We were taught stalaCtite (ceiling) and stalaGmite (ground).
stalagTite and stalagMite: The "t" in stalactite looks like a stalactite, hanging from the ceiling. Similarly, the "m" in stalagmite looks like a stalagmite, rising from the floor.
Submitted 16 hours ago by snek_boi@lemmy.ml to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
digger@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
snappy@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I always heard it as “-tite” because it hangs tight to the ceiling and “-mite” because it might poke you in the ass
RebekahWSD@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Tight to the ceiling and Might grow to the ceiling here!
5oap10116@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Stalagtites hang on tite. Stalagmites crawl on the floor like mites
susi7802@sopuli.xyz 16 hours ago
That’s better than the one I learned in school: tits hang.
zoedog@discuss.online 11 hours ago
StalagMITEs MIGHT hang from the ceiling, but they don’t.
moebiusstrop@piefed.social 12 hours ago
stroppy take: Stalactites don’t usually curve and do start out broad and grow down skinny, so really an “m” looks more like stalactites hanging from a ceiling. I’m going to have to forget I ever saw this.
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
I’m 46. I can’t tell you hour long it’s been since I heard these terms. They’re completely unimportant outside of a very niche science (but, not entirely useless knowledge).
The stuff about Nutty Putty Cave plummeted my interest in caves to absolute zero (tl;dr caver ends up trapped upside down and his remains are still there and the cave has since closed, real nightmare fuel and not even the only cave it’s happened in).
dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 15 hours ago
Your tl;dr makes it sound like they found his body, never bothered to recover it and put a „do not enter“ sign in front of the cave.
It’s much worse than that. He was found while he was still alive and over a hundred rescuers tried to get him out until his heart couldn’t handle it anymore after 27 hours. Only then they decided to leave him there, used explosives to collapse the passage to where he was stuck and then blocked all entrances with concrete.
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 31 minutes ago
Yeah, I know…
Sadly that’s the point of a tl;dr, it misses the nuance for people who can’t be arsed to read a whole paragraph.
I will also add that he died because of positional asphyxia. It’s not just that his heart couldn’t handle it. The way we breathe really only works if we’re right side up or laying down. If you’re upside down for a long period of time, your lungs are pushing against your guts and other organs that are pressing down on your lungs. It’s trivial to do for an hour or two, but beyond that, you’re breathing against physics and it just gets harder and harder. He also didn’t have much energy since he worked so hard to get in there. Even if they were able to pipe him sustenance, he couldn’t beat the physics and it was just a matter of time.
They also tried a few things to get him out, but because of the angle he was at, I think they broke one of his legs trying to pull him back out and he told them to stop trying. They were able to lower a phone to him and he was able to speak to his wife and children and tell them he wasn’t coming home, so that had to weigh on him as well.
It’s tempting to think about digging him out. He was underground, so you think “okay so dig.” But it’s rocks, so you can only use demolition (explosive). Explosives push things away, so if you used demolitions to get at him, you’d be crushing him. There’s no magical black hole bomb that just vaporises the rock. You break rocks with explosives by blowing them apart (pushing them away from you). The only way you could use demolition to get where he was would be to drop the explosives in with him, to make a bigger hole. Unfortunately he would be killed in the process and his body destroyed.
So yeah, fuck caves.
tpyo@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Worse than that, they did get him out some but an equipment failure dropped him into a more compromised position
kalpol@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
I just remember g for ground and c for cats.
LemmyFeed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Hmm I always just remembered it with “T for top”
Talos@sopuli.xyz 15 hours ago
“When the mites come up the tights (-tites) come down”. -my 1980’s chem teacher
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
“stalagmite’s got an m in it” - hagrid
remon@ani.social 27 minutes ago
Much easier to remember in German -> Stalaktiten -> Titten = boobies -> boobies hang down.