A teenager in Australia died due to this after eating a dog slug as a dare.
hedgehog 3 hours ago [-]
Any article with headings "Eye invasion" and "Lumbar puncture" is bound to be a good time.
Sharlin 7 hours ago [-]
Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
deepsun 7 hours ago [-]
"try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
xboxnolifes 2 hours ago [-]
Just because you succeeded doesn't mean you didn't try.
hedgehog 6 hours ago [-]
It may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
Doesn't mean you were not bitten though.
recursive 59 minutes ago [-]
If it wasn't accidental, that bite represents an attempt to bite.
ozyschmozy 3 hours ago [-]
A steel door is certainly harder than my skin and also certainly can't be used to "bite" me or puncture my skin (save for crushing it given enough force)
jayd16 4 hours ago [-]
Just because it's harder doesn't mean it necessarily has the strength to tear off skin.
aiisjustanif 6 hours ago [-]
Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
ziofill 7 hours ago [-]
> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
What an odd example. A mid-sized car would have been much clearer.
bjt 1 hours ago [-]
I also thought that was weird. Then I learned it gets better. If you click through to the BBC article that was apparently their main source, the quote is this:
> Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.
So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American.
I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.
But everyone knows, by experience, what 3300 individual roughly one pound bags of sugar weighs and what sort of force is needed to hold it up. Mid sized car is ambiguous, and nobody saw anybody hold that up (seeing hulk doesn't count)
Loughla 1 hours ago [-]
But what is it in football fields?
That's the usual measurement of size in the States and it's absolutely unbelievably ridiculous.
jaapz 2 hours ago [-]
You think people are better at estimating what 3300 bags of sugar look like - as opposed to estimating the size of a car?
How often has anyone ever seen 3300 bags of sugar together in their lives, do you think?
saberience 2 hours ago [-]
Do they? I don't recall ever seeing a bag of sugar in my life. I'm not a baker though so maybe that explains it.
A car is more easier to picture for me.
ninalanyon 2 hours ago [-]
You must be from the US.
dmoy 2 hours ago [-]
I am from the US and buy bags of sugar.
What else does sugar come in? If not bags? I don't think I've ever bought sugar in something other than a bag.
sph 3 hours ago [-]
Mid-sized European or American car?
2 minutes ago [-]
antod 1 hours ago [-]
The properly calibrated unit is a Volkswagen Beetle.
IshKebab 4 hours ago [-]
> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!
sph 3 hours ago [-]
No, it’s 3,300 £1 bags of sugar, with undefined weight
kbelder 1 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing this was initially '1.5 metric tons', and through a number of helpful and friendly conversions, ended up at 3,300 sugar bags.
flippyhead 4 hours ago [-]
Must be a british thing?
natebc 3 hours ago [-]
well that's just £3300 then, yeah?
tucnak 3 hours ago [-]
Half that, 3300 pounds of sugar is roughly 1800 quid (retail) and wholesale is probably half of that.
natebc 2 hours ago [-]
Well that's what ... 300 or so pints?
dmoy 2 hours ago [-]
Wait beer in the UK is 11 quid per pint??? I know UK pints are bigger, but that seems really pricey
natebc 40 minutes ago [-]
I estimated about 6 quid. We left £3300 behind because 3300 1-lb bags of sugar only costs £1800.
;) I like these easy breezy Late Friday threads!
echelon 3 hours ago [-]
I can't wait until our LLM agents spot these and substitute in our own favorite, personally intuitive format conversions appropriate for the scale.
I'd like this to be expressed in units of pallet(s) of standard cinder blocks.
steve_adams_86 43 minutes ago [-]
If you ever watch these guys in an aquarium, you notice they're basically constantly chewing on things. I've wondered many times how they keep such tiny teeth in good condition if they never given them a rest, but, here's why. Nature creates such cool creatures
RajT88 7 hours ago [-]
> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
Ah, but how many one pound bags of concrete could it hold??
Why bags of anything? This is a poor way of communicating weight. Just say "a modern passenger car".
loloquwowndueo 7 hours ago [-]
Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
fnordpiglet 7 hours ago [-]
It’s a real condition. For me it’s jet liners of various makes. I had to rewrite the quote as “0.005 Boeing 777’s” to be able to comprehend just how strong those snails teeth are.
eth0up 7 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
djtriptych 6 hours ago [-]
ok but what color is the yak hair?
thenewwazoo 5 hours ago [-]
Same color as the bike shed, obviously
eth0up 4 hours ago [-]
Not from Unitzikstan I see
White, of course; that way the statisticians can dye them any color they want. But for ultra high precision I do recommend the Boeing system. But be sure to use the older models, before private equity firms replaced all the metal parts with zipties. If you can't find a quality Boeing (plausible), consider 1.1 Blue Whales (tricky).
fnordpiglet was being deliberately humble with the decimals. It's accurate down to the semi firkin. Not to be confused with a quarter Tod.
