Yeah…yeah. I think that was when I lost all faith in Hollywood to adapt anything without shitting all over it. It’s gotten better with some recent stuff (Dune, for instance), but if I ever have to watch anything that is based on a property that I like, I try to go in with my expectations at absolute fucking bedrock.

Also, this is a reasonable time to mention one of my favorite heavy bands of all time, He Is Legend. They take their name from the Matheson book, and their biggest “hit” is called “I Am Hollywood,” so your comment just made me flash back to the late 2000’s metalcore scene.

For sure. I agree with you completely and see the connection to hexbear. I was mostly just making a joke that my particular circle had different but still very specific inside jokes.

Precisely

Sort of like how in the dark ages of the pre-internet Era, nerds would quote LotR and Hitchhiker’s Guide at each other to signal that they are nerds and are therefore of one heart and mind

You really weren’t there or had a very different experience than me. I mean, I guess by “very different,” I mostly mean we actually quoted Monty Python and Star Wars.

This is absolutely gold. I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

Thank you for your service o7

There’s just a spectrum of drunkenness where different games work best at different points. For example, you could start your Friday night off relatively sober and playing a bit of co-op shooter or a new RPG or something. Then, as the drunkenness increases, you move toward games that don’t depend as much on reflexes, attention, or making good decisions: old favorites, turn-based strategy, etc. Finally, once you reach fully shit-housed territory, it’s back to co-op games and games where you can shout at your friends and/or turn into a drinking game: Halo, Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, etc.

Frankly, if you’ve never played Mario Kart: “Drunk Driving” with a room full of people until 3AM and then passed out waiting for your next Smash Bros. match to start, you may have missed out on some core memories.

I… I want to hug you, I feel like I’ve actually found someone who gets it

Internet hugs Any time, friend. People shouting too loudly about how strongly they disbelieve and mocking others are just covering up their own fears and are still unwilling to give up their own idea of absolute truth, IMO (and I say this as a pretty strong anti-theist, myself). Give them a few years (or decades) to come to grips with their own mortality and they’ll be far more open to “live and let live.”

I can’t accept a world where death is the final answer for us all… It’s it’s too much…

It’s certainly uncomfortable and very…well, final, I guess. But personally, there are two ideas of materialistic afterlife that really comfort me:

• I like the idea of my physical body going on to become other things. There’s a growing movement where people more or less have their bodies composted and turned into soil by a service, and the soil is then returned to the family and loved ones. It’s comforting to me to think that even when my consciousness is gone, my atoms can return to other living beings. It might seem a bit weird to some, but I love the idea than my great-grandchildren might hang a swing in a tree that grew in the material that was once my body, or that bees might make honey from the pollen of wildflowers that grew in that soil.

• I’ve also always liked the idea of two deaths: the first being the death of a person’s physical body and the second being the last time anyone speaks their name or remembers them as a person. It helps me to avoid hopeless nihilism and hedonism to remember that my actions will have consequences that go far beyond my physical lifetime, whether I am able to see them or not. And in that way, anything that you dedicate time to, and anyone that you impact with your words or actions (positively or negatively) carries a piece of you forward.

But hey, at the end of the day, none of us really have the first clue about what awaits us. Plus, there’s the old Mark Twain quote: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” So go out and make the most of the time we’ve got! I, for one, need to get back to preparing to teach a new batch of students and trying to fix my furnace before fall really sets in. But any time you feel like talking through anything like this, you know where to find me, and clearly, I don’t mind the conversation ;)

Eh, I think he’s too stubborn and too good at defining his terms to go that route. I love the idea of Spinoza’s pantheistic view of the universe, but I would never tell the average person that because I don’t want to end up in the same box as Einstein, where just because I use the word “God,” people assume I’m religious.

Personally, I think Dawkins would wind up going the same route as Sagan, defining mystical experiences related to the universe as “numinous” rather than “religious” for precisely that reason: because it’s really obnoxious when people take your words out of context, so stick to using very specific words that don’t carry the baggage of religion.

Ego death is a hell of a thing…

I feel like I’m in this weird camp of “I Don’t Want To Be An Atheist!”

I don’t think it’s that unusual. Most people are just pretty good at pretending that they believe in a higher power and repressing that fear that maybe this is all we get.

At least personally there was a period of about a year where I went through every apologetics argument I could find in order to try and hang onto the religion I grew up with, followed by another year where I called myself a deist before I confronted the possibility that there was really no evidence for anything more than materialism. I wound up reaching the conclusion that unless we find more evidence, most religions and supernatural beliefs are just wishful thinking. And given my personality, I couldn’t really ignore that conclusion once I got there.

I just find the concept of a cold purely material universe where no greater force than Entropy exists scarier than any interpretation of Tartarus!

