A very tired student is trying their best.

Cooking Jam  -  Teija Lehto, 2016

Finnish,b.1965-

Marguerite Perey is one of the greatest radiochemists to ever live, and Francium is such a bullshit element that only an absolute master could identify and analyze it.

The short-lived intermediate actinide chain isotopes are mostly bullshit elements for a lot of the same reasons Francium is. Five of them (Radium, Radon, Astatine, Actinium, and Protactinium) are so scarce in nature and so ferociously radioactive that all of their names literally mean “unstable or radioactive element” because at the time of their discovery that was the only thing known about them. Isolating and identifying these bullshit elements demanded a total technical mastery of the cutting edge chemical and radiological analysis techniques in their time, as well as performing a tremendous amount of brutal physical labor. Preparing these extreme trace elements for study required processing thousands of pounds of raw uranium and thorium ores, often exposing the researchers and their assistants to high doses of radiation, just to obtain the extremely radioactive milligram-scale quantities of the intermediate isotopes they wished to study.

To even have the skills to identify Francium, Perey had to first spend years mastering the separation of transactinide decay products from raw mixed ore at the Radium Institute with her mentor and another true master in the field, Marie Skłodowska-Curie. Her work in Curie’s lab focused on the isolation and analysis of another previously discovered bullshit decay product, the obviously-named Actinium. Actinium occurs in high-grade natural uranium ores at a rate of 0.2 mg Ac/1000 kg ore, a concentration of 0.0000002%wt, so isolating enough of it to study required the painstaking and precise process of dissolving and refining thousands of tons of increasingly radioactive metals in powerful and dangerous solvents.

Upon isolation of a sample of Actinium (specifically Actinium mixed into a Lanthanum carrier) , Perey and the Curies would frantically study the element as its already intense radioactivity multiplied while even shorter-lived isotopes of Thorium, Radium, Radon, Polonium, and others grew in to the sample, obscuring its characteristics and endangering the researchers.

The decay of Actinium should have only initially produced beta radiation from its decay into Thorium-227, which in turn undergoes alpha decay into Radium-223. The days-long lifetime of Thorium-227 means that after a fairly short period of time, the Actinium sample will develop a significant amount of alpha radiation on its own. But Perey was skilled enough and fast enough to isolate and measure her samples before this process could happen, and what she found was an unexplained early spike in alpha radiation from some other very scarce very active alpha source, something that must have been decaying directly from the Actinium in minuscule quantities.

After analyzing several samples to make sure these results were reliable, Perey was confident she had discovered the elusive element 87, and asked Jean Perrin (her supervisor at the lab) to submit her findings for publication. At the time, she was a lab assistant and unable to publish papers, and did not get a degree until 1946, seven years later. She named the new element Francium, after her home country and the nation that sponsored her research.

While Perey was investigating the properties of Actinium, her mentor Marie Curie developed serious anemia and had to withdraw from lab work. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934, after years of continuous exposure to extreme radiation that destroyed her bone marrow and left her body unable to produce new blood cells. Perey discovered Francium five years later.

The dangers of working with highly radioactive elements were not well understood in the early era of radiochemistry, but the experiences of the early radiochemists left a huge impact on those that followed, and Perey championed studies of the effects of radiation and devised new protection methods for researchers throughout her long career. Though she was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize, she never won it, and her contributions and talent have been largely forgotten outside of the nuclear chemistry community.

The level of skill and care required to discover an element that is so immensely bullshit as Francium is staggering, and the numbers involved are unimaginable. The labs Perey and the Curies worked in were left unused for decades until their destruction in 1981, due to the intense radioactivity from sub-microgram quantities of these highly active elements contaminating the room. It’s likely that Perey never observed more than a nanogram of Francium during her lifetime studying it, and no quantity large enough to observe its bulk quantities has ever been assembled.

Aramis: What would we even say?

D'Artagnan: The truth.

Portaui lacrimis madidus te, nostra catella,

     Quod feci lustris laetior ante tribus.

Ergo mihi, Patrice, iam non dabis oscula mille

     Nec poteris collo grata cubare meo.

Tristis marmorea posui te sede merentem

     Et iunxi semper manib(us) ipse meis

Morib(us) argutis hominem simulare paratam,

     Perdidimus quales hei mihi delicias.

