Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alejandro1 03 August 2012 03:33PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 09 August 2012 07:48:10PM 3 points [-]

Pure aluminum can be found without reducing it yourself, but it's very rare. You'd have to pluck it out of the interior of a volcano or the bottom of the sea- and so it seems possible that some could end up in the hands of a medieval smith, but very unlikely.

Comment author: gwern 09 August 2012 09:54:59PM 1 point [-]

Oh, I don't know, one would say the same thing about meteoritic iron, and yet there are well documented uses of it.

(Although apparently the Sword of Attila wasn't really meteoritic and I got that from fiction.)