Dan questions

I listened to the most recent Beastcast today and, during the email segment, someone asked the crew to come up with their own "Dan questions." They struggled with the challenge - I think, partially, because they were a little off-base with what they were trying to do.

A good Dan question is not just shockingly stupid and obvious to everyone else in the room, but there's also an element of absurd fantasy (ie, what would happen if all triangles were removed from the world? Hahaha).

Can we come up with our own Dan questions?

Here's mine. Why can heads talk after being cut off? Could they be sustained longer by pumping blood through key blood vessels and closing off others?

I'm 100% Dan fan.

Pretty sure head's can't talk after being cut off since they're no longer attached to lungs pushing air through the vocal cords.

@fobwashed:

Which is why it makes perfect sense as a Dan question ?

Not really a Dan question, but the average person has troubles wrapping their minds around quantum computing and qubits. Hell, I have troubles understanding certain aspects of it.

If someone tried to explain quantum computing to Dan, I wonder if he'd just dismiss it all together from not being able to understand it or completely understand it. There is no in-between with him.

Dan's questions usually stun me into silence.
As such i'm having a hard time coming up with something with the same impact.

A key part of a Dan question is that it's something really naive or reductive that most people know the gist of but haven't ever had to explain it or maybe haven't even thought about the details of. I'm also struggling to think of anything but maybe like

If we burn fuel to heat things, how does the sun keep giving that much heat for so long? Is it getting smaller? How does the sun work?

I think the closest I get to a Dan/Paul question in my real life is that I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they say a room is stuffy. Like I understand it has to do with air flow but I do not know how anyone walks into a room and can feel the lack of air flow? I have never felt somewhere was stuffy my entire life, and always half-suspect that when people say "it's stuffy in here" they're making it up or their mind is playing tricks on them.

Possibly connected: I think ceiling fans are a bizarre placebo and my entire life have never once felt cooler because a ceiling fan was on.

So I have no idea how pasteurizing works. I always assumed it was some sort of filtering to get bacteria out of the milk to make it drinkable? But isn't milk also fine for humans straight from the cow? WHAT ARE WE DOING TO THE MILK AND WHY.

I refuse to look this up on my own now. Please explain.

@tobbrobb: it’s cooking! Just like you cook raw meat and it becomes edible and delicious, so do you also cook raw milk (as in boil it at certain temperatures for certain lengths of time) to “pasteurize” it.

Edit: with regard to your question about drinking milk raw, it’s unhealthy unless your immune system can handle all the bacteria in there, which is unlikely unless you’ve had lots of exposure to that bacteria in small, less harmful doses over a long period of time.

Nothing comes to mind. A lot of my stupid stuff is based on actions--"Oh no, I should not have done that" type scenarios. I'm more likely to have an egg white story than ask about what would happen if triangles disappeared.

One of the most stunned I've seen people react to a question I asked is when I asked "What is a hicky?" when I was in high school. Somebody was talking about how they got a hicky, I was confused and asked something like, "What, did they hit you?" I'm still not sure if the reaction was based on the people I was with or if not knowing what a hicky is by that age is a ridiculous thing.

Listening to the podcast and looking at this thread only concludes that Dan is the only being capable of asking a Dan question.

@leafling: Oh ok, I wasn't too far off then.! Thanks man. :D

A Dan question would be : "wait the dutch don't wear clogs all day"

If you planted a Corn Nut in the ground, it would grow into a corn tree as long as you watered it and stuff, right?

<Follow up question>

Okay... but what if you used Miracle-Gro?

<25 minutes later>

So... you're telling me... Ranch Corn Nuts AREN'T grown on a ranch?!?!

<Shocked silence>

How do they get their Ranch flavor then?

"So, Wifi sends data through the atmosphere, right? So, if I stick my head out of a helicopter, can I eat the internet? No, I'm honestly asking, why can't I eat it?"

Eh, yeah, only Dan can master a Dan question. It's a perfect equation of "stoner thought - the influence of THC + a lifelong fundamental misunderstanding of a concept x decades of wrestling and action movie logic * a passion for Waluigi".

In every generation, a Dan is born, but there can only ever be the one at any given time. To have more than one Dan is to risk them meeting, and nature cannot abide such a thing. If we were to accomplish replicating Dan in a thread like this, life as we know it would collapse. Heed my words! The end is nigh, and it likes to kick NPCs in the nuts! Beware!

Dan once cracked eggs, threw the yolks and whites away, and started cooking the fucking shells in an attempt to make egg whites.

There’s no fabricating a Dan answer.

If you make egg whites using brown eggs, are they egg browns?

How can you generate energy out of a mountain of trash? Do you try to let It fall down like a garbage waterfall?

@nutter: I really hope you're making up that story.

That story goes back as far as his days on Game Informer. I wish I could remember what. It was some Super Replay, either Tail of the Sun or Overblood.

"it's stuffy in here" ever been in a really hot room? or a room with no windows in the hot ass summer?

and i don't think you've ever been under a good ceiling fan then lol. i spent my early years in a foreign country and we had a fan that went faaaaaaaaaast.

