Slashdot Mirror
Microwave Experiments Cause Sponge Disasters
gollum123 writes "Reports about a study that found microwave ovens can be used to sterilize kitchen sponges sent people hurrying to test the idea this week — with sometimes disastrous results. A team at the University of Florida found that two minutes in the microwave at full power could kill a range of bacteria, viruses and parasites on kitchen sponges. They described how they soaked the sponges in wastewater and then zapped them. But several experimenters evidently left out the crucial step of wetting the sponge. "Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off," one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters."
3
2
1
I tried to use the technique to sterilize the cat, and that did not work very well either!
How else did they expect it to work? Of course you need the god-damn water in the sponge. Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
This means that if you wanted to destroy the blighters with radiation alone you have to choose a frequency a lot higher than microwaves, otherwise there will be areas in the minima of the standing wave that won't heat sufficently to kill the microbes.
The mechanism for steralisation is through the formation of steam that kills the majority of the nasties - not the microwave energy itself.
Simon
However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off,
He wasn't using one of those Sony battery-operated microwaves, was he?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
The microwave steralizes the wet sponge because it makes the water hot enough to kill anything living. The same effect can be had by dunking the sponge in a pot of boiling water.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
People do not understand microwaves. Berating them for not using their understanding of microwaves is like watching a Spiderman movie and saying "Why doesn't he just fly out of there?"
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
If the sponge caugth fire, the microbes are probably dead by now. Right?
holding your breath underwater for 5 minutes cures stupidity. I take full responsibility for all results of home trials.
Lots of smoke? Smells like burning tires? Really pissed off? These people sound like Linux users trying to get their sound cards to work.
From a darwinistic point of view, it would seam desirable that stupidity should kill (or sterilize, at least). I, however, have come the the conclusion that I'll need some stupid people around me to take care of some things. So I'll just be fine if stupid people identify themself as such from time to time.
People trying an experiment involving using the microwave at full power can get into trouble!
At least they didn't try to dry their dogs and cats.
--
Superb hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
Prepare for a Class Action Suit filed against Reuters, the Scientists who did this and news papers that carried it for the damages caused by the fires.
Out of the $100 million that will be awarded, $80 million will go the lawyers, $10 million towards court fees, etc., and the class action plaintiffs awarded a $15 coupon each that can be redeemed for a Microwave at Wal-mart.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Irradiating sponges is ok but OMG, don't do it to beef!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
There's this method of execution shown in Tom Hanks' 'The Green Mile' in which the guy to be electrocuted is seated in the chair and a wet sponge must be placed on top of his head. Some guy (Percy) with sadistic intentions 'forgets' to do this and the poor convict burns to death in the chair.
Forgive me if its off-topic, but you can learn a lot from the movies...
A sponge will be very very hot after 2 minutes at full power.
Next.. who will post this dry sponge on youtube/google video. please? anyone? Or just a good video what else fun you can d with a microwave:
-Light up a lamp.
-erase your CD. (extra points for CD-RW discs, bonus for AOL disks)
-Make it explode. mythbuster style... 8))
KIDS... don't do this at home.... (use the microwave of someone else )
Back in good old days, many centuries ago, there wasn't any kind of this Politically Correct stuff and neither was there protection of the idiots. There was one rule: survival of the fittest.
If you made mistakes dumb enough to kill you , you didn't get anybody to pull you out and nature did its thing and eliminated the "idiot's" gene.
Of course this had nothing to do with real accidents, but in the long term idiots would dissapear.
Nowadays there is no personal responsibility. People do their own mistakes and blame it on somebody else.
This idiot should have had at least his genitals burned so we wouldn't have anymore kids.
Mind you, I am all about protecting and subsidising the weakest, the handicapped, the sick and al. I just believe that dumb people that bring it upon themselves deserve no attention and no compassion whatsoever.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
We Americans measure our bacteria as fractions of an inch so the sponge fires were no doubt caused when people, in their germ kill potential calculations, screwed up while converting centimeter length microwaves to inches. Honest mistake.
In case of human IQ, the evolution feedback works in the wrong direction.
Generally, the more intelligent, well-educated and well-established couples get children at a later age, and get fewer of them.
The "dumber" and lower-class people reproduce faster, and there will be more and more of them.
This effect is clearly visible both on a global scale (developed/developing countries) and locally (lower/upper class).
...for the Darwin Awards
...but definitely stupid
Sponges...............$1
Microwave.............$60
Reading the article...Free
Burning down your house because you didn't read the whole article.....NOT Priceless
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
of course, those of us with children and bottle sterlisers know that placing water and objects in a microwave leads to the steam cleaning them... "well duh" was my reaction when i saw this "news" item yesterday....
Perhaps if you can't follow all the instructions there are some things you really shouldn't be doing.
Mind you, I am all about protecting and subsidising the weakest, the handicapped, the sick and al.
I think Al would be hurt if he found out you categorized him that way.
Fnord.
... how else did _you_ expect it to work?
A simple question for you: water molecules, are they larger or smaller than the bacteria and spores to be killed?
Last time I've checked, the wavelength used in the microwave is about 12.5 cm. Sure, the bacteria are much smaller than that, but is it at all relevant?
KnightTristan
Just a few months ago my friend put a bag of microwaveable popcorn into the microwave and left it for a few minutes. He came back and the microwave was smoking and the bag was on fire. Apparently the butter and kernels stuck together and burned. The apartment smelled for about 2 weeks (we could only open the windows a little at a time -- Canadian winter) and the microwave was ruined.
I think it's pretty funny that people tried this without wetting the sponge, however, I know many people that do not realize the nuances of how a microwave actually works.
Anyone ever see "Idiocracy"?
www.isoHunt.com
Some people put a dry synthetic object in the microwave on high for two minutes?
I don't think it's just the sponges that need sterilization...
They had this on the BBC yesterday too, I think in the morning they had suggested everyone microwave their sponges and then in the evening news they had a man with a ginger mustache from ROSPA who said that he wouldn't advise microwaving sponges because there is no setting on microwaves for sponges and that he for one didn't have the faintest idea what would happen if you did microwave a sponge except that whatever it was which happened would probably be unsafe and might cause an accident.
I found it very reassuring that ROSPA ( Royal Society For The Prevention Of Accidents ) does its research so thoroughly before making announcements.
... but maybe some of the people didn't read the article :-)
You are implicitly supposing that IQ is a genetic trait, which may not be the case. Intelligence (or the develoment of) could be more related to social or monetary issues.
I'm pretty sure Weird Al Yankovick won't mind. I think he fits the category like a charm.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Oh, but you say, taking things as fact without questioning why is a folly committed only by stupid people, thus making them ignorant. The two are really the same. I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light. There's probably less than 1,000 people on the planet who can give a good answer to these questions, and unless you're one of them, you've committed the same folly as your average suburban mom - you still don't truly know why a microwave works.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
So you are trying to say that people with lower IQ's are more succesfull? Time to take another beer to kill those unnecessary braincells.
Than boiling the sponge in a saucepan? I'd have though putting it in boiling water for a couple of minutes should probably destroy most bacteria.
and what type of spider?
Will i really be able to fly after that?
I'll let your guess.
Dumbass.
