Aluminum =/= aluminium

When I was a college student at the University of Aberdeen (I spent my junior year from Wabash overseas in Scotland, doncha know) I was admonished by one of my professors for misspelling the element aluminum. 

See, he didn't know I was an American, and I didn't know - at the time - that the Brits spelled aluminum with an extra i - aluminium.

So, just why do we spell that element differently than they do?

For a few years now I've been telling a story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) changing the name because it sounded better in their advertising back in the 1880's.

The story that Michael Quinion tells in his book about the etymology of words and phrases in the English language is somewhat similar to that but isn't quite the same.

Check out the story in his book - or on Google Books here.

Extracting gold from computer parts

I hope it goes without saying but, "do not try this at home."

I'd read somewhere that the process of 'mining' gold from electronic waste was - at this point in time - more profitable than actual mining from the ground.

After watching these two videos in which NileRed tried to recover gold from electronic scrap, I'm not sure how I feel about the veracity of that statement.