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Dear Messers Bosch, Neff, and others.

You know that strip between the oven door and the oven itself, where detritus collects?

You know how you keep making it out of aluminium?

You know how caustic soda corrodes aluminium?

You know what oven cleaner is made of?

You stupid or something?

: j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:

@goatsarah I can’t use oven cleaner in my 1980s era miele. Supposedly the surface is catalytic. All I know is it works great at keeping the junk off.
Sadly, I can’t get new door gaskets, so I’ve got may a couple more years until I need to learn how to vulcanize rubber or something to make new ones

@josephholsten @goatsarah A cerium-based one? How exciting! Cerium is one of those slacker elements when it comes to applications and people always say "self-cleaning ovens" as if that's sufficient justification to occupy a slot in the periodic table. I've known a few folk with self-cleaning ovens and they've never been a cerium catalytic one.

@chiffchaff @goatsarah Not certain. Miele H 806 B2. Looks like it’s a similar process, if not the exact catalyst.

@chiffchaff @josephholsten I think we can cut it some slack when pretend elements like francium
and astatine get slots.

@goatsarah @josephholsten The periodic table is at a wonderful point at the moment when period seven is finished. So it looks lovely.

I definitely think the pope of chemistry needs to say to the elements "okay, we're done" the way kids are dispersed at the end of a party when everyone's getting tired and silly.

(A genuine island of stability would be amazing, and I'd say "game on" if anything happened to have a half-life of >1s, say).

@chiffchaff @josephholsten Isn’t the issue with the island of stability that we have almost certainly passed it, but can’t create the right isotopes because neutrons?

@goatsarah @josephholsten Yes, as I understand it that's right. No way yet of getting enough neutrons in there. If someone manages that, I'll definitely take a grainy photo of that element in a suit and tie and make it Periodic Table employee of the month. At the moment I just feel bad like the way your heart sometimes sinks when a band says "here's some new material" and I know I *should* be enthusiastic.

@sparrowsion @goatsarah @josephholsten It's the ones at Z=114 that I've heard called the island of stability most often, but presumably there are other shells up there somewhere. As a chemist at heart it would be wonderful to make something with an actual ground state g-electron though.

@chiffchaff @goatsarah @josephholsten Wasn’t oganesson supposed to be in the island of stability?

@ajlanes @josephholsten @chiffchaff It may be. The issue is that we can't make transplutonic elements with sensible numbers of neutrons, so can't verify experimentally.