beats stainless steel in every application except hardness...
  
  You... aluminum-loving sonofabitch.
  
  Ever heard of hardened steel you aluminum loving mf?
  
  Fatigue resistance
- I prefer some alu in my steel pan. Heats faster.

Soft ass non-magnetic piece of shit aluminum

I still can't believe there's people pronouncing it aluminium instead of aluminium
- You do realise that aluminium (ium) is not spelled the same as aluminum (um) ? It's not a case of the same letters being pronounced two different ways
  
  I'm not the person you're replying to, but actually, I didn't know that; I just went and read up the history of the word and it's pretty interesting (for a nerd like me), so thank you for highlighting this. I admit, it used to confuse/irk me to hear Americans pronouncing aluminium like aluminum, so it pleases me to realise that I was wrong and that Americans are actually just pronouncing aluminum like aluminum.
  I think I didn't realise this in part because apparently aluminium is generally used in American scientific writing. This is interesting to me because many journals style guidelines demand American spellings of words (My mind blanks of specific examples right now, but I often have to replace s with z when Americanising my writing). I don't know why, but I find it neat to imagine a kinship with a hypothetical American scholar who curses as they "correct" aluminum to aluminium before submitting their paper.
  Edit: I can't believe I literally wrote an example of a word with the relevant s/z thing and didn't notice. Americanise/Americanize
- The same people who presumably fill balloons with helum, want to cut down on sodum in their diet, prevent Iran from refining uranum, power their phones with lithum batteries, and enjoy singing David Guetta's house classic Titanum

Aluminum is the best metal in the world at being a plastic.
- Is this a critique? That's pretty dope
  
  Not at all makes it ideal for a bunch of different applications.
  Vehicle frame is not really one of them.

Can confirm Rust is superior!

Uranium is the one true metal

Don’t get me started on titanium! 🙄
- Titanium is awesome, though. Has similar corrosion properties to aluminum (in that it only oxidizes on the surface), is similar in strength to iron/steel, but is only about 60% of the weight iron. So it's lighter.
  Plus if you mix in molybdenum and I think some nickel, you can have yourself a very long lasting spring that won't sag like steel springs after several years.
  Main downside is it's so expensive compared to iron :(

All the Simpsons fans out there know how great Zinc is.

I just spent 4 hours renaming every instance of "aluminum" into "aluminium" in a bunch of inventor projects. >.>
- Thank you for your service to the objectively superior spelling!
  
  Australian business with australian standards. I wish we had a script for this :(
- Wait, wasn't sh.itjust.works defederated from hexbear? Why can I see your comment?
  
  It appears that you are posting from a shitjustworks instance

Together they are thermite!

Thorium master race.

when you meet a steel is real bicycle guy
- Steel is fucking rad and I do hope to get onto to a plush steel frame one day, but I'm loving my alum lately.
  Most of the weight is not in the frame, it's in the stupid big tyres and suspension (and the fatass on top!)
  Carbon was fun, but so fragile and the lightness really didn't change much (because of the above - the frame was beautifully light but it didn't change the overall weight much) It is very repairable, though, much to my surprise

As a former cyclist, steel is real. I’ve seen aluminum bikes fail (as in, break at the top and down tube)during a ride. Screw your aluminum!
- ...my steel frame split at the welds fourty-five years ago; my bonded aluminum frame has ridden out building fires with nary an issue...
- not to defend Alluminium (bleh), but that's likely a production error, bad hydroforming, bad welds... at least it's not CF!
  
  It was the early 90’s and Raleigh had a line called Technium. The tubes were bonded to the lugs. Not really welded. More pinned and “glued” I guess. The frame broke at either the top or down tube and there went the fork, and my buddy’s face. Screw aluminum. Steel has memory. I found that out the hard way. I’m far from a metallurgist. This is the extent of my elementary teacher brain. And a broken cf seat post is scary.
- having no fatigue limit is a bitch.
  
