ScienceNostalgia101

Not sure if this is worth a separate thread or not, but since it involves vinegar and household food / beverage items I figure this is closely-enough related.

I recently threw away a big bag of potatoes (it was originally a big bag of mixed vegetables when I first got it months ago, but I finished everything but the potatoes first) because they were starting to look discoloured. As a precaution, I poured some vinegar onto the section of the fridge the bag had been touching, but then immediately wiped off the vinegar with some tissues. Is a few seconds' worth of soaking in vinegar adequate to disinfect it or would it need to be soaking for longer and/or soaking in something else?

To be fair, it's possible to be okay with infidelity and still care even about someone who gets her needs met elsewhere when you fail to meet them. We have common ancestry with bonobos, after all.

I think stronger evidence that Will's indignation was fake is in the fact that:

A: This is the same guy who has joked about alopecia himself.

B: He laughed until his wife glared at him.

. . .

Anyway, I forgot to consider Looney Tunes (I've actually in multiple debates on other sites invoked it as an example of double standards around cartoony vs. realistic violence; we go easier on content that sugar-coats the consequences of violence than content that bluntly portrays it, when quite frankly it should be the other way around; come to think of it that might be worth making its own thread for) but it's a little at odds with stuff that's often encouraged by parents; and insisted on by assertive parents; like Arthur, or Magic School Bus. In any case, it's pretty obvious that The Simpsons was expressly not intended for children; they just watched it anyway because they assumed everything colourful was meant for them, and parents either couldn't or wouldn't stop them.

In any case, cartoons that are expressly fictitious and play violence for laughs are a tad different from a real-life grown man going unpunished for engaging in real-life violence.

On 4/2/2022 at 1:18 PM, Peterkin said:

What? You mean the schoolchildren of the entire world have never before seen anyone hit anyone else?

And now that they have discovered the joy of slapping, they will indulge it henceforth?

Children's shows usually condemn slapping. (Unless an old lady is slapping Rainbow Dash, in which case it's played for laughs because an old lady is doing it. And also, because she was shoved by Rainbow Dash across the street against her will; albeit on the false premise that she wanted to cross the street; not sure if that makes it self-defense.)

A beloved celebrity slapping a not-as-beloved celebrity (well, at least beforehand) and not only going unprosecuted for it but having multiple public figures imply it's acceptable to use violence over words is going to make teachers' jobs a lot more difficult in the coming days, if not weeks.

Just imagine the scenario. "But Miss! He made a joke about her baldness! If Will Smith can slap people for that, why can't I?"

5 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Who said hitting is an appropriate response to bad taste? I have never condoned loutish behaviour in the school playground or the celebrity playground. But it happens. 

"It happens" is the most meaningless response one could possibly give. What matters is who is at fault.

1 minute ago, beecee said:

I'm not supporting the bias that existed towards gay people in those times...it simply was. The same as I didn't/don't support slavery in the 1800's. No I was not about then.

There were people even back then who knew it was wrong. Does that not, all else held constant, make them better people than most?

5 hours ago, Phi for All said:

I think you're the one missing the point. Chris Rock made a joke about a black woman's hair a decade after he made a documentary about how damaging misconceptions about black women's hair can be to their relationships and self-esteem. He made the goddamn film after his own daughter asked him, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" I think that elevates the situation above "He just made a joke about it". He had all the data at his disposal to make the decision that a joke about a black woman's bald head would be hurtful, but he did it anyway for a laugh. I'll take this same stance if Jon Stewart waits 10 years and then starts making fun of 9/11 first responders.

I mean, if he called a policewoman who responded to the 9/11 scene "G.I. Jane" she might probably take it as a reference to her heroism anyway.

Offense is taken, not given. Plenty of people react to jokes about baldness non-violently.

29 minutes ago, beecee said:

Don't be too sorry matey, I never watch your nonsense anyway, or take any notice of your poor philsophy.

 

Hush your mouth John !!!! Evidence!!! of all the gaul !!! 😅😉

Of course it is! But when was this interview? How long ago? Standards do change over time, mostly for the better. In my day, (50's and 60's) gay people were looked on mostly with scorn. 

And if they were recent interviews, were they conducted at a gay people's gathering? Or in front of an audience with known gay folk? I would raise the excellent "Natalie Wood and Robert Wood" analogy that someone raised earlier. Or if you like, there is a time and a place for everything.

No, there's not. It's either wrong or it isn't. If standards were different in the 1950s and 1960s, the standards were wrong and failing to see how society was wrong is a moral failing. Just as future generations will one day see what we were wrong about.

Anyway, Will's only in his early 50s anyway, so it's not like he was around for either of those decades.

