on Good Water

Source - http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-good-water

See, it's funny because hucksters say all sorts of crazy stuff about the water that they sell.

Whether they're selling ionized water...



...or anti-oxidizing, micro-clustering, alkalinized water...



These claims are bunk...hokum...pseudoscience. They would fail any psuedoscience test readily. Their 'scientific' evidence is anything but.

And the fact that Ian (the artist of Three Panel Soul - sometimes snsfw, you've been warned) mocks these claims by saying that the pitchman's (kind of looks like the Shamwow guy to me) water uses magnets to make the water molecules 25% smaller (impossible, atoms cannot be shrunk) and more efficient (at doing what, huh?).

See, it's funny...once you understand the science and explain it all to heck.

Tasks at Hand

Source - http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/tasks-at-hand

See, it's funny because you might think that a mountain made of rock candy would dissolve into the alcohol streams.

For those of you who aren't aware, "Big Rock Candy Mountain" is a song first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928 based partially on older hobo ballads telling tales of a more perfect world just a little further down the road.



That's Harry there singing the song.

In the chorus, you can hear the lines...

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
...
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws, nor picks,
I'ma goin' to stay
Where you sleep all day
Where they hung the Turk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain

Most of it isn't about chemistry but rather about a fantasy world where hobos were always heading to.

But would those alcohol streams really have such deleterious effects on a Big Rock Candy Mountain?

Well, assuming the rock candy is primarily sucrose and that alcohol streams are pure ethanol, not so much. See, the literature value for solubility of sucrose in ethanol is 0.6g / 100mL. That's much lower than sucrose's solubility in water (210g / 100mL). You can see that here.



If the 'little streams of alcohol' were actually spirits that you could purchase from a liquor store, though, they would be mixtures of alcohol and water (the percentage of alcohol is roughly equal to half the proof of the alcohol - 80 proof ~ 40% ethanol in water), then you'd have a much bigger problem.

But not as bad an erosion problem as you would have with just little steams of water.

Who knew?

What Causes Beef Rainbows?

Source - https://9gag.com/gag/anj1VRV/should-i-be-concerned-if-this-prepackaged-meat-is-shiny

I've seen those roast beef rainbows before, and I'll admit to having been a little freaked out by them.

I assumed that any greenish - even if it was iridescent greenish - wasn't good on meat. Turns out it's nothing to be worried about.

See, there are a few ways to make colors.

One is for there to be a light-absorbing dye. Like if you have a red shirt, it's been soaked in a chemical (a dye) that absorbs most of the colors of light except for the red wavelengths. That means that white light shone upon the shirt will reflect only the red light.

That's not what causes the roast beef rainbows.

Instead, they're formed by interference of light waves - as slightly explained in this Atlantic article or this Daily Mail article.

Source - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2287287/Why-beef-rainbow-NOT-tainted-Popular-myth-debunked-Department-Agriculture.html

When light is reflected off of a wet surface, some of the light reflects from different depths of the liquid. As the same white light reflects from different depths, the reflected light comes back slightly out of phase from the other light. This causes a diffraction pattern which leads to shimmering, shifting colors - like the rainbow from an oil slick on a puddle or a butterfly's wing.

Apparently the rainbow on roast beef is common enough that the USDA even has a page answering the following...

Meat contains iron, fat, and other compounds. When light hits a slice of meat, it splits into colors like a rainbow. There are various pigments in meat compounds that can give it an iridescent or greenish cast when exposed to heat and processing. Wrapping the meat in airtight packages and storing it away from light will help prevent this situation. Iridescence does not represent decreased quality or safety of the meat.

So, as Pink Floyd told us, you should eat your [rainbow] meat...how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

I guess that's one way to wash your glassware

That's my upload of a video I originally found here (warning, adult word in the link - video is school-appropriate, though).

So, what's happening here (I think)...

Clearly, something is burning. I don't see any fire, but the lighter lights 'something' inside the beaker. Because the fire is 'invisible', I'm assuming the inside of the beaker is coated in methanol. It might be ethanol or some other alcohol, but the fire isn't visible enough for me to think it's anything else.

The vapors burn, momentarily heating the inside of the beaker and pushing lots of gas out. Depending on the stoichiometry, it also uses up more moles of gas than it produces. If the water vapor then cools quickly enough, there's an even greater drop in moles of gas.

If the moles of gas inside the beaker decrease and the temperature decreases, the pressure is going to drop. That lets the outside air push the blue water into the beaker.

It's sort of like the ammonia fountain or the can crush demo, but this drop in gas moles is due primarily to combustion and temperature changes (I think.)

All that being said, the idea of igniting methanol vapors just seems stupid.

When you burn steel wool, it gets heavier

Anti-phlogiston at work, clearly!

Back in the day (primarily the 1700s), one of the prevailing theories of chemistry was that as materials burned, they released phlogiston, a gas that was somehow stored in the material (the wood, paper, whatever). That release of phlogiston made the material lighter.

It makes sense, right.

Sure, until you look at something like what you see above. The burning metal gets heavier as it burns. Maybe phlogiston has negative mass...or there's anti-phlogiston...or phlogiston just doesn't exist.

Along came Antoine Lavoisier in the 1770s and the discovery of oxygen. Now we know that the metallic oxide has metal AND oxygen, so it has more mass, more stuff, more weight.

But that took a looooong while to figure out.