An Adult Should Really Know This - Silly Things You've Had to Tell People

[jedikaiti]

Lot more deaths from shooting a bullet into the air (do they not *realize* that it comes down at high velocity?  seriously) than from waving around sparklers, in my opinion.

Who are doing this, and on what occasion? I had not heard of this, it sounds scary!! 

People with no sense, and on pretty much any occasion they can come up with    I've known two people to get injured from this, both while I was a college, both times from an idiot shooting off a gun a quarter-mile away and not realizing the whole "I shot a bullet into the air / It fell to earth, I knew not where" thing.  (With apologies to Longfellow - I'm sure he'd be against this too, if his arrow had hit a person instead of an oak . . .)

I used to believe bullets just lose momentum when they come down, so eventually they would pose no more danger than a thrown rock.

Apparently it takes a lot of time and distance before they lose momentum - they are much more likely to hit things first.

Mythbusters did an episode on this and mostly busted it. If a bullet is shot straight up into the air, it's no more dangerous than a falling rock of the same size. The problem occurs if it's shot at an angle and gets to hit something before gravity takes over.

The thing is, humans don't tend to shoot exactly straight up, it's pretty solidly at an angle.

[Virg]

jedikaiti wrote:

"If anything, I think they GAIN - they slow down on the way up, hit the top of the trajectory, and then accelerate on the way down."

A bullet fired close enough to vertical to reach an apex trajectory will fall no faster than terminal velocity on the way down due to air resistance.  The major danger is that one can fire a bullet at a very steep angle and still have the bullet travel an arc that meets the ground before air resistance slows it to terminal velocity, so the bullet still has lethal speed when it hits whatever's in its way.

mbbored wrote:

"I have to say, this the funniest thing I've seen all day. I totally think there should be a gall bladder fairy."

However, I discovered that it's a really bad idea to find a child who believes that the Tooth Fairy took her tooth after it fell out, and jokingly mention the Eye Fairy.  I'm just waiting for the therapy bill....

MommyPenguin wrote:

"I think that people also have the tendency to think that bullets can penetrate, well, people, but not things.  Think of how many cop shows you see in which a cop hides behind an open car door while a ton of bullets slam into the door, magically stopped by the (reinforced concrete?) door, leaving the cop in safety to shoot around the sides."

There's a real world exception to this.  These days, most police vehicles are reinforced to allow officers to hide behind doors or the body of the car, and they will indeed stop most bullets.  Back when it was popular on TV, it was absolutely false, but these days it's much more likely to happen.

Virg

[blue2000]

Just that a ring serves no other purpose than being a ring.  Designer clothing at least fulfills the purpose of clothing (i.e. keeping you warm, keeping you from violating social taboos, etc.)  Yeah, it's outrageously expensive and you're paying extra for the status symbol, but you're not buying it *only* for the overpriced value - you're getting some function out of it too.  (Maybe $5 worth of function, if that's what you could have spent on something else cheap, but still.)

The point I got from the article was that demand for diamonds is *completely* based on historical advertising - they'd have no intrinsic value without it.

Diamonds are also used for industrial purposes. According to this article, more often than they are used for jewelry. http://geology.com/minerals/diamond.shtml

It is fascinating to think about the fact that we wear something that is also used in machinery. If diamonds hadn't taken off as engagement rings, would we wear something else? Will silicon and fiber optics be all the rage in a few hundred years?

Maybe.   When alumin(i)um was first extracted from bauxite ore, it was seen as a rare, expensive luxury product.  The cap on the Washington Monument in DC is aluminum for that very reason. Nouveau riche people gave their silverware to the servants and bought shiny new aluminum tableware.  Now it's so cheap that it's disposable.

That reminds me - my great-grandmother (I think?) had a set of good Sunday silverware with Bakelite handles. They were all the rage at the time. However, Bakelite is one of the forerunners of modern plastic.

[kckgirl]

Lot more deaths from shooting a bullet into the air (do they not *realize* that it comes down at high velocity?  seriously) than from waving around sparklers, in my opinion.

We had a death in our county (elementary aged girl) from a stray bullet shot into the sky in celebration at midnight on New Year's Eve.