Bit of a misnomer. What I meant was more so whether the heat or other effects of the radioactivity can force a chemical reaction to occur that could start a fire that wouldn't otherwise have started.

I'm not accusing these cartoons of nefarious intentions or insinuating an obligation to realism or anything like that, just more out of curiosity whether it was a reference to anything real and/or coincidentally resembles something real. A lot of Simpsons moments are known to have had more truth to them than initially realized when it comes to things like, let's say, stuff about the legal system, but whether it's similar for the sciences is a distinct question.

15 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

And which famous women come to mind? In all of these examples, the 'people' referred-to are mature males, some of whom are considered sexy because of their shiny heads. The cultural standard, and more to the point in this case, the cinematic image of female beauty tends toward the Botticelli Venus type. Different POV for vanity. Different again, whether it's voluntary baldness or pathological.      

Jada is 50 years old. So let's cut the crap with the "age" angle. It's about male vs. female.

Yeah, baldness can be attractive in a male; supposedly; though it's impossible to prove they're attractive because of said baldness and not because of it. A lot of guys find some women who happen to technically be overweight attractive; does that make cheap shots about a woman's weight fair game too? (Oh wait, guys get cheap shots about their weight all the time; see also Donald Trump.)

An insult to Rob Reiner's baldness is an insult to baldness, and in turn, a de facto insult to Vin Diesel's as well. The only way it isn't also an insult Jada Pinkett Smith's is if the sexes involved are relevant.

But more to the point... why would Rob Reiner be insulted about his baldness, other than because people find it unattractive? You can't have it both ways. If it's attractive, the insult makes no sense. If it's unattractive, then you're attacking them for an involuntary physical trait. If men don't resort to violence over cheap shots at their own baldness, they shouldn't resort to it over cheap shots about their wives' baldness.

42 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

This is the position Chris Rock takes in his documentary about black women's hair, almost exactly. Black women are blamed for damage done to their hair from relaxers and wigs and weaves designed to make their hair more palatable to employers and white society. They often feel guilty about their real hair and what's happened to it. They get blamed (and often blame themselves) for their own condition. I can only imagine someone with alopecia feels much the way you do, and sees the harm done by further misunderstanding.

You're missing the point. Chris Rock didn't smear people with alopecia as being at fault for their own condition. He just made a joke about it. Jokes about type 1 diabetes, as long as they don't spread misinformation, don't bother me near as much as even the most well-meaning ignorance someone takes without doing their due diligence to make sure they're getting it right.

Of course, none of this is cause for violence. The proper place to deal with the spread of misinformation is by refuting it; and if that doesn't work, too bad, so sad, that's the price of living in a civilized society. The proper place to deal with distasteful jokes is by condemning them. If the public doesn't share your condemnation, too bad, so sad, that's the price of living in a civilized society.

13 hours ago, Phi for All said:

And since comedians don't make jokes about type 1 diabetics (though at one time I'm sure they did), your lack of offense is no surprise.  

Bill Maher jokes to Republicans that "you will still have diabetes", and though I think he meant type 2 (he often jokes that Republicans are fat) the problem in my eyes isn't the insensitivity, but the actual harm done, by contributing to a misconception that falsely gets type 1 diabetics blamed for their own condition, contributing to the false perception that we brought this upon ourselves, and in turn, to lack of support for forms of research that could cure this condition already.

But more to the point. Does apolecia cause people to die statistically years younger than everyone else? (Wikipedia says it doesn't affect life expectancy at all.) Does it have any equivalent to sufferers spending every waking moment of every day not being sure if hypoglycemia could get them killed?

The whole thing just seems like a case of vanity. Plenty of people are ridiculed for their bald heads without resorting to violence over it. Rob Reiner comes to mind.

In The Simpsons, Homer attempts to grow a donut to a larger size using the reactor core. In the show, not only does this not work, it causes a fire that apparently spreads up the sides of the cooling tower for some reason.

A: Is fibre-reinforced plastic combustible enough that a fire that started in the reactor could travel up the sides of the cooling tower?

B: Can radioactivity react with any standard donut ingredients to start a fire? Would the fire be started by the radioactivity itself, or by the heat associated with such radioactive materials?

On 3/29/2022 at 8:13 AM, swansont said:

 

It's not a haircut. It's a medical condition called Alopecia and making a joke about it was crass and IMO an example of "punching down"

I wasn't aware that Judd Apatow had medical training that would make his pronouncement have any weight at all.

Sure you can Google these statistics and find this information.

