I have not the faintest clue about zinc or your overall question, but this part:
saliva pH is 5; over 100 times more acidic than pH of cellular environment which is 7.4
7.4 is basic, right? "100 times more acidic than [something on the other side of neutral]" seems like a weird thing to say?
pH is basically the (negative) exponent in the concentration of H+; a concentration of 10^-2 gives a pH of 2, a concentration of 10^-7 gives a pH of 7. So moving from 5 to 7 on the pH scale is a factor of 100 in the concentration of H+. That's why they say it's "100 times more acidic". (Also, the neutral point in the pH scale is neutral because that's the concentration at which the positive H+ ions are balanced by negative...usually OH-...ions.)
One problem I see with that analysis is this part:
After all, workers are producing 20% more, so the amount of profit from hiring an extra worker increases by 20%.
If demand isn't being met, or if it's elastic, then increasing your production = increasing your profits. But if demand for your product is not elastic, increasing your production will just leave you with unsold product and decrease your profits; you'd make more money by using those new machines to reduce your work force.
I have 7 kids, so I feel qualified to make some observations on this topic.
Kid #1 asked "why" questions all the time when she was young. As a teenager, her questions have definitely decreased in frequency. This is primarily because all the questions she had as a young child actually got answered. There was a LOT of low-hanging fruit, and she picked it when she was young. She is still curious; her teachers enjoy her genuine interest in learning. It competes with her love of fan fiction, though.
Kid #4 also has some curiosity, and asks questions, though not as often as Kid#1 ever did. He, too, has fewer questions as he... (read more)
I was making tea. I poured hot water into a travel mug. The interior sides of the travel mug were silver. The liquid looked yellow. (Before I put the tea bag in.) To see if the yellow contamination had come from the kettle that I had heated over the stove, I poured some of the remaining water into the sink. That water was clear, with no evidence of a yellowish tinge. The mug had been taken from a cupboard of clean dishes. I was fairly certain I had looked in the mug before using it and seen that it was clean. After seeing the yellowish liquid, I still saw no other indication... (read more)
Conveying that is often worthwhile, but it's situational enough that simply stating the context of what you're doing is probably a better idea than formalizing a novelty scale.
Also, I didn't mention this above, but re-hashing stuff that isn't novel can be highly useful. Penetration of an idea into the population would never happen if people only ever pointed to the original source for an idea without conveying/spreading it themselves. It's helpful to have a million blog posts about the same thing, because each of those blogs is reaching a slightly different audience.
The problem with a novelty scale is that novelty has a high degree of circumstantial/subjectivity to it. What's new to one person is old hat to another. Millions of people may independently recreate the same wisdom based on their life experiences, and that insight feels new to them, but might not be new to those they share it with. In the modern age, not even a google search can guarantee that an idea hasn't been laid out somewhere by someone.
Is the Letters site itself, the project you mention, or was one particular conversation on that page discussing the idea (if so, which one)?
Your definition of ruminating includes that you introspect on causes and consequences as opposed to solutions. The techniques you mention may include focusing on causes and consequences, but they are very solution-oriented.
If there is a difference in their successfulness, I think that solution-orientedness is why. People who ruminate are thinking about a problem without trying to solve it. That's, frankly, a depressing thing to do. Feeling like you have a problem that can't be solved is almost the definition of frustration, and just reminding yourself of a problem without any sense of moving forward or making progress will reinforce negative thought patterns without accomplishing anything.
By contrast, people who engage in focusing, IFS, and related techniques have a goal in mind. They're not just reviewing the problem and its causes; they're trying to get somewhere. There's an underlying optimism that is being fostered, especially if it works well enough for people to want to keep trying it.
Epistemic status: I'm not the first person to think of this, and I'm not sure if this is possible. But I want to flesh out some options for consideration and get feedback. Sorry if it's long.
WANTED:
A crowd-sourced site that reliably presents important pros and cons on any/all topics and hopefully leads us collectively closer to consensus.
This has been on my mind for a few years now. Figuring out truth in the digital age is often tricky and sometimes downright impossible. (Is minimum wage a good thing? Should I adopt a paleo or keto or vegan or Shangri-la diet? What do we really know and not know about the historical Jesus?) Especially when... (read 2937 more words →)
For the most part, and to my limited memory of chem...yes.
Umm. Hmm. *goes back and reads the relevant parts of your post* I don't know any of this off the top of my head. Let's see... Wiki says zinc acetate is a salt of zinc and acetic acid. Ok, so zinc acetate is already zinc ions and acetate ions. (CH3CO2-). Two of those ions for each Zn,... (read more)