Recent comments in /f/askscience

ItsSillySeason t1_jd6iyh1 wrote

Still (no pun intended), you aren't ever getting more methanol for your ethanol when concentrating. You're just taking out water. So a shot of apple jack isn't really any more dangerous than a glass of apple jack. Same for two, three, or four. The real problem would be that it's easier to drink a lot quickly, which is its own independent hazard, and one that comes with any high alcohol beverage. So if you're really concerned about it (and yet, making apple jack -- a head scratcher of a juxtaposition) go ahead and drink a glass of water with each shot of jack. In fact, you could melt the ice from the process and drink that. Heck mix it back in. Problem solved.

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dirtballmagnet t1_jd6c1kh wrote

Historically it appears to have been responsible for some pretty notorious indiscipline in any army that passed through the Valley of Virginia in the American Civil War. Like ill behavior beyond the usual drunken ill behavior.

I think weather permitting applejack to be made on the Blue Ridge and the forcible conscription of volunteers whose enlistments were running out led to a small revolt in early 1862, where an infuriated Stonewall Jackson sent an artillery piece to start firing solid shot into the mountainside where the revolting rebels were holding out.

One wonders if it had a hand in the dissolution of Hunter's army after the battle of Lynchburg, 1864, the surprise achieved at Cedar Creek later that year, or the intensity of the destruction of the Shenandoah Valley thereafter.

The source for the mini-revolt would be likely found in D. S. Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants, Vol. I. but I don't have it at hand.

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florinandrei t1_jd6bwq6 wrote

It definitely does have a kinetic energy.

The only thing is - when you go from kinetic energy to temperature, you run into all sorts of trouble if you do it for single entities.

Temperature is an inherently collective measure. If it's single particles, stick to kinetic energy.

What is the "temperature" of this marble I'm throwing? ;) (not the temperature of the glass, but the "temperature" of the marble as a single particle with some kinetic energy)

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florinandrei t1_jd6br1i wrote

> they exhibit different physical properties including changes in electrical conductance

Of course they do. I'm just saying - the borders between them are far more fuzzy than most people imagine.

E.g. consider the changes that occur in tar or pitch when cooled from the boiling point of water to the boiling point of nitrogen. It's liquid at one end. It's solid at the other. The changes are smooth, without any sharp transitions.

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Greyswandir t1_jd6b3ce wrote

To give a direct example from your own body: the heat is capable of beating on its own without any signals from the brain. A region of the heart called the pacemaker generates a rhythmic signal which starts a wave of muscle contraction which runs across the heart and causes it to beat in a sequence which pumps blood (random or disorganized contraction of cardiac muscle is called fibrillation, pumps little to no blood, and is what those paddles you see in ever medical show are for). The heart is only involved in sending signals which tell the pacemaker to speed up or slow down. But the basic function of the heart itself runs on its own.

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askscience-ModTeam t1_jd6alvt wrote

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big_sugi t1_jd69th2 wrote

Depends how much you drink. The methanol is already in your cider or wine; applejack or ice wine just concentrates it, along with everything else that’s not water. That makes it easier to take in too much, whereas the sheer volume will slow you down from doing it with non-distilled alcoholic liquids.

Also, as to methanol specifically, the ethanol will help to inhibit the breakdown of methanol in the body into formate, which (I understand) is what’s actually toxic. That’s the reason that a bottle of scotch can actually be used to treat methanol poisoning.

The other stuff, though, isn’t neutralized in the same way.

I think, anyway. It’s been decades since I took a chemistry class, so I might be misstating some of the finer points.

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BurkeyAcademy t1_jd69eeg wrote

Champagne yeast, as with all yeast, produces mostly ethanol, but a little methanol as well. The amount of methanol isn't enough to affect you, unless it gets concentrated. The worst form of concentration is that it boils at a slightly lower temperature than ethanol (64.7°C vs. 78.3°C), and so comes off at a higher concentration in the beginning of the distillation process.

As to whether the icing concentration would do the same thing, I don't know, but I have some doubts.

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MomICantPauseReddit t1_jd66y1z wrote

I'm a high schooler so I don't really know anything, but I'm pretty sure the way our brains work isn't much like a computer or robot at all (a comparison I feel is implied by words like "run" and "system"). It may perform computations, but at the end of the day, a computer is called a computer when it can run software to complete essentially any computation. If it can't do that, it's typically reclassified as a "calculator" or a "machine", or it has some specialized name. However, evolution is not concerned with the computations it doesn't need to make, so the brain is more like specialized "hardware" to perform specifically its tasks. To make a visual analogy, if "completing a task" is compared to "connecting point A to point B", a computer will take a "rectangular" path to leave room for further infrastructure and to make things more readable. However, readability and future iterations are no concern for a "machine" optimized purely by the force of killing ones that are not. It takes a direct approach, connecting A and B with a diagonal line. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's how I visualize the difference between a computer and the brain.

So simply "scaling it down" in the same way you can a computer, by putting in processors with less power but that do the same thing, doesn't make so much sense to me. A "smaller brain" would have to somehow do the exact same things, and that means it has to be intelligently built because simply "making it smaller" wouldn't accomplish nerve function in any way other than a seizure. The brain accomplishes its exact task. If nature could make it smaller and still do the same thing, it would. In fact, the reason humans are born so underdeveloped is that if we developed any further, our heads would be too big and kill the mother every time. Maybe human innovation could build something smaller out of neurons that functions the same, but I doubt it to be frank. Nature has been perfecting this thing for about as long as the brain has existed. You could probably put something that has an analogous function into a human skull (like a baby's brain in an adult's body or an engineered "lite" version of an adult' brain), but obviously we can see that the function would be at a lower level. Let's, of course, assume that we know how to "wire" the correct neuron outputs to the nervous system to make things connect properly.

When it comes to putting a smaller species' brain into a human's head, I think it's out of the question. Like I've mused, the human brain does exactly what a human brain should do. The function of, say, a monkey is completely foreign. It's almost like if you tried to take two people who speak different languages, and write code in different programming languages, to accomplish different tasks, and try to mash their code together and make it work together. The inputs and outputs just won't align in a way that makes coherent sense. It's possible we could map out every input and output in a monkey brain, and find every entry signal in our nervous system, and map connections so that the outputs more or less make sense, but that really only strikes me as possible because we're so closely related to monkeys. I don't see it as concievable for something like, say, an octopus.

I sound a lot more confident above than I really am. I should stress again that I am a high schooler, and I don't know much at all about neuroscience. The above is nothing more than musings derived from common sense, and lacks the nuance of work composed by someone truly educated in the field.

tl;dr, a "smaller" brain simply won't do the same thing without basically starting from scratch to engineer a new brain, if my musings are correct.

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