Frazz by Jef Mallett for August 12, 2018

They’re teaching chemistry to 2nd graders now? Wow!

Really, this is one of the amazing facts that contributes to the existence of life on Earth at all. If H2O behaved like almost every other chemical compound, it would contract instead of expanding when it solidified. Then the denser ice would sink to the bottom of every body of water, new ice would form on the surface and sink, and so on until it was solid ice top to bottom, without a sheltered supply of liquid water able to support life thru the winter.

Love the curiosity of the girl and the educational value of this strip. Also, are you all aware of the dangers of Dihydrogenmonoxide?

The real reason that ice floats is that the water molecules join together in a rigid crystalline structure, which contains much more “empty space” than water in the liquid form.

That is why it’s less dense.

B.S. – We all know what that isM.S. – More of SamePh.D. – Piled Higher and Deeper

Someone with a Ph.D. has spent his time studying more and more about less and less, until eventually he knows everything about nothing.

Interesting Frazz and comments from above.

Everybody is missing the facts:

1. cream floats on water or water sugar solutions.

2. Ice cream is not a solid rigid block because it is a frozen whipped foam.

3. Most ice creams don’t melt too quickly because of the emulsifiers and gums used to trap the air.

Kansas State has a dairy with experimental ice creams.

nobody uses Fahrenheit when discussing science- water is the most dense at 4° C that’s why lakes don’t freeze from the bottom up (like all other liquids) allowing fish to survive winters

Here was my Ph.D. experience. First I had to have a B.A., and that meant four years of courses, including a distribution requirement for a number of courses outside my major. Then an M.A., with two years of course work in the general field, in my case classics. I took courses in Greek and Roman history (including reading Thucydides in Greek and Tacitus in Latin), an excellent course in Plato in Greek, as well as courses in Early Greek Poetry and Greek Drama. Then I moved on to the Ph.D., and I did two more years of course work, including a course in Roman Art, Roman History of the Imperial Period, Apuleius, Homer, two courses in Historical Linguistics, a course in the editing of texts (based on Ovid), a course called a Proseminar, in which we did assignments in a number of subfields, such as epigraphy and paleography, and reading courses (one on one with a professor) in Roman Comedy, Herodotus, and the Roman poet Propertius. Then I had to take what were called General Exams: translation exams in Greek and Latin, followed by an oral exam in general topics in Greek and Roman history and literature. Then I had to take what were called special exams: each student picked one Latin author and one Greek author and one topic and spent a year reading extensively on those, and all of this was tested in an oral exam. Then I had to propose a dissertation topic, and I had to defend my topic in another oral exam. Then I had to write the dissertation, which took two years. The dissertation topic was pretty specialized, I do admit that, but I managed to solve a problem which had first been raised almost a hundred years ago. So, yes, the dissertation was specialized, but it came in the context of a pretty broad training in Classical history, literature, philosophy, art history and archeology, as well as ancillary fields, such as historical linguistics, epigraphy, paleography, and the editing of texts.

Water has a molecular angle of 109 deg instead of 180 deg as most other compounds and therefore is a polar molecule. Meaning ice floats and the consequences are as others have pointed out. It also means water can dissolve many other things, like salt and organics (we can be described as a big bag of salty water). If you want a proof that God exists, this is one of them.

Yah. Water is weird.

When I was a freshman at Caltech, one of our professors was Jürg Waser who was a world expert on exactly this one thing - water. How it freezes, how it melts, how its density changes, how the H2O molecules arrange themselves under different circumstances almost like crystals even in liquid form, how the H2O molecules act more like separate H+ and OH ions sometimes… His thick university-printed textbook was affectionately known as “Waser’s Wasser.”

The heck with all this. What really matters is why does the beach ball continue to spin and hover over the vacuum cleaner hose when you stick the hose into the exhaust!?

“Certain thing which are unlikely are nonetheless essential for life to exist. Life exists, therefore God exists.”

Stupidest agument for the existence of God there is. We have yet to find evidence of the exitence of extraterrestrial life anywhere, although we are finding more and more environments which, consistent with our CURRNT understanding, have the POTENTIAL for life. That these planets have the POTENTIAL for life but do not (so far as we know) support life indicates that life is not “inevitable” (under the right conditions); the fact that we do not KNOW whether any of these planets support life (despite potential to support life) leaves open the possibility that we are not unique; if we are not unique, most (if not all) cnceptions of a Creating Deity with a Plan for the World are rendered superfluous.

We are here; whether by design or by happenstance, we wonder WHY we are here. If life (with the capacity for self-awareness) exists elsewhere, it seems likely that they ALSO wonder why, alone (so far as they know) they are the only planet in the universe upon which they know life exists.

A simple question doesn’t mean a simple answer.

Tautologies are not good arguments. And will someone calculate the chance of an outside intelligence existing independent of universe formations?

Heat doesn’t rise, it disperses (entropy). Hot air rises because it’s less dense.