The weird things people ask their spouses...

[gnomi]

Paraphrased conversation between MAB and me last night:

(edited to add conversational markers, for clarity)

Me: Hey, I've got a science question.

Him: [curious] Yeah?

Me: Do people float in oil?

Him: [bewildered] Huh? I don't want to know where this question came from.

Me: No, seriously. Would a human thrown into a big vat of oil float?

Him: (thinks a minute) Yeah, of course.

Me: Because humans float in water, and oil floats in water.

Him: [contemplatively] Yeah.

(pause)

Him: [bemusedly] OK, why?

Me: Cop show. Bad guy gets thrown off a catwalk into a vat of oil. Does he float?

Him: [contemplatively] Yeah. Unless he drowns, instead.

Me: Yeah, 'cause then the oil's in his lungs and he'll sink to the bottom.

Him: Yeah.

It's conversations of this type (which are somewhat common around our dinner table) that make me wonder if other people talk about things like this.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Sigh. :-)ˆ

[cellio]

We have conversations like that at times. We also have "speculative halacha" discussions, where Dani will pose some goofy question like "if you used a purely artificial process to produce something that exactly resembles bacon, could you eat it?" and we'll try to tease it apart.

[arib.livejournal.com]

How about some discussions I've had with various rabbis:

"Which direction would an astronaut on Alpha Centauri face when he or she prayed? Up?"

or

"Does telekinesis outside of an eruv on Shabbat count as carrying?"

My rabbis said it doesn't, because it's notthe natural method for carrying things...

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I've had some interesting questions of my own, such as how to put a mikvah on Mars, or if the Passover invitation of "Let all who are hungry come eat" means that you've given carte blanche to vampires.

In fact, as a SF writer, for professional reasons I had to put a story on hold recently. Col. Ramon requested a ruling on when to observe shabbat in orbit, and I didn't want a story of mine to end up out of date if I wrote it the wrong way...

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

The answer is that it would be kosher, because it's not really bacon. Read "The R Strain" by Harry Turtledove (who is the GoH at Arisia, where I'll be tomorrow).

[cellio]

That's one interpretation. Another is that if it's correct to build a fence around chicken for "meat and milk" lest people get confused or be misled, then even moreso it's appropriate to build a fence around "instinguishable from pig without the lab notes". So I don't know how it would play out.

(This isn't the marit ayin argument, because just as you can put out a stick of yellow fat with a meat meal so long as you show the wrapper saying it's margarine, you could also put out fake pig with the OU hechsher.)