IMHO a better way to sterilise a sponge is as follows:
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Ask yourself: who wants to have sex with someone who burns sponges in his microwave?
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
The evolution feedback, in case of human IQ, has worked just fine till now. Almost all human institutions are organized in a pyramid-like structure: the more intelligent, well-educated people will be more at the top, leading. The "dumber" and lower-class people are more near or at the bottom, doing more of the menial work. ...?
.... So, we'd have 1 billion people, of which 99.99% have nothing to do, except to just try and enjoy themselves. My guess is most of them would get really bored really fast...
Now, until we have robots (or other technological solutions) that can take over most of the unskilled and lower-skilled work, we do need these "dumber" and lower-class people or the entire economy and our way of life will come to a standstill. Or do you really think, that if everybody was more intelligent and well-educated, that we'd have enough people with PhD's who would find satisfaction in working at the checkout of a supermarket or cleaning toilets or
The question then becomes: what if we do get to the point where we have robots (or whatever) to do most of the unskilled, lower-skilled and maybe even medium-skilled tasks? We'd have 5 billion people in the world, "mostly" not well-educated and due-to the evolutionary feedback up till now a "big" percentage would not be intelligent enough to be well-educated. What should become of these people? What would they do all day if they're all unemployed?
Even if natural selection would step in hard at that point and we'd be left with only with 1 billion people, all well-educated, what would THEY do all day? I mean, can you imagine 1 billion well-educated people working on innovations or being "artists"? Soon enough there would be little left to invent, or at least not enough to keep 1 billion people occupied, and then what? Spread out across the universe and colonize other planets? Sure, but seeing as everybody would ofcourse take all the knowledge with them there'd be nothing "real" to do on those planets as well, apart from just living.
Recessive dominant genes?
Stupid genes (or others) never dissapear until they have been dissemenated enough so that both parents have the gene. Which then expresses itself.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Of course it's a genetic trait. Perhaps not entirely, but there's a significant genetic component to it, that's why we're humans after all, you can't take a chimpanzee and raise him in IQ promoting environment and get Einstein.
I suspect we have a potential entry for the 2007 Darwin Awards.
--- This meme is memory intensive
One exceptional feature of a microwave is that it will keep heating at full effect no matter how hot the target gets. The only limit how you design your target.
d omestic-microwave-oven/
You can for example melt and cast most metals:
http://net127.com/2005/01/24/melting-metals-in-a-
With some research, you may even be able to use your kitchen microwave to generate some fusion reactions.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
When I was in college, someone took one of my coffee mugs, filled it up with Hershey's chocolate syrup, and put it in the microwave for 90 minutes. Then they left. As best as we can tell, the syrup first boiled over and filled up the bottom of the microwave. Eventually it hardened into a black crust and caught fire. That's when the fire alarm woke us up, you know -- it was three o'clock in the morning.
The microwave was ruined, and there was some damage to the cabinet. And I lost my favorite coffee mug too. But it's probably the best use for Hershey's chocolate syrup that I could think of (since it's pretty awful stuff).
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
People read the original article and played dumb for a bit, temporarily throwing out conventional wisdom regarding non-food objects in the microwave as they followed Reuter's authoritative instructions.
But, hey, this is slashdot and people don't play, rather, they are dumb, and we all have a good laugh at their misfortune while we're glad it was somebody else who ruined their microwave and not us.
And yes, I did make a whole bunch of toxic smoke years ago by forgetting to put the bowl of water while nuking a CD.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
This effect is clearly visible both on a global scale (developed/developing countries) and locally (lower/upper class).
What you're missing is what "developing/developed" means.
I've also been busy with such data, and I can tell you people were multiplying like rabbits in the likes of Germany, France, USA and so on, before they 'developed'.
Also don't confuse being massively ignorant (mostly a cultural phenomenon) with being genetically stupid.
Let's kill this stupid theory.
Actually evolution's still working just fine, the problem is lack of selection pressure.
For a while, intelligence was favored as the smarter people had better health and survived longer and thus reproduced more, and more consistently. Now that more of the population is living "comfortably", there's no longer a favorable selection for that trait. This suggests the level of intelligence has been optimized for the current environment.
What's going on now is that since there is so little pressure (i.e. the environment isn't really harsh enough to consistently select for a specific favorable set of traits) the gene pool is moving back towards a more neutral stance. I.e. the gene pool is getting more diverse in this environment. This is normally a good thing. It means when the next environment change brings in a pressure that selects for a different favorable trait, more of the population will survive because of this diversity. If we kept evolving for intelligence and suddenly the environment changed to say, high UV radiation resistance as being the next favorable trait, those additional intelligence refinements would likely be fairly useless (neglecting the effect of technology that could be invented to artificially maintain a stable environment). So the current trend now is to randomize the genetics of the population so hopefully some part of it will be able to survive no matter what happens next. You'll still see more intelligent people pop up now and then, as part of the normal variance. But the mean value won't move until there's a reason that becomes an advantage to survival and/or reproduction, and yes it may in fact backslide a bit as it stabilizes.
People keep assuming that being more intelligent is consistently an advantage. It may be from a societal view of how we define "success", or maybe "potential", or even "progress". But from natural selection's point of view, it isn't. Bigger brains require more resources in terms of food, complicate births, take longer to mature to adult level, etc. The system is designed to quit once "good enough" has been reached, so it doesn't waste resources on overkill.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
There are really intelligent folks around.
*ducks*
w00t
The average IQ on a fixed scale has been increasing with about 3 point per decade in the period from IQ tests were introduced until around ten years ago. Since the IQ scale is defines so 100 is the average, this means that the scale has had to be renormalized periodically.
Thus, evolution does not seem to have had a bad effect in IQ for that period (which is probably too short for evolution to be a factor anyway).
-Al
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Useless for disinfecting sponges because you won't get significant radiation reaching the center.
> I mean, can you imagine 1 billion well-educated people working on innovations or being "artists"?
Sure. According to Mr Jobs, that's what's happen inside their Cupertino HQ.
640KB of virtualized ram will be enough for everybody
Intelligence (or the develoment of) could be more related to social or monetary issues.
Ah, but rich parents typically bear rich kids (trust funds, inheritance, better opportunities, better educations leading to better paying jobs, etc.) and poor parents typically do not offspring that go on to make millions. Rags to riches (or riches to rags) *can* happen, but neither is commonplace. Similarly, kids do tend to reflect their parents' religion, social standing, morality, etc.
Don't assume that enviromental variables aren't inheritable. In most cases, I don't think that genetic predisposition can hold a candle to environmental predisposition. If Einstein was born to a family living in the slums (instead of an upper-middle class family), do you think he would have still come up Special Relativity? How nice it would be to pretend that he would; yet, it would be utterly naive to suppose that even an individual of Einstein's calibur could have completely overcome his environment, somehow educated himself, and then somehow pursued the academic community to listen to these crackpot "time dilation" theories coming from a man who could not afford a decent suit, let alone college.
Depending on your definition of "a good answer" there are either a good many more than that, or none at all. And given the controversy surrounding String Theory, I dare say that the likely candidates would disagree as to which thousand actually have a good answer:
Some facts.
1.Not holding your breath under water would be stupid.
