Have you ever noticed something so silly that you just have to show someone? On the website of the mining lobby group, the Minerals Council of Australia, are a few items from the Periodical Table. The Minerals Council has spotlit three major Australia exports from the Periodic Table: Gold (AU, 79), Uranium (U, 92), and..
. Coal (6, C). Looking at that last one, I think there’s a mistake here, guys.
This was brought to my attention by a tweet from The Australian Institute’s – and she’s right, it’s an extremely embarrassing bit of artistic license, though I suspect the Council isn’t sufficiently embarrassed that they would take it down . We’d be wrong not to note that what they’re talking about here is Carbon (the 6, C on the table), and does derive from the Latin word ‘Coal’. In non-Latin terms, the Periodic Table focuses on individual elements and not composites.
Coal is predominantly from carbon, but hydrogen, sulphur, oxygen, and nitrogen. It’s a bit like saying saliva is pure H2O. It water in it, but it also has a lot of stuff that water.
So what we’re left with is a website with a bunch of things that read in bad faith. If I were to hazard a guess, the Minerals Council has used Coal as a stand-in because the the true name, Carbon, might carry an obviously negative connotation connected all the stories about how , and . We should probably do something about that.
But the Minerals Council isn’t done yet. When clicking through to the coal section, yo.
