Next YC batch: "We're Mollusca and we're democratizing access to nature's strongest material"
> 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".
▲ WorldPeas 2 minutes ago
[-] more importantly: how many kilos of feathers versus how many kilos of steel can it hold?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg
The main question is how many American football fields is that
▲ boogieknite 59 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 1 hour 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.
Sorry, but that's what 14 (standard) pickup trucks of yak hair was invented for.
▲ djtriptych 3 minutes ago
[-] ok but what color is the yak hair?
▲ bell-cot 35 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...
▲ functionmouse 14 minutes ago
[-] because as a reader, bags of sugar are more engaging to me than bags of concrete.
▲ CGMthrowaway 37 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
?
▲ moffkalast 23 minutes ago
[-] But how many times can it bite the area of Rhode island?
▲ RobRivera 1 hour ago
[-] How many hogs to the bushel?
▲ riffic 9 minutes ago
[-] anything but the metric system.
▲ tonymillion 1 hour 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?
▲ giwook 6 minutes ago
[-] Is it De Cecco though or some inferior brand like Barilla?
▲ 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.
This article is from 2015.
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.
▲ horacemorace 8 minutes ago
[-] 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.
▲ hedgehog 1 minute ago
[-] It may have gotten a nibble but empirically I still have a finger :)
Analogous to the keratinous denticles in a cat tongue, just much smaller in scale.
▲ aiisjustanif 29 minutes ago
[-] Well that was more disturbing than I thought it would be.
> 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.
All I wanted was to see a picture of a snail's tooth.
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.
[2015], with a nice correction from 2017 about the differences between compressive and tensile strength.
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.