2.Some people can hold their breaths under water for more than 5 minutes. Look up free-diving for instance.
3.Taking responsibility for stupidy is... well.. you know...
Most people are stupid. Why is this surprising?
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Well, actually, I got a sneak preview of the next Jean M Auel book. You will recall that Ayla has already invented flint and steel for making fire, horse riding, needles and dogs, and Jondalar has invented guns. In this new book, Jondalar invents Rock and Roll (but Ayla gets jealous and smashes his instrument when he starts "sharing Pleasures" with groupies) and Ayla invents the Courts and becomes the first lawyer. She successfully prosecutes the First Cave of the Lanzadonii for breach of patent when they start sewing with needles, and later goes on to represent a woman who cuts herself on a flint knife which was not properly labelled as sharp. Later in the book, she nearly loses a case brought by the S'Armunai Wolf Women, but the case turns around when she calls one of Jondalar's exes from the Sharamudoi as a surprise witness.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Generally, the more intelligent, well-educated and well-established couples get children at a later age, and get fewer of them.
The "dumber" and lower-class people reproduce faster, and there will be more and more of them."
I saw that film, too
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
": the more intelligent, well-educated people will be more at the top,"
I presume you're not an American?
Even if natural selection would step in hard at that point and we'd be left with only with 1 billion people, all well-educated, what would THEY do all day? I mean, can you imagine 1 billion well-educated people working on innovations or being "artists"? Soon enough there would be little left to invent, or at least not enough to keep 1 billion people occupied, and then what? Spread out across the universe and colonize other planets? Sure, but seeing as everybody would ofcourse take all the knowledge with them there'd be nothing "real" to do on those planets as well, apart from just living. .... So, we'd have 1 billion people, of which 99.99% have nothing to do, except to just try and enjoy themselves. My guess is most of them would get really bored really fast...
Errr, what the hell are you arguing? Seriously, I can't figure it out. That there's a finite limit to our intellectual pursuits and/or technological achievements? That existence itself is pointless? That smart people don't know how to have fun?
Society as a whole will always figure out something to itself occupied. Individuals that don't see the point anymore will inevitably withdraw from society and/or commit suicide--either way, removing themselves from the gene pool--leaving only those individuals who are able and willing to find a purpose. I don't see how intelligence or lack thereof has anything to do with it.
It's seems to really be a moot point whether IQ is genetic, social or monetary as an individual's children will (generally) be raised in the same social and monetary situation as the parents. No personal experience, but my father has been a guidance counselor at a High School since he retired from the military,(about 7 years) and he swears it's genetic. According to him, 95% of the time, if the kid is an idiot, when the parents come in for a meeting they're going to be idiots too, and the same thing holds true for the smart kids.
The relative poor Eastern Europe has much lower fertility rate than the rich Western Europe, despite a similar culture and similar (high) level of education. Even the very poor North Korea has fertility rate of only 1.9 children per woman. This seem to indicate a different cause is more likely.
In the countries with high fertility, children tend to be (or, until recently have been) responsible for the care of their parent in their old age. Having many children is therefore a way to ensure your comfort at an old age. In the welfare states of Western Europe, the state tend to take over that responsibility from the children. And in the communist states, the responsibility lies with the state to an even higher degree. This can explain why long time communist states have very low fertility rates, and why stable welfare states also have low fertility rates.
For capitalist countries with less well developed welfare systems, rich and well educated people will tend to set up other provisions (funds) to ensure their economic independence in their old age, and thus also be less depend on children for their pension. This explain the effect you see.
Society as a whole will always figure out something to itself occupied
Translation: It's 8 AM and I haven't slept yet.
from TFA: "Two minutes in the microwave can kill many germs on kitchen sponges, but the sponges have to be WET."
I wanted to sterilize my sponge but I didn't know what WET stood for. According to Wikipedia, it could be either Western European Time, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Wuest Expanded Translation (a translation of the New Testament by Kenneth Wuest) or WET Web Tester, an automated web testing tool. I assume that my sponge is none of the last three, so how do I change the time zone setting of my microwave?
Humans set goals which evolution can work for or against. In the case of the goal "All humans become smarter and more peaceful, and achieve worldwide safety and comfort, and stop shooting each other over which hand the invisible man in the sky wants you to wipe your a** with", the goal is nearly universal, at least among men who have thought at all about the optimal future state of mankind.
It is implied, and obvious to everyone except for pedantics like yourself, that value judgments about evolution are using that goal as the standard of value. And therefore evolution can move in 'right' or 'wrong' directions, relative to that goal.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
"Wet before nuking".
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
Like all crackpots who complain about things, the microwave accident is just a trigger event for an underlying psychosis.
It's obvious to any reader of "Monthly Sicko"(tm) that the guy's been repressing a deep persecution complez, ever since he lost his job on The Green Mile.
As long as, somewhere in this vast universe, there is even one strand of DNA replicating or about to do so, evolution will continue to be a success.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Most people desire a minimum level of material comfort, and money is fundamental for that. Therefore, even if intelligence comes from genetic factors, inteligent people will be relatively well from a monetary point of view. A person with a "smart gene" mutation would find a way to get rich even if born in a poor family.
I think it's most probable that both nature and nurture affect intelligence, one is the hardware and the other is the software, it's reasonable to expect that both factors will have an influence. But you cannot prove that by correlation alone.
LOL you are such a noob! Everyone knows the three things you should never put in the microwave: dry sponges, tin foil, and babies! Duh!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
Also the U.K http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6293735.stm , and we had two cities in the 'Most Intelligent' list....
How many people are wiping their ass with their sponge in the first place?
Note that the current American president has degrees from two of Americas top universities, so the theory could still stand.
You could argue that perhaps it needs to be clarified slightly eg. "the more intelligent, or well-educated" to account for places where education is purchased rather than provided by the state on merit.
Once again, we see that P.T. Barnum was correct...a sucker born every day. And apparently a lot of them have microwave ovens.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
A better example would be people who think diplomacy will work with homicidal maniacs bent on our destruction.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Because microwave ovens work best by vibrating water molecules. As they vibrate friction causes them to turn to steam which is what sterilizes the sponge in the first place.
The Nazis practiced genocide and encouraged eugenics. The fact that the distasteful former has so completely colored the latter to the point of tainting its meaning is obvious in your case.
Eugenics is practiced with every prenatal screening, gene screening to discover genetic abnormalities prior to conception, and with almost every in-vitro process. Do you consider those "horrible"?
This is merely encouraging a subset to remove themselves from the gene pool. There's a major difference between showing someone cliff-diving and describing its wonders vs forcibly shoving someone off a cliff.
Or do you hold that the Darwin Awards website is an abomination as well?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
We'd have 5 billion people in the world, "mostly" not well-educated and due-to the evolutionary feedback up till now a "big" percentage would not be intelligent enough to be well-educated. What should become of these people? What would they do all day if they're all unemployed?
They are consumers. They buy stuff. This appears to now be of fundamental importance to the economy (no one cares what you produce as long as you buy...).
Newsflash. Stupidity is NOT genetic. Intelligence may have some genetic links, but what you call "stupid" is people acting on incomplete or incorrect information, which is what we do EVERY DAY OF OUR LIVES.