It is a bit overwhelming. I tend to fall back on acknowledging that I am part of the universe rather than in opposition to it as a way of confronting that existential dread. Plus, entropy is actually not as scary as it seems at first since space and time are really, really big compared to the scales we perceive and think in. That leaves lots of places where order can appear without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and our species is very unlikely to ever really reach that point where the heat death of the universe affects us personally.

So I just file “the cold indifference of the universe” away in the same area as knowing the sun will one day expand and consume Earth: it’s interesting to know how it all works, a little scary, but very unlikely to ever significantly affect this little pocket of the universe I perceive as my self.

As an agnostic atheist that favors materialism, I found it to be very fun and exciting to do pretty massive doses of psychedelics, especially ones that frequently spur thoughts of “higher powers.” 2C-E, in particular is known for bringing about thoughts about the divine, and that was a lot of fun (I just played around on Universe Sandbox while I came up, put on some good music, then laid on the floor in a blanket and thought about the universe for a few hours).

Dawkins on acid would be a hell of a time

No need to get ashamed! Lots of people had bad experiences in chemistry classes at a young age and don’t remember much beyond “it was hard, it didn’t make sense, and I was really bad at it.” So, you’re in good company!

This is at least partly because chemistry was traditionally a “weed out” class, meaning it was used to determine whether people “had what it takes” to succeed in the sciences. As a result it was usually taught in a way that made it harder than it needs to be and a lot of people decided not to pursue STEM careers/education because chemistry felt too hard. But lots of times , it felt too hard just because it was taught poorly (on purpose).

Basically, don’t be afraid to get back into chemistry! Even though I’m in chemistry education, I don’t really have any great book recs for someone starting from scratch, as I’d want to recommend a textbook that’s not necessarily easy to work through in your own. However, The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum and Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks are both really fun to read and relatively accessible. To get more of a well rounded, academic understanding I would highly recommend taking a class at a local college (community college if you’re in the US, to keep the cost down, but there are probably similar options in other countries). It would be more work and deadlines, but trying to educate yourself about this stuff can be really hard and intimidating, and if you take a class, you’ll be much more likely to stick with it and get something out of it.

Not dumb at all! In order to not write an even bigger wall of text, I assumed some things, like everyone already knowing that in water, a pH of 7 is considered neutral. This is because that solution would have an equal amount of acidic ions and basic ions, each with a concentration of approximately 10^(-7) moles per liter. But with a different solvent like ammonia, the change in auto dissociation constant means that to get an equal number of acidic and basic ions, you would only need a concentration of 10^(-15) moles per liter.

So, it would change a lot of the standard practices in a lab, like making buffers, neutralizing solutions, etc. Since it’s Saturday and I’m doing this all off the top of my head, I don’t know what other implications there might be, but basically a lot of things that chemists and biochemists take for granted would need to recalculated. Acids would be more acidic, bases more basic, etc. In ammonia, even water would be a fairly strong acid!

The chemistry doesn’t really change, but a lot of the standard practices would need to be done differently (including the way we make buffers, measure pH, and the range of pH that a solution could be).

Water is the most common substance that can be either an acid or a base (on earth), but lots of other compounds are also amphoteric.

In fact, on other planets where ammonia fills the same role as water, ammonia would be the most common amphoteric substance, so most solutions would be in a liquid ammonia solvent. This means neutral pH on those planets would substantially higher!

K_w is the auto dissociation constant for water, and at room temp, K_w is about 10^(-14). Taking the negative log of the square root of K_w gives the pH of pure water of about 7. The auto dissociation constant of ammonia, however, is about 10^(-30), so the pH of pure liquid ammonia is about 15! Basically, as soon as we start using solvents other than water, pH gets really funky

Edit: and before anyone jumps in to say “ack-shully, pH is based on the concentration of hydronium ions in solution, so you can’t use pH for systems based on solvents other than water,” pH can also be considered to be based on the protonated form of whatever the solvent is. So in an ammonia-based solution, you would find the pH by taking the negative log of ammonium instead of hydronium. Instead of defining pH as

pH = -log [H_3 O^(+)]

A more universal definition would be

pH = -log [H_2 A^(+)]

Where the auto dissociation reaction of any amphoteric solvent can be written as

HA + HA -> H_2 A^(+) + A^(-)

This is more detail than most people care about, but there’s always lurking pedants on the Internet, so I thought I would leave a more detailed explanation

Well, my grad school research used quantum mechanical calculations to predict physical properties of chemicals, so it fits for me ;)

Plus, as long as I have to teach first years the Bohr model, I figure chemistry can claim him as an honorary chemist. After all, what is chemistry but applied physics? Relevant xkcd: “Purity of the field”

Hydroxic acid hydrohydroxic acid

If the anion ends in “ide”, the acid name is hydro___ic acid. So hydroxide becomes hydrohydroxic acid.

Source: I teach chemistry.