If I'm to believe that second person didn't misspeak, they had "mental breakdowns" with an "s", so multiple breakdowns, over the thought that their eating lettuce could cause a nuclear apocalypse.
They must really like lettuce. If I had a mental breakdown over the fear that my eating a specific food would cause untold human death and suffering, including my own, I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe.
98
lime @feddit.nl - 4day
(While chewing lettuce) “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
103
SanctimoniousApe @lemmings.world - 4day
Would you mind doing that more over towards Washington DC, please? TIA.
19
lime @feddit.nl - 4day
Tactical salad, lol.
17
TeamAssimilation @infosec.pub - 4day
How dare you add common sense to our imaginary and greatly embellished struggles!
The audacity of this guy, I almost died of Asperger!
4
pigup @lemmy.world - 4day
Maybe after the first few mental breakdowns, they could have maybe just gone on the internet may be kind of like, I don't know, learned more. So they were saying they were just so sure that they could accidentally split atoms and they didn't question why there weren't nuclear explosions going off at every restaurant hundreds of thousands of times per day.
Edit: /s for the simpletons below 👇
3
SharkyAttack @lemmy.world - 4day
You understand that there are a lot of people alive before the internet existed, right? And if this person is relating a story from their childhood, and they’re anywhere over like 35 years old, us old people couldn’t just “go on the internet”.
5
Droechai - 3day
And even if you did go on the internet, there wouldnt be any answer to the prompt "does chewing salad risk splitting atoms" on yahoo or altavista. The search engines where not "smart" enough to parse deeper in the question nor where there enough "random trivia" answers online
2
SharkyAttack @lemmy.world - 3day
Ah yes, name calling. What a mature way to handle the situation.
1
Anivia @feddit.org - 4day
I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe
I guess you did not grow up with parents that forced you to clean up your plate before leaving the dinner table
2
NeatNit @discuss.tchncs.de - 4day
Sometimes all kids need is a scientifically literate adult to explain precisely why their fear isn't possible.
56
Frozengyro @lemmy.world - 4day
Yea, just tell them they and the surrounding half mile would be instantly vaporized and wouldn't even know they were dead.
31
edgemaster72 @lemmy.world - 4day
"It hasn't happened yet and you damn sure aren't special enough to be the one to do it"
23
icelimit @lemmy.ml - 4day
It happens all the time. That's how the multiverse branches are kept under a manageable number for the simulation.
4
ameancow @lemmy.world - 3day
I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth's crust, mantle and core.
Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.
Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades. Fast forward to me now explaining to people on reddit what lava is, that it's actually molten rock... there are a lot of people who have never thought about it, saw pictures of volcanoes and just accepted that they spit out "hot goo" and never thought deeper.
I wish I was kidding, but also... I wonder if it's a simpler, more peaceful life when you don't know how anything works. I was up at 2:00 AM with my brain whirring away, like every night.
24
_stranger_ @lemmy.world - 3day
I loved this story, thank you for sharing.
I think the people who sleep well at night are the ones that don't care how anything works. Sometimes it's ignorance, but often it's just burnout, and worse sometimes it's a complete lack of empathy for anything that isn't themselves.
8
EvilBit @lemmy.world - 4day
Reminds me of a profoundly stupid movie I saw as a child called Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious and no that’s not aphasia talking. He takes an atom out to the shed and splits it with a chisel. An explosion ensues, complete with charred face and smoking hair standing on end.
Hey, that was my favourite movie when it came out. I was sure Yahoo Serious was going to be a huge star.
2
EvilBit @lemmy.world - 3day
I don’t equate “profoundly stupid” to “bad”. I enjoy a good stupid movie. I adore Hudson Hawk. I watch Ready Player One all the time in the background.
2
Riskable - 4day
Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.
15
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 - 4day
A single atom wouldn't even be worse than, like, a pop rock anyway. You need a whole mess of them motherfuckers to make a big boom.
