Dumb questions thread

[David B]

Since there are so many helpful scientists in the house, and so many dumb questions, and TBM/Autodidact hasn't started one, I will.

And I'll start, because an easy to explain overview might come in useful.

How do we know when deposits, whether water born or ice, are in fact annual, as opposed to being successive snowfalls or flood events in the same year?

David B

[Christina]

Hey David - you should also ask about your theory on freezing one's fat ass off : )

[David B]

Originally Posted by Christina

Hey David - you should also ask about your theory on freezing one's fat ass off : )

Hypothesis!!!

Tomorrow!

Need to eat quickly, then a little evening shift.

It's been a busy day, what with looking at cars, transferring money, getting old car scrapped.

David B

[RAFH]

I'm not sure how that is determined, but if it were me, I'd look at current snowfalls over the years and see what pattern develops, if the thick and thin are from individual storms or annual. My guess is immediately, one would be able to differentiate individual storms, but as the years passed, those would get merged into the larger pattern with only the major thick and thin of the annual deposits showing above the noise.

Alternately, there is the resort to consilience. Are there indicators within the sample that relate to other dating systems, such as ash layers that can be chemically analyzed and assigned to known volcanic events. Then it's a relatively simple matter of counting the layers between such events and seeing if the number corresponds to the number of years, or more so to a greater number that would result from individual storms. Additionally, one could look for patterns in the layering, thicker or thinner laminae, and see if those correspond to known climactic cycles. If the model based on annual laminae corresponds to those cycles, you have consilience, if they do not, well, you do not.

Observe, deduce, synthesize, test, analyze, compare ... ... repeat.

[ninewands]

In the case of water-borne sediments, it's relatively simple to identify annual depositional cycles (a/k/a VARRRRVES).

In the case of glacial lakes, the layering is, almost by definition, annual because the winter temperatures reduce the water supply that is the source of the sediments.

In the case of temperate-zone lakes, like Suigetsu, there is almost always a difference on the biota in the layers and it is one which can really only be explained on the basis of annual layering.

At Suigetsu there is a difference in the species of diatoms whose valves are preserved in the layering. In fact the light colored layers are made up almost exclusively of diatom valves, while the dark layers contain some diatom valves but are mostly clay mineral crystals. This is because there was a well-documented annual diatom bloom prior to the seventeenth century earthquake that converted the lake to its current brackish, meromictic character.

When analyzing the varves in the Green River formation, there are alternate layers of light-colored, organic-poor clays intercalated with dark-colored, organic-rich layers. The source of the dark coloration is fossilized pollen grains which are more-or-less missing from the light-colored layers. Since the climate in the Eocene, IIRC, was not a LOT different from the climate today, this necessarily leads to a presumption that the layers are annual couplets, with the light-colored layers representing the normal sediments and the dark-colored layers representing springtime deposition. This presumption appears to be supported by the fact that a number of longer-term astronomically based cycles appear to be reflected in the layers and correlate well with annual depositional cycles.

Whatever ... llanitedave can correct me wherever I'm wrong.

BTW, has anybody sent "the memo" to Joe Meerts?

[nygreenguy]

Heres a question.

LEts say we can go the speed of light.

Ok, were on a deck on the enterprise going the speed of light.

Im at the anterior end, you are at the posterior.

Can I see you?, if so, how? The ship is moving light speed, so the light would essentially have to go faster than light to reach me. Or is this just "relative". It wouldnt be going faster than light relative to the ships interior.

[Ray Moscow]

Originally Posted by nygreenguy

Heres a question.

LEts say we can go the speed of light.

Ok, were on a deck on the enterprise going the speed of light.

I should probably wait until JB joins in, but:

An object with mass can never reach the speed of light. You can only approach it by accelerating more and more, but as you went faster you and the ship would gain mass, requiring a greater and greater force to accelerate you.

Im at the anterior end, you are at the posterior.

Can I see you?, if so, how? The ship is moving light speed, so the light would essentially have to go faster than light to reach me. Or is this just "relative". It wouldnt be going faster than light relative to the ships interior.

As you approached the speed of light, the opposite ends of the ship would grow closer and closer to each other -- though inside the ship, this would not be apparent to you. Also, time would slow down at the same proportion.

Closer and closer, slower and slower, more and more massive. It's a bit like British Rail and a McDonald's diet combined.

