I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
salt water (a fantastically good conductor by non-metallic standards).
Physics question (for anyone who knows the answer): when lightning strikes somewhere in the ocean, why isn't every living organism in the entire ocean electrocuted? How far away do you have to be to avoid being fried? How does one calculate this?
For what it's worth, it is quite possible to at least stun fish through electricity. I know people who have done this for scientific studies of fish. It's called Electrofishing and is restricted in most places because it makes over fishing easy and requires some significant caution on the part of the fisher (you're wearing a backpack designed to produce high voltage while standing in water).
Google: lightning sea
I tried it and got good hits, which is why I suggest it. Variants will probably work too.
8gwern
I'm not a physics major, but this is how I would reason: a regular human usually survives a lightning strike, IIRC. Why would fish be any different? It might hurt them but they have simpler nervous systems to boot. So my initial guess is that no fish at all is hurt, no more than they are fried by the sun unleashing gigawatts onto the ocean.
But that's a cheap answer, perhaps. Let's try another route. A human isn't that big compared to a tuna fish, but is pretty big compared to things like trout or salmon. Let's say we weigh 100x as much as those small fish.
Lightning is a one-shot packet of energy - like quickly blinking a flashlight. As the light spreads away from the flashlight, it begins to fade out. (Why isn't the entire earth illuminated?) Well, there's a fixed number of photons released, and the sphere/area they are spread over keeps getting bigger as they go - it increases as the square of how far away they are. It's like gravity: you get an inverse square law. Squares increase pretty fast - 2^2 = 4, 3^2 = 9, 4^2 = 16 etc.
So if we humans are 2 feet around from the 'epicenter', how many units of 2 feet do we have to go to cut the strength by 1/100 and give the little fish a little fish-sized dose? Well, the square root of 100 is 10, so 10 2-feets is 20 feet.
In other words, by this reasoning, I'd expect even little fish to survive a lightning strike around 20 feet away. 20 feet is much smaller than an ocean.
This is all high-school physics at best; all you really have to do is think about why gravity follows an inverse square law, analogize a space-filling gravity to light, and guess some numbers in the best spirit of Fermi calculations.
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)