7 comments

  • RajT88 1 hour ago

    > 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

    Ah, but how many one pound bags of concrete could it hold??

    Why bags of anything? This is a poor way of communicating weight. Just say "a modern passenger car".

    • CGMthrowaway 13 minutes ago

      How about

      > 10x stronger than the jaw of a dog

      > 20x stronger than a human jaw

      > as strong as the jaws of a great white shark

      ?

      • boogieknite 35 minutes ago

        whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke

        • loloquwowndueo 1 hour ago

          Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement

          • fnordpiglet 59 minutes ago

            It’s a real condition. For me it’s jet liners of various makes. I had to rewrite the quote as “0.005 Boeing 777’s” to be able to comprehend just how strong those snails teeth are.

            • eth0up 44 minutes ago

              Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.

            • bell-cot 11 minutes ago

              Understandable, with how many there are to pick from, and the wiggle room in the longest ones -

              https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/As...

            • RobRivera 47 minutes ago

              How many hogs to the bushel?

              • tonymillion 36 minutes ago

                > Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

                Is that cooked or raw spaghetti?

                • nathanfries 1 hour ago

                  I noticed that too. I feel like this might be a new way of laundering AI written text, just provide the quote verbatim as if the they believe it was actually written by the author.

                • hedgehog 47 minutes ago

                  I wanted to see some pictures, this paper has good ones:

                  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332

                  If you put your finger in front of a garden slug it may try to eat it, it's a very odd sand-paper sensation but I never knew why.

                  • deepsun 41 minutes ago

                    "try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.

                    • Sharlin 43 minutes ago

                      Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.

                    • ziofill 32 minutes ago

                      > Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

                      What an odd example. A mid-sized car would have been much clearer.

                      • somedude895 1 hour ago

                        All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.

                      • imzadi 53 minutes ago

                        Snails had a good run being ignored by everyone but the French and now we're smearing their slime on our faces and trying to turn their teeth into armor.

                      • black6 1 hour ago

                        [2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.

                        • Sharlin 37 minutes ago

                          And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.

                          • codesnik 1 hour ago

                            now, let's combine both.

                            • boothby 1 hour ago

                              Do you prefer a web-weaving snail or an extra-bitey spider? I'm leaning spider.

                              • cwmoore 36 minutes ago

                                Poor goats

                            • cwmoore 40 minutes ago

                              Which is the less intelligent? Strong works when dumb.

                              I know people like to talk about “how smart” the butterfly or whatever is for “adapting itself” to whatever environment, and it is cute, but there is a practical engineering choice between delicate design and brute force.