At a nerd party you could be the king geek when you bring in this block containing the exotic metal known as thulium. Unlike the rest of the so-called "rare earths" thulium really is rare at only 0.5 parts per million in the earth's crust. Let that sink in for a minute. Scoop up a million pounds of dirt and in all of it there's only a hamburger's worth of thulium mass in there! And with China, which produces over 99% of the metal, recently curtailing its export someday this curiosity might well end up becoming jewelry!

If these facts leave you a little meh-so-what consider also the exceptional difficulty involved in the purification of thulium. One process outlines no fewer than 15,000(!) distillation cycles in order to obtain pure thulium. More modern shortcuts have whittled this down to a bare few hundred. Hopefully this gives one measure of what it takes to get these little bits of metal! 

Alright, here is a big woodsy chunk of 99.95% pure thulium metal so you can show it off at that party and amaze everyone.