{"id":27,"date":"2008-12-07T23:40:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-07T23:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/whats-in-playa-dust-and-pixie-dust\/"},"modified":"2008-12-07T23:40:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-07T23:40:00","slug":"whats-in-playa-dust-and-pixie-dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/science\/whats-in-playa-dust-and-pixie-dust\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in Playa Dust and Pixie Dust?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pixie_dust\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A friend from my Burning Man village recently sent the following email out to a list I'm on:<\/p>\n

Ever wondered what makes up the playa dust we breathe for a week every year?
 
I had the opportunity to have some sampled by a portable X-Ray Fluorescence Analyzer.  Here's a website if you are interested in this nifty device: http:\/\/www.innovx.com\/<\/a>
 
We tested some dust from 2007 for the following elements:
Pb, Cr, Hg, Cd, Sb, Ti, Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu,Zn, Sn, Ag, As, Se, Ba, Co, Zr, Rb
 
The results:
Zr (Zirconium) 173ppm (that is parts per million)
Sr (Strontium) 270ppm
Rb (Rubidium)  53ppm
Th  (thorium) 14ppm (radioactive, but don't worry, 14ppm is close to normal)
As  (Arsenic) 21ppm
Zn (Zinc)  142ppm
Cu  (Copper) 55ppm
Fe (Iron)  29,400ppm
Mn  (Manganese) 559ppm
 
Make of it what you will!
-Sage<\/div>\n

The rest is probably mostly silicon and oxygen, but someone pointed out that, with the Black Rock Desert<\/a> being a dry lake bed, we're inhaling a fair amount of "fossilized fish shit."<\/p>\n

In any case, I decided to conduct a similar investigation of pixie dust.<\/p>\n

My preliminary results:<\/p>\n

Uo (Unobtainium): 100,000 ppm
PCP (angel dust): 12 ppm
MSG (monosodium glutamate): 888 ppm
RGB (scattered rainbows): 256 ppm
LULZ (laughing gas): 13 ppm
PLUR (Flinstone's Chewable MDMA): 1 ppm
Pixie Stix: 2 ppm
fairy dust: 1 million ppm
glitter: 120 ppm
bass nectar: 140 bpm
Truffula Tree pollen: 49 ppm
playa dust (see above for breakdown): 50,000 ppm
midi-chlorians: stfu ppm
Schwartz: 2 ppm
Snow Crash: 1010 ppm
Philosopher's stone dust: 10009 ppm
God particles: 42 ppm
tachyons: mpp 212
fractal dust: 4 + 5i ppm
ground unicorn horn: 1 ppm
nanobots: 1024 ppm
menthol Gold Bond: 775 ppm
microscopic black holes: -100 ppm
BS (feces): 300,000 ppm
BPM (Big Pants Matt): 10^-14 ppm
magic and\/or dandruff: the remainder*<\/p>\n

*YPPMMV<\/p>\n

Pixie dust can be radioactive depending on which isotope of Unobtainium we're
dealing with.<\/p>\n

After posting some of my results to the list, my dear friend Hapto<\/a> presented me with a gift. See above. It's a "Dept. of Controlled or Uncanny Substances Official Pixie Dust Distributor" card. w00t! I guess this means I should follow the fourth dust commandment and stop getting high off my own supply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}