Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
(OP)
See http://www.dhmo.org/research.html for a survey on whether various groups think that worldwide governments should ban dihydrogen monoxide. One petition was headed with
The statistics on the web page are amazing
David
Quote:
Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in all forms of cancer, it is a major component of acid rain, if it is inhaled in its natural state it is often fatal, in gaseous form it causes severe burns.
The statistics on the web page are amazing
David





RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Techmaximus
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Dihydrogen monoxide has been found to be nearly omnipresent within the food chain. It occurs in high levels in such staples as milk and a variety cruciferous vegetables.
In addition to the stated dangers of its gaseous and liquid forms, its solid state is responsible for probably thousands of deaths per year due to accidents.
In its pure form it's even more dangerous; surely all have heard of the severe biological disturbances created by ingesting significant amounts of pure dihydrogen monoxide.
Ban the stuff, I say.
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Bring back the HP-15
www.hp15c.org
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RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Dammit, how can I prove that I got the pun
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Spoilsport.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Dangerous stuff - we must ban it!
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
I plan to ground those little terrorists later today.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Y'all, if you haven't followed the link zdas04 posted, you should. It's an interesting study in the power of selective telling. I plan on hauling it out next time someone sends me an email about how ASPARTAME CAUSES MORE BRAIN TUMORS THAN ANY OTHER SUBSTANCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD or somesuch.
Hg
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RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
25362,
Is it more appropriate to say as hydrogen hydroxide? I read somewhere that water is such a strong polar solvent that it dissolves itself, though in minute quantities, leaving H+ and OH-
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
This just illustates to me the powrer of the media and the way information is presented.
Some great responses though - I really liked digger42j's last one!!
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
It is available in such a huge scale worldwide, and in various stages of purity, that it is considered the most important compound of oxygen and hydrogen.
It is important to realize that although it is being generally used to smother fires it has caused much harm when used to put out magnesium fires or when trying to suffocate flames when grease in a kitchen pan catches fire.
Quark, the alternative name would be oxygen hydride. On the other hand, you are right. Only about 2 ppb (1.8×10-9) of its molecules dissociate into ions at room temperature.
The high polarity of this oxide together with its ability to form hydrogen bonds gives it its unique ability to dissolve ionic compounds. Others it keeps in suspension as the milk of magnesia used to neutralize stomach acidity after a heavy meal.
It is also amphiprotic acting both as base or acid. It can donate and accept protons. It is a mild reducing as well as oxidizing agent. Its conjugate base is the ion HO-.
Potassium reacts so violently with this oxide that the metal often explodes off its surface, with a distinct violet-colored flame of excited potassium atoms.
So many ordinary and extraordinary, good and bad, things could be said about this ubiquitous compound that not even an extremely long thread could handle them.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Even though it may (science has not proven this) serve the common good of mankind, we cannot sit idely by and allow the environment to be destroyed in this way simply for our benefit.
LOL....
Bob
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Bruv
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
I found out the hard way that DHMO is the primary solvent used in Blinker Fluid.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Ciao.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
The deaths in the recent subsea eatherquakes in Asia are all directly attributable to the uncontrolled and unexpected dihydrogen monoxide displacements caused directly by the earthquake.
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
I am certain there are more ways that the two listed above.
lol Hydrae
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Evil, vile substance I say. Get rid of it!
NSPE
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Well, there's always the "Isolated Cold Environment" (ICE). The North and South Poles are very sparsely populated areas, which might prove ideal for long term storage.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
How about "Superheated Transport of Exothermic Atmospheric Moisture" (STEAM).
Pretty hazardous one there.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Good Luck
johnwm
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RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
I finally had to write down the formula "H20" and explain the whole thing was a farce.
I just got handed the local "Drugs Don't Work" monthly newsletter (more gov't stupidity).... this one about alcohol...On the front they list 8 True/False questions and on the back they give 10 answers. I guess they test all the stuff when they write.
Last month they told us how to make Meth, the preceeding month listed all the street prices for various drugs.
Gotta love the south....
Racing and bullfighting are the only real sports...everything else is just a game.
Bob
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
I take it she has moved you from her Xmas card list to her s**t list?
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
It is an excellent reminder of how people have a willingness to believe what they are told, a lack of suspicion that others may not be as trustworthy as we think.
That is, how some people can use the language to pursuade others of all sorts of untruths. In this case the simple guise of calling water Dihydrogen Monoxide still fooled some people.
