This reads so much like an urban legend, that I had to poke around a bit. It appears that it was a piece of fiction written by a Williston Fisk for Harper's Weekly in 1898, and has been given various backstories as time went on.
I'm reminded of when my son, who was six at the time, came into the house and announced that he and the neighbor's boy, nine, were building a bomb, and that he needed to get some stuff from the pantry. When I investigated what exactly was going on, they were putting "hot" things like black pepper and Tabasco into a plastic bowl and were going to "set it off" with a match.
Thankfully, that complete failure seems to have been the end of either of their mad scientist careers, as they are now twenty and twenty-three, and both well-adjusted, peaceful members of the community.
When I was 5 or so, I was convinced that if I dropped a bowl of hot water into a bucket of cold water, I'd get big explosion. That experiment yielding lukewarm water ended my mad scientist career.
When I was 7 or 8 a friend and I crimped the heads off strike-anywhere match sticks, wrapped them in foil, and struck them with hammers and rocks. They were quite loud, one even set off a sound-activated toy inside the house.
I make no claims as to how well adjusted I am, but I've at least survived 40-odd years of life since then.
When I was 12, I made a "smoke bomb" by placing a fire cracker in the bottom of a tube and topping it up with powdered clay. It shoot out a 4 m tall plume of dust, which was cool and all, but I thought it would look a lot more impressive with a black plume.
So I painstakingly ground down some charcoal to fine dust and redid the same experiment. That gave a much more impressive boom, but no dust plume, which puzzled me until I learned about dust explosions.
Thank God they didn't tell a chatbot about their little experiment. Their lives could have been ruined right there if the chatbot operator snitched on them and ordered a SWAT raid on your house.
Age eleven and had access to a chemistry set that a relative gifted. It had sulfur, but the saltpeter, and charcoal came from elsewhere. The 1960s encyclopedia had the instructions.
This is actually a fun one, and kinda has some parallels to building a nuclear weapon.
I tried this as a grownup because I finally managed to get my hands on saltpeter (could only dream of it when kid). Followed the instructions, mixed everything in correct ratios, lit it with great care and fanfare and... hiss fizzle. I was so disappointed! I think it came down to purity of ingredients and not enough surface area.
Point is, there are certain details of the process required to make it truly work, that are not readily known; in a similar way with nuclear energy, the theory is pretty well known but some nitty gritty details like the implosion or detonator design are not.
As a kid I found saltpeter at an old-fashioned pharmacy and made gunpowder, and it also barely fizzled. I think you have to grind the ingredients much finer than a kid has patience for.
To a point. Plenty of people from previous generations with missing digits and hands thanks to play with commonly available fireworks of the area (Australia based, so no idea how common that remains in the US).
My own experiments from my youth also one time resulted in some shrapnel punching through a 5 inch thick concrete tile very close to someone’s head (thought we were safe behind said tiles).
Get involved with the kids blowing stuff up so the danger is within reasonable bounds.
When I was younger in rural Appalachia, my local drug store still sold "chemicals" and I purchased salt peter and sulfur and proceeded to attempt to make smoke bombs. Didn't have a double boiler, so attempted to make it in the microwave. Needless to say, it didn't go too well.
I blame my dad though, he found the recipe online and printed it off at work to bring to me.
I ended up with an interest, since I was a toddler my parents tell me, that I cannot stay local for- wild cats. Unfortunately, I have to travel the entire globe to be able to see them in their natural habitats. But no matter where I go, there are always local birders, and locally to me there are tons of different birds. The only wild cats here are bobcats, which are very cool, but I've seen and photographed them a lot already. I wish I was interested in the birds.
> a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck
I know this is tangential to your point, but lions don't really hunt that way. They ambush, as they could never outrun a gazelle, and then they don't snap its neck unless unintentionally. They tend to just start eating it while it is still alive. It's quite brutal to watch.
I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.