A New God Damn Sponge
Nothing witty
Let this be a lesson! This is what happens when you don't RTFA!
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
The link between intelligence and the receipt of higher education degrees has never been conclusively proven to my mind; British life is littered with Oxbridge graduates who are quite demonstrably dense in everything but a narrow field, and usually only pull that off by force of will.
The link between wealth and power is well established and easily demonstrable.
I don't know who's dumber really: people who can't follow simple instructions when sterilising a sponge in a microwave, the people who were surprised that superheating water in an object killed off bacteria. I've been sterilising soil from the garden for indoor plants in the microwave for years; kills all bacterial and fungal spores stone dead (and provides a heady scent of cooked worm).
I'm agree with you
Five minutes isn't impossible at all. The Austrian free-diver Herbert Nitsch can hold his breath for more than 9 minutes.
You should watch the movie "Idiocracy". It is written by Mike Judge, who also wrote "Office Space". It is not that good, but it is still fun, and raises a couple of points :)
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
--Coder
Actually, the biggest problem with eugenics theories is this: the gene pool is too large for any multi-gene cluster (as must be needed to influence anything so nebulus as intelligence) to become dominant in any reasonable amount of time. If you want to see results on the order of a tens of thousands of years, you'd have to cut down the number of people, or at least segregate them into small breeding pools.
In any case probability is that even the stupid have excellent genes, the best results of millions of years of genetic pressure on small breeding groups of human ancestors. They may have drawn a bad "hand", or have had the hand they were dealt badly played (poor environment and education), but it goes too far to blame the individual cards.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
#1: survival of the fittest selects not only against lack of intelligence, but also against lack of things like penicillin. if you are such a firm believer in survival of the fittest without any artificial aid from your fellow human beings, the next time you get a deep gash, don't stich it, don't bandage it, and when the sepsis sets in, no antibiotis whatsoever. die shivering and hallucinating as your organs shut down happy that you are fulfilling natural selection
#2: survival of the fittest selects in favor of not only intelligence, but also in favor of communication. in other words, if you are about to walk into the path of a crouching mountain lion in the brush, and ogg says "stop", saving your life, nature selects for that ability: effective communication and social organization. an individual bee by itself is a dead in a day or two. a hive of bees will thrive and kill animals ten times the entire colony's size. effective social organization is a survival advantage, and by living in a community of humans where each specializes in a different ability and knowledge set, your ability to survive goes up by orders of magnitude. no one man knows everything, and anyone who thinks they do, or thinks they should, is probably demonstrating a profound ignorance of the value of communication as a survival advantage. and as a maladapted asocial loner, they should probably be selected against for an inferior set of genes
so your entire point about survival and "intelligence" is right... but only when considering your points and reversing them 180 degrees
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>>>Back in good old days, many centuries ago, there wasn't any kind of this Politically Correct stuff and neither was there protection of the idiots. There was one rule: survival of the fittest....
Yes, you just hogtied people to a stone, and threw them in the lake. The ones that sank drowned, and the ones that did not survived.
Or you made them walk on burning coal. The ones that got burnmarks were killed, and the ones that did not could live.
This is called survival of the fittest.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Wet sponge before microwaving.
Do not leave in microwave unattended.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
10 percent solution works wonders.
Get up!
When I first heard the experiment, I was thinking, "Finally! Eileen does not have hoard her sponges and search for sponge-worthy men!" Just zap and reuse! But these disasters are more Krameresque than Eileeny.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Please, stupid people don't need protection. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use.
buff3r
There are bigger threats than germs in kitchen sponges. Once you are done nuking sponges, you better mod your TV to stop the government from spying on you, too.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Primates (with a few notable exceptions) are group animals and enjoy a rich political and social life and all that that implies. Individuals co-operate as well as compete and the slow and the weak are helped and assisted. If you made mistakes dumb enough to kill you , you might indeed have someone on hand to pull you out. Survival of the fittest just doesn't cover it. Political correctness is neither here nor there.
Evolution doesn't necessarily select for intelligence or against stupidity. Even very highly intelligent people can make stupid mistakes and under some conditions stupidity is an evolutionary advantage.
The Nazis practiced genocide and encouraged eugenics. The fact that the distasteful former has so completely colored the latter to the point of tainting its meaning is obvious in your case.
The Nazis performed eugenics to an extreme degree. I think that eliminating "stupid" people (using an arbitrary definition of "stupid") by encouraging them to kill themselves would qualify as a moderate-to-extreme form of eugenics.
Eugenics is practiced with every prenatal screening, gene screening to discover genetic abnormalities prior to conception, and with almost every in-vitro process. Do you consider those "horrible"?
These are controversial ethical debates. Some people, especially the disabled community, do not believe that those who are born disabled should be screened out. Of course, the definition of "disability" and "disease" varies greatly.
This is merely encouraging a subset to remove themselves from the gene pool.
Deliberately encouraging people to kill themselves would... land you in a fair bit of trouble, I think.
Or do you hold that the Darwin Awards website is an abomination as well?
More like insensitivity to loved ones.
In that case, the "fittest" were the ones who, upon seeing someone approaching with rope and stones, got the fsck out of town.
I think that's why shoes were invented.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I had read one of the papers on microwaving your sponges, and since our house was enjoying a bit of a mouse-poop-on-the-counter problem at the time, I figured microzapping the bacteria couldn't hurt. Unfortunately it was an old microwave and there was no "quick minute" button, so in a hurry, I inadvertently set it for 20:00 minutes instead of 2:00. Maybe ten minutes later my housemate says, "my god what is that awful smell," and I run into the kitchen to find the sponge on fire and the microwave still dutifully cooking it. The smell lasted at least a week, and I threw away the microwave. So here's a question...I'm a little hazy on the concept, but microwaves heat stuff by exciting water molecules. Once the water molecules had evaporated what did it heat in the sponge that caused it to catch fire?
"I can see it now, billboards with signs saying: "a microwave is a great way to get a tan," "a blowtorch is a great way to thaw frozen pipes," and of course "it is cool to operate power tools--in the nude! Buy Budweiser!""
A small amount of humour is a dangerous thing.
A lot depends on what is being selected for. If my parents had decided they want someone with blond hair & blue eyes, I wouldn't exist! For that matter, if they had wanted someone with 20/20 vision, I wouldn't exist!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
From the FAQ:
"Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma."
Thus the reason that people will mod a Funny post Informative.
SYS 64738
...if my kitchen is even "Spongeworthy".
That's true, to a point. However, if the weaker, slower members pull the whole group down, the group might not survive. A group of primates who just lost their Alpha Male because he died after rescuing little BoBo from a leopard, might get whooped by another group of primimates.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Eugenics is practiced with every prenatal screening, gene screening to discover genetic abnormalities prior to conception, and with almost every in-vitro process. Do you consider those "horrible"?
These are controversial ethical debates. Some people, especially the disabled community, do not believe that those who are born disabled should be screened out. Of course, the definition of "disability" and "disease" varies greatly.