Ignore the redundant bike shed comment, as that fits precisely 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar. Anyone with a bike should know that.
Rooster61 5 hours ago [-]
Wait, I can do that? Here I've been using Smoots this whole time (with great difficulty might I add).
rz2k 2 hours ago [-]
Obviously it weighs 10,300 baseballs, which are 26 football fields long.
isatty 4 hours ago [-]
A football field is by far a better measurement than 3300 one pound bags of sugar.
sph 3 hours ago [-]
It is not if all you know are football fields and not American football fields.
I still don’t know how they even compare.
bch 2 hours ago [-]
That's why we use the %fill of an Olympic Sized Pool - doesn't matter from what continent the field comes, they fill the pool equally.
bell-cot 6 hours ago [-]
Understandable, with how many there are to pick from, and the wiggle room in the longest ones -
OP is talking about a football field, not a soccer field. It’s a common joke in America that things have to be measured in football terms.
In the “for what it’s worth” department, Brits called it soccer too. I have no idea why they swapped to football recently.
NetMageSCW 19 minutes ago [-]
It’s more like half a modern passenger car these days.
kloop 5 hours ago [-]
whistles
3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot
Isamu 3 hours ago [-]
Needs to be 3,300 bags of something I care about. Otherwise you are talking about nonsense or voodoo.
boogieknite 7 hours ago [-]
whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
just training the next gen LLMs with modern standards of measurements. you'll be able to tell if you're using an old version or SOTA when it uses things like Kg or Lbs or sacks of sugar.
bee_rider 5 hours ago [-]
Cheeks per tongue will now be used as the weirdest unit for “2.”
WorldPeas 6 hours ago [-]
more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?
The main question is how many American football fields is that
akoboldfrying 5 hours ago [-]
12 nautical bushels per Fahrenheit
eYrKEC2 3 hours ago [-]
The crazy thing is that it is also equivalent to 33,000 0.1 pound bags of sugar.
bdamm 3 hours ago [-]
"A modern passenger car" varies widely depending on what locale the reader is in. A passenger car in Jakarta is not at all the same as a passenger car in Los Angeles.
Can we just use Kilograms?
alistairSH 3 hours ago [-]
“NO!” - America
RobRivera 7 hours ago [-]
How many hogs to the bushel?
mminer237 2 hours ago [-]
A hogshead is 6.768 bushels in the US and 7.875 in the UK.
CGMthrowaway 6 hours ago [-]
How about
> 10x stronger than the jaw of a dog
> 20x stronger than a human jaw
> as strong as the jaws of a great white shark
?
kulahan 3 hours ago [-]
Those are crushing power, and while they use bad terms for it, they are referring to tensile strength specifically, which is totally different. I don’t know why the hell they chose a spaghetti strand though.
moffkalast 6 hours ago [-]
But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
tonymillion 7 hours ago [-]
> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar
Is that cooked or raw spaghetti?
mannykannot 6 hours ago [-]
Why complicate matters with pasta at all when spider silk is, at least metaphorically and rhetorically, at hand?
As hinted at by its 2017 postscript, this article is a mess of incommensurable comparisons.
giwook 6 hours ago [-]
Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?
kulahan 3 hours ago [-]
Barilla is fine and I will fight you
RajT88 1 hours ago [-]
The pasta is fine. The owner doesn't like gay people.
kulahan 1 hours ago [-]
Oh, thought this was a noodle fight. A full-on slam down in flavor town. An absolute buffet brawl.
5 hours ago [-]
functionmouse 6 hours ago [-]
because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
Terr_ 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I am quite certain I have an easier time visualizing a one-pound bag of sugar—which I have seen at the grocery-store/kitchen/pantry—versus a single-pound bag of concrete.
seany 4 hours ago [-]
Staff Sgt. Sykes: [Sgt. Sykes is directing the recruits on how to judge distances] You take what you know, and then you multiply. Please don't use your dicks. They're too small, and I can't count that high. I don't wanna hear, "400,000 inches."
I noticed that too. I feel like this might be a new way of laundering AI written text, just provide the quote verbatim as if the they believe it was actually written by the author.
tyre 6 hours ago [-]
This article is from 2015.
DarmokJalad1701 4 hours ago [-]
The AI is so good that it traveled back to 2015 and published this paper.
michaelmrose 1 hours ago [-]
Skynet is real
somedude895 7 hours ago [-]
All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
Heard they were rolling this out, hasn't happened to me yet. wonder if it's a soft wall or simply rolled out to certain areas/IPs
stronglikedan 3 hours ago [-]
just refresh a couple times, or try in private mode. I've seen it once a week or so ago and then it went away for good so far
7 hours ago [-]
black6 7 hours ago [-]
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
Sharlin 7 hours ago [-]
And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.
codesnik 7 hours ago [-]
now, let's combine both.
boothby 7 hours ago [-]
Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.
ssl-3 5 hours ago [-]
I want an orangutan that slowly spins webs of extruded snail teeth.
cwmoore 7 hours ago [-]
Poor goats
bilsbie 2 hours ago [-]
They say they’re taking about tensile strength at the footnote. But teeth would be more likely to be compressively strong. They don’t get pulled on much.