13
icelimit @lemmy.ml - 4day
If I accidentally bite an atom and the tiny shards shatters nearby atoms, wouldn't that just make more? Like sort of.. a chain reaction ?
Maybe I just have to gobble up all my salad before all the booms blow my jaws and neighbours away.
7
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 - 4day
I think your jaw would have to be made of tungsten or something for that to happen, but I'm not a physist; I've just played one in a video game. 🤷‍♂️
6
TriplePlaid @lemmy.zip - 1day
It would not make a chain reaction because the nuclei of typical atoms are unlikely to split when irradiated (that is to say, hit by the pieces of the original atom that split) and will more likely ionize (have an electron knocked off) or transmute (turn into a different element by changing the number of protons).
In nuclear weapons or reactors the uranium must be "enriched" because regular uranium atoms are too stable to sustain a fission reaction. We must have a high amount of rare uranium-235 (the easily splittable isotope) compared to U-238 (the more common stabler isotope) which is why uranium needs to be enriched. Most of the atoms in your salad are stable isotopes, so there will likely not be any cascading fission reactions even if your teeth were somehow able to trigger one (or even 1000) every single time you took a bite.
1
icelimit @lemmy.ml - 21hr
So this is what nerd-baiting feels like
1
moakley @lemmy.world - 3day
When I learned about germs, how they're everywhere and too small to see, I thought I must be squishing them every time I touch anything. So I went around the entire house touching every surface, especially the windows, because nobody ever touched those.
9
ceoofanarchism - 4day
Yep was super paranoid and anxious over misunderstandings now just super paranoid and anxious over worst case unlikely scenarios.
8
Steamymoomilk @sh.itjust.works - 4day
NOO BILLL
WHYYY
EVAPORATES INTO ASH
8
Cossty @lemmy.world - 4day
When I was a kid, I was playing one day outside and then later I realized there is an ant nest nearby and I saw that I killed some ants by walking near it.
After that, I didn't want to kill any more bugs etc, so whenever I was walking on grass, I would always check the grass before me to see if there are any bugs in it, and only then I would make a step.
Yeah, it was very slow and inefficient, but it wasn't that bad because I was actively avoiding grass and this whole experiment didn't last very long either, maybe a couple of months.
Then I went back to stepping on the bugs.
7
DragonTypeWyvern @midwest.social - 3day
Just tell yourself they'd kill you if they had the chance, it's a preemptive strike
3
Stonewyvvern @lemmy.world - 3day
Learned about Vacuum Decay when I was 10...it gave me another complex layered on top of my other complex layer cake...
7
rumba @lemmy.zip - 3day
yeah my poor dyson /s
Seriously though, the best part about vacuum decay is you'd never see it coming and barely have time to notice if it did happen.
2
AquaTofana @lemmy.world - 4day
I remember being told "Atoms are always moving", so I would cut reeeeaaaalllllyyyy fucking slow for a bit thinking that the atoms would "move out of the way."
I also just read my husband this meme and he was like "Oh yeah. I remember thinking I was risking my area for arts and crafts."
7
ZkhqrD5o @lemmy.world - 4day
New anxiety just dropped.
6
Kairos - 3day
Its not possible to do by any metric. And besides, a chain reaction is needed. A single atom turned into pure kinetic energy wouldn't be noticeable at all.
8
ZkhqrD5o @lemmy.world - 3day
Yes, and if I cut a mango, how many billions of atoms is that? So I'd recommend to cut the mango in increments of one angstrom to minimise the chances of a chain reaction happening.
2
Kairos - 3day
\0. The force that keeps the nucleus together is much stronger than the force needed to break the inter-atom bonfs. (Blanking on the names right now. Strong and weak forces?)
1
ZkhqrD5o @lemmy.world - 3day
Yeah, but what if the knife is really sharp?
1
Kairos - 3day
The knife edge can't be smaller than an atoms width, so still no.
1
NoDignity @lemmy.world - 3day
You say that until someone pulls the classic prank of swapping all your mango atoms with uranium-235.
