A, yes, quick sand, the bane of my childhood.
My mom once actually stepped in quicksand (thankfully only up to the top of her boot). It was in Canada. Yes, Canada has quicksand! She was visiting my uncle in Saskatchewan.
Unlike the movies, it fits its name. One minute she was walking, then suddenly it was like she fell into a pit, but couldn’t get her boot out. I can’t remember how the story ended. This was like 35 years ago that she told me about it.
You know, seeing you in the wild I think is kinda like seeing quicksand. Very rare, usually fatal, but if you live - probably a great story.
Let’s see if I get out alive.
Just as a reminder that even if you turned an entire atom into pure kenitic energy, you wouldn’t even see a flash.
Math stuff:
So E = M c^2
I’ll choose a carbon atom because it’s a round number (don’t think about that statement too hard)
So carbon has an atomic mass of 12 atomic mass units. In grams (divide by Avagadro’s number) is 1.992 E-23 grams.
Shove that into E=mc^2 and you get 1.790 nanojoules, which is 4.974 E-16 kilowatt-hours. Or at 12¢ per KWH is 5*E-15 cents of power.
So to power a 500 watt gaming rig, you’d need to burn about 20 nanograms of carbon at 100% efficiency, per hour.
Reading all these adventure books and comics made me really fear quicksand as a child… I was living in East Berlins suburbs. The most comparable thing to quicksand would have been a mud puddle!
Don’t forget quicksand… I spent all my childhood afraid of falling into it. Somehow it was an unwarranted concern.
See I always knew it was fine because I was never in as jungle or swamp, because that’s where it always is in movies and cartoons.
I was always worried about perfectly round holes in the ground and falling into them. Looney Tunes really over-represented how common they were.
Happened to me once. I was super drunk walking home and didn’t see an open manhole in front of me. I got super lucky, though.
From my drunk perspective, I’m just walking along when suddenly the ground is nearly at my eye level. Then I realised I’m dangling there, with only my head and elbows outside. I dragged myself out and continued on home.
I have no idea how I managed to fall inside with both my legs at the same time and why my arms didn’t hurt like hell, not even in the morning.
The part of the brain that goes “we’re doing reflexes now and you don’t get a say” is wild.
I don’t think reflexes were involved here, more likely it was lucky arm positioning at the right time. But what do I know? I wasn’t quite there to witness it.
Especially since anyone can paint them on the floor anywhere!
My childhood fear was getting the vaccine shot for the swine flu which was a big issue in the mid 70’s. My 5th grade class received new text books and there was a photo of a kid getting the vaccine shot. Instead of a needle it was delivered by a big device that looked like an uzi machine gun and I was terrified of it. Time passed and I never got the shot. That’s when I learned how the news works.
When I was a kid there was a Norwegian children movie called “The hunt for the kidney stone” where a kid travels into the body of his sick grandpa to find out what’s wrong with him (kidney stone). After the movie I asked my mom what kidney stones are, and where they come from. “You can get them if you eat too much salt, for example” she says, and after that I was TERRIFIED every time my parents would put salt on anything.
I read a story somewhere of someone getting them from the oxalates in peanut butter.
They were eating like 1 kg a week for a month or two though.
Sometimes I look at the wide open sky and think “What if gravity suddenly reverses and I fall up into the sky and then space? That would be really dangerous.”
I had a clear childhood memory of when gravity temporarily vanished and we all had to duck and cover under our desks. Years later I learned how gravity worked. A few years after that I realized my memory was impossible though it felt very real. This may be the root of my trust issues…
Human memory is wild. We’re extremely good at inventing things that never happened, or adjusting memories over time as we recall them into something completely different than what actually happened. And it can feel so real.
Stephen King wrote a story of just that happening to a guy. Except gravity didn’t reverse he just kind of lost mass, but the result was the same.
The dangers of dieting.
Dude wasn’t even dieting what was crazy is for all intents in purposes no one could tell he was losing weight. He looked the same weight but when he get on a scale it show him losing weight. You really should read it. For some reason its a stand alone novel, but its actually really short for a Stephen King novel.
I swear to God I’m not trying to be a dick, but just so you know the phrase is “for all Intents and purposes.”
Chubbyemu made me fear gas station sushi.
gas station sushi
I didn’t know those 3 words existed in that combination and I’m frankly appalled that they do
For every time someone eats gas station sushi, someone has to eat a PB&J from a 5-Star restaurant to maintain the balance of the universe; otherwise you get weird things happening like The Fruit of the Loom logo losing the cornucopia, or Donald Trump becoming president.
I remember freaking out when the last season of Friends aired - what, there are people vacationing in Bermuda? Are they insane? I was in my late teens
When I was in my late teens, I ended up on a boat from Ft Lauderdale to the Bahamas. Theres no way no to go through just a little bit of the Burmuda Triangle. I remember freaking out / being super excited, wondering what crazy stuff things would happen on our journey. Of course, nothing happened. I was so disillusioned.
By now, satellites and GPS can just navigate us around the triangle, kind of like with hurricanes.
The triangle is HUGE, and due to where it covers, a lot of shipping went through it, and still does iirc… Saying its dangerous because ships wrecked there often isn’t that far off from calling Earth dangerous since every human has died there. It’s a true statement, I suppose, but the context helps understand it’s not a very reasonable one.
Yeah the mystery of the triangle was puffed up by disingenuous authors who lied and fudged details to pretend ships went missing all the time. Things like reporting ships missing but not their eventual returns, claiming there were no storms when records showed otherwise, including sinkings and crashes that happened well outside the triangle, and a bunch more.
When the the data is analysed; the number of incidents is the same as anywhere else on the planet.
My understanding is there’s a lot of coral reefs in the Bermuda triangle and, like you say a lot of shipping with through there. So it makes sense a lot of ships went missing in that area.
Sailors are a superstitious lot so there were stories about it being cursed. Kinda like how it’s bad luck to carry bananas on a sailboat.
My uncle told me he sailed through the Bermuda Triangle all the time. I thought he was full of crap.
I will never not cringe at “on accident” instead of “by accident”
euchhhh.
To imagine you wrote this sentence by purpose.
Roaming black holes
Gamma ray bursts
The germans invading
Electrified bodies/puddles of water
Yknow, the usual stuff kids are afraid of…
Fun fact: The Bermuda Triangle actually lives in your closet and plans to get you in your sleep.
But, it told me it lived under my bed?!
It’s a triangle, so it’s under your bed, in your closet, and in the attic.
And you’d deserve it for saying “on accident”
Don’t forget ‘for no reason’. As opposed to reasonable accidents.
Isnt “for no reason” referring to why the person feared that, not that the accident had no reason?
