Topic: Are most people too simple minded to understand nuance? (Read 218 times)

Using powdered alcohol to spike someone's drink would be much more difficult than using regular alcohol.

Regular alcohol can be concentrated to levels up to 95% with simple distillation before reaching an azeotrope. (Azeotrope simply means that when you boil it, equal amounts of ethanol (alcohol) and water go into the vapor.


Regular alcohol is concentrated, clear and mixes easily. The concentration can get up to 95%.
With powdered alcohol you have 58% alcohol by weight but only 12% alcohol by volume.


So you need about 10 times the volume of powdered alcohol to spike someone's drink and you also need to pour a powder in it and dissolve it first. This process would take forever and you would get caught.

Also I don't want to get into what a smart poisoner would do to get someone really vulnerable in case the wrong people read this but I guess always look after your glass when you're with a bunch of strangers and if in doubt, throw it out.


If someone took some zippo fluid they would only need to add a few drops to get you really fucked up. If the drink is a big tall cocktail with strong tastes already, you may not notice until it's too late and you feel yourself getting unusually drunk and fucked up.

Conversely you'll notice if your cocktail suddenly is full of undissolved powdered and tastes less alcoholic due to the addition of all those support matrix sugars from the powdered alcohol.

Same as what's wrong with plutonium-powered cars: the technology is sound, but the social consequences are not. In much the same way as it would be somewhat undesirable for terrorists to be able to purchase plutonium at AutoZone, there are certain people who might find that powdered alcohol is more usefully added to other people's drinks than their own.

Whoa, you must be some sort of wizard scientist! Man, you're such a genius for figuring all this out.

All those scientists who've wasted their entire lives studying models should just come to you for your supreme knowledge of environmental subjects, as it seems that you've probably spent literally hours researching.

It's the short attention spam that most people have.  Social media, television, and the internet has made us crave instant results which often gives us a poor outlook on the long term negative consequences.  We are suffering like a boiling frog in a pot, things are slowly becoming worse but we fail to notice it.

What's wrong with powdered alcohol?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_powder

Im a designer by trade, so I'm always interested in when things like this have colours within the visible light wavelength.. being purple means its near the ultraviolet wavelength.. 100nm. thats why it interested me. I'll have to check out the papers to understand more.. Thanks  

I would caution you that Konstantine and I have had a number of discussions about climate change, and although I lean in the moderate denier direction, and he the opposite, he really knows his science and has a good understanding of the method. I don't recall us disagreeing about facts, but more what they mean and how they should be interpreted as policy.

Yes broadly speaking people want simple ideas.

I agree with this as it is indeed that some people are concluding just in the context of their own but not in the global view. So, we should always be mindful and considerate to everyone even in the smallest thing that we can.

You can find the paper related to the video here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem.2161

If you are interested and unable to access it behind the paywall, send me a PM and I can message you a copy.

The purple flash is likely due to solvated electrons. These are more commonly seen when alkali metals are reacted with ammonia, as they are then more stable in solution, but do also occur for a split second when alkali metals are reacted with water.

If you want to know more about this particular reaction here is a longer video that explains what happens.

Link to the Video (High speed camera reveals why sodium explodes!) This video doesn't really go into why the purple flash is there, but it's extremely interesting. I had probably watched it a bunch of times in its entirety when it came out.

I can theorize as to why there is a purple flash, but I'm not a scientist myself, I've got years of physics and chemistry I need to understand.

The amperage generated during the coulomb explosion is gigantic so it's possible that the color is due to sparking electricity.
You can look up underwater electric sparks and cycle the videos frame by frame and you'll see a similar color.

To understand this I would try and ask Thunderf00t over and over until he answers or look through his videos to see if he went into it, starting with the videos related to alkali metals and water explosions.


That one with climate change just kills me. It's interesting to note that one can very easily do the experiments on greenhouse gases with equipment you can get your hands on very cheaply.