@elflaconeri: Listen to the "Giant Bombcast 07/22/14" starting at 2:44:40.

@moskelosk: @elflaconeri: @an_ancient:

@nutter: Dan shines to all as a beacon of hope.

Dan is the ICP song "Miracles" in human form.

The egg white story is what I fall back on every time I'm exhausted by something insane Dan says or does. It's like my way rebooting my Dan expectations. So like just taking a second to say "Well, this is the man who tried to cook and eat an egg shell. I don't know what I was expecting."

He also locked his keys in the car, on the side of the road, during a storm, WHILE THE CAR WAS STILL RUNNING so...yeah, anything is possible.

@arcadefire:

Yes. I would describe those rooms as hot. The same way I would describe them, in the winter, as cold. "Stuffy" don't enter into it. Does stuffy just mean "hot while indoors"?

Maybe you are right about bad ceiling fans, though.

It's not quite Dan levels, but I'm convinced that hollandaise is just breakfast mayonnaise, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

@soybomb43: Personally, I would describe "stuffy" as a combination of hot and humid, or just poorly ventilated. But that's because of where I grew up, not necessarily saying it makes a lot of sense.

The egg white thing is super hilarious and makes me laugh every time I think about it. There is actually a wacky logic to it. I mean, if you break open an egg and look at it, the shell is the only white part. It's like something an alien would do :-D

This reminded me of this thread. I could see Dan asking if plants die of old age and what would happen if there were no moon

https://twitter.com/JamColley/status/1115113759431843841

He has actually inspired me to ask questions about stuff that might seem like obvious knowledge and as it turns out, more often than not, no one knows the correct answer.

I've also had snide remarks or laughter come right back at them after a quick google search.

Moral of the story: never stop asking seemingly stupid questions, you'll learn a lot. And Dan's a cool guy.

I honestly love how hungry for knowledge he is. I feel like he gets a lot of shit for being ignorant because USUALLY that level of ignorance is coupled with an anger or hate that simply isn't present in Dan Ryckert. But it also has to do with the fact that this is the internet, and apparently "I don't know" is tantamount to admitting some grave, horrific crime. This isn't to say it's ALL okay, that eggshell thing is just the best/worst, but I feel like if EVERYONE had the same sense of curiosity and want for knowledge, it'd be a net positive.

ALL that having been said: how do ovens actually work?

I understand heat gets pumped into them, either through gas fire or electrical coils, but the idea of "broiling" being different from "baking" being different from "toasting" and how the oven measures temperatures and sustains them, how it applies heat to foods in different ways all might as well be pyromancy to my brain.

@soybomb43: "Stuffy" to me always connoted that it's hot AND the air is motionless. So if you leave the windows of your house closed on a hot day and walk in, it's not just hot, it's STUFFY. The air is still and stale. If you leave them open, it's still hot, but at least fresh air is moving around so it's less "oppressive."

So I think the disconnect is I don't understand how one judges "motionless" air. I don't think I could walk into a house and tell you if any windows are open, regardless of temperature, unless I actually feel wind blowing. If you aren't directly in front of a window have you ever been able to tell the motion of the air? Does stuffy just mean a) "it's hot and you don't feel a breeze" or b) is it possible to be hot, not feel a breeze and it still not be stuffy?

Also if the answer is a), why is that a thing worth stating, worth having a term for?

@undeadpool: So, the difference between broil and bake and toast is mainly where the heat comes from. Bake is about heating a food from all sides, to give a nice even cook; broil is about heating from the top, which can give food a crispy top if that's what you want; toast cooks from two sides at a higher heat than baking or broiling.

My Dan question is: why do some ceiling fans have a clockwise, and a counterclockwise setting?

@rejizzle: Air circulates backwards in Australia.

@soybomb43: The difference is that the air is contained. The windows might have been a bad example, so here's a more definitive one: if there's no breeze and you're indoors, that's a "stuffy" heat. It's contained. It's oppressive, by which I mean it can feel like it's literally pressing on you. Whereas the same temperature outdoors, even WITH no breeze, isn't going to feel as oppressive because it isn't contained. So it's not JUST hot and no breeze, though even if it were: Having one word to say that is more descriptive than 3.

@rejizzle:So if I broil food at 450 or bake it at 450, it's applying the same "amount" of heat more concentrated in one direction or another?

@undeadpool: Yes, though I bet an actual chef could give you more explicit information about this.

@rejizzle Fans have both rotation settings depending on the season. For summers during the hot months, you would want fans to normally rotate counterclockwise to bring the cool air down on you. During winter, you would want fans to rotate clockwise to push the cold air up to the ceiling to leave the warm air around you as much as possible. I think it has to do with the angle of the fan blades which makes all this nonsense possible.

@shiftygism: This is the correct Danswer.

I'd agree with this if I believed that Dan actually ever learned anything.

Knows how to cook an egg white...