However it is just such mis-direction in creating a false obvious "cause and effect" relationship that is popular with various interest groups.
If it is easy as this to fool educated people (Sprintcar's colleague, me for the first post or two) then how much of what we are told by "authority figures" which is well crafted, with deliberate intent to decieve, actually goes on?
For example, everybody breathes, everybody dies, breathing is the cause of death. The simple linking of two truths implies a causal relationship. (actually even these are not necessarily true).
The main technique currently is to support the lie with statistics (and hence the well known expression "lies, damned lies and statistics").
We now have the notion, strongly re-inforced, that "speed kills". This justifies speed cameras which generate revenue. On one stretch of roadworks in the UK the speed cameras generated £250,000 in a very short space of time.
Actually, it isn't speed that kills but bad driving.
If we list all the causes of motoring deaths and the statistics provided with them we find a list that includes speed, drink, drugs, falling asleep, badly maintained vehicles, objects thrown from overpasses and bridges, and so on.
Each backed by impressive figures.
In the Uk one could be forgiven for thinking that there is daily carnage on the roads to equal that of the first world war trenches (actually, more died in the flu epidemic that followed than all the war, but which statistic is the one we remember?) and that the population of the UK is in serious decline.
In actual fact the UK's roads are supposedly the safest on the planet and of these, the safest roads are the ones with the most speed cameras (because they are the busiest and generate the most revenue?)
One authority cited a 30% reduction in deaths since installing speed cameras. Of course, they didn't asy if that was a drop from 1 million deaths a year or from 1 death a year. They did not declare the revenue earned.
Language can also induce people into a believe in something not actually based on any factual evidence.
The well turned phrase or imagery can be more pursuasive than even statistics.
Oscar Wilde's well crafted description of fox hunters "The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable" is an excellent example. It may well have been a significant factor in creating the hysteria over hunting in the UK (25,000 foxes killed annually by hunts, over 4 million killed annually by other means).
We can add to this the great "acid rain" political fiasco in Europe several years ago.
Today we have global warming.
We have the postulate that wind farms are environmentally friendly (which is why so many environmental groups oppose them?)
How much of what we hear is actually clever propaganda?
How can we find the truth if so many can so easily be fooled by DHMO scares?
Churchill (I believe) said "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the poeple some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
This also sounds good enough to be true but i now begine to wonder if it doesn't just re-inforce a believe in the people that ultimately no deception will go undetected when in fact, that is just what can happen: clever people can fool all the people all the time.
So the reason why the DHMO story is so good is because hwoever patently absurd it really is, it does have the power, even in this transparent form, to fool some of the people.
So what is there that we are being told is true, isn't? and what is it costing me?
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Regards,
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
This thread is Evidence that there is a distinct lack of logical though in far to many nowadays.
OTOH, what would politicians have to talk about if they were forced to make proper use of logic, evidence, cause & effect? Too bad we'll never find out :)
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
My intent in starting this thread was to give everyone a chuckle and to elicit some additional observations about DMHO that my wife could share in another (non-technical) venue. It has far exceeded that intent.
Your leap of faith from DMHO to global warming was great. When I read the original link, my first thought was "can I get away with posting this link in the Global Warming thread?" Then I decided that it would either be ignored or ridiculed there.
Your observations after the discussion above makes the point so much more strongly (yeah, I gave you the first star)--presentation is so much more important than content since we've all seen here that a silly idea can gather adherents and we've seen in other threads that a very good idea not presented as well gets laughed at.
David
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
The hype about global warning is also based in FUD. If you can generate enough fear, then people will pay you to study the problem, and pay you to help develop solutions. Humanity depends on it.
Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
http://www.lomborg.com/articles.htm
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
David
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
When he said that he was quoting Abraham Lincoln.
JMW makes many valid points. However, I can't totally agree that, "... in fact, that is just what can happen: clever people can fool all the people all the time."
I believe it is more the case that, there are a few dangerous people who are clever enough to know at which times, "you can fool all of the people", and when those opportunities present themselves, they do...
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
The essential question is correlation vs. causation. It needs to be asked about any statistical study. If two conditions statistically correlate, is it because one causes the other, or because both are indicators of a third condition that causes both?
Another question is what correlation really is. "A majority of X are Y" doesn't mean anything if a majority of NotX are also Y.
