dude u cant be for real ….yes bc you *need* to especially for certain food…its like heating a skillet before using it….. if not ur food will be all fuckd up and cook unevenly and i jus…t i cant…. i mean….. i used to work in a kitchen and am a waitress now and i… i cant believe ppl r reblogging this….unless they are 13 years old and have never cooked or baked before.
This particular moment in Star Trek is actually quite important. A lot of people don’t realise that understanding something is not the same as approving of something. This particular episode (A Taste of Armageddon) had a civilization where war was fought on computers instead of on the battlefield and instead of people dying in combat they would send the calculated amount of “casualities” into a camp to die. Kirk is outraged completely by this and rightly should be, but Spock is not so overtly disapproving. He understands why they might think their solution is better for their civilization and takes the time to think about why they are doing it. Even though he can understand why, he still believes it is wrong for them to be doing it.
There is a separation between understanding something and approving of something that a lot of people seem to miss.
There is a separation between understanding something and approving of something that a lot of people seem to miss.
THIS THIS FOR THE LOVE OF EVERY GOD THIS.
It drives me batshit insane, too. I just got hit with the “understanding it means you’re FOR IT” bullshit in a political argument elsewhere, and the subtext - as always! - is that unless you’re for it, you shouldn’t try to understand it, because it’s Evil and understanding that is Wrong.
I hate that so very much I can’t even begin to even. And I don’t think it’s just “a lot of people.” At least in what passes for political discourse in the US, for example, it’s most people.
I have a whole theory about the fundamentalist cultural takeover of the GOP that gets into why - it’s a definitional part of that culture for reasons involving scriptural interpreation- but I won’t belabour that here. It’s just crazymaking.
The reverse (inverse?) is also true– a lot of people in arguments will yell “you just don’t understand!” if you disagree. (I’ve been guilty of that myself, honestly.)
Look at your wrist, see the blueish veins? The blood flowing through them contains hemoglobin, a protein that has four iron atoms incorporated into its structure. Iron is only naturally produced in one place, it can only be forged in the core of dying stars.
Every time you look at your veins, remember that you are built from, and kept alive by, pieces of stardust.
This is actually a thing, to the very best of my knowledge! Iron might not be only produced in the heart of a star on its way to going supernova (I would need someone with, y’know, actual degrees to say that for certain), but that’s certainly a major source! The way stars work is through fusion, or taking two atoms of an element (or different element) in an environment of massive heat and pressure and joining them to create a new element. Fusion gives off massively more energy than fission, which we’re more familiar with and can actually do ourselves with elements like uranium, but the hiccup in fusion is that there’s a point at which the energy gain is no longer high enough to offset the density of the atom created. So, fusion works GREAT on things like hydrogen or helium, which are both very small and therefore easily fused to give massive energy yields–this is why the biggest stars tend to burn very hot (not an absolute rule), because they have so much of these smaller elements available. These enormous stars–the sort of stars that die with a bang (nova/supernova) rather than a whimper (petering out)–burn hot and build up enormous pressure in their core, so the deeper you go the bigger the elements are.
Iron is the turning point, the point where you stop getting energy from fission and start getting it from fusion instead. As you work up toward iron from hydrogen on the periodic table, you get less and less energy from fusion, and as you get further from iron, into the higher numbers, you get steadily more energy from fission until you reach what we recognize as the radioactive elements, which break up easily enough to be practically applied for energy gain. Iron, however, is basically neutral: it won’t give energy either way, and managing either one would require a massive energy output. So, suppose you have a really huge star, a giant of some kind, and it’s been burning away happily for time immemorial (I don’t really have the time to go get data for star lifespans, I’m supposed to be studying for my organic chemistry final), fusing hydrogen into helium and helium into lithium and so on and so forth. And now it’s reaching the end of its life and the elements it’s creating are getting up to the teens and twenties, and it fuses two oxygens into an iron atom. That’s the cutoff: the star has now started to die. The dense iron building up at the core of the star causes it to collapse inward, building pressure, and when the pressure inside gets too much…boom. Supernova.
So yeah. Iron is the element that kills stars, and it’s the element that keeps us alive. It’s…it’s pretty damn cool.
