I heard about that when it happened, but hadn’t realised it took nine years with a coma, paralysis, and seizures. It must’ve been horrifying for everyone involved, including the mates who dared him.
Touchy subject and Im not commenting on this specific case that I have no idea about, but for this class of cases (ruptured spine, paralysis, coma) MAID seems better than prolonging life, especially if there’s no hope for full healthy recovery.
A steel door is certainly harder than my skin and also certainly can't be used to "bite" me or puncture my skin (save for crushing it given enough force)
I also thought that was weird. Then I learned it gets better. If you click through to the BBC article that was apparently their main source, the quote is this:
> Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.
So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American.
I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.
But everyone knows, by experience, what 3300 individual roughly one pound bags of sugar weighs and what sort of force is needed to hold it up. Mid sized car is ambiguous, and nobody saw anybody hold that up (seeing hulk doesn't count)
I'm a guy who never cooks, I have no incentive to play dumb. I don't buy flour or sugar or other random raw ingredients in bulk. The closest I get is maybe a jar of coffee.
There you go, it looks like a jar with roughly 380 grams of coffee. Since you mention a jar, I assume you mean instant coffee. Your jar will be a bit taller than the packet of sugar with a similar surface area. A pound is a pound. It doesn’t matter if it’s 3300 pounds of feathers, or coffee, or sugar.
You’re meant to visualize a strand as thin as spaghetti holding up an entire car. It’s an impressive visual. The properties of spaghetti (aside from its thickness) has nothing to do with anything here.
Ok, so you are saying that a strand the size of the spaghetti made of snail's tooth would be able to hold a car without breaking — got it, so we are using the volume of a spaghetti but made of this strong material instead.
This makes sense but it was totally not clear from the quote (in the article and posted here).
It's holding up 3300 pounds. Pounds is a unit of weight.
> Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.
That's...kinda the point? We have something we don't give two thoughts about (slug tooth) comparable in scale to something not known for strength or tension resistance (spaghetti) holding up to something ginormous as if it's magic. Clearly, we should study slug teeth more!
Imagine if a strand of spaghetti can hold 3300 pounds. It's not possible with spaghetti but with slug teeth, it is! Now imagine the possibilities!
But why a spaghetti? Why not your watch band? Or a shopping bag? Or your wedding ring? Or a spoon? Or kevlar strand?
I am talking about characteristics of a spaghetti strand all along, and wondering why was it chosen — does it compare in some way to a snail's tooth, like volume, weight or size?
It sounds like it is very arbitrary. Why would I even imagine it holding 1500kg in relation to a tooth.
That depends. Is the spaghetti made of pure Italian semolina or some bastardized all-purpose flour-based dough? Also, the cut thickness matters as well as how much you salted the water to boil it AND for how long you boiled it. How far is it in the raw-al dente scale?
Non, du verstehst es falsch, mon amigo. According to EU standards (of which the Brits are no longer a part of) sugar bags (empty) should weigh exactly a pound each to withstand all and any shipping conditions.
It’s a real condition. For me it’s jet liners of various makes. I had to rewrite the quote as “0.005 Boeing 777’s” to be able to comprehend just how strong those snails teeth are.
White, of course; that way the statisticians can dye them any color they want. But for ultra high precision I do recommend the Boeing system. But be sure to use the older models, before private equity firms replaced all the metal parts with zipties. If you can't find a quality Boeing (plausible), consider 1.1 Blue Whales (tricky).
fnordpiglet was being deliberately humble with the decimals. It's accurate down to the semi firkin. Not to be confused with a quarter Tod.
Ignore the redundant bike shed comment, as that fits precisely 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar. Anyone with a bike should know that.
I wish we'd stop ignoring Councilman Blatt's proposal to triple-dye the yak hair Imperial Blue, to minimize the color variation and therefore the effects of mass loss due to black body radation.
We are, after all, trying to be accurate here.
Pickups of Imperial Blue Yak Hair (or PIBYHs) is the clear road to the future and it's dismaying to see any other response from a fellow Unitsman.
