Sunday, February 12, 2012

Reddit is like quicksand


Today I Learned(TIL) is an interesting sub-Reddit on the popular blogging website Reddit.com. Without going into too much detail, Reddit is a blogging website where as a member one can blog about anything they want, usually it is to spark a conversation within the blog. Depending on how well the blog is writing or how interesting the blog is, a blog may be “upvoted” and depending on how many upvotes a blog has depends on the order of the list of blogs on the main page of Reddit. The more upvotes a blog has the higher the blog goes on the list with the ultimate goal of being a blog on the front page of Reddit. A sub-Reddit is simply a smaller form of Reddit within Reddit with the purpose of categorizing blogs based on the topic of the blog. So Today I Learned is a sub-Reddit where Redditors can post interesting links to websites where the poster found something that is not common knowledge, hence the name Today I Learned. So today I learned that no one can actually drown from quicksand, interesting right. Hollywood among other factors has skewed the public’s idea of how quicksand works. Quicksand is a mixture of sand, water, clay and salt, which when in the right concentration creates an amorphous solid. When the mixture is not disturbed, the quicksand has a solid form, but when something such as a foot is placed on the quicksand, it snaps out of equilibrium. The sand falls to the bottom of the mixture and the water stays on top, this is why when you fight the quicksand you sink. If the motion stops, the mixture starts to become solid again, the whole process is similar to the corn starch and water solution that you may or may not have seen growing up. Anyways many people think that this is the end of the road for them, that they will sink into the ground never to be seen again. This is false, because quicksand is roughly twice as dense as humans are so according to Chase Smith, you would only sink half way.

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