I agree there's much debate on this topic. In a contrary view, there was a story in the insert in my Sunday paper this past weekend about a married dwarf couple wanting to ensure their child was born a dwarf. This would be intentionally producing a child with what is considered a genetic abnormality by, at a rough guess, 95+% of the population. Personally, I feel that intentionally disadvantaging a child in this manner, because they will be at a disadvantage in today's society, is not unlike unnecessarily amputating a new born's legs or arms at birth. The story also made mention of intentionally selecting deafness for a deaf couple. I feel the same way about that.This is merely encouraging a subset to remove themselves from the gene pool.
Deliberately encouraging people to kill themselves would... land you in a fair bit of trouble, I think.
Or do you hold that the Darwin Awards website is an abomination as well?
More like insensitivity to loved ones.
Telling someone to "drop dead" if you will, is not punishable. As an example of how stupid our society has become as a whole, I was by pure happenstance viewing an ad on TV this morning. It was of the new Lexus IS, and they had one on a runway racing against an IS dropped from a helicopter across the drop target. The ground based IS squeaks right under the falling IS in classic thrilling escaped by a hair style.What makes this germane to this discussion is the text that was apparently felt by someone that needed to be included in the ad. Underneath, it stated first off, "all ariel sequences were simulated", followed by "Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt."
Now, if you have to tell someone that measuring out 4000 feet on a runway and racing a car dropped from a helicopter @ 4000 feet is something you shouldn't attempt, I'd say that anyone so tempted should be allowed to go ahead and potentially remove themselves from the gene pool.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Watched Idiocracy lately?
This sounds remarkably like the urban legend about the aircraft company firing chickens at their windshields only to realize that they weren't supposed to be frozen. In any case, Darwin is written all over this one. If you don't have the mental wherewithal to figure out that (dry sponge) + (lengthy microwave session) = (fire & smoking ruin of microwave)...oh well.
Perhaps more interesting would be to ask the question of these thermodynamically-challenge folk, "What nasty crud having you been wiping down with that $0.29 sponge that makes you feel compelled to sterilize it with a microwave rather than just using cleanser and hot water like the majority of sane people?" For that matter, if you believed your sponge to be that contaminated with bacteria, wouldn't you just -huh, huh- ***throw it away***?
As to confirm my complaint I just see a blurp on the RSS feed of my paper about the/a British Fire Chief warning for putting sponges in the microwave.
Again without any reference or explanation why it's a bad idea.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yeah, that's the touchy thing about that. Then again, if sperm #2 had been a little faster, you wouldn't exist. Or, you'd exist, you'd just be different. They'd still have a child, it just wouldn't be "you".
So, I think that entire argument is a very hollow strawman.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Hate to feed a troll but:
IQ is the most weakly correlated with breeding of the features you mention. The wealth, education and class levels of people are very strongly correlated, but it is not even remotely clear that this is more than the common effect of security on progeny numbers seen in many fish, mammals and birds.
The phenomenon is that many critters have *more* children which they care for poorly when they are low on resources or under stress. The assumption we like to make is that the critter is estimating the survivability of it's kids low, and thus going buckshot rather than sniper since it is dark (low chance of success).
Of course if there are so few resources that the critter can't even create kids eg: starving, then that will dominate and fewer kids will be expected again.
Very very good point, wish I had mod points. That's the way society naturaly evolved: few intelligent people at the top and the "unwashed masses" doind the menial works. Always the evolution of the more complex structure (society) takes precedence over the evolution of the individual.
As for the second part, the problem is pretty much solved, isn't it? Most of the developed world already runs in a rat-wheel, working to satisfy created needs (like a new car every five years). So no, they won't die of boredom, unless they already are.
As for the few who gave up the idiot box and try to find interesing things to do - well there is still huge work to be done for at least a couple of hundred years. Just in programming - if I had a spare year or so I'd work on this and for 5-10 years or more there is still a good open source Common Lisp distribution missing. And then the whole meeting girls in bars thing to work out... Come to think of it, life is actualy short, isn't it?
Sorry, viruses do not contain "a tiny amount of water". Bacteria, of course, do contain water within their cell walls, but they are small enough that most of the microwaves will miss them. That's why you can't kill ants or flies in your microwave. Also see http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=26 5489
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
You imply that you are part of the 0.000001% of the population you've identified as being capable of answering your question, but anyone expecting the average Joe to have the faintest idea how a 65 year-old nearly ubiquitous kitchen appliance functions is an arrogant asshole?
You've got some serious chutzpah...
"Yes, you just hogtied people to a stone, and threw them in the lake. The ones that sank drowned, and the ones that did not survived."
Actually, the ones that survived were burned for being witches. After all, how else could they survive? Talk about a shitty test.
You apparently do not know what you are talking about. Check wikipedia: the heat is generated by the rotation of watermolecules who are aligned by the waves. FYI: watermolecules are smaller than 120 mm, and smaller than bacteria, and they only *rotate*. They have nothing to do with something in the range of 120mm. The bacteria contain more than enough water themselves to get cooked. Wetting the sponge is a waste of energy.
Actually, i put my cycling clothes once every 1 - 2 weeks into a microwave. I have a recumbent, so the back part of my shirts and trousers get a distinguishable smell after a while. Since they can't be washed hot or ironed, i want to kill off the bacteria in a cool way. So first i make sure they are completely dry, the only water in it is in the bacteria. I do this to prevent high temperatures. Then i put them into the microwave (an old one, not sure how powerful it is) for five minutes at full power. After that, they are warm, but not hot and defenitly not burnt. Then i wash them at 30 Celsius and all the smell is gone.
Trust me, I work for the government.
...the sponge microwaves you!
Of course, "in the good old days" most people who could not start a fire, ride a horse, milk a cow, kill and gut an animal, grow food, cook meals, sew clothing, wield a weapon, etc. were all likely to be considered idiots. At least if they were over the age of 13 or so.
So it's good thing that all the superior minds who vaguely understand microwaves and post on Slashdot have mastered that list of basic knowledge so thoroughly. Wouldn't want to burn off anyone's genitals by mistake!
after the value of social networking and communication is appreciated, then you begin to open the door for individual concerns and rights to get abused. if the value of the hierarchy or organization overrules the value of the individual, then individuals rights begin to decrease
your lament over idiots who fail to take accountability for their actions doesn't consider the opposite: where blaming the individual is enforced in such a way that organizations, the government, large corporations, etc., can get away with nurder instead. you have to err in a certain direction: on the side of the group, or the side of the individual. if you side with the group, justice will caution on the side of heartless and cruel organizations, and you will horror stories of individual rights getting crushed. if you side with the individual, justice will caution on the side of idiots without a sense of responsibility, and you will hear horror stories of morons getting millions for spilling coffee
in other words, when examined in a vacuum, your horror stories of lack of personal accountability are awful. but when your stories are examined in context, in reality, where we are given a choice between two negative situations: erring on the individual or erring on the group, your stories aren't so bad. i'd rather hear about the idiot getting millions for spilling coffee than the toxic waste dumper getting away with poisoning neighborhoods
you can't err on the side of individual rights and on the side of large organizations at the same time, you can't practice justice without making errors, and you have to expect one type of horror story or the other type no matter which way you err. in this way, when looking at your horror stories of lack of personal accountability outside of a vacuum, they don't sound so bad. because you appreciate the fact that limiting individual rights because of a lack of personal accountability means that large companies and the government begin to get away with murder instead of individual morons
i'd rather have grandma get millions for spilling coffee instead. when you see things that way, your issue with idiots without a sense of responsibility isn't so bad
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you choose to read an article on the internet and choose to do something stupid like put an object into something you consider a black box and see what happens, YOU are personally responsible for the result of the act you have chosen to perform. Just because you are a moron doesn't make you any less responsible. Your perspective is the equivalent of thinking that hugging a tree will somehow save it from the elements in which it exists. Both are flawed. Ignorance itself may != stupidity but acting on said ignorance does. An ignorant fool is still an ignorant fool.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Then again, if they decided to get it on 5 seconds earlier or 5 seconds later, you wouldn't exist! Gotta love the butterfly effect.
