3094: Mass Spec

2025-05-27T23:00:45Z

Altay: Fix their/there typo.

{{comic
| number = 3094
| date = May 26, 2025
| title = Mass Spec
| image = mass_spec_2x.png
| imagesize = 407x253px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = Patients at least found it to be an improvement over Millikan's incredibly messy and unpleasant oil drop suspension procedure.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|This page was created by HARVEY FLETCHER (UNCREDITED). Don't remove this notice too soon.}}
In the early 1920s, the domestic bathroom scale (initially a form of {{w|Spring_scale|spring scale}}) was introduced to customers in the United States of America. The device soon became popular, and has remained so to the present. Although means to ascertain the weight of the human body existed before the 1920s, they were not in common use, and were not thought necessary in routine physical / medical examinations.

The joke in this comic arises from the claim that, before the invention of the "modern" bathroom scale, human body weights needed to be obtained, not by earlier, less convenient, forms of scale technology, but by Rube Goldberg-esque implementations of {{w|Mass_spectrometry|mass spectrometry}}.

Mass spectrometry, a late 19th-century invention (thus, available only a few decades earlier than the bathroom scale), was developed to obtain the masses of atomic particles by ascertaining their mass-to-charge ratios. The basic steps, as represented in the comic, are ionization of the mass (rubbing the scalp with the balloon), separating the resulting particles on the basis of their mass-to-charge ratio (the magnet), and observing the result on a detector (the target, not neccessarily the bull's eye). Since the ionization procedure for ''bona fide'' mass-spectrometry assays involves turning the mass to be analyzed into a gas, the method would quickly be recognized as unsuited for obtaining human body weights, especially over the course of a dieting program, and become unpopular. There are other ionization techniques to transfer larger compounds intact into the gas phase, however, a human body would be way too heavy to be analyzable by this technique.

The title text compares the mass-spectrometry-based method for obtaining human body weights with the method based on the {{w|Oil_drop_experiment|Milliken-Fletcher procedure}}, also available only a few years prior to bathroom scales, in which the mass to be analyzed takes the form of atomized oil droplets that are ionized by X-rays. Neither is suited for weight measurements over time scales of any length, but the cleanup procedures for a human body converted into ionized gas are certainly less onerous than those for a similar mass converted into an oil spray. The original procedure was intended to determine the mass of an electron, based on the known mass/density of the oil droplets. The title text seems to imply the converse, determining the mass/density of a person based on the (now) known mass of an electron.

Note: Randall uses the correct term "mass spectrometry". The term "mass spectroscopy" was used in the beginnings of the technique but is not used anymore. Today, a spectroscopy method entails the interaction of matter with electromagnetic radiation (e.g. IR light - as in IR spectroscopy or radio waves - as in NMR spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy). In the case of mass spectrometry, this is not the case. Here, ions are manipulated or interacting with EITHER electric OR magnetic fields and thereby the mass-to-charge ratio is determind. Both "spectrometry" and "spectroscopy" alude to a "spectrum" of possible results that can be used to quantify and qualify any inputs being measured, and a distribution of molecular weights ''can'' be usefully represented in a rainbow-like visual, but doesn't bear any direct relation with the electromagnetic spectrum, hence the technical name difference.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Don't remove this notice too soon.}}
:[Ponytail, wearing a lab coat, is giving a balloon to Cueball. Behind Cueball, there is a ramp on the ground, a magnet hanging from the ceiling, and a target on a poster on the wall.]
:Ponytail: Rub this balloon against your head, then go jump past that magnet toward the target on the wall.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:Before the bathroom scale was invented, the only way to weigh people was mass spectrometry.

{{comic discussion}}<noinclude>
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Physics]]

Talk:2742: Island Storage

2023-02-24T19:58:33Z

Altay: Note about the distortion to Greenland.

Hey at least New Zealand made it onto this map! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.48|172.70.178.48]] 17:46, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Of course the proper storage mode involves packing the continents back to Gondwada layout and then hiding them on the far side ;-) [[User:RIIW - Ponder it|RIIW - Ponder it]] ([[User talk:RIIW - Ponder it|talk]]) 18:59, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

It seems worth noting that the scale was distorted to make some islands fit. Greenland has a longitudinal height of 2671 km, but has been shrunken considerably in order to be wedged into a 1725 km gap in the Gulf of Mexico. [[User:Altay|Altay]] ([[User talk:Altay|talk]]) 19:58, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

3094: Mass Spec

Talk:2742: Island Storage