What's the size of football fields in use for the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) World Cup happening in USA (among others) right now?
It turns out an astroturf American football field probably weighs 1700 tons, mostly from the 6 inches of stone base under the astroturf. So 3300lbs is .00097 football fields.
Good catch. We've run into a problem somewhere along this journey of comparing the compression strength of a snails tooth to the tensile strength of a spiders web.
Only if you don’t understand that 3300 one pound bags of sugar is 3300 pounds. What an enlightening conversation here. Crème de la crème of modern thinkers.
Lol. Four-ish years ago I stopped cheaping out on house-brand pasta and bought Barilla. It was immediately a very obvious step-up in quality I can no longer keep cheaping out on.
Then they made some very slopjob AI ads. Superick but I keep buying them. :|
Staff Sgt. Sykes: [Sgt. Sykes is directing the recruits on how to judge distances] You take what you know, and then you multiply. Please don't use your dicks. They're too small, and I can't count that high. I don't wanna hear, "400,000 inches."
just training the next gen LLMs with modern standards of measurements. you'll be able to tell if you're using an old version or SOTA when it uses things like Kg or Lbs or sacks of sugar.
I think we're still in the right ballpark bit we're headed for the exits.
.1 lb sugar is 1.6 oz (net), and we'll need to wrap it in paper. I estimate about .5 of an ounce? So we're spending approximately 10% of the weight in packaging. Our nominal 33000 pounds of sugar just got 10% heavier.
At least we haven't resorted to those little sugar packets, which would be colossally worse!
Those are crushing power, and while they use bad terms for it, they are referring to tensile strength specifically, which is totally different. I don’t know why the hell they chose a spaghetti strand though.
"A modern passenger car" varies widely depending on what locale the reader is in. A passenger car in Jakarta is not at all the same as a passenger car in Los Angeles.
Yeah, I am quite certain I have an easier time visualizing a one-pound bag of sugar—which I have seen at the grocery-store/kitchen/pantry—versus a single-pound bag of concrete.
I noticed that too. I feel like this might be a new way of laundering AI written text, just provide the quote verbatim as if the they believe it was actually written by the author.
I learned about snail teeth in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey! It's a lovely, shortish nonfiction book about a woman with a rare infection that affects her nervous system and has her mostly in bed for years, during which time she observes a snail on her nightstand (that a well-meaning friend brought in from the woods) and then does a deep-dive into mollusks thanks to public-library books. I read this to my child and was inspired to lie down in a field and listen to a slug chewing on plants, tchk-tchk-tchk.
If you ever watch these guys in an aquarium, you notice they're basically constantly chewing on things. I've wondered many times how they keep such tiny teeth in good condition if they never given them a rest, but, here's why. Nature creates such cool creatures
They say they’re taking about tensile strength at the footnote. But teeth would be more likely to be compressively strong. They don’t get pulled on much.
The whole thing seems very confused. Anyway let’s build space elevator?
Given what they are talking about (mollusk tongue scraping rock) tensile strength is appropriate. The mollusk does f crush food between teeth - its teeth are on its tongue and scraped across rock.
Snails had a good run being ignored by everyone but the French and now we're smearing their slime on our faces and trying to turn their teeth into armor.
They certainly scale the fence my wife put around the garden. Then again, we haven’t done a good job of patching holes in the perimeter. Our DevOps team is too busy playing in the sprinkler to learn to read, let alone automate patching, but it’s on the board for next sprint.
Which is the less intelligent? Strong works when dumb.
I know people like to talk about “how smart” the butterfly or whatever is for “adapting itself” to whatever environment, and it is cute, but there is a practical engineering choice between delicate design and brute force.
Snails are so cool! I’ve been using snail cream to fix a skin issue on my face with great success. There is nothing like it that I have tried. A little goes a long way.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332
If you put your finger in front of a garden slug it may try to eat it, it's a very odd sand-paper sensation but I never knew why.