[nygreenguy]

Originally Posted by Ray Moscow

I should probably wait until JB joins in, but:

An object with mass can never reach the speed of light. You can only approach it by accelerating more and more, but as you went faster you and the ship would gain mass, requiring a greater and greater force to accelerate you.

Yeah, i know. Thats why I said "lets say". Its a hypo

As you approached the speed of light, the opposite ends of the ship would grow closer and closer to each other -- though inside the ship, this would not be apparent to you. Also, time would slow down at the same proportion.

Closer and closer, slower and slower, more and more massive. It's a bit like British Rail and a McDonald's diet combined.

lulz. But this doesnt even come close to addressing my question

[Ray Moscow]

Originally Posted by nygreenguy

Can I see you?, if so, how? The ship is moving light speed, so the light would essentially have to go faster than light to reach me. Or is this just "relative". It wouldnt be going faster than light relative to the ships interior.

OK, you wouldn't be able to see, because for you time has stopped and there is no distance between front and back anyway.

Plus, you've consumed all the energy in the known universe (and then some) just getting up to speed.

[perfessor]

Originally Posted by Ray Moscow

OK, you wouldn't be able to see, because for you time has stopped and there is no distance between front and back anyway.

This. You would see the other person before attaining light speed, and after slowing down again, and would be unaware of any "light speed" event.

Plus, you've consumed all the energy in the known universe (and then some) just getting up to speed.

You're no fun. Next, you'll probably tell me that the radioactive spider won't give me powers.

[Ray Moscow]

Originally Posted by perfessor

You're no fun. Next, you'll probably tell me that the radioactive spider won't give me powers.

In the interest of fun, let's say that we've established a "warp" field that allows a bit of "normal" space inside containing our ship and crew, and the warp bubble travels as fast (or faster) than light.

I suppose the rules inside the bubble could be tweaked as we (having god-like powers) wished?

Trekkie Ray

[Jobar]

Originally Posted by David B

Since there are so many helpful scientists in the house, and so many dumb questions, and TBM/Autodidact hasn't started one, I will.

And I'll start, because an easy to explain overview might come in useful.

How do we know when deposits, whether water born or ice, are in fact annual, as opposed to being successive snowfalls or flood events in the same year?

David B

Ninewands' answer covers everything except glacial ice cores; those can be determined to be annual by checking for deposited airborne pollen.

[umop apisdn w,I]

Originally Posted by Ray Moscow

In the interest of fun, let's say that we've established a "warp" field that allows a bit of "normal" space inside containing our ship and crew, and the warp bubble travels as fast (or faster) than light.

I suppose the rules inside the bubble could be tweaked as we (having god-like powers) wished?

Trekkie Ray

Call yourself a Trekkie? There was far too little technobable in that answer. You should have mentioned "Heisenberg inhibitors" or "Tachyon flux" at least once in there...

[David B]

Originally Posted by Christina

Hey David - you should also ask about your theory on freezing one's fat ass off : )

Right, I have a little time, so better late than never.

I have the idea in my head that in order to keep weight constant, then the amount of energy coming into one's body via digesting food should equal the amount of energy leaving the body by means of using the energy to perform some sort of work, and, crucially for this potentially dumb argument, by heat loss.

Let's consider a case with some simplifying assumptions.

A person is maintaining an approximately constant weight, based on an approximately constant food intake, and maintaining an approximately constant exercise regime, including (perhaps even only) normal work used in every day life.

First Dumb Question! If, then, by one or more measures designed to increase heat loss, would that tend to losing weight?

Measures could include - turning down the thermostat on the heating, while keeping amount of clothing constant, removing more clothing, while not compensating by raising the thermostat on the heating indoors, or by being outdoors in temperatures less than body temperature, or by more extreme measures, like spending time in a cold, or at any rate significantly less than body temperature, bath or shower, or swimming pool or sea.

Second Dumb Question. If indeed being colder would tend to help lose weight - is it possible to get ball park figures for the amount of heat being lost by, say, turning the thermostat on house, office or pool down a few degrees, taking at item of clothing off, taking a 50 degree bath for 20 minutes......or whatever other measures taken?

I'd imagine that would be difficult to quantify precisely, because of variations in body shape, variations in insulating fat, because of the body's self regulating mechanisms like withdrawing blood from the surface and extremities when cold, the thermal qualities of garments taken off, and stuff like that.

