ScienceNostalgia101

Didn't expect PETA-types on this site. o.o In any case, opening a window would just allow more flies to come in. (And worse, risking that a bee or hornet or wasp would come in.) We aren't expected to spare a human burglar's life either, yet in that circumstance I think I'd just retreat and call the cops, partly for my own safety's sake, but also because a burglar has more to potentially live for than a housefly. At least in my town. EDIT: Though for the record, and just so I don't sound like TOO much of a dick, I try to finish them off as soon after spraying them as reasonably possible so it's a quick death. I don't mean to torture them, I'm just not good at killing them without spraying them first.

I notice alcohol easily kills houseflies; when I can hit 'em. (Yes, I finish them off just to be sure.) But they're crafty little things, and usually manage to maneuver around it, especially when they can tell I'm coming. I want to be able to spray them from far enough away that they can't tell I'm coming, but that the alcohol still hits them with enough force to kill them, or at least leave them immobile enough to finish off. Is there any way to create a stronger spray bottle than the kinds alcohol is usually stored in? (Sidenote: Yes, if I ever in the future intend not to live alone, I will ensure I get a locked safe to keep the bottle in so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.)

I intend to get groceries later today and hopefully will remember the vinegar this time, but in the meantime if I use lime juice to get tape residue off the windowsill, and wipe it down with water afterwards, are there any particular precautions I need to make against it attracting mold or other harmful organisms?

Thanks for the clarification, everyone. I vaguely heard of lifestyle as a factor in allergies before but wasn't sure whether this was a fringe notion or not... seems not.

The idea that our immune systems would mistake food of all things for something harmful sounds bizarre. The idea that it would react to a lethal extreme to anything sounds even more bizarre. Surely even if it thinks the threat is lethal, obviously the response would have to be just shy of lethal to be of any help at all. Yet we hear of life-threatening allergies to food items of all things all the time. How did life-threatening allergies to food items not result in enough anaphylaxis deaths over the course of evolution to leave behind only the genes that tell the immune system how to tell food from life-threatening pathogens? Or at least tell the body there's no point fighting a lethal pathogen with an even more lethal response?

Well, thanks for the replies thus far, but in light of the aforementioned issues of the hassle with ice packs and heating packs, I think I'm just going to look for something that's as breathable as possible. Thanks again, everyone!

So for a geek convention coming up in a few months I was... considering dressing up as a cartoon animal. (Been going a little too mundane with my prior cosplay and wanted to make up for lost time.) But I'm worried about being too warm in it, so I want some sort of coolant between my outer costume and inner clothing. Icewater, I presume, would be a little too drastic and probably result in frostbite, if not hypothermia. (Even if I found a material watertight enough to make it work.) However, is there any other coolant whose equilibrium temperature is a little more comfortable; not too hot, not too cold?

So it's mostly an aggregation of data from different sources, then. Fair enough. That still falls under the category of "country from which said greenhouse gases enter the air" more so than category of country being assigned blame for it. In any event, thanks again.

So I presume, then, that this means that greenhouse gas emissions are calculated based on the country from which said greenhouse gases enter the air?

So this site puts Canada past the USA as far as greenhouse gas emissions per capita go. Which strikes me as a tad counter-intuitive, as we're not quite as prone to car culture as Americans or to eating quite as much meat. But then I got to thinking about the notorious bitumen sands of the prairies, and how those are considered especially bad for the environment, even compared to the (as of Deepwater Horizon) infamous fossil fuel extraction methods of the USA. But that leaves behind two further questions: A. How do they distinguish greenhouse gases produced at extraction from those produced at consumption? Is it simply a matter of calculating from which country they go into the air (eg. if extracted in Canada and consumed in the USA, the GHGs from extraction are counted as Canadian ones and the ones from consumption counted as American ones) or is there some more precise formula built on assessing culpability? B: Is it really fair to blame oil producing countries for catering to consumer demand? If one country didn't cater to consumer demand, another would. Doesn't the real blame belong to the consumer? If the latter, does the same apply to individuals vs. companies?

Cool! Thanks again for the info, guys. Sorry I forgot about this thread until just then...

So I was recently watching this video on YouTube and it shows a bunch of large balloons being popped in slow motion. (First example a few seconds shy of a minute in.) I can't tell whether that is dust or mist or something else at the outer edge of what used to be the balloon immediately after it was popped. Could the act of popping a balloon cause enough adiabatic expansion to bring the air in the immediate vicinity of the balloon to the dewpoint? Would the remnants of the balloon be aerosolized to the point of initially being visible as dust in the aftermath of the popping? Or is it a "little from column A, little from column B" solution with the aerosolized balloon bits acting as cloud condensation nuclei in a room otherwise close to the dewpoint? Or some other explanation I am missing here?

"Equal" is undefinable, so the point is moot. Each sex faces different and unique struggles to which what one would consider the opposite sex "equivalent" is inherently a matter of opinion.