3
ZkhqrD5o @lemmy.world - 3day
Yeah and what if I squish the mango, thereby compressing the water and fusing the hydrogen into helium?
2
redsand @lemmy.dbzer0.com - 4day
If you did manage to do this by random chance would you even notice? A single atom is pretty small. If you somehow split a random carbon atom in lettuce wouldn't you get less than a Joule as long as it doesn't somehow chain?
6
Bubs - 4day
This is just what I've heard a long time ago so don't quote me lol. But no, splitting a single atom shouldn't do anything of note. I believe it's the same general reason that a nuke doesn't set the entire atmosphere on fire - you need a lot of energy to split atoms. That's why nukes need enriched materials.
I also believe that even a nuclear explosion won't be triggered by a single split atom in a bomb. For example, the Manhattan Project bomb was triggered by shaped explosives that surrounded the nuclear core. The blast of the charges "compressed" the nuclear material to the point it reached a critical mass that allowed a runaway fission reaction.
12
bdonvr @thelemmy.club - 4day
Yeah it would be small to the point of not being perceptible. A single atom has an insane amount of energy for its size, but its still not enough to move a grain of sand any amount that would be perceptible to the naked eye
8
Skyrmir @lemmy.world - 4day
Just be glad no one showed you crunching life savers in the dark.
When I was in kindergarten they showed us a cartoon with anthropomorphic teeth to try to encourage dental hygiene and those teeth scared me so much that I refused to brush my teeth for years and I ended up getting gum disease because of it.
5
Agent641 @lemmy.world - 3day
I guess there are two kinds of people because when I learned that splitting atoms causes a nuclear explosion, I got a craft knife and some sand from the garden and went to town on them trying to slice some atoms just right đź‘Ś
I mean... The chance of that happening is incredibly low, but... It's not zero.
Have fun stressing out of cutting things. Any cut you make can be the one low chance cut when you accidentally split an atom. :)
-2
T156 @lemmy.world - 3day
It is zero. You split atoms all the time, thanks to the radioactive carbon-14 in our bodies, from nuclear testing.
A nuclear bomb goes off because a lot of atoms split all at once, which causes a whole lot more atoms to then split. But that requires a critical mass. It doesn't just happen on its own.
3
AllHailTheSheep @sh.itjust.works - 3day
sorry, but the chances are actually zero. it takes a lot more force and specialized conditions to split an atom than a knife
2
edgesmash @lemmy.world - 4day
What kid wants to eat salad?
-3
rockerface🇺🇦 - 4day
A kid whose parents actually gave a shit about parenting?
11
edgesmash @lemmy.world - 4day
Come on, man. I have my kids eating their veggies, but they don't like it. The older one knows they are healthy and eats them reluctantly, the younger never chooses veggies unless we attach consequences for not eating (e.g., no dessert unless you eat your veggies).
But neither wants to eat them.
5
DomeGuy @lemmy.world - 4day
But neither wants to eat them.
Respectfully, if neither of your children have a vegetable* dish they will eat as a snack you haven't exposed them to a wide enough array of vegetables and vegetables preparation methods.
Don't be afraid to add salt, roast instead of boil, or just experiment with things you haven't tried.
(*: And "vegetable" here is strictly in a culinary context, excluding grains and near-grains like potatoes and including savory sead-bearing plant-parts like cucumbers. But if they don't even like a form of potato or a grain, you may have a eating disorder on your hand...)
9
edgesmash @lemmy.world - 4day
Hey man, I honestly appreciate your insight and ideas. You're spot on for what to do for how to cook and prepare veggies for kids (and adults too). My parents raised me on the most bland American cuisine imagination (they rarely even added salt), but when I left home, I discovered the greater world of veggie preparation.
Regarding my original downvoted comment, it was just an old Gen x dude trying to make a dumb old joke.
5
DomeGuy @lemmy.world - 4day
I'm glad you took it in the spirit it was intended. (Slightly chiding, but well-meaning.)