Tu, dulcis Patrice, nostras attingere mensas

    Consueras, gremio poscere blanda cibos,

Lambere tu calicem lingua rapiente solebas,

     Quem tibi saepe meae sustinuere manus,

Accipere et lassum cauda gaudente frequenter

And here’s my translation:

Wet with tears I have carried you, our little (female) dog, just as I did in happier times fifteen years earlier (lit. “three periods of five years).  For myself, Patrice, now you will not give me a thousand kisses nor will you be able to lie lovingly around/against my neck.  I have sorrowfully placed you, merit-worthy, in a marble tomb and I have joined you always to myself in death, as by your cleverness you matched a human.  Alas, we lost such pleasures for myself!  You, sweet Patrice, were accustomed to join us at our table, to beg charmingly for food (while sitting in our) laps.  You were in the habit of greedily licking our cups with your tongue, which my hands often held for you.  Frequently and joyfully (you) receive a weary one with your (wagging) tail...

he was a dirt-speckled white tall stocky arab gelding with absurdly long haunches and very dark quizzical eyes. he was very interested in new people and new objects and utterly terrified of anything that he couldn’t automatically define. he had very pronounced withers that would jam right up into your goddamn crotch when you were riding him bareback, and he had the worst, bumpiest, most broken-laundry-machine of a gait that would jar the teeth from your skull right as you were losing your virginity. 

he was the world’s largest dog. he would wander over without fail to come over and say hi and then he would slowly and sedately lick you all over your hands and arms without using his teeth once. the man. loved. to lick things. you offered him something to eat and he would ever so delicately pick it up with his front lip, deposit it dexterously in his mouth, then gently chew. he never bit or kicked a person in his entire life. he didn’t mind being sat on while he wandered around and grazed, and he was so tall and broad that you could sit on him backwards and lay forward with your arms folded on the big black-spotted white of his butt like he was a couch.

he loved having his feet trimmed. he would always be so interested in the man working with his feet, and he would lick them on the arms and they never knew how to deal with it. we got a lot of comments like “This is the lickiest damn horse I ever saw” and also “please god he’s leaning on me make him stop.” 

he’d trip over himself every four seconds, and while he’d amble like a lanky sedan chair on the way out on a trip, on the way back you’d have to keep your elbows yanked back to your sides and your biceps straining as you kept his head glued to his chest and kept him from going faster and faster. he had this amazing lunatic bursts of insane energy when the situation called for it, and while he wasn’t particularly fast, the mere sight of that much poorly aligned and desperately out-of-proportion horsemeat attempting to fling itself through the sound barrier was enough to make you want to sit down for a minute.

he became desperately unhappy once his lifelong partner-in-horse would leave  while someone took her out on a ride alone and he’d stand in the farthest mile corner of the six miles of pasture and scream his head off until she came back. his sweat always smelled more acrid and sour than hers did, and he always foamed in big greenish smears. he loved being brushed until his hair fluffed out gleaming white, and while hoses terrified him into emotional outbursts, he very much loved to swim, and stand in the shallows and churn the water while jerking his head up and down in dogged delight.

on hot summer days he would lay down in the softest most nibbled to the quick part of the pasture and sleep for hours in the sunshine with the breath wheezing in and out his mouth and his legs stretched out. 

he absolutely had to walk in front of his horse partner at all times. 

he didn’t like dandelion flowers. he liked eating hollyhocks and thistle flowers, and he destroyed my mother’s lilac bush by literally walking over it until it was on his undercarriage and scratching back and forth with a look of complete and total bliss on his long stupid face. 

if you walked up to him in the dark he would walk over, inspect you for food, then breathe on you and keep you company while farting gently. if you were taking a nap in the grass he’d walk over and lick you mournfully on your face while farting gently. if you were riding him and he saw a leaf that looked at him wrong he would explode in seven different directions at once and yank your arms out of their sockets, excitedly farting the entire time. 

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.

publisher: I've been looking into tumblr, have you thought of using Blaze to promote your book?

me: NO

publisher: But it seems like an efficient way to get this in front of more eyes-

me: people on tumblr hate Blaze.

publisher: There is no algorithm and you can't pay to promote a post? I don't understand how anyone advertises anything on tumblr.

me: That's the best part. They don't. They can't.

(trying to make him understand that we do not control the attention. We just have to show something shiny and gay enough and if people are interested, they'll reblog.)

This is Cosmos, my publisher's dog.

He barks at my publisher's phone notifications. So every time a book is sold, Cosmos barks.

It's been days.

I think you guys would love to know that when you buy a book, a dog barks in Vancouver, Canada.