The same applies; do they not select based on who they think is more likely to win them an election? It's in the interest of everyone in a particular party for them to be the ones in power, and the more of their candidates win, the more power the party has. What any politician who embraces gender quotas; if it's done out of sincerity and not just pandering; is effectively saying, is "I do not trust my own judgment in who to appoint to cabinet, as even among the candidates a plurality of male and female voters combined picked, from among candidates my own party picked specifically to appeal to that plurality of men and women combined, I myself think my own bias in favour of men in politics, shared in common with the constituents who put my party into power, would cloud my own judgment in who to assign to what role." If that's what they're arguing, fine. But they shouldn't then fire them for publicly dissenting against any of their other ideas.

It was not my own opinion, it was that of everybody else. I wouldn't claim to know why male nurses and teachers have a higher salary than their female counterparts, but frankly it sounds like a fair enough exchange for how much more serious an accusation a sexual relationship with a student / patient would be depending on the sexes thereof, and in turn, the leverage those invoking this as an accusation would have against male teachers compared to against female teaches. (See also; male teachers smeared as pedos for enforcing dress codes.) I'd think of it as hazard pay. And yet, it is the plurality of voters, half of them female, who chose to exclude them from "positions of power." Do they not have that right in their capacity as voters? Your point hinges on also counting certain other notions as misogynistic, a point I dispute. Also, the anti-immigrant thing is clearly the main selling point. It's the only thing that really stood out about Trump during the primaries. They can't afford to throw their market-worshipping crap under the bus to save their anti-immigrant crap. If anything's going to get thrown under the bus, it's the market-worshipping crap. (Hence the being okay with a guy who accepted help from Putin, who's trying to "restore" the Soviet Union...)

You say this as if "conservative" were the sole alternative to "progressive". Why should I have to choose between aligning with those who decry opposition to abortion as "misogyny" and aligning with the scum who voted Trump? I don't expect conservatives to line up and decry every lack of nuance, because my expectations for conservatives are already through the floor. They spent the 80s pretending to have a problem with the Soviet Union and the 00s voting for a guy who accepted help from a dictator who wants to restore the Soviet Union. The question is how the rest of us deal with these people ethically. Do we claim to know their motives, despite the lack of rhyme or reason to them? That's dicey, at best. Even your study only refers to a gender role, not to outright hatred of either sex. Is it "misandrous" to prefer that teachers or nurses be women? If not, why is it "misogynistic" to prefer that politicians be men? And if so, isn't it hypocritical of them to condemn these gender roles, if only for that reason, let alone the fact that many of these people can in other contexts be caught using gendered insults anyway? We all have our own notions of gender roles in mind, and what counts is the sex of the voter, not the representative.

The irony is, when I was a teacher, I don't know if I'd know how to deal with hyperactive students in my capacity as a teacher because I'd been basically trained to deal with this iPhone-sedated generation. In their teen years. But if we didn't suppress hyperactivity, could it have been the norm instead of the exception? Could we have made more content cross-curricular with P.E. than we do now? I'm just trying to imagine the possibilities. Role-playing atoms in different states of matter. Calculating "second differences" among times taken to run laps. All of this in addition to facilitating more fitness and finding a more constructive outlet for the hyperactive traits people plainly find endearing enough to flock to them in fiction. Who benefits from teaching them to just sit still for hours on end for years of their lives? People selling heart attack meds?

I am aware of that. I am one of them. However, those who self-identify as "progressive" tend to, at best, not actively distance themselves from the implicit accusation that millions of voters are just "misogynistic". No, I regret the label "progressive" because they accuse people who oppose stem cell research that could save their own lives of faking their "life begins at conception" worldview to oppress women. To a point. However, I also don't think the negative aspects that tend to come with self-identified "progressivism" should be written off as just a coincidence. I think framing opinions as a package deal and everything outside that package deal as anti-progress is a slippery slope to writing off everyone who disagrees with you as a bigot of some kind or another.

Google search says desalinization costs 81 cents per cubic meter. However, I'm not even sure where to start on figuring out what maintenance would cost. What would cause such a structure to require maintenance in the first place? Is there any material that could stay intact, or at least not be punctured to the point of filling with water and sinking, whether for being mistaken for food by animals or for any other reason? I'm picturing a triangular prism, at least as wide as a hurricane, (angled to it to force upslope flow) meaning at least 5 surfaces, at least 3 of which would be hundreds of kilometres wide, with some means to securely and airtightly connect the surfaces after they are formed. Perhaps aluminum, with the sides smelted together? How thick would an aluminum surface need to be in order to not be accidentally punctured open by animals? Would it be malleable enough to bend, but not break, under wind stress, while otherwise maintaining a reasonably close approximation of a triangular prism?