I think it can be really hard to not pass on our bad habits to our kids. Mine have a room just as messy as mine ever was, and they're at least as bad at doing their homework as I ever was.
Good job so far!
4
edgesmash @lemmy.world - 4day
I'm glad you shared! Life is hard, parenting is doubly hard, and we're all just trying to make it through and do at least a little better than our parents did.
I'm just glad my kids didn't inherit my messy room... I had literal layers of stuff on the floor, like it was some sort of strata. I can't believe my parents let me get away with it. That said, I knew where everything was.
Anyway, good job to you as well!
3
edgemaster72 @lemmy.world - 4day
My nephew's favorite food is broccoli, not all kids hate veggies
8
idiomaddict @lemmy.world - 4day
My favorite food as a kid was cauliflower and my family didn’t even make it nicely, just steamed with a little butter. I still love vegetables, but I don’t think I’ve ever steamed anything but fiddleheads and dumplings.
fossilesque in science_memes
Splitting Hairs, Splitting Atoms
If I'm to believe that second person didn't misspeak, they had "mental breakdowns" with an "s", so multiple breakdowns, over the thought that their eating lettuce could cause a nuclear apocalypse.
They must really like lettuce. If I had a mental breakdown over the fear that my eating a specific food would cause untold human death and suffering, including my own, I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe.
(While chewing lettuce) “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Would you mind doing that more over towards Washington DC, please? TIA.
Tactical salad, lol.
How dare you add common sense to our imaginary and greatly embellished struggles!
The audacity of this guy, I almost died of Asperger!
Maybe after the first few mental breakdowns, they could have maybe just gone on the internet may be kind of like, I don't know, learned more. So they were saying they were just so sure that they could accidentally split atoms and they didn't question why there weren't nuclear explosions going off at every restaurant hundreds of thousands of times per day.
Edit: /s for the simpletons below 👇
You understand that there are a lot of people alive before the internet existed, right? And if this person is relating a story from their childhood, and they’re anywhere over like 35 years old, us old people couldn’t just “go on the internet”.
And even if you did go on the internet, there wouldnt be any answer to the prompt "does chewing salad risk splitting atoms" on yahoo or altavista. The search engines where not "smart" enough to parse deeper in the question nor where there enough "random trivia" answers online
Ah yes, name calling. What a mature way to handle the situation.
I guess you did not grow up with parents that forced you to clean up your plate before leaving the dinner table
Sometimes all kids need is a scientifically literate adult to explain precisely why their fear isn't possible.
Yea, just tell them they and the surrounding half mile would be instantly vaporized and wouldn't even know they were dead.
"It hasn't happened yet and you damn sure aren't special enough to be the one to do it"
It happens all the time. That's how the multiverse branches are kept under a manageable number for the simulation.
I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth's crust, mantle and core.
Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.
Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades. Fast forward to me now explaining to people on reddit what lava is, that it's actually molten rock... there are a lot of people who have never thought about it, saw pictures of volcanoes and just accepted that they spit out "hot goo" and never thought deeper.
I wish I was kidding, but also... I wonder if it's a simpler, more peaceful life when you don't know how anything works. I was up at 2:00 AM with my brain whirring away, like every night.
I loved this story, thank you for sharing.
I think the people who sleep well at night are the ones that don't care how anything works. Sometimes it's ignorance, but often it's just burnout, and worse sometimes it's a complete lack of empathy for anything that isn't themselves.
Reminds me of a profoundly stupid movie I saw as a child called Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious and no that’s not aphasia talking. He takes an atom out to the shed and splits it with a chisel. An explosion ensues, complete with charred face and smoking hair standing on end.
honestly the sound of him hunting around with the chisel is a pretty good bit
Hey, that was my favourite movie when it came out. I was sure Yahoo Serious was going to be a huge star.
I don’t equate “profoundly stupid” to “bad”. I enjoy a good stupid movie. I adore Hudson Hawk. I watch Ready Player One all the time in the background.
Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.
A single atom wouldn't even be worse than, like, a pop rock anyway. You need a whole mess of them motherfuckers to make a big boom.
If I accidentally bite an atom and the tiny shards shatters nearby atoms, wouldn't that just make more? Like sort of.. a chain reaction ?
Maybe I just have to gobble up all my salad before all the booms blow my jaws and neighbours away.
I think your jaw would have to be made of tungsten or something for that to happen, but I'm not a physist; I've just played one in a video game. 🤷‍♂️
It would not make a chain reaction because the nuclei of typical atoms are unlikely to split when irradiated (that is to say, hit by the pieces of the original atom that split) and will more likely ionize (have an electron knocked off) or transmute (turn into a different element by changing the number of protons).
In nuclear weapons or reactors the uranium must be "enriched" because regular uranium atoms are too stable to sustain a fission reaction. We must have a high amount of rare uranium-235 (the easily splittable isotope) compared to U-238 (the more common stabler isotope) which is why uranium needs to be enriched. Most of the atoms in your salad are stable isotopes, so there will likely not be any cascading fission reactions even if your teeth were somehow able to trigger one (or even 1000) every single time you took a bite.
So this is what nerd-baiting feels like
When I learned about germs, how they're everywhere and too small to see, I thought I must be squishing them every time I touch anything. So I went around the entire house touching every surface, especially the windows, because nobody ever touched those.
Yep was super paranoid and anxious over misunderstandings now just super paranoid and anxious over worst case unlikely scenarios.
NOO BILLL
WHYYY
EVAPORATES INTO ASH
When I was a kid, I was playing one day outside and then later I realized there is an ant nest nearby and I saw that I killed some ants by walking near it.
After that, I didn't want to kill any more bugs etc, so whenever I was walking on grass, I would always check the grass before me to see if there are any bugs in it, and only then I would make a step.
Yeah, it was very slow and inefficient, but it wasn't that bad because I was actively avoiding grass and this whole experiment didn't last very long either, maybe a couple of months.
Then I went back to stepping on the bugs.
Just tell yourself they'd kill you if they had the chance, it's a preemptive strike
Learned about Vacuum Decay when I was 10...it gave me another complex layered on top of my other complex layer cake...
yeah my poor dyson /s
Seriously though, the best part about vacuum decay is you'd never see it coming and barely have time to notice if it did happen.
I remember being told "Atoms are always moving", so I would cut reeeeaaaalllllyyyy fucking slow for a bit thinking that the atoms would "move out of the way."
I also just read my husband this meme and he was like "Oh yeah. I remember thinking I was risking my area for arts and crafts."
New anxiety just dropped.
Its not possible to do by any metric. And besides, a chain reaction is needed. A single atom turned into pure kinetic energy wouldn't be noticeable at all.
Yes, and if I cut a mango, how many billions of atoms is that? So I'd recommend to cut the mango in increments of one angstrom to minimise the chances of a chain reaction happening.
\0. The force that keeps the nucleus together is much stronger than the force needed to break the inter-atom bonfs. (Blanking on the names right now. Strong and weak forces?)
Yeah, but what if the knife is really sharp?
The knife edge can't be smaller than an atoms width, so still no.
You say that until someone pulls the classic prank of swapping all your mango atoms with uranium-235.
Yeah and what if I squish the mango, thereby compressing the water and fusing the hydrogen into helium?
If you did manage to do this by random chance would you even notice? A single atom is pretty small. If you somehow split a random carbon atom in lettuce wouldn't you get less than a Joule as long as it doesn't somehow chain?
This is just what I've heard a long time ago so don't quote me lol. But no, splitting a single atom shouldn't do anything of note. I believe it's the same general reason that a nuke doesn't set the entire atmosphere on fire - you need a lot of energy to split atoms. That's why nukes need enriched materials.
