Comment by driggs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by driggs | Hacker News Reader

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Names are NOT just names, unless you believe that all of science should involve rote memorization of arbitrary labels.

Calcite is made of calcium. Magnetite is magnetic. Andesite's type locality is The Andes. Azurite is blue (azure).

Sure, there's lots of minerals, and the damage is already done in that there's a long list of minerals honoring people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minerals_named_after_p...

But this mineral is very special (which is why you're reading an article about it). Couldn't they have thought of some name, even Latin, having to do with the fact that it's the first known mineral from the lower mantle? From the fact that it was trapped in a diamond? That it lasted one brief second? A prefix added to "perovskite" since it's simply another form of that mineral? Or at least if naming it after a person, how about the guy who discovered it given what a cool discovery story this is.

Maybe Ho-Kwang "Dave" Mao deserves honor; give the guy an award. But as far as I can tell from the article, he has nothing to do with this mineral.

I respect your rant, but this ship has sailed long ago. I'm fine with arbitrary names, my pet peeve is names that are actively misleading.

For example oxygen, which isn't actually required to make acids but is required for burning stuff. In some languages its name comes from fire, and that makes so much more sense.

Even worse example is electron having "negative" charge or elementary particles having "spin".

No, I really gotta side with him on this one, it's a huge problem in mathematics. In programming it just becomes annoying as "Joe's Text Editor" gives you something as opposed to "Joe's Polyphasic Maldovian Quirklegag" which gives you almost nothing.

My monophasic Merovingian quirklegag is deeply offended by this.

> Would you also defend my naming of a mineral if I thought the guy from `Revenge of the Nerds` should be honored, and called it boogerite?

Geologists have had names like fukalite, cummingtonite, taconite, fornacite, and dickite since the 19th century so I don't think they'd even notice.

(I already edited my response since what was intended as a joke sounded unintentionally confrontational.)

The fact that there are already bad names doesn't justify creating more bad names. If nothing else, I suppose the terrible names are memorable.

(I took it to be more jovial than confrontational fwiw)

Bad names are all we've got left. There are over four thousand named minerals. How many ways can you say the words "blue" or "magnetic" in an Earthly language before you run out of words like azurite or bluite and start using ridiculous (and confusing) names like azurelite and bluilite? I hope you've got several thousand in mind (Anglicized for academia no less) because color and magnetism are two of the main ways minerals are identified. Just a google image search for the word "blue mineral" returns dozens of results in varying shades of blue, let alone turquoise or "blue-green".

The name serves as a mnemonic, not a diagnostic criteria! My brain is overloaded with emacs keybindings, I can’t memorize any more arbitrary lists!

What can you tell me about Fe₃O₄? _blank stare_

What can you tell me about Magnetite? A ha!

> What can you tell me about Magnetite? A ha!

What about Fe₃Si (suessite)? Fe²⁺Fe³⁺₂S₄ (greigite)? They too are magnetic.

I don't think magnetite is even the only magnetic mineral with Fe₃O₄ and if you want to be precise it should be ferromagnetite, because every thing from Fe₂O₃ (hematite) to FeTiO₃ (ilmenite) are weakly magnetic.

You’ve completely missed the point.

“Seuss” presumably tells you something meaningful about suessite.

“Greig” presumably tells you something meaningful about greigite.

“Dave Mao” doesn’t tell you anything about davemaoite.

I've just had a quick search, and apparently both seussite and greigite are named after people, exactly like davemaoite.

> Suessite is a rare iron silicide mineral with chemical formula: Fe₃Si. The mineral was named after Professor Hans E. Suess.

And:

> Greigite is an iron sulfide mineral with the chemical formula Fe2+ Fe3+ 2S 4. It is the sulfur equivalent of the iron oxide magnetite. [and was] named after the mineralogist and physical chemist Joseph W. Greig.

(From Wikipedia)

> You’ve completely missed the point.

I don't understand your point because it is nonsense: magnetite was named after Magnes [1] and Pliny wrote about him and his discovery two thousand years ago. The most credible alternatives for the etymology of "magnetite" are Magnesia ad Sipylum (Manisa, TY) or Magnesia, GR, all of which existed long before the concepts of ferro- or electro-magnetism were described.

Either way, eurocentrism is the only reason you associate the word "magne-{whatever}" with the physical phenomenon.

Magnes/Manisa/Magnesia => magnetite => more than a millenium of development in physics and language => magnetism => you associating "magnetite" with "magnetic".

All words are made up.

> “Seuss” presumably tells you something meaningful about suessite.

> “Greig” presumably tells you something meaningful about greigite.

Narrator: they don't. They were keywords to search for before making a nonsensical argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnes_the_shepherd

Is my point nonsense, or are you unable to see past your own pedantry?

Sure, if you insist on invoking Pliny The Elder, I'll grant you that magnetite was originally a bad name. And then humans discovered electromagnetism. Now geology students all over the world invoke a word that didn't even exist - which has the same root name as the mineral, owing to the fact that the mineral has that property. It's now a good name. And every modern geology student is thankful, because they think of "magnetism", not the thousand-year-old root of the word "magnetism" which predated our discovery of the physical phenomenon.

I wrote "presumably" in my reply to you above because I don't know or care what seussite is, and was typing on a cell phone at 2AM. The point was the point. If I flipped a boolean bit because you were trying to trick me, then all you've done is prove that those examples are also bad names rather than good names.

Names ought to have meaning, when possible, rather than being arbitrary.

If you still think that point is nonsense, and are unable to understand that argument beyond the details of an example, then you're going to have a long successful career as the guy people regret inviting to their party.

PS: Disagreeing with an argument doesn't make it nonsense.

> azure:

> sky-blue color; pigment or paint made of powdered lapis lazuli," early 14c., from Old French azur, asur, a color name (12c.), from a false separation of Medieval Latin lazur, lazuri (as though the -l- were the French article l'), which comes from Greek lazour, from Persian lajward, from Lajward, a place in Turkestan mentioned by Marco Polo, where the stone was collected.

So there you go. Azure because of where Marco Polo happened to get a blue rock.

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