I think there was one here in Maryland as well.  (Or maybe we're thinking about the same event.)  I posted the link to people who were whining about whhhhyyyyyyyyy were the mean old police spoiling people's fun by arresting folks caught shooting into the air.

I'm in Maryland, too, so we're probably talking about the same event. It was this past New Year's Eve, and a 10-year-old girl was killed by a falling bullet about five miles from my home. The shooter hasn't been found.

[Snooks]

Kind of like me explaining sparklers at fourth of July to an exchange student.  She was shocked that our tradition involved setting sharp bits of metal on fire then giving them to kids and telling them to wave those sharp bits of metal around.  I had to explain that we celebrate our freedom to be reckless idiots just as strongly as our freedom for everything else 

We use them to celebrate someone trying to set fire to the King.

[Elfmama]

Lot more deaths from shooting a bullet into the air (do they not *realize* that it comes down at high velocity?  seriously) than from waving around sparklers, in my opinion.

We had a death in our county (elementary aged girl) from a stray bullet shot into the sky in celebration at midnight on New Year's Eve.

I think there was one here in Maryland as well.  (Or maybe we're thinking about the same event.)  I posted the link to people who were whining about whhhhyyyyyyyyy were the mean old police spoiling people's fun by arresting folks caught shooting into the air.

I'm in Maryland, too, so we're probably talking about the same event. It was this past New Year's Eve, and a 10-year-old girl was killed by a falling bullet about five miles from my home. The shooter hasn't been found.

Yes, that was it.

[Julian]

You can ski in Australia and Tasmania.

I'm sorry, I couldn't leave it.  Tasmania is part of Australia.  Perhaps you meant you can ski in Tasmania and parts of mainland Australia. Which is correct.

My point still stands that most of Australia's population does not live in areas where they get the winters much of the US does that would make hot water heaters being outside severely impractical. I would guess a good third to a quarter of the population lives in this area. The Midwest,  Plains States, New England and the mountain States: that's a big chunk of the population. As an example Syracuse, NY (population 662,000 or so) gets an average of 128 inches of snow (330 cm) of snow a year. That's cumulative,  not snow,  then melt,  then more snow. Minneapolis Minnesota (population 3.4 million or so) has an average temperature in January of 13.1 F. (-11 C).

I'm afraid I don't understand your point.  Comparing anything between Australia and the USA based on population is ludicrous considering our national population is about 10% the size of yours.

Decent numbers of people live in these areas.  Tens of thousands, if not hundreds.  I imagine that if outdoor hot water systems were an issue in these areas, it would be severely impractical for those living there, no matter how many of them there were.  I've no idea if they take alternative measures (I'm going to Tassie soon, I'll try to notice) but I'm sure if it was a problem, they would.

I am in Tasmania.  The rental house I lived in had an external electric hot water system, the house I bought had an internal electric system.  I've since changed it to a gas-fueled external system, one of those 'heat as you go' ones that has no storage cylinder.

But...what keeps that water line from freezing?  We had a problem once in England with outside water lines freezing, and it wasn't even the sustained kind of cold that the northern US gets, just a cold snap of a couple of days.

I'm not sure.  I've had the hose freeze, but not the house water pipes.  I suspect because they mostly run underground, and there's residual heat in the house as well (it's well insulated and never gets below freezing inside) and where I live it rarely stays that cold for that long.  I also don't get any ground freezing, just heavy frost, the odd sleet or snow.  Maybe the colder areas have more problems?  I really don't know.

I do know that they sell a special blend of freeze-proof diesel fuel here year round.  And the water in my windscreen washer freezes solid regularly.  We've also had a white Christmas - in the middle of our summer.

[dawnfire]

You can ski in Australia and Tasmania.

I'm sorry, I couldn't leave it.  Tasmania is part of Australia.  Perhaps you meant you can ski in Tasmania and parts of mainland Australia. Which is correct.

