It's in the water

Some of the ideas I hear in Skypeland are astounding. One person said it was awful that people were drinking bottled water because the "potable" water around the world was no longer potable (if it is no longer potable, is it reasonable to call it potable?). I disagreed, and asked what was wrong with potable water.

One person from an island in Greece said that there were chemicals to remove diseases in the water, and other bad chemicals that people put in the water. I asked if he was referring to chlorine. He did not know what that meant, and asked if I knew how to process water to remove mercury. I said that there were methods to remove mercury from drinking water, depending on how contaminated the water was to start with and how much money people were willing to spend.

At this, the room exploded in discord, with people positively furious at me for mentioning money. One person said that he had lived in California for 20 years and its water system was bad. I said that contrary to what he claimed, California did not have a single water system, but had many water systems. I said that in some places, depending on how much was spent, the water was of higher quality than in other places. People in the room said that this proved I was wrong, since they claimed I had said third world countries did not deserve good water (Where they get this nonsense from, I have no idea...wow...).

The person from Greece asked me several times how one could remove mercury from drinking water, and I told him it could be removed by distillation and reverse osmosis, and other methods, but it is not always cost effective. He asked me again, and I answered again. He asked this same question probably 6 or 7 times and I answered the same way each time. He was becoming angrier and angrier as this situation unfolded. (I have no idea why, however...) He said that the reason there is more mercury in his water is that there is a drought in Greece because of Global Warming and it is a fact. I disagreed with the claim that this is a fact, but I was attacked by just about everyone in the room for stating this. (I did some more checking and there are other methods as well as distillation and reverse osmosis to remove mercury from water, including Coagulation/Filtration; Granular Activated Carbon; Lime softening:
http://www.freedrinkingwater.com/water-contamination/mercury-contaminants-removal-water.htm
http://www.historyofwaterfilters.com/distillation-pc.html
Do none of these people ever use google? All he wanted to do was ask the same question over and over, and refuse to listen to the answer or discuss it or even learn anything. To him, it was just an excuse to get angry at anyone else who tried to have a conversation with him or try to educate him about the situation. )


Someone else gave a long discussion about water that I could not understand at all. He talked on and on and on, and when I tried to interrupt to get him to clarify a point I did not understand, I was shouted down. No one wanted to stop him or get him to explain. It was just a stream of meaningless incomprehsible blather in awful English. Amazingly, no one else had a problem with this. I guess it is better to let someone speak incoherently and uninterrupted than to stop them and get them to explain.

Finally someone from Africa talked about water quality in various African countries. He said that some countries have good water quality in Africa, and some countries have bad water. He lectured me about how awful it is to have one tap for an entire village. People asked me what I thought, and I said I agreed for the most part. This made people very angry, but I have no idea why. I guess they believed that this was at odds with what they thought I had said earlier, although it wasn't.

The conversation moved into a discussion of "recognition". One person claimed that it was easy to get recognition for something if you are rich, but that it was impossible to get recognition for anything if you are poor. He said, "Recognition is given to the fat and rich. They never give to peasants and ants." I asked about Google, and pointed out that those who produced Google were poor.

He said Google does not count since the people who produced Google were rich in education. He said that the world is not fair since it only recognizes people who are intelligent or educated or gifted in some way. I was stunned at the ludicrousness of this argument. He was basically claiming that people should get recognition for inventions even if they do not invent, or for being authors if they have not written anything. By this reasoning, people should get recognition for being athletes if they have not done anything athletic, because it is unfair to recognize only those who are athletically gifted. Holy cow...

He asked for an example of someone who started without an education and obtained recognition. I gave Steve Wolfram as an example, since he did not have a high school education. He had never heard of Wolfram and could not even pronounce his name. He dismissed this example since he was positive that Wolfram had experience and therefore it was unfair to give him recognition.

Someone else stated, "If you drink coffee it will neutralize the bad effects of smoking." (???) I disagreed but I did not have much energy to state my objections very loudly. Another lady stated, "Intelligence will kill mankind; people are too smart for their own good." (Somehow I did not notice this principle operating in the Skypecast.) Someone else said we have plenty of intelligence and knowledge but we do not have wisdom. (Funny, I had not noticed much of any of these in this room. I notice that people who are ignorant and stupid love to claim they are superior to others since they have "wisdom" instead of education and intelligence.) In the middle of this, we were interrupted by someone who insisted that all conversation cease. She asked for the host repeatedly, and then said in heavily accented English, "Hello... hello.... hello... no speak english... you speak Turkish?"

Someone else told us his idea that rather than consider carbon dioxide sequestration from burning coal, that we should just collect the carbon dioxide coming out of the smoke stacks. We should process this collected carbon dioxide, and burn it again as fuel to avoid pollution. This was met with general approval by a person who said, "That is the most best thing I have ever heard. It is the most valid." (Um, does this not violate various laws of thermodynamics?) He later said that "Science is evil, and the stepchild of mathematics, just like medicine".

Oh, I see. How profound. Or maybe not...