2 ms·

Sure, "it's more complicated". But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Only from that realization ca

by wahern 6y ago

Sure, "it's more complicated". But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Only from that realization can you start to identify and answer more sophisticated questions, including the exceptions. My point is that you can get an incredible amount of mileage from the most basic principles taught in school. Which is literally the point of a basic education. But people tend to emphasize "don't believe everything you learn in school" rather than "most of what you're taught in school are foundational truths to your environment that can have immense utility in your day-to-day life." If you focus on the former rather than the latter, you won't get into the habit of learning how to apply your knowledge. And if you're not well practiced at application--which is a life-long endeavor for even the most basic rules--then superficially that knowledge tends to seem useless. I never studied computer science in college--I was already writing Perl and JavaScript when I entered a 101 course which was teaching Pascal, and I dropped it the next week. But I did end up learning--and still learn--the theory and its application. I often hear computer science graduates lament that they never actually need to apply what they learned in school in their professional lives. Well, "need" and "can" are two different things and it's a choice you make. Failure to rigorously apply even basic principles is a big reason, IME, why so much software is utter crap. Do you need to consider algorithmic complexity for every little script you write? Yes! Not because it necessarily matters to the performance of the script, per se, but because the script will be part of a larger data processing system, and the way it fits into and shapes that system can and often will effect algorithmic efficiency down the line. It's a useful skill to apply first principles to everything you encounter in life. Not just scientific principles, but moral and emotional principles, too.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Well, again, you're burning oil (or if you're starving, meat), not carbon. It's mostly carbon by mass, but not by molarity.
- wahern 6y ago
  That's not a more accurate representation than "burning carbon". The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. My middle school biology class would have been in the early 1990s when many of the finer details of cellular respiration weren't in any textbooks (certainly not middle school). It wasn't until 1996 that a critical step in ATP synthase was confirmed. But you don't need to know anything about ATP to understand the basic role of carbon in energy extraction and respiration. Actually, now that I think about it biology classes tended to focus more on photosynthesis, which sort of makes sense historically--I suppose breaking CO2 photosynthetically was for hundreds of years the far more scientifically intriguing question, and perhaps that's why it was emphasized so heavily in primary and secondary school biology.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. I would guess that there are two familiar forms of combustion in day-to-day life: burning wood, and burning gasoline. Only the second is referred to as "combustion" in the vernacular. (Since it happens in an "internal combustion engine".) Neither involves burning pure carbon; one burns carbohydrates and one burns petroleum. The definition of "combustion" that I was taught in chemistry class was "any reaction that produces carbon dioxide and water". But you might have a very different day-to-day life and chemistry education, I guess.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Most of the energy is from re-binding the carbon from protons to oxygen. Binding two protons to an oxygen yields a lot less.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago

by wahern 6y ago

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> But the most basic, predominate mechanism is that you're literally burning carbon and exhaling CO2. Well, again, you're burning oil (or if you're starving, meat), not carbon. It's mostly carbon by mass, but not by molarity.

wahern 6y ago
That's not a more accurate representation than "burning carbon". The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. My middle school biology class would have been in the early 1990s when many of the finer details of cellular respiration weren't in any textbooks (certainly not middle school). It wasn't until 1996 that a critical step in ATP synthase was confirmed. But you don't need to know anything about ATP to understand the basic role of carbon in energy extraction and respiration. Actually, now that I think about it biology classes tended to focus more on photosynthesis, which sort of makes sense historically--I suppose breaking CO2 photosynthetically was for hundreds of years the far more scientifically intriguing question, and perhaps that's why it was emphasized so heavily in primary and secondary school biology.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. I would guess that there are two familiar forms of combustion in day-to-day life: burning wood, and burning gasoline. Only the second is referred to as "combustion" in the vernacular. (Since it happens in an "internal combustion engine".) Neither involves burning pure carbon; one burns carbohydrates and one burns petroleum. The definition of "combustion" that I was taught in chemistry class was "any reaction that produces carbon dioxide and water". But you might have a very different day-to-day life and chemistry education, I guess.
ncmncm 6y ago
Most of the energy is from re-binding the carbon from protons to oxygen. Binding two protons to an oxygen yields a lot less.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago