What? No. The Leidenfrost effect would apply. You could pour a few milliliters of liquid helium over your tongue and it would boil on contact. You just need to make sure to minimize total contact time.

The oxide layer forms within seconds, like aluminium and sodium (the two elements surrounding it), and even if you scraped it off and stuck it on your tongue, it isn’t going to react quickly enough to do you any damage. It will probably taste slightly bitter, like licking baking soda. I have some downstairs. Shall I test it and take a video of the results?

This is similar to Michael’s solution to it in The Good Place. If you haven’t watched it, it’s basically a Moral Philosophy course, with hilarious and beautiful examples. Also with giant, flying cocktail shrimp.

I’m glad someone listened to me a couple years back. The first comment I ever made on Lemmy was on the original version of this, pointing out that Magnesium was DEFINITELY fine to lick.

Founded by Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, yes, that Ghislaine Maxwell.

Tardigrades don’t have visible eyes like that in the left picture. That’s some ai-generated slop image of a demodex mite.

Elsevier was literally founded by the father of Ghislaine Maxwell. He clearly passed on his moral framework to his daughter.

Yeah, they put up LEDs to make a “rainbow road” for pride month as a performative gesture.

Those also look very similar to pokeweed. You probably had a pokeweed infestation.

Law of superposition. The timescale is in the order that you would find it digging down through ancient rock strata: youngest on top, older as you go down.

A very well-reasoned answer, thank you!

Thanks. Good point!

I’m just a peon on mint.

Here’s a question: if you know the steak isn’t real, having copied only your memory of it from the matrix, but you know that the original had to have been based on the experience of killing a real animal, is the nonexistent steak vegan? What if all cows are already extinct, like in the world of the Matrix?

A great point, but I wonder if it would have reached that point if cypher had been given relaxation time and good experiences in the construct from the start.

So, as Cypher made clear, the main draw of the matrix was that he didn’t have to spend his entire life being miserable, with shit to eat, and nothing enjoyable to do. Soo… What about the constructs? If they could simulate people and sensory input with enough fidelity to “learn kungfu”, couldn’t they simulate the experience of a juicy steak? Why, when they weren’t actually spending their time outside the matrix doing much other than sitting in a spaceship, wouldn’t they just spend 6 hours a day in the construct? Wouldn’t that have given them all much more practice with breaking the construct of the matrix, and also let them have the nice stuff that the matrix offered, and also knowing that they were the masters of their own destinies? It seems like Morpheus was just a shitty manager, and Cypher was unfulfilled in his job.

Be forewarned: it’s definitively from the 1870s. They didn’t yet understand cellular respiration, there are a couple of seriously racist paragraphs (most notably one in which the article author states as a well known fact that the “hyperborean” people are all candle thieves, because supposedly they ate the candles. They didn’t yet understand the nature of dinosaurs, either. However, the chemistry experiments seem fun, if potentially deadly at times, including some terrifying instructions on how to make chlorine gas, capture it, combine it with hydrogen gas, seal the container, then expose it to light and watch it explode as the photosensitive reaction makes hydrochloric acid. Fun times. Anyway, it’s a very entertaining read, and there are six volumes of the stuff. I’ve only gone through the first thus far.

It would be like sticking your penis in pineapple juice. It contains digestive enzymes that are very similar to stomach acid. The reason that butterwort (another carnivorous plant) is called by that name is that you can use the plant’s dew to curdle milk. Just like how you can use acid or enzymes to cure food, it would cure your penis (in fact, volume I of the book “Science For All” from the 1870s has an entire chapter on carnivorous plants, and they give a fascinating description of how you can cure meat using sundew or butterwort dew) The curing (effectively cooking) would not occur very quickly (it’s not like it’s piranha solution), but it would happen, and that tingly, prickly feeling of eating a pineapple that you get on your lips and in your mouth when you eat a bunch of pineapple at once? That would happen to your penis, but it would happen faster, and burn more, because the penis is a very sensitive organ.

I agree with most of that, except for this: Theseus clearly didn’t give a flying fuck about angering the gods, because right after kidnapping Helen, he went into the underworld to try to kidnap Persephone, the wife of the Lord of the Dead. You can’t expect me to acknowledge that Theseus was devout enough to think a fever dream was a sign to abandon Ariadne and that she’d be fine, but not afraid enough of the gods to try to kidnap a goddess out from under the nose of the lord of hell.

I would say the title is like the name of the ship, since the title can’t change without the URL changing.

“Ship of Theseus”? It’s in reference to a ship which was used to row out to Delos every year for a ritual, but it was very specific that it had to be the same boat that Theseus used. So, as the pieces broke and had to be replaced, eventually every original plank, nail and line would have been replaced. After all of those replacements, which occurred one at a time over decades, is it still the same boat? If you collected all of the old replaced bits of the original boat, then put them together into a boat, would that be the original ship? At what point does it stop being the “ship of Theseus”?

If you’re talking about History repeating itself, the joke is that the wikipedia page is, itself, now a ship of Theseus. It has the same URL (we call it the same thing), but none of the original remains. Is it still the same article?