So I was looking at the rainfall rates associated with Hurricane Agatha, and I thought "if only we could move that water just a few thousand kilometres further northwest..." So what's stopping society from investing in an artificial mountain range, anchored to any common location shared by multiple hurricane tracks, to force the humidity from the hurricane to condense, with a crevice partway up the mountain to capture the rainwater and relocate it to wherever it is needed? Not that the water would necessarily be clean enough for human consumption, but being desalinized, would it not at least be useful for farming? Would it just be a one-time investment that would eventually pay for itself in desalinization for farming or would there be maintenance costs involved that prevent it from paying for itself even over the long term? More semi-modestly, what about the idea of water pipelines along the North American coast? While I'm aware that hurricanes are of lower air pressure than their surroundings, would the water pressure in particular from a flood in one town along the pipeline force water toward drier towns along the pipeline? Or would that depend on whether or not the hurricane is already out of the vicinity?

People find hyperactivity so endearing that they pay good money to see it in fiction. (Eg. Pinkie Pie, Jessie The Cowgirl, etc...) On top of that, it can also be a good way to burn the calories kids are generally known to want to consume in the first place. Society spends the first few years of a kid's life teaching them to walk and talk, and the next few teaching them to sit down and shut up. So why are we holding hyperactivity back? Why aren't we embracing it? The response I usually hear is that hyperactive kids can injure themselves or damage valuable property. So why isn't the response to give them protective clothing that would cushion their impact if they fall, and put them someplace securely separate from anywhere that valuable property is stored? Is the difficulty with the parents needing to do work tasks without leaving their kids unsupervised? If so, why isn't there a tax credit/voucher for babysitting/daycare services for such circumstances?

What's wrong with it, primarily, is the word itself. It implies anyone who disagrees with the ideas associated with it doesn't value "progress". Or that "tradition" is the only reason to disagree with them on policy, or even where you agree on policy, the only reason to doubt the motives they ascribe to those who disagree with them. For instance, I disagree with gender quotas for federal cabinet. I think if male and female voters combined prop up the gender role of men in politics and women in other professions, that's their right in their capacity as voters and the few the voters do elect shouldn't have a higher probability per capita to be assigned cabinet positions. That's not "representing men and women equally" that's representing the voters who voted for the (generally fewer) female candidates who won disproportionately. I agree with "progressives" more on, let's say, abortion rights, but even then, I question the certainty to which they attribute opposition therein to "misogyny." Partly because that's the same thing opposition to gender quotas is attributed to, but also because the voters who oppose abortion rights are the same ones who oppose embryonic stem cell research despite its potential to save their own lives one day. They are, however tragically, living their values. They are, however tragically, behaving like people who believe life begins at conception.

I don't know whether or not this anecdote is real, but it's the reason my attention was brought to the concept of "demolishing" condemned buildings and how wasteful it sounds, to say nothing of the perverse incentives to recruit demolition employees who might be biased by their destructive instincts against the possibility they're really being used as accomplices in vandalism. (After "The Troubles," a church group offering teenagers an opportunity to demolish a building sounds sketchy as all hell.) A: Obvious first question is; why aren't they just repurposed? If a building is no longer structurally stable enough for its former purpose, why not strip it of its desks / its beds / whatever else was applying too much pressure on the support beams and just let it be some big empty building to rent out to tourists and/or filmmakers who would apply relatively less pressure on it? Does it depend on the structural flaws for which it was "condemned" and whether or not the support beams are already broken beyond repair? If so, how did it not collapse while those things applying downward pressure were still inside it? B: If there's no longer any use to get out of the building, why not put a giant smokestack around the building, such that any fumes from its incineration are lifted past the level of free convection (assuming the incineration is saved for a day with unstable air) then pump in some extra oxygen if need be and set fire to the whole thing? That way you can put a giant pot of water over it and cook food in it (or use it for coffee, or tea, to share with everyone in the neighbourhood) in lieu of burning fossil fuels for said same heat, saving on their combustion both when the thing is burned, and when the fire is over and the ashes require less energy to transport than unburnt debris. What say you, Science Forums? Is there something I'm missing here?

I was under the impression the point of soap was to make your hands too slippery for germs to cling to, and therefore have them all leave your hands, where they could have been harmful, and go down the drain into the methane-producing sewers, where they could be made useful. (Provided your infrastructure is designed to harvest the methane, of course.) Besides, what's stopping bacteria from evolving to survive "antibacterial" soaps like they did with antibiotics? in theory the point would be moot among those who wash their hands thoroughly enough, but antibacterial-soap-resistant antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a venue where sewer workers have to deal with them sounds like a recipe for disaster if sewer workers' protective clothing punctures...

I... was not aware of that. At all. I thought all it'd do was increase the veggies' shelf life. Next time I'll only buy enough to use within however long they last in the cupboard. (Although looking up acrylamide on Google, I'm some glad I boiled my potatoes instead of frying or roasting them.) As for my immune system... I'm not immunocompromised or anything on that level, but I don't fully trust it, what with it having attacked my own insulin-producing cells as a type 1 diabetic. Isn't it early in childhood that the immune system figures out what's harmful and what isn't? How much further benefit is there in adulthood to deliberately eating food that was put on the same glass surface a bag of discoloured potatoes was previously on? Or is a few seconds' worth of immersion in vinegar going to make the point moot now anyway? I don't intend to walk on eggshells or anything like that, I just prefer to take precautions where it's not too much trouble.