Third Dumb question - given positive answers to the first two questions, how much heat loss, and what sort of cool regime, would it need to lose say 20 lb 9even very approximately) over a period of a year?

David B (hopes some of the real scientists have a go at this)

[ofro]

You have a great idea here, but... Making the body lose more heat in order to lose body weight only works if you get the body to burn more food.

To a certain extent, the body has the ability to adjust to a lower ambient temperature by burning a bit more fuel. For example, the shivering reflex gets you to move your skeletal muscle. You will also be more inclined to move about than just sit on the couch. And if you are young, you still have a very specialized tissue called brown fat whose physiological role is to burn fat for the purpose of heat generation. Maybe you have seen the prototypical picture of a half-naked Eskimo baby on a bear rug in an ice-cold igloo. Or our own kids running around in cold weather not caring about the cold. Unfortunately, this tissue is lost with age.

So turning down the temperature may help a little bit, but it is not very comfortable. If we can resists turning up the heat, the more likely response to cold temperature is that we will put on more insulation.

The more extreme measures of taking an ice bath won't do you much good. If you extract more heat from your body than what it can produce, you'll put yourself in danger of getting hypothermic.

There have been all kinds of efforts to short-circuit our body's biochemistry to generate more heat. For example, the brown fat cells make their mitochondria burn fat without producing the energy-containing ATP a.k.a. adenosine triphosphate. This is equivalent to causing a short-circuit that produces only heat and no useful biochemical work. There are chemicals that will do that, too. People have tried it, and theoretically it was a great idea. Unfortunately, our brain cells rely greatly on their mitochondria for functioning. The side effect were damage to the brain and other organs.

[ofro]

Originally Posted by David B

Third Dumb question - given positive answers to the first two questions, how much heat loss, and what sort of cool regime, would it need to lose say 20 lb 9even very approximately) over a period of a year?

This question is actually answered fairly easily. A pound of body weight corresponds to about 3,000 calories. In order to get rid of 60,000 calories in a year, you "only" need to have a negative balance of 170 calories per day. That's equivalent to not drinking one soft drink, or eating a candy bar each day.

WITHOUT CHEATING, THOUGH!

[perfessor]

A possible monkey wrench in David B's scenario is that the body tries to maintain an ideal internal temperature - and is willing to spend energy to get there. So you burn calories trying to cool down, as well as trying to warm up.

I have heard this as an explanation for why swimming is not a good weight-loss exercise. Despite other benefits it may well have, it simply does not force your body to cool itself, since the water does that for you.

[David B]

Originally Posted by perfessor

A possible monkey wrench in David B's scenario is that the body tries to maintain an ideal internal temperature - and is willing to spend energy to get there. So you burn calories trying to cool down, as well as trying to warm up.

I have heard this as an explanation for why swimming is not a good weight-loss exercise. Despite other benefits it may well have, it simply does not force your body to cool itself, since the water does that for you.

I was wondering about that, too.

Sure, sweating leads to heat loss, because of latent heat and evaporation and stuff.

But still - I maintain that in an approximately stable situation, where energy taken in from food equals energy used over a period of perhaps a week, and also exercise (and hence sweating) doesn't change, then if more energy is lost though turning heating down/wearing less/taking cool baths without reaching the point of hypothermia, then that energy has to come from somewhere, and if not from burning fat, then where?

David B

[ofro]

Originally Posted by David B

I was wondering about that, too.

Sure, sweating leads to heat loss, because of latent heat and evaporation and stuff.

But still - I maintain that in an approximately stable situation, where energy taken in from food equals energy used over a period of perhaps a week, and also exercise (and hence sweating) doesn't change, then if more energy is lost though turning heating down/wearing less/taking cool baths without reaching the point of hypothermia, then that energy has to come from somewhere, and if not from burning fat, then where?

David B

I don't disagree with that. What I am not sure about is how many calories you can lose this way. Believe me, I have thought about that, too, and wish that number were significant.

[Codec]

Try this..

As we all know, it takes 1 calorie to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade. Translated into meaningful terms, this means that if you eat a very cold dessert or drink iced drinks the body raising these to body temperature literally sucks the calories out of the only available source, your body fat.