Incidentally, this is what leads to humans' tendency to crap up ecosystems with inventions that bypass 'the natural order of things' by using exotic, nonobvious properties of the materials in their environment (like the difference between a bird building a nest and manufacturing Portland cement) and put intolerable selective pressure on other species.
This also means that once we're on this path, more intelligence is the trait most advantageous to advance, absent really extreme selective pressure on our ability to maintain homeostasis (e.g. asteroid impact, nuclear war, runaway Venus-like global warming, etc.). Even then, evolving the ability to colonize other planets seems like our DNA's best shot at continuing to propagate.
In college I lived in a cooperative house where 50 of us shared a big industrial kitchen. Todd, a guy I was friendly with, walked in with a hot dog wrapped in foil-backed paper. He said, I can put this in the microwave, right? And I'm thinking "Um, you never heated a hot dog in the microwave? That's what they're best at!" It did not occur to me that he meant, including the foil-backed paper. Who doesn't know you can't put foil in the microwave?
So he stuck it in there and pop! the paper explodes in flame. I yelled "what are you doing!?" and he said "you said it would be fine!"
I guess in a way this was my first experience in tech support: you can never be too clear.
How else did they expect it to work? Of course you need the god-damn water in the sponge. Microwaves have a wave length measured in the centimetre. The size of a bacterial spore is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller The size of a bateria is a lot smaller than this again.
...Or maybe someone who feels superior to "the masses" need to really review the concept of dielectric heating.
So, are you suggesting that any body shorter than the wavelength of microwave radiation (12 cm) will be left unheated? Neat! That must be why my pizza rolls are still frozen when I get them out.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
And no, I had not planned on wetting the sponge. I was wondering "Isn't this going to burn the sponge?" but I was going to do it anyway. The main problem is that the article I read said that the water was the reason why the bacteria loved the sponge but did not mention that the scientists tried it with a wet sponge. This encouraged the mistake people made. It was a poorly written article.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This is unlikely to be anything new. Very intelligent people have a tendency to get distracted into doing other things that distract from their "real" business (evolutionarily speaking) of increasing the representation of their genes in the gene pool. On the other hand, intelligence can benefit survival, so while the number of offspring may be smaller, they may survive longer, compensating for their lower average fertility.
So we may already be pretty close to steady state insofar as evolution of intelligence is concerned. The notion that there is some kind of evolutionary driving force toward ever-greater intelligence is probably wrong, but fears about degradation of the gene pool because of less intelligent people having more children are probably also misguided.
Whether it would be a good thing for us to get smarter is another question entirely. And one that we will have to answer eventually, because genetic studies will inevitably lead eventually to identification of genes that limit intelligence, making it possible for parents to control, at least to some extent, the intelligence of their children.
I think this was covered before: U.S. Cities Don't Make the Intelligence Cut
"I didn't know the sponge was supposed to be wet."
Anybody remember the scene in this movie?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Why not just put your sponges in a pot of boiling water for two minutes and skip all the exploding parts? It even works on metal scouring pads.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Worse than you thought I know, but it's true.
Dr. Raymond Stantz: I was present at an undersea unexplained mass sponge migration.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Uhh, Ray, the sponges migrated about a foot-and-a-half.
According to the article, now they have to warn people that the sponge will be hot when it comes out of the microwave. If you weren't expecting that already please place your microwave on the curb for pickup. Thank you.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
And everybody loves DEVO!!!
Whip it Good!
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
Please get an education. You did something ignorant that a first year physics student (as well as a first year cooking student) generally knows not to do. Bye now.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
my karma will hurt after this post. [...]And so I say "farewell to karma..."
People who try to apply reverse-psychology on moderators should be treated with -1, Provocation.
You are implicitly supposing that IQ is a genetic trait, which may not be the case. Intelligence (or the develoment of) could be more related to social or monetary issues.
It has a correlation to monetary issues, but is not "caused" by monetary issues. Diet has a bigger factor in IQ than anything you list, but then you could claim "societal or monetary" could affect diet. Perhaps you should have just said "environmental." That's the real buzz word for the debate. Is it genetic or environmental? And the answer is probably the same as height and many other things. It is 100% genetic, except where affected by the environment. That is to say, genetics sets up the baseline. The environment can cause deviations from he baseline, but the environment does not set the baseline. 1000 people from the same environment will vary wildly. 1000 people with the same genetics are quite close together. This has been shown with twins separated at birth and raised in vastly different environments ending up more similar than different, for hobbies, traints, and yes, results on IQ tests.
The people that imply enviroment has anything to do with IQ or height are trying to come up with excuses for differences between people. Why is it so bad that someone is "dumber" than someone else and it can't be changed? It is people that claim environment that imply a low IQ is a failing that must be explained away.
Learn to love Alaska
Evolution does not have any right or wrong directions. That's devolution fallacy.
Humans set goals which evolution can work for or against. In the case of the goal "All humans become smarter and more peaceful, and achieve worldwide safety and comfort, and stop shooting each other over which hand the invisible man in the sky wants you to wipe your a** with", the goal is nearly universal, at least among men who have thought at all about the optimal future state of mankind.
It is implied, and obvious to everyone except for pedantics like yourself, that value judgments about evolution are using that goal as the standard of value. And therefore evolution can move in 'right' or 'wrong' directions, relative to that goal.
Um, you are confusing breeding and evolution. You'd like to breed humanity into some communal loving sheep species. God gave us free will to screw with our selves how ever we choose. That applies to our species as well. Your communal loving sheep will be slaughtered or enslaved or just governed by 1-5% of humanity that goes down the other route. They are actually both morally equal. To say one side is morally better than the other is just to apply our own standards on it. I'm not part of the ruling class, but I'd like to be. I'm not ruthless or crave it enough though. I'm quite happy being a bottom rung sheep. So as long as I don't get slaughtered in a war, I'll be happy.
... lighting yourself on fire can ensure that you don't ever have to worry about germs again. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited by law. Flames may not be as pictured. Self-immolation should not be attempted by children, pets, people with allergies, or others who may be disturbed by screaming (particularly their own). Always consult your family physician before lighting anyone on fire.
Life needs more saving throws.
