Slate Explainer's Questions of the Year for 2007

[KamaAina]

Explainer is a feature in Slate that invites you to send in offbeat questions, and have them "ask the experts". Exactly how offbeat the questions can become has not been revealed until recently...

http://www.slate.com/id/2179944

The Explainer's Unanswered Questions From 2007...

• Can a baby get drunk off of nonalcoholic beer?...

• Mitt Romney is running for president. His father, George Romney, a former governor of Michigan, ran for president in 1968. Is "Mitt" named for the mitten-shape of Michigan?

• If I drank a bunch of orange juice, which caused me to get heartburn, then ate a bunch of antacids, would it neutralize the vitamin C, thus providing no benefits from the ingested vitamin? If so, if you ate antacids continually, would you get scurvy?...

• Why are some cats softer to the touch than others? Is it possible I have the softest cat in the world?...

• I haven't seen this in the news, but perhaps you could explain it anyway. Why do people feel like destroying things when angry?...

• Why do men almost never win on ABC's Wheel of Fortune?...

• Hello. I am an editor and writer and I would like for everyone to change some letters that are now in lowercase to uppercase. An example would be the 18th century to the 18th Century. Where does one go about starting to do this?

• Is it "open sees me" or "open says me"?

• Can dogs be mentally retarded?...

• If mountains are measured from sea level, then the 12,000-foot peaks in Colorado are only about 7,000 feet above Denver since they lie on a 5,000-foot-high plain. That being so, a one-foot rock lying on the ground becomes a 5,001-foot-high mountain. Do we need to address this differently, if it really matters at all?...

• When a man lies to his lawyer to obtain a divorce from a wife of 47 years when she is ill and does not even know and cannot defend herself, is this legal, or perjury?

And the winner is...

http://www.slate.com/id/2181280

Why don't we drop medical waste and nuclear waste into active volcanoes, the "ultimate high-temperature incinerators"?

The answer: Because the hazardous parts would come right back out.

We do incinerate more than 90 percent of the medical waste in the United States, both to reduce its total volume and to kill off infectious agents. But burning up blood-soaked bandages, discarded needles, and stray organs like tonsils and appendices creates many dangerous byproducts, including dioxins and carbon monoxide, as well as fly ash laced with heavy metals. While an onsite incinerator at a hospital would be equipped with scrubbers and filters to capture these byproducts for landfill, any gases or ash produced in a volcano would be emitted straight into the atmosphere.

:rofl:

edit: The softest cat in the world is MooMoo, of Rockland County, N.Y. Mom and I belonged to her (and her not-as-soft friend Buddi) until Mom moved into Repuke Stepdad's no-pets crib. :(

[bicentennial_baby]

1. My vet says that grey cats are the softest...

I have no idea if this is true, or if she's just buttering me up. :P

[KamaAina]

2. MooMoo is a tuxedo

The softest cat in the world is MooMoo, of Rockland County, N.Y. Mom and I belonged to her (and her not-as-soft friend Buddi) until Mom moved into Repuke Stepdad's no-pets crib.

I have known several other tuxedos who were soft. But in Moo's case, I suspect a touch of Persian ancestry as well (she also tended to collect "eye crud"; perhaps her face is very slightly "Persian-shaped").