I also believe that even a nuclear explosion won't be triggered by a single split atom in a bomb. For example, the Manhattan Project bomb was triggered by shaped explosives that surrounded the nuclear core. The blast of the charges "compressed" the nuclear material to the point it reached a critical mass that allowed a runaway fission reaction.
Yeah it would be small to the point of not being perceptible. A single atom has an insane amount of energy for its size, but its still not enough to move a grain of sand any amount that would be perceptible to the naked eye
Just be glad no one showed you crunching life savers in the dark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcgRGo4wj2w
When I was in kindergarten they showed us a cartoon with anthropomorphic teeth to try to encourage dental hygiene and those teeth scared me so much that I refused to brush my teeth for years and I ended up getting gum disease because of it.
I guess there are two kinds of people because when I learned that splitting atoms causes a nuclear explosion, I got a craft knife and some sand from the garden and went to town on them trying to slice some atoms just right đź‘Ś
Reminds me of The Flintstones Split the Atom
I mean... The chance of that happening is incredibly low, but... It's not zero.
Have fun stressing out of cutting things. Any cut you make can be the one low chance cut when you accidentally split an atom. :)
It is zero. You split atoms all the time, thanks to the radioactive carbon-14 in our bodies, from nuclear testing.
A nuclear bomb goes off because a lot of atoms split all at once, which causes a whole lot more atoms to then split. But that requires a critical mass. It doesn't just happen on its own.
sorry, but the chances are actually zero. it takes a lot more force and specialized conditions to split an atom than a knife
What kid wants to eat salad?
A kid whose parents actually gave a shit about parenting?
Come on, man. I have my kids eating their veggies, but they don't like it. The older one knows they are healthy and eats them reluctantly, the younger never chooses veggies unless we attach consequences for not eating (e.g., no dessert unless you eat your veggies).
But neither wants to eat them.
Respectfully, if neither of your children have a vegetable* dish they will eat as a snack you haven't exposed them to a wide enough array of vegetables and vegetables preparation methods.
Don't be afraid to add salt, roast instead of boil, or just experiment with things you haven't tried.
(*: And "vegetable" here is strictly in a culinary context, excluding grains and near-grains like potatoes and including savory sead-bearing plant-parts like cucumbers. But if they don't even like a form of potato or a grain, you may have a eating disorder on your hand...)
Hey man, I honestly appreciate your insight and ideas. You're spot on for what to do for how to cook and prepare veggies for kids (and adults too). My parents raised me on the most bland American cuisine imagination (they rarely even added salt), but when I left home, I discovered the greater world of veggie preparation.
But, with all due respect, you haven't met my kids. My partner and I are not perfect parents, but we've tried many different ways to prepare and serve veggies, including salted, roasted, sautéd with oil and seasoning, boiled, raw with/without dip/sauce... It doesn't help that my partner is nearly as picky as my kids (to be fair, I can be quite picky with respect to texture). But, at least we're making sure they understand that a balanced diet is vital to health. And, hey, both of my kids are healthy and in the lower percentile for height-weight ratio, so we haven't failed them yet.
Regarding my original downvoted comment, it was just an old Gen x dude trying to make a dumb old joke.
I'm glad you took it in the spirit it was intended. (Slightly chiding, but well-meaning.)
I think it can be really hard to not pass on our bad habits to our kids. Mine have a room just as messy as mine ever was, and they're at least as bad at doing their homework as I ever was.
Good job so far!
I'm glad you shared! Life is hard, parenting is doubly hard, and we're all just trying to make it through and do at least a little better than our parents did.
I'm just glad my kids didn't inherit my messy room... I had literal layers of stuff on the floor, like it was some sort of strata. I can't believe my parents let me get away with it. That said, I knew where everything was.
Anyway, good job to you as well!
My nephew's favorite food is broccoli, not all kids hate veggies
My favorite food as a kid was cauliflower and my family didn’t even make it nicely, just steamed with a little butter. I still love vegetables, but I don’t think I’ve ever steamed anything but fiddleheads and dumplings.