Possibly a poor translation from my side: I’m referring to the “head office” of the university, i.e. the group of people under the direct leadership of the principal, who have the highest administrative authority at the university.

A professor at my university tried that, but the students quite quickly made a huge fuss, got the principals office involved, and the universities lawyers informed said professor that what she was doing was illegal, and that she should stop before she got any more trouble. She stopped.

To be fair, the result of this calculation only depends on the area/volume ratio of the human. I used the specific cylinder, because humans are roughly cylindrical, and have a volume of roughly 100 L. The surface area of a regular human is probably a bit larger than that of a cylindrical one though.

I’m actually a chemist, thankyouverymuch

#Chemistry Is When There’s Too Many Electrons For The Physicists

;)

The math actually says that we might quite possibly get nuclear stuff. I checked because at first I intuitively thought the same thing as you.

Assuming

• cylindrical human, 2m tall, 25 cm diameter.
• air displaced from the point you teleport to is instantly moved to form a monolayer (1 molecule thick) on your surface.
• The displacement of air is adiabatic (no heat is transferred, which will be true if the displacement is instantaneous)

Volume of displaced air: ≈ 100L = 0.1m^3 At atmospheric conditions: ≈ 4 mol

Surface area of cylindrical human: ≈ 1.58 m^2 Diameter of nitrogen molecule (which is roughly the same as for an oxygen molecule) : ≈ 3 Å Volume of monolayer: ≈ 4.7e-10 m^3

Treating the air as an ideal gas (terrible approximation for this process) gives us a post-compression pressure of ≈ 45 PPa (you read that right: Peta-pascal) or 450 Gbar, and a temperature of roughly 650 000 K.

These conditions are definitely in the range where fusion might be possible (see: solar conditions). So to the people saying you are only “trying to science”, I would say I agree with your initial assessment.

I’m on my phone now, but I can run the numbers using something more accurate than ideal gas when I get my computer. However, this is so extreme that I don’t really think it will change anything.

Edit: We’ll just look at how densely packed the monolayer is. Our cylindrical person has an area of 1.58 m^2, which, assuming an optimally packed monolayer gives us about 48 micro Å^2 per particle, or an average inter-particle distance of about 3.9 milli Å. For reference, that means the average distance between molecules is about 0.1 % of the diameter of the molecules (roughly 3 Å) I think we can safely say that fusion is a possible or even likely outcome of this procedure.

I am now sitting on the wing of a plane that is about to take off. Gonna try to Tom Cruise it. Will post updates soon.

To be fair: If you live in the south, it doesn’t make much sense, but if you live a bit further north it’s the difference between getting up when the sun is a a reasonable place, or getting up in the middle of the night (winter) or the middle of the day (summer). I want it to be light out when I’m awake, not when it’s sleeping time.

Turns out it’s easier to adjust the clock than to say “work starts at 9 in the winter and at 8 in the summer”

This put words to thoughts and feelings I have had for a long time, but have not been able to express accurately. Thank you, well written.

Some languages - specifically Norwegian that I know of, don’t have separate words for “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”. In Norwegian we have the word “kjæreste” which can be directly translated to “dearest”. To me it always feels a little weird to use “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, i guess the same could be true for other non-native english speakers.

Doomscrolling has now become an Olympic sport

And if I have that page, I’ll be a viable competitor

Wait till I show you…

int *ptr[]

In Norway we have the stereotypical Norwegians “Ola Nordmann” and “Kari Nordmann”. Ola and Kari were quite common names a couple generations ago (not so common now). “Nordmann” literally translates to “Norwegian [person]”, but is also a not-too-uncommon last name.

We typically talk about them if we’re describing something or some situation and what the stereotypical Norwegian would do/think.

Don’t know about Saturday, but “lørdag” comes from the Norse word for “washing day” because the vikings were surprisingly hygienic for their time, and bathed/washed themselves once a week.

I definitely agree that breaking best practices in a way that could lead to UB or hard-to-find bugs should give point deduction. The sole requirement shouldn’t be “write standard compliant code”.

However, a test does not simulate a real-world development environment, where you will have time to look through your code with fresh eyes the next day, and maybe even have someone review your code. The only thing a test reasonably simulates is your ability to solve the “thinking” part of the problem on your own. Thus, deducting points for trivial stuff that would 10/10 times be caught, either by the compiler, the developer or the reviewer, but isn’t “strictly correct” just seems pedantic to me.

To be fair, other than the example by OP I have a hard time coming up with things that wouldn’t be either caught by the compiler or are very bad practice (which should give point deduction).

I have to admit it sounds stupid to deduct points for that anyway, a test should measure your ability to reason, not your ability to remember trivial formalities.

I have a masters degree in materials chemistry and engineering. When people find that out they often say stuff like “I could never understand that” or similar.

I am of the firm belief that I could teach anyone everything I know given enough time and motivation. The thing is, I don’t think there’s anything special about me that makes me capable of doing what I do, other than thinking chemistry is extremely interesting. I don’t have a more capable brain or anything. I’m just a bit of a nerd.

I absolutely agree that way too many people have the misconception that you have to be “special” to do a lot of the things many people find hard. It’s all about being interested enough to spend time learning it.

Maybe not your generic “discussions”, but at c/askscience we can discuss interesting (and more or less absurd) scientific questions and hypotheticals, if you’re into that kind of thing ;)

Great answer! I’m just commenting because I think this would be a question that would be nice to post on c/askscience where I regularly lurk and look for cool questions to answer, but where there aren’t too many questions being asked yet :)

I’m one of the people that thinks the world is probably going to shit (mass migration from uninhabitable land, wars over water / farmland etc.) but I don’t use that as an excuse to not do anything. My reasoning is that even though I honestly think everything is going to shit, I might be wrong, so the best I can do is plan to go down fighting to make the world better. Either the world burns, and I can say with integrity that I tried my best, or we somehow pull through and prevent the worst prognosis from becoming reality. Either way, slacking is a bad idea.