#3

The bubbles are CO2, which dissolves in water to make carbonic acid, so when it goes flat you lose that acidity and that’s why it tastes different.

Life doesn’t really make sense to me generally.

5 Likes
#4

Music on vinyl. Both the way it works and its popularity in the year 2020.

2 Likes
#5

thanks for the explanation doc!

1 Like
#6

Prove it

1 Like
#7

Gather some gas from your Diet Coke, and see if it puts out a burning splint (not spliff, Bob Marley). Then bubble some through a calcium hydroxide solution and see if it goes milky.

2 Likes
#8

Just tried it. It did not go milky.

9 Likes
The Sunday before Christmas
#10

ur milky

2 Likes
#11

magnets. they’re just made out of little magnets? sure, ok.

1 Like
#12

Bikes

#14

Rita Ora. Never had a hit, she’s everywhere, what’s the truth behind this?

4 Likes
#15

Music on vinyl makes a lot more sense than on any other format. Music is just vibration like any other sound. At its basic level you sing into an apparatus which turns the vibration of your voice into the up and down movement of a cutting needle which cuts a grove on a disc. When you reverse the process the vibration is transmitted to a stylus and reproduced as sound. It’s a simple mechanical process that you could recreate with a bit of effort and some fairly simple machinery. Try creating a digital music file from scratch.

4 Likes
#16

Do you mean how they stay up? I think I read that science doesn’t really know either

2 Likes
#17

I understand all this but I still can’t get my head round how grooves in a bit of plastic and a bit of metal can accurately reproduce the sound of a whole orchestra

Loads of 1 s and 0s makes more logical sense to me somehow

2 Likes
#18

In this excellent book he suggests that in some imaginary post-apocalyptic someone who dug up the relics of our time would probably be able to work out how to reproduce music from a wax cylinder or a vinyl record, but almost certainly not from a computer drive.

5 Likes
#19

I think it’s right that there is no fully satisfactory explanation for why a bicycle is more stable when it is moving forward than it is when it’s standing still. Obviously when someone is riding it the balancing movements he or she makes help to keep it upright but it is still a lot easier to do this the faster you are moving forward (and a riderless bike pushed forward will stay upright for longer than one that is just let go whilst stationary)

2 Likes
#20

Wireless charging. Even when I understand, it dosn’t make any sense. Magic innit.

3 Likes
#21

Radio and TV broadcasting. All this sound and vision floating through the air and caught by what, a thick bit of wire 🤷

2 Likes
#22

I don’t understand how any of the technology in the world works on anything but the most superficial level. I know there is no way I am ever going to really comprehend how a modern computer works in any meaningful way.

There’s a theory that there was a brief period of human history when any relatively intelligent person with access to education could understand the world around them. So an educated person in, say, 1890, wouldn’t be likely to encounter anything much that he couldn’t understand with a bit of effort. Before that there was superstition and witchcraft and after it just the kind of dully accepting bafflement that we have now.

#23

Makes perfect sense for numerous reasons

#24

the groove and needle is just recreating the same ups and downs as an orchestra would on the changing air pressure on the ear drum, how lots of different notes and instruments all getting summed together into one and our brains still being able to perceive them as separate I dont know, but the digital files end up the same as when it comes out a speaker it is the same ups and downs