I was hoping some people here had already heard of it. Like, if someone in the physics forum had asked "what is the probability that atoms don't exist" I'd have said "akin to the probability that you could shoot a bullet at a piece of tissue paper and have it fly right back at you" because that's exactly how my professors in my undergraduate years summarized the findings of the gold foil experiment. I was hoping the life sciences had their own analogues to that.

In any case, I am content with the answers thus far. It is possible, if unlikely, therefore Judd Apatow was technically right and therefore those making him out to be wrong were wrong themselves.

. . .

Oh, and Phi For All, as a type 1 diabetic myself, I'm far more offended by things that cause us actual harm than by mere insensitivity.

https://pagesix.com/2022/03/28/judd-apatow-says-will-smith-could-have-killed-chris-rock/

What is the probability that one slap could have caused someone to lose their balance, fall, and hit their head in a life-endangering manner? How does this compare to, let's say, every day risks like the risk of driving, or not-as-everyday risks like the risks of getting hit by lightning when standing outside in a thunderstorm?

On 3/27/2022 at 4:23 PM, swansont said:

Is there a point for looking for realism in cartoons, which exist without having to conform to real-world limitations (other than financial), and looking for realism in parody?

It's more so because said cartoons have piqued my curiosity about very specific aspects of chemistry. Same reason I already have analogous threads for pop cultural depictions of physics and biology; you have a means to discuss these things while the matter is still fresh in your mind from the spark the fictional portrayal created in your mind.

Speaking of which, thanks for the feedback thus far.

I sometimes like to record the sunsets and sunrises, but standing outside next to my camera for the entire duration thereof is tedious, and leaving it outside unattended risks incentivizing my neighbours to steal it. Does anyone here know of any reliable lockable safes made of glass or clear plastics, which would sound an alarm if a would-be thief attempted to break the glass, and/or how to construct such a safe from scratch if need be?

I'm referring to a cool-summer continental climate zone within Canada. That's as specific as I dare get, what with my taste in pop culture also being outlined in these and similar threads.

How close does it have to be to the freezing point for freezing to death or other permanent effects to be a serious risk? A quick Google search suggested keeping the temperature above 60 Fahrenheit in your room while sleeping (a guideline I have gone below on several occasions; now I'm wondering if that's part of why I wake up with nosebleeds and a sore nose so often in the winter) but how much further below are such ill effects only temporary?

Heh, I remember when I was a kid I went to the mini-forest (ie. area of trees surrounded on all sides by actual houses which in turn were surrounded by rural streets; negligible risk of encountering wild animals, except maybe winter birds) in my neighbourhood and tried to fall asleep in my warm coat in the snow in the middle of the day, just to see what it'd be like to wake up outdoors under direct sunlight. I had no idea the cold air would've been harmful in and of itself with or without actually reducing the temperature of the rest of my body. Probably for the best I didn't fall asleep after all. XD

In the meantime, I'm thinking I'll wait until summer. And will definitely make sure I have a net with me when I do.

@Peterkin:

Yeah, I'm probably not going to try it during the summer unless I could find myself a wire mesh or net to keep hornets away, at the very least. What about in the winter months? Would it be (relatively) safer then, what with the worst of the animals being in hibernation? What about on a back patio or something like that? Would the winter birds presumably leave me alone, or would I need a net to keep them away too?

@Swasont:

I just figured they must've found something at least somewhat soft to sleep on. Or at least softer than a wooden surface, if nothing else...

I figure if I have one for biology and another for physics, I may as well round out the high school science trifecta!

In "The Simpsons," a recurring chemistry gimmick is to feature sulfuric acid, and to portray it as green, instead of the H₂O lookalike it is in real life.

I presume the speed with which the acid would eat metal and destroy clothing is exaggerated to save time; and that it would in real life do so more slowly than that; but what of the "green" thing? I know the chemical itself is colourless as are solutions thereof in water with no impurities, but is there supposed to be a kernel of truth to the "green" thing? Are there impurities that are often deliberately added to it to make it easier to tell apart from other liquids, and/or created accidentally as a result of the manufacturing or bottling processes? Or just some misunderstanding of the term "green vitriol"? (Which I'm aware is a sulfate salt, not the acid itself, but the latter part of the name could be easily mistaken for the acid by those less familiar with either...)

This George Kouronis clip features him boating on a lake of 0.13pH sulfuric acid (Johnny Knoxville, eat your heart out!) and the lake appears to have a turquoise-ish cyan-ish colour. Not quite green, but close enough that I wonder if previous depictions of Kawah Ijen might have led to the association of sulfuric acid with "green" in the popular imagination. As well, it also makes me wonder what led to that turquoise-ish cyan-ish colour in the first place; could it have been yellow light reflected by the sulfur and blue light from the sky refracted together in the lake?

Ah, good to know. Thanks again!

