"Ophelia" > wrote:

>
>"Joseph Michael Bay" > wrote in message
...
>
> no matter how much yttrium it has.
>>
>> (That's a made up example, by the way. I'm pretty sure nobody
>> needs yttrium in their diet. I just like saying "yttrium").
>
>LOL.. so .. what is it?

There is an obscure small ghost town in scandinavia named Ytterby.
Because ores from near it were studied in a certain era of the age of
chemical discovery, there are FOUR elements named after that obscure
ghost town. The most important attribute of the "lanthanide"
elements is that they are almost entirely the same as each other. If
you discover an element that is essentially identical to the next
element over, then how do you come up with a name for it? For several
of these, letters were dropped from the previous element. Ytterbium.
Yttrium. Terbium. Erbium.

Or something like that. I'm disconnected from the net at the moment
and don't remember my chemistry well enough to look it up. And I'm
not at home to look it up in reference works.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27