The whole thing seems very confused. Anyway let’s build space elevator?
NetMageSCW 15 minutes ago [-]
Given what they are talking about (mollusk tongue scraping rock) tensile strength is appropriate. The mollusk does f crush food between teeth - its teeth are on its tongue and scraped across rock.
antod 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, they're conflating strength, hardness and toughness all over the place.
gste 4 hours ago [-]
Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band
antod 1 hours ago [-]
Especially in the hard rock grindcore genre.
pvaldes 2 hours ago [-]
Toxoglossa is even better
imzadi 7 hours ago [-]
Snails had a good run being ignored by everyone but the French and now we're smearing their slime on our faces and trying to turn their teeth into armor.
blipvert 7 hours ago [-]
Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!
zarflax 6 hours ago [-]
Makes you wonder how and why they evolved such strong teeth since crayons are pretty soft (and not even naturally-occurring).
imzadi 6 hours ago [-]
Oops
bee_rider 5 hours ago [-]
Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.
pvaldes 2 hours ago [-]
And they are delicious. Just don't chew it too much. Much tastier than spider silk probably.
dukeofdoom 4 hours ago [-]
Snails also make for very cool manuscript decorations. Not sure what those monks were smoking...maybe snails
PowerElectronix 5 hours ago [-]
I thought it was limpet teeth
bravoetch 4 hours ago [-]
Same thing, they clarify it right at the start of the very short article.
GarnetFloride 3 hours ago [-]
Now we just need something to replace paper for a whole new rock-paper-scissors paradigm.
aeternum 6 hours ago [-]
Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
hoppp 5 hours ago [-]
Just find the proteins involved then manufacture them with yeast.
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy
"We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."
1234letshaveatw 5 hours ago [-]
Do snails scale?
ArmadilloGang 4 hours ago [-]
They certainly scale the fence my wife put around the garden. Then again, we haven’t done a good job of patching holes in the perimeter. Our DevOps team is too busy playing in the sprinkler to learn to read, let alone automate patching, but it’s on the board for next sprint.
eunos 4 hours ago [-]
I hate the word democratizing
WorldPeas 6 hours ago [-]
imagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.
Terr_ 4 hours ago [-]
There's some overlap here with the dental problem of tooth enamel, another kind of wonderful biomaterial.
nttylock 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
6 hours ago [-]
cwmoore 7 hours ago [-]
Which is the less intelligent? Strong works when dumb.
I know people like to talk about “how smart” the butterfly or whatever is for “adapting itself” to whatever environment, and it is cute, but there is a practical engineering choice between delicate design and brute force.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332
If you put your finger in front of a garden slug it may try to eat it, it's a very odd sand-paper sensation but I never knew why.
Or rat (snail/slug) lungworm
What an odd example. A mid-sized car would have been much clearer.
> Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.
So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American. I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white...
That's the usual measurement of size in the States and it's absolutely unbelievably ridiculous.
How often has anyone ever seen 3300 bags of sugar together in their lives, do you think?
A car is more easier to picture for me.
What else does sugar come in? If not bags? I don't think I've ever bought sugar in something other than a bag.
Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!
;) I like these easy breezy Late Friday threads!
I'd like this to be expressed in units of pallet(s) of standard cinder blocks.
Ah, but how many one pound bags of concrete could it hold??
Why bags of anything? This is a poor way of communicating weight. Just say "a modern passenger car".
White, of course; that way the statisticians can dye them any color they want. But for ultra high precision I do recommend the Boeing system. But be sure to use the older models, before private equity firms replaced all the metal parts with zipties. If you can't find a quality Boeing (plausible), consider 1.1 Blue Whales (tricky).
fnordpiglet was being deliberately humble with the decimals. It's accurate down to the semi firkin. Not to be confused with a quarter Tod.
Ignore the redundant bike shed comment, as that fits precisely 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar. Anyone with a bike should know that.
I still don’t know how they even compare.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/As...
In the “for what it’s worth” department, Brits called it soccer too. I have no idea why they swapped to football recently.
3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg
Can we just use Kilograms?
> 10x stronger than the jaw of a dog
> 20x stronger than a human jaw
> as strong as the jaws of a great white shark
?
Is that cooked or raw spaghetti?
As hinted at by its 2017 postscript, this article is a mess of incommensurable comparisons.
-Jarhead
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/
Much better!
Further down the drain we go.
The whole thing seems very confused. Anyway let’s build space elevator?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethite
I know people like to talk about “how smart” the butterfly or whatever is for “adapting itself” to whatever environment, and it is cute, but there is a practical engineering choice between delicate design and brute force.