You can still believe that the scientific method works; and might leads you to 2 conclusions:
(a) "I can prove earth is not flat" (using this methodology)
(b) I cannot prove there is no God, though I may believe the prevalence of evidence does not support the hypothesis, there's no scientific test that I can design.
The scientific method is partly inspired by belief in a God who is good (so no deceit) and created a universe that runs on laws. If you have particular beliefs about God, you can build a lot on that (as Descartes did).
Just because you think I am wrong does not mean I have failed to think through the various components/implications of my statement.
I can disprove that the Earth is flat with the incredibly varied, concrete, observable evidence that it is not. It comes in many forms and is undeniable, hence the lengths flat earthers have to go to to “prove” the evidence is all just a collection of lies that serve some nebulous, nefarious purpose (they don’t even agree on what that is) that serves some faceless evil group they prop up (usually “the deep state” or Jewish people). On the other hand, I do not have concrete, observable evidence that God does not exist. That’s the thrust of my point.
Perhaps you might think this is bullshit because *obviously* this world is real and not an illusion and there is *obviously* no evil demon to deceive us into thinking the Earth is spherical instead of flat.
And yes this is what philosophers do. Nobody here is arguing that such demon exists and is actually deceiving us, but since you've accepted you can't prove god doesn't exist (maybe mis-step for you since you're probably not the philosopher type), well, can you prove such demon doesn't exist? Seems to me the same thing.
The idea of not naming G-d is based on the concept of being human comprehension and not within realm of human language. G-d can name things in our world but it’s a one way street. For humans it’s presumptions to assign a name to G-d. it implies an understanding that can’t exist.
Don't know why you're downvoted so much, but your observation is spot on.
This is essentially Descartes evil demon issue. If you can't disprove that an evil demon (with god-level powers) is deceiving you at everything you perceive, then how are you going to be sure about anything? (including that the Earth is not flat?)
It has always been a difficult philosophical issue about how much we can trust reality itself.
That’s an interesting big picture philosophical question with big picture implications, but it’s not really what we are talking about here. We are confirming the things we can about our shared reality, not questioning its very nature.
Even when I was teen back in the 1980s while payphones were still going strong, they weren't everywhere you wanted them to be. My mother had a standing rule that if I was going to be out past 10pm, I had to call her to let her know. Depending upon where I was, it was often a pain to find a payphone before 10pm so I didn't get in trouble. If I had an emergency, it wasn't at all guaranteed I'd be near enough to a payphone for it to be helpful.
I had a great time at UR in the early 90’s because they had the most computing hardware per interested student in the country. I was able to relatively quickly work my way up to access to pretty much any system the school owned that I wanted, including the Cray at the LLE.
My son just finished his first year in college, and had no trouble getting decent grades without using AI while many of the kids around him were using it. At least in his humanities track, class participation is a lot of his grade, and he said the "AI kids" tended to suck at participation because they hadn't actually thought about the material, and couldn't dynamically work with it in class. He also said their AI assisted writing that he'd read was dull and unoriginal, and all sounded the same, which he thought likely helped his essays stand out. His English composition teacher said he was "probably too advanced for this class" when he told her he didn't use AI to write his essays, which made him roll his eyes, as he has clinically diagnosed dysgraphia (learning disability in writing).
Makes sense the ones who can't tell that AI does a piss poor job at writing get bad grades. In a humanities track I can certainly see how going basically completely no AI should be an advantage. Even in a other tracks it should be better, especially if professors think out assignments well. Group assignments are my biggest worry as in some classes they can really make/break a grade, working with those believing in AI would certainly be a disadvantage.
> the framers of the Constitution believed the American people would never elect someone so criminal and unfit
The framers of the Constitution were looking at a different world, where there was not the instant communication and sense of one "America" that we have. They figured that, while attempts at corruption were inevitable, the different states would protect themselves by not allowing representatives from another state to succeed at any self-serving corruption. But the rise of national party instead of state as primary political identity (which Washington warned about), and the huge propaganda pipe that is the internet, have destroyed the (supposed) protection of many individual state identities.
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