  While I agree, I do have to clarify that there is a fatigue limit, it's mainly that the limit for steel increases so fast that few people are willing to put in the testing for billions of cycles to model ultra-high cycle fatigue
- Aluminium doesn't get stronger on the welds like steel does, it gets weaker. So if you screw them up, you end up with a two part bike
  
  Weaker or more brittle?
- And now I'm back to looking at steel (and titanium) adventure hardtails...
- I love my steel bike, it's great on the road, on gravel or for a quick grocery shop.
  I'm not gonna win any competition with it but it is honestly such a fun bike.
  And with care it should last forever.

Okay starkiller.

Back in my younger days I joined a flat earth gang. Real fun guys. It was mostly just a dudes hanging out together, talking shit, and doing petty crimes.
One day we come across this dude and he starts going all in on us and how stupid we are. Shows up some stupid video of some nerd debunking us and talking shit to us. Darnell, one of the guys in the group is getting a bit agitated but this dude keeps talking shit to us and calling us dumb. Next thing you know Darnell sucker punches the guy and a couple of the other guys starts wailing on the guy. I joined in too because I wanted to support my friends. The last thing the guy heard was Darnell saying, 'take his ass to the edge'.
- what is this...from? Your mind?
  
  No it's a real story from my youth
  
  I was there too

But it is tungsten that reigns supreme:
All the people here who bought this wireless tungsten cube to admire its surreal heft have precisely the wrong mindset. I, in my exalted wisdom and unbridled ambition, bought this cube to become fully accustomed to the intensity of its density, to make its weight bearable and in fact normal to me, so that all the world around me may fade into a fluffy arena of gravitational inconsequence. And it has worked, to profound success. I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. Big burly manly men who pump iron now seem to me as little children who raise mere aluminum.
I can hardly remember the days before I became a man of tungsten. How distant those days seem now, how burdened by the apparent heaviness of everyday objects. I laugh at the philistines who still operate in a world devoid of tungsten, their shoulders thin and unempowered by the experience of bearing tungsten. Ha, what fools, blissful in their ignorance, anesthetized by their lack of meaningful struggle, devoid of passion.
Nietzsche once said that a man who has a why can bear almost any how. But a man who has a tungsten cube can bear any object less dense, and all this talk of why and how becomes unnecessary.
Schopenhauer once said that every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Tungsten expands the limits of a man’s field of vision by showing him an example of increased density, in comparison to which the everyday objects to which he was formerly accustomed gain a light and airy quality. Who can lament the tragedy of life, when surrounded by such lightweight objects? Who can cry in a world of styrofoam and cushions?
Have you yet understood? This is no ordinary metal. In this metal is the alchemical potential to transform your world, by transforming your expectations. Those who have not yet held the cube in their hands and mouths will not understand, for they still live in a world of normal density, like Plato’s cave dwellers. Those who have opened their mind to the density of tungsten will shift their expectations of weight and density accordingly.
To give this cube a rating of anything less than five stars would be to condemn life itself. Who am I, as a mere mortal, to judge the most compact of all affordable materials? No. I say gratefully to whichever grand being may have created this universe: good job on the tungsten. It sure is dense.
I sit here with my tungsten cube, transcendent above death itself. For insofar as this tungsten cube will last forever, I am in the presence of immortality.
- Is this a copy pasta? If not, it should be
  
  It is

And i hate Tin..
- /sn

Punching strangers in the face can get expensve.

Tesla Cybertruck something something.
- But seriously making the body pannels out of stainless steel and the frame out of aluminum would be a hilarious joke among 2nd year engineering students about what happens when you let the sales people make the specs.
  
  Also, ffs how do you design a car without crumple zones in this day and age?

Doesn't most cheapo aluminum have iron mixed in to make it more affordable? I worked at a machine shop a couple of months and I remember the shitty castings downright having iron bubbles inside them

- Makes a great lightweight dutch oven as well (especially when hard anodised). Non stick, doesn't rust, still distributes and holds heat really well, and about 1/3 of the weight.

Plastic for the win? 😁

If aluminum's so great, why isn't there any lithotrophs that use it?