this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
186 points (97.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35870 readers
982 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

An overwhelming majority of what we eat is made from plants and animals. This means that composition of our almost entire food is chemicals from the realm of organic chemistry (carbon-based large molecules). Water and salt are two prominent examples of non-organic foodstuffs - which come from the realm of inorganic chemistry. Beside some medicines is there any more non-organic foods? Can we eat rocks, salts, metals, oxides... and I just don't know that?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Edit: Wait, I’m dumb, charcoal is very much carbon-based.

I think that it still fits. People don't usually consider amorphous carbon, diamonds, graphite or fullerene as "organic", even if carbon-based.

[–] ValiantDust@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have to admit, chemistry has been a while and I don't remember the exact definitions of organic vs inorganic chemistry, so I just went off the "carbon-based" in the OP.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

The textbook definition is something like "carbon covalently linked to other junk". (The other junk is usually hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur.) So it usually excludes [macro]molecules made exclusively of carbon, like those.

[–] Radio_717@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Charcoal and activated charcoal are not amorphous carbon compounds because their structures contain other elements than just carbon.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a fair point - you're right that typically charcoal does have bits of hydrogen and oxygen, to the point that its empirical formula is around C₇H₄O, so by textbook definition it is organic. However I think that it falls into a grey area due to the relatively small amount of the "other components", and perhaps because of the structure?

[–] Radio_717@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Im finding that people have strong opinion on what qualifies as organic. Haha.

I think it’s cool I can talk to people about chemistry outside of work tho. None of my friends understand anything about what I do for a living.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I thought that you made meth in your basement? Jesse, we need to cook!

Jokes aside, it's nice for me to discuss Chemistry too. Without going too much into details, Chemistry was part of my life for a long time, and I miss it quite a bit.