Misconceptions/Ignorance

[Spectrre]

As a Type 1 Diabetic, I face all sorts of people who seem to think I am 'allergic to sugar' and wonder why I am not as big as a house. People seem to believe Type 1 diabetes is gained from the overindulgence of too much sugar, Where it is actually an auto-immune disease, a fluke basically. I was just curious what kinds of misconceptions the general public have about the escapist community's lives and how you deal with it. I'm also open to answer any questions you have about me and what daily life involves.

captcha: political PARTAYYYY

I think this one annoys me the most

"The belief that planes couldn't bring down the twin towers because jet feul doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel"

I think someone utterly missquoted that statement if you heard it that way. Though I have no idea how hot jet fuel burns or how hot it needs to get for a plane to evaporate, the way that statement was used by the 9/11 skeptics (that I read about anyway) is that the plane that crashed into the Pentagon had almost completely evaporate. Which is supposedly impossible because jet fuel doesn't burn that hot. That was their cue to bring in the "It was a bom of some description"-theory.


OT: The misconception I encounter most personally is the one where people like my mother and her parents think because I spend a lot of time on the computer that I must always be playing a (violent) game and I'm completely addicted to it. I study Webdesign.. Is it that impossible for me to be.. ionno, working for school, designing a site? Or even just fooling around in Photoshop due to boredom? Or watching a movie, talking to people? Nope, must be I'm gaming like an addict. /rage

No it's the idea that jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel so the twin towers shouldn't have collapsed because the rest of the building would still have been sturdy

That's actually true, though misleading. Jet fuel does indeed not burn hot enough to melt steel. Steel melts at about 1400 degrees Celsius, and I think jet fuel burns at about 800. However, this is misleading because steel becomes soft when it heats up. Steel can lose half its tensile strength at a mere 600 degrees, so even though jet fuel fire wouldn't have melted the supports in the WTC, it would have weakened them enough to give way and collapse.

Hmhmh, interesting. Thanks for that info. Still though, I'm still sort of stuck at the thought: "Wouldn't it have collapsed under the weight and sudden shift in force of the floors above collapsing on it anyway?" It seems kind of... logical I suppose that the building wouldn't be able to handle so much stress. Though although I'm nowhere near an expert on those sort of things. For all I know it's designed to take much more.

 

[Guardian of Nekops]

partially incorrect (i think, sorry if im being an ass hat). a black hole is like a gravity well, i think that earth to mercury would be pulled in. also, the sun is too small to be a black hole, it would just become very cold, and die (a neutron star).

Nope, our sun would become a White Dwarf.
And if for whatever reason our sun did somehow become a Black Hole (which it can't...), we wouldn't be sucked in, not even Mercury would get sucked in, they'd orbit the same since the Black Hole has the same mass as the star it is formed from, sometimes even less mass since it is usually only the core that forms the Black Hole.
Everything that has mass has a gravity well. YOU have a gravity well, it's just so tiny it doesn't effect pretty much anything. The Black Hole has the same gravity well as the star it formed from.

Actually, I believe what bullet_sandwich meant was that if we were to replace the sun with a real naturally formed black hole (the gravitational force of which would be much, much higher than the sun's due to the increased mass gained from being formed from a larger star) then the increased force would overtake the current orbits and suck in the closest of the planets, and possibly some of the farther ones eventually.

...and really, even if that isn't what they meant, they did apologize preemptively for their inaccuracy.

It has been cut out, but in my original statement I said that if our sun was to form a black hole (which obviously it can't, I was being hypothetical...) then we would orbit the same.

I understand that if we compacted the sun into a black hole (impossibly), the mass would be the same and therefore the orbits would be maintained. It stands to reason that a gravitational well would not increase in force just because a change in shape had occurred, assuming the shape change did not add or remove mass from the object creating the well.

This, I understand, however I did not say that the sun created the black hole (which is, as you have pointed out many times before, impossible), I suggested that a real and possible black hole replace the sun.

So, in essence, I suggested that we take the sun, replace it with Betelgeuse, and then turn that giant into a black hole.

In that situation, would the planets closest not be pulled in, considering the increased force created by a black hole that is actually physically possible and not the tiny impossible thing the sun would never create?

No, because Betelgeuse is larger than the "inner-circle" of our solar system. It's hypothetical black hole form would be large enough to reach past Jupiter outright. Our whole solar system would probably easily get sucked in. But your point is still correct, of course. Just slightly wrong in context

Also, in this case it doesn't matter at all whether Betelguese was a black hole or not. Either the star or the black hole would have the mass to pull in the solar system (what with all remaining planets being just barely fast enough to remain in their orbits around the lighter Sun), and the only real difference would be whether the planets died in a flare of heat at the star's surface or in a crushing force at the singularity.

Point is, the gravity well of a black hole is no more deadly than that of the star that created it... just harder to see and a little different flavor of death.