� Answers �
Chemicals, sporks, evil game show hosts from hell and the mistakes we make. That's what's in this week's answers column. Do you have a question of your own?
I played dominoes with the DJ from my slam last night. I hadn't played dominoes since I was in Puerto Rico back in 1991. Christ, I'm getting old. I'm saying things like "I haven't since..." and that's a sign of the elderly I'm sure of it.
ask johnpowers
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name: staci
email: [email protected]
url: http://fatbuddha.diaryland.com
question:
i have a chemistry exam tomorrow, and this is a review question ..
identify the limiting reagent and the volume of the product formed when 11L CS2 reacts with 18L O2 to produce CO2 gas and SO2 gas .
why the hell would i need to know this ? i'll take a guess and say you probably don't remember how to do those types of problems, so why do we need to be fed this bullshit in the first place ?
answer:
Well... if I had 12 slices of bread, how many servings of peanut butter would I need and how many sandwiches could I make?
6 of each. Easy - right?
Now, take MDMA or "N, alpha-Dimethyl-1,3-benzodioxole-5-ethanamine" which has the chemical formula C11H15NO2 and looks three dimensionally like this:
Given that you can figure out how to make peanut butter sandwiches, your chem professor would argue that you should then be able to take the skeletal formula for pure ecstasy and break it down into it's component parts and then look up somewhere the melting point (147-148� C - Hydrochloride crystals from isopropanol/n-hexane) and cook yourself up a batch of illegal substances that will either get your locked up for a long time or pay off all of your student loans and buy you a villa in Milwaukee.
So basically, your professor is an undercover hippy anarchist and he wants you to mess some shit up in 'The Establishment' armed with the knowledge of how to cook up anything in the drug store (or in it's back alley)
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name: Piper
email: [email protected]
url: http://white-rook.diaryland.com
question:
If Marc Summers and a rabid Pomeranian got into a fight, who do you think would win?
answer:
Oh. OoooHoo! Marc Summers would certainly win, because he is the Anti-christ and no earthly Pomeranian be it a rabid Pomeranian or not could ever hope to take down the devil born unto the flesh!
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name: rachel
email:
url: http://protoplast.diaryland.com
question:
why do we as a human race, both individually and collectively, keep making the same mistakes--or rather (if you dislike the word "mistakes")--keep repeating the same actions without different outcomes.
answer:
On the whole us humans are instinctive. We get pissed off, we punch someone or we shoot someone. We want what our neighbor has, we invade their land. We see our way of life changing, that scares us, we decide to fight back and fly some air planes into buildings.
We may be more civilized now than in ancient times, but a drug dealer shooting someone for ripping him off is no different than a cave man bashing the skull in of a neighbor who tried to steal his freshly killed deer - just as Osama Bin Laden is no different than the Romans who tried to wipe out Christianity by feeding captured Christians to the lions. It's all heinous it's all pointless.
We repeat the same mistakes because we think we are smart. We will learn from our past mistakes and change the inevitable outcome... while in fact we aren't changing that much from before and we're going to end up in the same place after all.
It's human arrogance. We think we're very smart and can change it. "This time things will be different." ... "Uh uh, don't work that way - AroOOOooOOoOGa" and the ship goes down.
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name: curltwirler
email: [email protected]
url: http://curltwirler.diaryland.com
question:
Sporks: essential, unnecessary, dangerous, tacky, ingenious?
What do YOU think?
(I seem to have a fixation with eating utensils lately)
answer:
Ok, there are multiple patents out there for the spork. The Dispoz-O spork is one of them... but 'this plastic spork is truly an original. It was designed to serve the purpose of three plastic utensils; the plastic spoon "sp"; the plastic fork "or"; and the plastic knife "k", all combined to make a "Spork"'
Now unknown to most people, not only is it a fork spoon, it's a fork-spoon-knife!
"Wait a minute honey, I have to finish cutting this steak with my spork, I should be done NEXT WEEK!"
I truly believe the spork is an evil invention of the food service corporate world to save money at the expense of causing their clientele aggravation.