My point still stands that most of Australia's population does not live in areas where they get the winters much of the US does that would make hot water heaters being outside severely impractical. I would guess a good third to a quarter of the population lives in this area. The Midwest,  Plains States, New England and the mountain States: that's a big chunk of the population. As an example Syracuse, NY (population 662,000 or so) gets an average of 128 inches of snow (330 cm) of snow a year. That's cumulative,  not snow,  then melt,  then more snow. Minneapolis Minnesota (population 3.4 million or so) has an average temperature in January of 13.1 F. (-11 C).

I'm afraid I don't understand your point.  Comparing anything between Australia and the USA based on population is ludicrous considering our national population is about 10% the size of yours.

Decent numbers of people live in these areas.  Tens of thousands, if not hundreds.  I imagine that if outdoor hot water systems were an issue in these areas, it would be severely impractical for those living there, no matter how many of them there were.  I've no idea if they take alternative measures (I'm going to Tassie soon, I'll try to notice) but I'm sure if it was a problem, they would.

I am in Tasmania.  The rental house I lived in had an external electric hot water system, the house I bought had an internal electric system.  I've since changed it to a gas-fueled external system, one of those 'heat as you go' ones that has no storage cylinder.

But...what keeps that water line from freezing?  We had a problem once in England with outside water lines freezing, and it wasn't even the sustained kind of cold that the northern US gets, just a cold snap of a couple of days.

I think the water pipe is minimally exposed to the elements. water come in from the street underground, up through the wall to the unit, then through the wall to be distributed to the various outlets.

[TootsNYC]

MommyPenguin wrote:

"I think that people also have the tendency to think that bullets can penetrate, well, people, but not things.  Think of how many cop shows you see in which a cop hides behind an open car door while a ton of bullets slam into the door, magically stopped by the (reinforced concrete?) door, leaving the cop in safety to shoot around the sides."

There's a real world exception to this.  These days, most police vehicles are reinforced to allow officers to hide behind doors or the body of the car, and they will indeed stop most bullets.  Back when it was popular on TV, it was absolutely false, but these days it's much more likely to happen.

Virg

Yes, but *my* car door isn't reinforced.

And I wonder how well insulated the water heaters in Australia are--because I'd be less worried about freezing and more worried about slow heat loss and inefficient (therefore more expensive) energy use.

[artk2002]

And I wonder how well insulated the water heaters in Australia are--because I'd be less worried about freezing and more worried about slow heat loss and inefficient (therefore more expensive) energy use.

Exterior water heaters aren't uncommon here in SoCal. Ours was in a sheet-metal shed attached to the side of the house. An insulating blanket took care of heat loss.

[Hillia]

And I wonder how well insulated the water heaters in Australia are--because I'd be less worried about freezing and more worried about slow heat loss and inefficient (therefore more expensive) energy use.

Exterior water heaters aren't uncommon here in SoCal. Ours was in a sheet-metal shed attached to the side of the house. An insulating blanket took care of heat loss.

I remember seeing this a lot - a small closet attached to the outside wall of the house.

[Virg]

TootsNYC wrote:

"Yes, but *my* car door isn't reinforced."

Well, you'd better put that in your to-do list then.  I figured since you live in New York City, you'd have that covered by now.   

Virg, who lived in NJ and thus must bust upon New Yorkers

[CharlieBraun]

I do know that they sell a special blend of freeze-proof diesel fuel here year round.  And the water in my windscreen washer freezes solid regularly.  We've also had a white Christmas - in the middle of our summer.

Russians call that "vodka."

[Julian]

I do know that they sell a special blend of freeze-proof diesel fuel here year round.  And the water in my windscreen washer freezes solid regularly.  We've also had a white Christmas - in the middle of our summer.

Russians call that "vodka."

 

[White Dragon]

My cousin is the eldest of 5 kids. She is part has a large extended family - one of those families where the moms' and aunties' sole mission is that no one ever starves.    Food was a huge part of every family gathering.

In spite of this, neither cousin nor her sisters ever learned to cook. Mom 'did for' her kids until they moved out. While a loving environment, this left cousin a bit under-prepared for life on her own.

So, a few weeks after her wedding, Cousin was making her new husband a nice dinner.
Cue a frantic call to her mother. Cousin is at the liquor store and can't find the powder.
The what?
The powder!
Because, you see, the recipe called for dry white wine....

And in case you were wondering, Cousin is a school teacher.