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 Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!
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dominic_dice
Skeptic Friend

United Kingdom
53 Posts

Posted - 09/22/2004 :  11:25:47  Show Profile Send dominic_dice a Private Message
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/dhmo.htm

"Are you THE dominic_dice"
"No, a dominic_dice. I come in six packs now"

Ricky
SFN Die Hard

USA
4907 Posts

Posted - 09/22/2004 :  11:42:50   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Send Ricky an AOL message Send Ricky a Private Message
Do you know how this all started? This was an experiment for a school science far, to test the knowlege of teens in chemistry. A person asked 50 random 9th grade students what they thought about it:

"Forty-three students favored banning it, six were undecided, and only one correctly recognized that 'dihydrogen monoxide' is actually H2O — plain old water." - http://www.snopes.com/toxins/dhmo.htm

Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.
- Isaac Asimov
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Siberia
SFN Addict

Brazil
2322 Posts

Posted - 09/22/2004 :  15:40:36   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Siberia's Homepage  Send Siberia an AOL message  Send Siberia a Yahoo! Message Send Siberia a Private Message
Gee. This shows how retarded people can be.
I pity the world of tomorrow.

"Why are you afraid of something you're not even sure exists?"
- The Kovenant, Via Negativa

"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
-- unknown
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filthy
SFN Die Hard

USA
14408 Posts

Posted - 09/22/2004 :  16:07:56   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send filthy a Private Message
Haha, wonderful!

And horrible. Even such an ignoramus as I knew what the prefixs 'di' and 'mono' ment at that age.

What the hell are they teaching the kids these days? Have the creationidiots already taken over the science classes?


"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)

"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres


"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude

Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,

and Crypto-Communist!

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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard

USA
4574 Posts

Posted - 09/22/2004 :  16:52:39   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send H. Humbert a Private Message
I could have sworn I've seen Penn and Teller take this bit on the street as well. They were walking around trying to get a petition signed to ban it. They kept spouting facts like: "Do you know that dihydrogen monoxide is in nearly everything you eat? In what they serve your children at school? Does this not concern you????"

It was hilarious--but disturbing at the same time--to see so many people just jumping on the bandwagon to ban this stuff without even knowing what it was or what it supposedly did. They added their names to that list almost as fast as when The Man Show went out and collected women's signatures to end "women's suffrage."


"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman

"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie
Edited by - H. Humbert on 09/22/2004 16:54:42
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26022 Posts

Posted - 09/22/2004 :  17:59:27   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message
H. Humbert wrote:
quote:
I could have sworn I've seen Penn and Teller take this bit on the street as well.
Yeah, it was in the first season of Bullshit!, in the episode on environmental extremism. They did the petition thing at an environmental rally. Of course, it's unknown how many people they spoke with who wound up on the cutting-room floor because they knew the joke, but the fact that they nabbed a bunch of people at all - at an event at which one should be able to find many truly thoughful people - is a bit scary.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too.
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Starman
SFN Regular

Sweden
1613 Posts

Posted - 09/22/2004 :  23:50:25   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Starman a Private Message
This headline apeared in a Swedish newspaper (a long time ago.)

Toxic discharge!
800 liters of lethal Sodium Chloride released into local river



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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard

3192 Posts

Posted - 09/23/2004 :  05:11:51   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send BigPapaSmurf a Private Message
Lethal if you injest all 800 liters maybe.

My foavorite is when the man show was at the mall convincing ladies of the validity of the 'chocolate diet' Eat as much as you want!

"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History

"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini
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Plyss
Skeptic Friend

Netherlands
231 Posts

Posted - 09/23/2004 :  07:06:02   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Plyss a Private Message
quote:
Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf

Lethal if you injest all 800 liters maybe.



Considering sodium chloride melts above 800 degrees celsius i'm willing to bet it's lethal in liquid form ;)
Still, for a newspaper such poor fact-checking is rather sloppy.

Incidentally, how old would a typical 9th grade student be? I'm not very familiar with the US school system.
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filthy
SFN Die Hard

USA
14408 Posts

Posted - 09/23/2004 :  07:17:19   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send filthy a Private Message
quote:
Incidentally, how old would a typical 9th grade student be? I'm not very familiar with the US school system.


Fourteen. And it would seem that many of them too, lack an understanding of the US school system and it's contents.


"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)

"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres


"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude

Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,

and Crypto-Communist!

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Ricky
SFN Die Hard

USA
4907 Posts

Posted - 09/23/2004 :  09:47:54   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Send Ricky an AOL message Send Ricky a Private Message
quote:
My foavorite is when the man show was at the mall convincing ladies of the validity of the 'chocolate diet' Eat as much as you want!


The best was when the Man Show went around getting women to sign a petition to end woman suffrage (what they thought was the suffering of women).

My memory is a bit hazy, but I don't think we learned the naming of chemicals until chemistry in high school (as we also took introductory chemistry class in middle school). That happened to be 9th grade for me, but only because our school has a very strange way of teaching the sciences. They did chemistry and physics the first and second semesters of freshman year, then biology and earth science the first and second semester of sophomore year. From there, you could choose what you want to do.

Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.
- Isaac Asimov
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Siberia
SFN Addict

Brazil
2322 Posts

Posted - 09/23/2004 :  12:37:04   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Siberia's Homepage  Send Siberia an AOL message  Send Siberia a Yahoo! Message Send Siberia a Private Message
I know for sure I learned how to name chemicals on the last year of High School...

"Why are you afraid of something you're not even sure exists?"
- The Kovenant, Via Negativa

"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
-- unknown
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Dude
SFN Die Hard

USA
6891 Posts

Posted - 09/29/2004 :  09:38:47   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Dude a Private Message
It's a sad statement on the scientific literacy of our country.


Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson

"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin

Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth
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