Even if natural selection would step in hard at that point and we'd be left with only with 1 billion people, all well-educated, what would THEY do all day? I mean, can you imagine 1 billion well-educated people working on innovations or being "artists"? Soon enough there would be little left to invent, or at least not enough to keep 1 billion people occupied, and then what? Spread out across the universe and colonize other planets? Sure, but seeing as everybody would ofcourse take all the knowledge with them there'd be nothing "real" to do on those planets as well, apart from just living. .... So, we'd have 1 billion people, of which 99.99% have nothing to do, except to just try and enjoy themselves. My guess is most of them would get really bored really fast...
O.k. say an economic purge just leaves those not employed to starve to death as low level jobs are all done by robots and those jobs that are left are all very high skilled jobs. Um, I don't quiet buy that. I'd think that the human labor would be redirected. We'd use them as entertainment before just allowing them to die off. Think wars being refought and televisied for the fun factor to see who wins. The elite don't take part it just a common lower class thing, but say every major war in human history is refought with period weapons, just to see if that nation's team could now win. If you get bored or tired of life, you die off so you won't make it as an immortal. Immortals don't get bored easily. They might start building a ring world just to take up the time.
Pedants like myself, please. Being pedantic is what we do.
O
As for the second part, the problem is pretty much solved, isn't it? Most of the developed world already runs in a rat-wheel, working to satisfy created needs (like a new car every five years). So no, they won't die of boredom, unless they already are.
As for the few who gave up the idiot box and try to find interesing things to do - well there is still huge work to be done for at least a couple of hundred years. Just in programming - if I had a spare year or so I'd work on this [sourceforge.net] and for 5-10 years or more there is still a good open source Common Lisp distribution missing. And then the whole meeting girls in bars thing to work out... Come to think of it, life is actualy short, isn't it?
There is a few thousand years of things that I'd like to do. But for some eason, I still put have daily/weekly sex in there with learn every human language and Phds in every existing human field of knowledge. Actual reproduction, I don't want. I just want the sex. Maybe 50, 100, or 500 years of daily or weekly sex as ordered would be enough for me to get bored with it, but then there is all the science and tech things that I'd also be able to play with. I think having a society where we become immortal would chage us more than anything. I'd life with my current wife for 50-100 years, but after the house was paid for, the kids moved into lives of their own, and I'd still have hundreds of years to live in the future? We both might get bored with just each other after 200-300 years.
*Shrugs* I don't know, out of all the misuses of such phrases, at least "and" and "et" mean the same thing. Give him some slack, at least he didn't use "ecetera"...
The original story said it took between 4 and 10 min at full power to kill all the spores in the sponge. What kind of life can survive 10 min in a full sized microwave! Incredible!
When I put my gold ring into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off!
I wish I had mod points to mod you up, but alas... In any case, I concur... the original article clearly says they were using sponges that had been soaked in wastewater.
Microwave Experiments Cause Spooge Disasters
...haven't any of these people seen "Green Mile"? You always wet the sponge. Always.
The weird things isn't that people forgot to wet the sponge so it wouldn't catch on fire...
The weird thing is that people are so afraid of bacteria that they are going be microwaving their sponges!! Not only that, I see they sell anti-bacteria material sponges pre-made at the store... and anti-bacterial soap... and anti-bacterial air-sprays (don't worry about lung cancer from breathing that crap!). Anti-bacterial teething rings... anti-bacterial towels... anti-bacterial shaving cream...
When did people get paranoid about bacteria all of a sudden? You gotta admit, bacteria isn't a significant problem for most people in the industrialized world, even without all the extreme anti bacteria tactics people are using.
They said they wet the sponges in waste water. Not that anyone trying this should wet the sponge before trying it. Those two things are different.
Yopu for you?
I gave up on sponges. Even in Colorado, they get stinky in a week or two. Now I use a vegetable brush: it doesn't reek, it's dishwasher-safe, and it cleans dishes better.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Of course, *every* human being is an idiotic or dumb at some random instant in time... the trick is not to be dumb "in front a tiger".
Thanks to Trotsky, Marx and Lenin (or so the joke goes...)
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I thought they used oompa-loompas.
> sent people hurrying to test the idea this week
Sounds like a heard of sheep. Do they blindly rush out to test every idea like that? You'd think the cloud of evaporated urine, Lysol, grease, and Ramen created by heating it would be more harmful than rinsing it.
While you are testing out all the theories in this tread, try Peeps (you know those disgusting marshmallow candies that you still have in your closet 2 years after Halloween re-located them from the store shelf to your shelf). They are great fun to watch in the microwave -- try it and see. And no, they won't light everything on fire.
Granted that I know that microwaves heat up water, but the original article could be interpreted in several ways:
Saying they soaked the sponges could mean that they did that to contaminate them for the test, not necessarily as part of the microwaving procedure.
If the sponges are not wet, they should not get hot, since microwaves only heat up water.
If I was going to try this, I might put a dry sponge in the microwave, along with a bowl of water (since not having any water can damage the microwave). They didn't get into the mechanism, whether the heat kills the microbes, or if the microwaves themselves do something.
A couple of things:
:)
1) "Gypsies" should be capitalized like any other proper noun. They are an ethnic group, like Jews or Serbs or Albanians or Koreans, and should be capitalized as such.
2) This reminds me of an article I read some years ago, maybe in Popular Science, which mentioned how certain people (in this case, those with a rare genetic-abnormality-caused blindness) would marry others with the same condition and have children, and the article pointed out how very BAD an idea this is, since both parties' recessive genetic abnormalities would now become a dominant trait, and guarantee the offspring to have the same genetic abnormality!
3) I apologize for possibly baiting flames here, but I must mention that I've long been of the opinion that the human race is ultimately doomed to failure for one simple reason: Unlike EVERY other species on the planet, we allow our weak to survive and persist.. Of course, with my godawful 20/160 eyesight, I certainly consider myself among the "weak" and probably deserve to be NaturallySelected(tm) out of the picture..
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
What kind of response do such people expect to get back from an edifice?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
**(For the record, I don't downmod comments)**
The whole robots/unemployment thing has been hashed out repeatedly, argued even before there was a term/name for "robots". The following is the outline of personal notes i used for a speech i had to give in speech class a few years ago:
SPOILER WARNING: That's part of the premise of the setup in Brave New World by Huxley. They tried making an island for all the people who were grown to be smart and let them loose. You might want to read it.
I've been using the microwave to sterilize kitchen sponges for several years now.
And yes, the sponges are always wet. I've seen The Green Mile.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Ok, showing how dumb we can all be some times. I tried this after my son was born. We started sterilizing his bottles using a steamer in the microwave. Well, I figured it would be just as effective for sponges! Let's face it, those kitchen sponges get really smelly and nasty after a while - no matter what they say about "germicidal". Unfortunately, I also tried it w/ a not-completely-wet sponge. Damp won't do it, the thing has to be SOAKING wet. I put a damp one in there for 2 minutes - enough time to boil water - and burned a hole right through the middle of it. Now, thanks to HIGH-TECH RESEARCH (I'm embarrassed to say it's my alma mater) I know that if I soak the thing, it actually DOES kill the germs!
The only way of evaluating the success of a trait that really makes sense evolutionarily is the fraction of the population of that species carrying the trait as a function of time. But that doesn't take into account survival of the species, or of what you might call its "evolvability" -- it's ability to continue to evolve or to give rise to other species. That is probably appropriate from an evolutionary point of view, since in most circumstances natural selection doesn't really much "care" about survival of the species. It will quite happily paint a species into a corner where extinction is inevitable.
