Skepticism and critical thinking

Subsonic said..
What'd you do? Start a metal fire?

fangman said..
I do have a pic of Remery post sodium experiment:

remery said..









Only a small one. I was a trainee science teacher, barely 18. The curriculum had me putting a tiny bit of sodium in water to demonstrate the reaction. I made a big deal about the danger and moved all the kids back. I put a tiny bit of sodium in the beaker of water. It went "fizz". The kids went "booooo". So I put a big chunk in. It exploded and molten sodium landed in my hair. The kids went "yaaaayyyyy, sir made a bomb."

D3 said..




Do they do that in human blood?
If so, citation needed.

Never mind, you're just guessing.

it's probably a recipe for abrasion at the junctions in the arteries.

fangman said..
I just re read my post. As per usual it was way funnier in my head.
Anyhoo as an edit for clarity, it should read,
"What's worse than my dad jokes? My nerd jokes...."
And yes, I should have stuck to the cooking line. In recompense I do have a pic of Remery post sodium experiment:

Pcdefender said..
Why is drag part of the Olympics?

D3 said..


How do calcium and iron get combined in the human body to become an abrasive?

Just seemed a bold claim to make on a thread about critical thinking. I've paraphrased it below

Somehow calcium and iron react together in the human body that becomes a blood borne abrasive, that combined with exercise creates a recipe for abrasion at the junctions of arteries.

fangman s


Yes you are right, it's not iron oxide that gets Twiggy excited, but the oxygen does bind at the ferrous atom.
As for K2 I first heard of it in a dental publication as it turns out a Canadian dentist was the instrumental in its discovery. Here is an neat little summary of his travels:
"...mild-mannered Dr. Weston Price, a Canadian with a small dental practice in Ohio, wondered why so many of his patients had terrible teeth. He hypothesized that there was something about the rapidly modernizing diet that was linked to declining dental health. Dr. Price sought out pre-industrial populations scattered across the globe in an effort to study this relationship between tooth decay and nutrition.In a series of perilous expeditions, he made his way to remote villages in the mountainous pockets of Switzerland, settlements along the rugged coasts of the Outer Hebrides, and the archipelagos of the South Pacific. He travelled with the nomadic Masai of Tanzania and the Nuer of the South Sudan, New Zealand Maori, the Inuit of Alaska and the tribes of the Peruvian Amazon and Andes. He observed that populations that maintained their traditional diet did not suffer from the tooth decay or malocclusion that was rampant back home. Instead, he found square jaws with neat, straight rows of teeth. When the same families were introduced to common processed foods, they would develop cavities and dental decay. Armed with a camera, he would take photos of siblings - where the older child was raised on a traditional indigenous diet and the younger living on imported foods. Where the first child would have well formed dental arches, the second would have many misaligned teeth.
It was a predictable pattern, and in addition, Price noticed several other symptoms of declining health, such as slow healing bone fractures.His fieldwork throughout the 1920s and 1930s yielded over 15,000 such stark photographs. When he returned, he detailed his ethnographic and nutritional studies in a book called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Without the benefit of our understanding of modern nutrition, Price hypothesized that these declines in dental health were not the result of some toxin in American diet, but the "absence of some essential factors". He tested and analyzed thousands of samples of traditional foods for their nutritional content and compared them to common foods of the time. What he found was that many of the traditional foods, like fish eggs and the butterfat of grass-fed cows, were rich in fat-soluble nutrients. He deduced that there was some activator or catalyst in the fat-rich diet that allowed the body to make use of other macronutrients like minerals. One activator had a significant affect on the health of bones and teeth, but since he could not identify or chemically isolate it, he labelled it as Activator X.For years, physicians and nutritionists debated what this mystery Activator X could be. Some thought it might be a kind of essential fatty acid like EPA. Sixty years after Activator X was first mentioned, researchers now believe Activator X to be vitamin K2."