dang it, Sarah, you shouldn't've said anything, I thought maybe we could sneak it by without Dylan noticing...
So, I work at fairly well known manufacturer of airborne products, and my favorite thing is to hear people who work here say that gay marriage "just isn't natural". Umm yeah, and creating electronic devices to destroy, monitor or generally remove ourselves from the rest of nature makes us regular Davie Crockets. sigh
Pennies are the most wasteful, of course:
penny 0.023 dollars/cm^3
nickel 0.074
dime 0.294
quarter 0.309
half-dollar 0.316
dollar 0.907
These calculated based on largest diameter. The true density should take into account the rills (the bits cut out to make ridges on the edges of the dime, quarter, and half-dollar), and when you do that, the density of the dime, quarter, and ha'dollar are supposed to be exactly the same as each other, and that's because they were face-value quantities of silver when first minted. The penny and nickel are "tokens" which were minted to be worth less as metal than their face value.
Sources contained herein (note that the overt factual errors were attempts to troll-- it's a bad habit):
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=MPG.17e9cfaa60251e4e989695%40news.seanet.com&oe=UTF-8
I am impressed and appalled. And impressed.
And appalled.
I remember learning in high school chemistry class (albeit in independent study, aka horsing around) that pennies after a certain year would melt easily in a crucible, and ones after that wouldn't.
My chem teacher was less delighted about this discovery, but I'm not sure why he didn't make us clean out the lab equipment properly and did it himself.
Prolly because befor WWII they were made of copper, now they are made of zinc (Which mostly likely has a different melting point).
During high school, I learned that you can put a filthy penny into a packet of hot sauce at Taco Bell and swish it around for a while, and it'll come out quite clean, but with a weird dull finish.
Also, the envelope slitters are only good if they're the hard plastic kind (like most that hold bidniz cards), rather than the softer slightly flexible ones.
John--no, the turning point was, if memory serves, like the mid- to late-80s. (This was in 1990 or so)
Early '80s, as a matter of fact: 1982.
http://tinyurl.com/3dm84 (link forwards to usmint.gov)