It is important not to fall into the trap of confusing evolutionary success with value. While natural selection may have replaced the hand of god as an explanation of the origin of species diversity (at least for educated people), it is easy to fall into the habit of presuming that because something has evolved, it must be good. But natural selection is not a god, and it doesn't care about us. While we may of course be happy that we have evolved, that doesn't mean that natural selection has our best interests at heart. And there is no reason why we shouldn't interfere with natural selection, so long as we make sure that we know what we are doing.
You forgot the most important part of your closing. :)
:)
AND MAKE SURE THEY HAVE A CAMCORDER WHEN THEY TRY.
Youtube needs more video's resulting in the death (or at least permanent sterility) of the people in the videos.
Of course I'm not advocating people film them killing other people, but if you are doing something stupid enough to cause severe pain at best, and probably death, you should have the decency to publish the recording so we can all laugh at you
Cheers
I am 31337 or something.
> "In case of human IQ, the evolution feedback works in the wrong direction."
> Evolution does not have any right or wrong directions. That's devolution fallacy.
I believe you're mistaking his grammar. "Wrong direction", in this statement, doesn't apply to any inherent goal of evolution, but to a goal of the race that evolution applies to, specifically enhancing human IQ.
If he had said, "We're devolving", I'd agree with you, but in this case, what quite clearly states is that the process of natural selection appears to be moving an attribute of humankind in a direction that is counterproductive to its apparent goal. In essence, the 'wrong direction'.
He actually states the intent of the devolution fallacy in the correct form, by not attributing a set of goals to an undirected process.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
My guess is that you're not intelligent enough to know that, even counting a huge database of All Human Knowledge as part of your own, no one can know everything. There will always be something new to learn (and if there's not, there's always something new to try).
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
See, there's this cool thing we have in the English language called sarcasm. You should look it up some time.
The guy was making fun of the other guy's use of "let my guess" by saying "I'll let your guess." He was playing on the use on Engrish there. The parent you're referring to was what we would call a joke killer, like you. Seriously...how you missed the clear joke here is beyond me.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
There's plenty of good jokes here about Darwinism, and some useful discussion about how to actually sterilize a sponge (boiling water, dishwasher, eliminating the sponge as a middleman and simply cleaning plates in the microwave, etc.), but what about the reasons for sterilizing the sponge in the first? Does it even make sense?
Remember, we're talking about a species that used eat stuff raw that had been sitting out in the sun for a couple hours, and beat it into edible sized pieces with sharp rocks. It's a species that still does eat stuff off the floor, picks its nose, and thinks nothing of touching computer keyboards or the handrail on city bus. And here we are worrying about ordinary household bacteria in a sponge that probably gets used in conjunction with some form of antibacterial detergent anyway.
Seriously, how many death certificates note "Cause of death: Scotch Brite scrubber sponge?" How much clinical evidence is there that disinfecting sponges increases longevity or improves your health?
At the same time, there is mounting evidence that moderate exposure (without overdoing it, of course) to microbes may bolster the immune system, and questions about whether antibacterial products might kill only the weakest pathogens, leaving no resource competition to stifle the growth of chemical-resistent bacterial strains.
Don't be paranoid. Most of the microbes out there never hurt anyone.
Or let's put it another way: the more "advanced" a society gets the less applicable natural selection becomes. Why? Because societies in first world countries will try to safeguard its citizens against stupidity or any other "lack of fitness". Not only does it protect its citizens against natural hazards, such as wild animals, bad weather, famines etc. but it also strives to protect them from any new threats arising due to the new life style.
;) - A funny movie none the less.
The example in this case would be: guy hears about scientists sterilizing a sponge, guy rushes to the microwave in order to replicate the experiment, sponge catches fire, guy frantically jumps around in circles while microwave oven and room catches on fire, this sets off the fire alarm which in turn calls the firefighters, they extinguish the fire, guy sues everybody and their grandma, gets rich and procreates like mad..
We have basically neutralized effects of natural selection on us by assuring the survival and procreation of individuals that would be "less fit". Instead we are subjected mainly to genetic drift, the other effect that determines the gene pool of a population.
The movie Idiocracy actually takes it a step further and postulates that stupidity actually increases the "fitness" of an individual (i.e. a stupid individual is more likely to have children), thus a bunch of generations down the line we'll be living in an "idiocracy" such as the one depicted
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I figured it was just a mistyped "and all." I was being playful, not malicious. :)
Fnord.
i Can't Believe this! Does nobody here remember the Green Mile?
Gotcha, I was just being "playfully defensive". ^.^;
In fact, there are no "directions" at all.
The researchers simply stated the procedure they used to perform their experiment, and the results thus obtained.
If you were to follow their "directions", you would soak the sponge in bacteria-laden wastewater prior to putting it in the microwave oven.
It is understandable that many people would want to skip that step.
That said, it is still surprising that people didn't wet their sponges, as the researchers indicated that it was probably the heated water, not the microwaves, that killed the bacteria.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
One day we will absolutely be able to "clone Einstein". Now, the real question is, will we be able to subject the clone to all the hormonal and chemical processes that Einstein was subjected to during the entire span of his lifetime that produced his genius, and, more importantly, can we make him want to be interested in something we consider, or will later consider, useful?
In other words, cloning is merely making a genetic copy. To actually create a carbon copy, or even a copy with similar enough abilities, is more than merely cloning. (This is more along the lines of what you're suggesting.)
The potential for stupidity or intelligence certainly has hereditary components. Recent studies have shown that environment has the largest effect on expressing the potential intelligence, and in some cases might even increase that capacity. This does not debunk the fact that some people just have more innate intelligence (genetically based) but it doesn't guarantee that those fortunate people are "smarter" than anyone else. It's the same with athletics. Some people are just "gifted" with better physique. However, if they eat @ McDonalds everyday for 30 days and sit on their can watching TV (Thanks Spurlock!) vs someone not so gifted that goes out and trains for the ironman triatholon, who do you think will win a triatholon race between the two?
Innate abilities mean nothing if you don't work to express them.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
But, I'd argue that this isn't even the reason we're "doomed". I'd point to something else, if you're of this particular mental bent: look at birthrates among the intelligent, educated, well-off people in the "rich" countries. You'll note the major trend you'll see is very low or no births to these people. So the genetically "successful" for the human race are actively removing themselves from the gene pool, whether consciously or not is irrelevant. I myself am contributing to that trend by only having a single child. If humans were like other species, I would have 30+ kids. Of course, that would kill me.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
But the very question of who's weak is changed by technology.
I was born with some sort of pigeon-toed or club-foot defect. I'm not sure exactly what, because as an infant I wore a brace that twisted my legs back into "normal" position, I have no recollection of it.
Now I'm a karate black belt who can deliver pretty good kicks with those "deformed" legs. So who's "weaker", me or the guy born with perfect legs but who doesn't use them for anything more strenuous for a walk to the fridge for another beer?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Yeah, but it WILL ruin a good screwdriver, so use a cheap, WELL_INSULATED one instead.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Ray: Of course you forget, Peter. I was present at an undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.