For example, a dessert served and eaten at near 0 degrees C will in a short time be raised to the normal body temperature of 37 degrees C. For each gram of dessert eaten, that process takes approximately 37 calories as stated above. The average dessert portion is 6 oz, or 168 grams. Therefore, by operation of thermodynamic law, 6,216 calories (1 cal./gm/deg. x 37 deg. x 168 gms) are extracted from body fat as the dessert's temperature is normalized.

Allowing for the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net calorie loss is approximately 5,000 calories.

Of course, those who wrote such things confused Calories and calories (which is a good reason to move to Joules!).
It does work that you loose weight drinking iced drinks though.

[ofro]

I wish it were that simple. The problem is that the body at rest produces heat at a rate of about 100 Watts (for comparison: 1 nutritional Calorie = 1 kcal = 1.16 Wh or Watt-hour). In other words, we are burning about 100 Cal per hour, which is consistent with the 2000-2500 Cal per day we need to take up as food. This is the basic metabolic rate at rest, and it depends pretty much only on lean body (i.e. muscle, not fat) mass.

A basic metabolic rate also means that we have to get rid of that heat, and we do that by many different ways, from sweating when we are too hot to adjusting the amount of clothing we wear. So if we eat ice cream or drink ice water, the heat we extract from the body is not calories lost in the eventual form of lost body weight. Rather, we just sweat less or expose less skin until we are back to the original temperature.

There could be a small effect of activating the body's metabolic rate to produce a bit of extra heat, but I am skeptical that this amounts to too much.

[ofro]

Originally Posted by Codec

Try this..

As we all know, it takes 1 calorie to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade. Translated into meaningful terms, this means that if you eat a very cold dessert or drink iced drinks the body raising these to body temperature literally sucks the calories out of the only available source, your body fat.

For example, a dessert served and eaten at near 0 degrees C will in a short time be raised to the normal body temperature of 37 degrees C. For each gram of dessert eaten, that process takes approximately 37 calories as stated above. The average dessert portion is 6 oz, or 168 grams. Therefore, by operation of thermodynamic law, 6,216 calories (1 cal./gm/deg. x 37 deg. x 168 gms) are extracted from body fat as the dessert's temperature is normalized.

Allowing for the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net calorie loss is approximately 5,000 calories.

Unfortunately, the devil is in the detail. You forgot something very important, which set you off by a factor of thousand.

The calories you calculated for your 168 g of ice-cold fluid are 6,216 cal (or "small calories") or 6.2 Cal (or "large calories"), scientifically known as kcal (kilocalories). The calories you calculated from the dessert were kcal. Instead of having a deficit or 5000 calories, you lost only 0.1% of the calories you just enjoyed.

[laughing dog]

Here's a question that has been nagging at me for some time. Aren't all scientific theories evidence of Intelligent Design "theory"? BTW - I am not a proponent of ID.

[Codec]

Originally Posted by laughing dog

Here's a question that has been nagging at me for some time. Aren't all scientific theories evidence of Intelligent Design "theory"? BTW - I am not a proponent of ID.

I don't think so. Generally a theory (or probably what you really mean a hypothesis) isn't something that pops out of the air. Its more a collection of building blocks and experience that come together.

ID at one level says "stuff happens" and we can't understand why because something supernatural intervenes. At another level as the ID'er, you have absolutely control over everything, and can make any change you like.

If you are not a physicist, and have little experience in physics, it's pretty unlikely you will come up with a new theory of relativity. You will have had to spend some time in the field, looking over data, understanding the issues, understanding the constraints and so on. Then suddenly a new idea pops into you're head, and it might appear to be "out of the blue", but I think its actually your subconscious working away on the problem sieving through alternatives.

An intelligently designed theory would, I think, come right out of the blue, as in, say, a sedimentary geologist suddenly coming up with a new idea about molecular cell biology. Hypotheses are subject to a lot of darwinian selection, the bad ones dieing in infancy, better ones making it through to concious thought, and good ones getting published. The best go on to be theories, but are often challenged and out-evolved by better "adapted" theories.

[ofro]

Originally Posted by laughing dog

Here's a question that has been nagging at me for some time. Aren't all scientific theories evidence of Intelligent Design "theory"? BTW - I am not a proponent of ID.

They are at best described as "hypothesis"; personally, I prefer "conjecture."