The experiment demo from the 1850s (I think a woman named Eunice came up with it) was literally comparing a flask of Nitrogen (most like the atmosphere) to a flash of Oxygen (again big part of the atmosphere) to a flash of CO2, all left out in the sun.

The flask of CO2 got hotter because it trapped more heat.

You could literally get some big glass bottles or aquariums and then seal them shut, burn a few matches or sake up some soda or just add some co2 from a carbonation machine or from an airsoft pistol.

Then stick some thermometers in there.  And that's it.

Then again, you could just visit a park that has glaciers on it and look at them shrinking year after year. You could visit many of them and you'd find that most glaciers are retreating. You might find a couple of exceptions but if 100 are shrinking and 5 are growing you pretty much know here we are heading.


You can then measure the sea level (which is probably more challenging) and find that the sea level is increasing at a rate of 3mm per year.

I can actually notice the sea level rise where I live because I'm right on the water. The highest tides of the year reach higher places then they used to and when air blows the water in it can get extreme. The difference isn't noticeable year to year but you can almost see it if you've been here long enough.


I wonder what idiots think about that? Probably that the sea level is rising because someone left their garden hose on or something. Or maybe that god is drooling? I mean if man was created in His image than it's very likely that God's a drooler.

These arguments always make me laugh. "How can global warming be real when it's snowing outside?" is as stupid as saying "How can people be starving when I've just eaten lunch?"

The whole "chemical" v "natural" nonsense that you see pedaled a lot in advertising, particularly with organic foods, GMOs and MLM scams, is equally nonsense. Arsenic, cyanide and flesh eating bacteria are all natural. Water, oxygen and table salt are all chemicals.

It's not just due to a lack of education, but also a lack of interest in education. People are all too happy to be willfully ignorant.

I'm curious what exactly causes the purple flash.. Sorry Im not a science major or anything so I'm totally clueless to all that but I am interested to know how and what elements and why the colour purple comes out of that explosion..

For example, climate change is obviously real, but if a big volcano erupted we could have 3 years worth of winter and then the climate change would return (temperature goes down quickly and comes back quickly)

Also in a warming planet although the net ice is down, there's going to be a lot more snowfall in many places that receive snow due to the higher moisture content in the atmosphere.

Warmer planet = more snow in certain areas


Also c02 helps plants grow but past a certain level the gains taper off completely and then secondary effects destroy the plants or make them bad for agriculture. (A simple-minded person might think that climate change is good, because plants are going to grow like crazy, yee-haw doo-dah day.


Or the good old chemicals are bad, or GMOs are bad for your health.

Any issue that requires nuanced thinking is one that a big part of the population just doesn't truly understand. To understand the world you have to be able to think through things that seem paradoxical to your intuition and overcome them with logic.

Chemists and "smart" people with PHDs are no exception.

Most chemists still probably believe that the bigger the atom of an alkali metal, the more violent the reaction with water although the opposite is true.

To them it just makes sense that the bigger more exotic, more expensive atoms are going to blow up more explosively. But the opposite is true. The explosion is ridiculously fast, faster than hydrogen blowing up (it's a coulomb explosion, the blobs of metal unzip themselves and all come to contact with the water incredibly fast).

Philip E Mason is the guy that found this out. He's almost as incredibly smug as I seem in this post. Here's a video of the coulomb explosion filmed at 11k fps

Here is the video

It took a god-damn YouTuber (who is a fine chemist and I think a PHD also) to discover the truth about this. To dig out the nuance. While nearly the entire academic world had it wrong.


Pop science is the biggest example of that. The shit they say sometimes I can hardly believe.

Solar Roadways, Powdered Alcohol, Self-filling Water bottles, new battery type with Quantum Effects, plutonium car, human gill... all shit that falls apart within 1 minute of thought.

Most people somehow seem incapable of that. And by the way, I'm not very smart of very quick. It just seems that there's billions of idiots out there.