I love that the DMHO experiment is being done in schools. I think it (or something similar to teach critical thinking about statistics, polls, and other aspects of data presentation) should be mandatory. When I was a kid we had a brief unit on propaganda (which could have been titled How To Lie With Statistics, but that's yet another book I read years later)--if Willie the mayoral candidate for Wormville says 4 out of 5 worms surveyed support him, but he's only interviewed 5 worms out of the 200 in Wormville, is he really widely supported? That sort of thing. It had a profound effect on my little 9-year-old mind.
Hg
Eng-Tips guidelines: FAQ731-376
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
For example, if you tell people (correctly) that marine life in the region of a nuclear power station generally grows much larger than elsewhere then people make the link between radiation and mutation instead of discovering that the warm cooling water outflowing into the sea is responsible.
It doesn't take much of a scare story about the MMR Vacination (the mumps measeles and rubela vacine all in one) for some parents to decide not to have their children vacinated with a consequent recurrence of some of these diseases.
A pattern of lukemia cases around one of the UK's nuclear power stations also gave rise to similar doom stories till it was traced to conditions that existed during the building of the power stations and that were not actually related to it at all.
Of course, the really sad thing is that many people prefer to believe a bad lie rather than the boring truth. Hence even after these notions are dispelled (even allowing for the lesser publicity the solution gets) there will always be some who persist in believing the false reports.
This naturally brings us to conspiracy theorists who would rather a good conspiracy theory to the mundane "truth".
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Your last post brings up a really good point. I think the best example is silicone breast implants - science now discounts causation of health problems (mundane truth), but hysteria remains (bad lie, good conspiracy).
Regards,
Cory
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RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Years ago, one of the legal entities (not sure if it was OSHA, EPA, local, or whatever) mandated that the company must examine all retirees and "older" workers annually (participation on the part of the examinee, of course, is voluntary) for signs of cancer. As one can imagine, these retirees and older workers used to practically bathe in the stuff back in the 50's, 60's, & 70's, before the alledged carcinogenic affect of Butadiene was known.
Interestingly enough, the cancer rate for these workers and retirees is lower than the cancer rate of society as a whole. Perhaps they breathed/contacted the stuff so much they built up an immunity?
-InspEngr
Interestingly enough, the
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Maybe it killed off all of the less robust individuals while they were young...
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
The point being to explore the relationship between the data offered and the data available.
Here's a good example of bad journalism (or clever manipulation):
It was reported that the local traffic police were pulling cars over "at random" to make vehicle safety checks.
The press reported that 30% of the cars tested were found to have major life threatening defects.
Implied was that 30% of all cars are dangerously faulty.
Of course, they neglected to state the criteria for this "random check". A significant ommission.
Well, i suspect it was not quite at random. I suspect the local traffic police were pulling over only cars of a certain age and appearance.
I really doubt they were actually stopping brand new Mercedes, Rolls Royces, BMWs but probably a high proportion of 20 year old bangers.
But there you go.
Who questions the statistics when provided by an authority figure? Do we presume that the entire population were alarmed by this news?
Well OK, probably no-one gave it a second thought if, like me, they group journalists with politicians, estate agents (realtors) and second hand car dealers; that is to say, if they told you the sun was shining you'd get a second opinion and take a look your self.
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
Evidence 1. Mr Noah of Asia Minor was insighgtful enuff to create a Large Vessel that could isolate living creatures from the Poisonous Fluid and keep them alive until Safe Ground was sighted. The whole story can be read in scripts from Ancient Times - and is therefore true.
Evidence 2. The Roman Empire. Known to the world as a bunch of decadent drug addictives. One of the more common drugs was - and is still - DHMO. The need for said liquid was so great, in fact, that the Romans constructed big structures known as aqueducts to bring it into city centers. It is supposed that this chemical substance bears a large responsibility for the fall of the Roman Empire.
Evidence 3. During WWII, an even more sinister substance DDMO aka known as "heavy water" (the parallel to "heavy stuff" is obvious and frightening) was produced by the Norwegians. It is doubtful for what purpose - it was probably thought to be the only effective antidote for the Nazis of the time. Much has been written about the Heroes from Telemark and no more needs to be said about that episode. It is clear to all thinking men that the selection of the substance to be modified was based on thousands of years of experience with its dangers.
Be Warned!!!
Gunnar Englund
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
What we have here people, is a failure to
communicatethink for yourself.Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
By the way, Zdaz04 is right about "State of Fear" excellent book about global warming. Makes a not so subtle point about fear being induced by certain people to push their onwn agenda's. Micheal Crichton, while writing fiction, does lots of research and bases his stories on real life data/technologies.
RE: Movement to ban Dihydrogen monoxide
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