What about bats? I know they're usually nocturnal, but is there a risk of a stray rabid bat being out during the day and biting? Would anyone happen to know how significant such a risk would be?

Not sure if this should count under a movie thread, but rather than having a separate one for movies than video games, I figured I might as well put video game cutscenes under the same category. In Wind Waker, Link falls asleep on a wooden surface. Outdoors. At the top of a lookout post.

When I watched this I thought 3 things.

1: Heh, "4:20".

2: How doable is this? I know in China the beds are pretty hard, but I would think even hard beds have a little more give than a literal wooden surface.

3: How safe is this? He does this outside, in summer, on an island full of birds. What's stopping those birds; or any other animal that can make it to the top of that lookout post; from biting him and in so doing transferring some of their diseases to his bloodstream? What's stopping a hornet or wasp from stinging him?

3 hours ago, Genady said:

Here you are. I'm sure there are more.

Word Value Calculator - Sum of Letters Numbers - Online Numerology (dcode.fr)

 

Cool! Thanks!

As for programming, it's been years since I've done any, and though I'm familiar with do loops and if statements I don't recall how to convert letters and numbers back and forth to each other. I just had a feeling from what I recalled of computer science in college that something like this was doable.

Thanks again!

So I found this on Reddit, and naturally, find it tedious to try to work out by hand or by calculator various parodical examples like the kinds presently being output by the comments section. I was wondering if anyone here is familiar with any computer program that would allow you to type in a letter-to-number legend, then type in a word and have it output the sum associated with it. Thank you in advance!

As if on cue, I've since found this article further reinforcing my point about this pandemic casting the appeal to nature fallacy in an even worse light than usual.

Compared to when? Before this pandemic began?

Anti-vax talk and nature-worshipping talk have long been joined at the hip, and the former took on a much darker tone when it so plainly and so unmistakably got so many people killed in recent times. Sure, vaccines saved lives before, but a disease where so many city-dwellers could witness people dying on the street en masse right in front of them is a little harder to explain away than some historical plague that one could, consciously or subconsciously, think of as hoaxes. While anti-vax sentiment has been alarmingly stubborn in the face of this pandemic (and right-wingers shifting the goalposts from blaming leftism for anti-vaxxers to co-opting anti-vaxxers themselves has been especially odd), at the very least it's left less room for sitting on the fence.

In theory "herbal medicines" with fewer side-effects are less harmful in and of themselves than anti-vax rhetoric, but in practice legitimizing this kind of nature-worshipping talk has paved the way for legitimizing it in higher stakes contexts like how to deal with pandemics.

If not from before this pandemic began, then what chronological reference point are you referring to?

So I was recently thinking about how people are afraid direct western involvement in this war could provoke a nuclear war. But with the Russians theoretically being able to access the radioactive contaminants at Chernobyl anyway. Wasn't the point of the missile defense system to be able to intercept missiles? What is the risk of that system failing vs. the risk that the Russians could, whether deliberately or by accident, release radioactive fallout into the sky that could spread throughout the world?

Microwave unplugged, then. Thanks for letting me know.

I'll make a note of going to a place that also sells toaster ovens next time I go to get batteries. Thanks again!

My kitchen lacks one of those gradually-adjustable lights. Sometimes when I get up in the middle of the night I want a light that's just bright enough to help me see what I'm doing when I eat, but not as bright as the overhead lights. Sometimes, therefore, I use the refrigerator's partly-opened door. I'm fully aware that the refrigerator doesn't just produce light, but also heat, from the fact that relocating heat from the interior of the refrigerator to the exterior thereof converts electrical energy to heat energy in the process.

However... since this is the same thing my electrical heaters in my apartment do anyway... does that mean that, so long as I adjust the thermostat down afterwards... that the effect is cancelled out? (Presuming I do not leave the refrigerator door open long enough to contribute in any non-negligible way to food spoilage.)

Same thing with cooking. In theory I could just bake all my potatoes in the oven in one go to soften them up, then just microwave a different already-softened potato every few hours for a few days so I can consume them all before they go bad. However, I would much rather bake them one at a time so I can have each one of them fresh from the oven, and I presume in winter, again, the effects of this would be cancelled out by turning down the thermostat, would they not?

Now don't get me wrong, I intend to find out what batteries my flashlight uses, get plenty of them, and find a way to set up my flashlight to point toward the table so I don't have to continue to generate waste heat in the spring and summer. I don't intend to let a partially opened refrigerator become a long-term habit. However, in the meantime, I'd like to know whether or not I am wasting any non-negligible amount of electricity that wouldn't otherwise have been consumed by my electric heaters keeping the apartment warm from the bitter cold outside.