I wanted to see some pictures, this paper has good ones:<p><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332</a><p>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.
Garden snails around seattle will absolutely bite you (teeny tiny bite) and draw blood if you let them crawl around on your skin.
"try"? If it's harder than your skin it means it did, not tried.
Just because you succeeded doesn't mean you didn't try.
It may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)
A steel door is certainly harder than my skin and also certainly can't be used to "bite" me or puncture my skin (save for crushing it given enough force)
Just because it's harder doesn't mean it necessarily has the strength to tear off skin.
Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
If you ever watch these guys in an aquarium, you notice they're basically constantly chewing on things. I've wondered many times how they keep such tiny teeth in good condition if they never given them a rest, but, here's why. Nature creates such cool creatures
> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar<p>What an odd example. A mid-sized car would have been much clearer.
I also thought that was weird. Then I learned it gets better. If you click through to the BBC article that was apparently their main source, the quote is this:<p>> Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.<p>So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American.
I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883</a><p><a href="https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white-granulated-sugar-500g" rel="nofollow">https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white...</a>
But everyone knows, by experience, what 3300 individual roughly one pound bags of sugar weighs and what sort of force is needed to hold it up. Mid sized car is ambiguous, and nobody saw anybody hold that up (seeing hulk doesn't count)
But what is it in football fields?<p>That's the usual measurement of size in the States and it's absolutely unbelievably ridiculous.
You think people are better at estimating what 3300 bags of sugar look like - as opposed to estimating the size of a car?<p>How often has anyone ever seen 3300 bags of sugar together in their lives, do you think?
Do they? I don't recall ever seeing a bag of sugar in my life. I'm not a baker though so maybe that explains it.<p>A car is more easier to picture for me.
I'm guessing this was initially '1.5 metric tons', and through a number of helpful and friendly conversions, ended up at 3,300 sugar bags.
Mid-sized European or American car?
> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar<p>Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!
Must be a british thing?
I can't wait until our LLM agents spot these and substitute in our own favorite, personally intuitive format conversions appropriate for the scale.<p>I'd like this to be expressed in units of pallet(s) of standard cinder blocks.
> 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar<p>Ah, but how many one pound bags of concrete could it hold??<p>Why bags of anything? This is a poor way of communicating weight. Just say "a modern passenger car".
Sorry I only understand football field based units of measurement
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.
Wait, I can do that? Here I've been using Smoots this whole time (with great difficulty might I add).
Obviously it weighs 10,300 baseballs, which are 26 football fields long.
A football field is by far a better measurement than 3300 one pound bags of sugar.
Understandable, with how many there are to pick from, and the wiggle room in the longest ones -<p><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Association_Football_field_diagram_-en.svg/1280px-Association_Football_field_diagram_-en.svg.png" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/As...</a>
OP is talking about a football field, not a soccer field. It’s a common joke in America that things have to be measured in football terms.<p>In the “for what it’s worth” department, Brits called it soccer too. I have no idea why they swapped to football recently.
<i>whistles</i><p>3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot
whenever i see things like this i think its a tongue-in-cheek joke
just training the next gen LLMs with modern standards of measurements. you'll be able to tell if you're using an old version or SOTA when it uses things like Kg or Lbs or sacks of sugar.
Cheeks per tongue will now be used as the weirdest unit for “2.”
The main question is how many American football fields is that
Needs to be 3,300 bags of something I care about. Otherwise you are talking about nonsense or voodoo.
The crazy thing is that it is also equivalent to 33,000 0.1 pound bags of sugar.
more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg</a>
"A modern passenger car" varies widely depending on what locale the reader is in. A passenger car in Jakarta is not at all the same as a passenger car in Los Angeles.<p>Can we just use Kilograms?
How many hogs to the bushel?
How about<p>> 10x stronger than the jaw of a dog<p>> 20x stronger than a human jaw<p>> as strong as the jaws of a great white shark<p>?
Those are crushing power, and while they use bad terms for it, they are referring to tensile strength specifically, which is totally different. I don’t know why the hell they chose a spaghetti strand though.
But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar<p>Is that cooked or raw spaghetti?
Why complicate matters with pasta at all when spider silk is, at least metaphorically and rhetorically, at hand?<p>As hinted at by its 2017 postscript, this article is a mess of incommensurable comparisons.
Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?
because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
Staff Sgt. Sykes: [Sgt. Sykes is directing the recruits on how to judge distances] You take what you know, and then you multiply. Please don't use your dicks. They're too small, and I can't count that high. I don't wanna hear, "400,000 inches."<p>-Jarhead<p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/</a>
anything but the metric system.
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.
They say they’re taking about tensile strength at the footnote. But teeth would be more likely to be compressively strong. They don’t get pulled on much.<p>The whole thing seems very confused. Anyway let’s build space elevator?
All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.
now, let's combine both.
Limpet Radula is a badass name for a rock band
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.
Snails? These are MARINE snails, soldier! Oorah!
Snails are our greatest enemy. Source: medieval manuscripts.
And they are delicious. Just don't chew it too much. Much tastier than spider silk probably.
Snails also make for very cool manuscript decorations. Not sure what those monks were smoking...maybe snails
I thought it was limpet teeth
Now we just need something to replace paper for a whole new rock-paper-scissors paradigm.
Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
Just find the proteins involved then manufacture them with yeast.
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy
"We dropped out of high school to build AI-powered snail teeth."
Do snails scale?
They certainly scale the fence my wife put around the garden. Then again, we haven’t done a good job of patching holes in the perimeter. Our DevOps team is too busy playing in the sprinkler to learn to read, let alone automate patching, but it’s on the board for next sprint.
I hate the word democratizing
imagine growing tools out of this stuff instead of forging or casting, that'd be neat.
[flagged]
Which is the less intelligent? Strong works when dumb.<p>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.