5 year old C, when adding 200 plus 200 in math: "It's 400, I memorized it out!"
3 year old Little Man, as I was patting his cute little behind: "I will have a big bottom when I'm grown up because my size will be big. And I will have hair in my nose."
11 year old G, clearly concerned at the notion that there was a finite amount of crude oil underground throughout the world: "Does it produce itself?" (I thought this was a really great question!)
Little Man, while watching butter melt onto his warm rice: "It's floating in!"
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4 comments:
I loved these!ie
I did this wrong. Anonymous is me.
I love these posts! They always make me laugh!
Does oil produce itself? I know the answer to that one! Yes. Oil is being made constantly. Most of it is made from buried organic matter (i.e. dead stuff). With sufficient pressure and heat, the carbon-based life forms (death forms?) get turned into hydro-carbons (chains of carbon atoms dusted with hydrogen atoms). Most oil is made in the seafloor because most organic matter accumulates there - sealife that falls to the floor + stuff that washes off the continents. So oil is constantly being made. However, and this is the important part, it is made very very very slowly. At our current rate of consumption, the world's usable supply of oil is estimated to be used up within our lifetimes. Think about it. No more oil means no more gasoline, no more fuel oil for home heating, no more gas-fired power plants. That's the obvious bit. But it also means no more plastic, no more nylon, no more synthetic fabrics. From where you are sitting right now, think about all the things that involve synthetics, plastic, and even elastic, that are *touching* you. And there is even more that you can see without getting up from your computer. That's pretty dire. And definitely something to worry about.
Now, perhaps I shouldn't be so alarmist. Some things currently made with oil can be made with substitute materials. So saying "no more synthetics" is a bit harsh. But it is many times more expensive to make these things from non-oil sources. This means that either some really important inventing needs to start happening, or our economy is in for some rocky times.
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