Talk:3037: Radon

The sun is a white star. It looks yellow from within the atmosphere because blue light is scattered out of it, the same reason the sky is blue. How did physicist Randall not know that? Nitpicking (talk) 20:26, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Randall is almost certainly a Superman fan, and we all know that Kryptonians get their powers from yellow suns. Barmar (talk) 21:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia disagrees; The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V), informally called a yellow dwarf, though its light is actually white. It formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. 172.71.23.87 20:43, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Your quote agrees with me. As @Starstar says below, it might be intentional on his part. Nitpicking (talk) 20:53, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

No "his quote" doesn't?? (Unless I'm understanding your meaning with "his quote") Yes the sun is White. HOWEVER, it is NOT called a "white star". Stars aren't categorized by color but by tempeture. Which I mean I guess it sorta means their catagorized by color but thats being nitpicky. Our sun is 5,772 K, which according to wikipedia means its a class-G star which is known by the not nerds as a yellow dwarf. Being a physicist means Randell is VERY aware of the category of our Sun. Repeat, the Sun is called a "yellow dwarf", therefore is Ponytail said "white star", she'd be talking about a star that is 9000 K and therfor NOT our Sun. Seriously this was like a 5 minute google search. Apollo11 (talk) 21:01, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps it is intentional? Starstar (talk) 20:36, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Possible trivia: The effect used in the title text for "²³⁸Umbrella" does NOT use html formatting. It uses unicode for the almost-but-not-technically superscripted "238" before "Umbrella." On some systems, this renders with the "23" being larger than and slightly below the level of the "8". Whether Randall knew of this effect or not is a mystery. If he did know, his motivations are a mystery. Maybe the 8 is radioactive and emitted a non-massless particle, thereby making it smaller (less mass != less volume, but go with it here) and more buoyant (less weight) in the presence of the adjacent characters. 198.41.227.105 21:19, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

You can't use HTML markup in the title attribute, so there's no other way to do super/sub-scripting there. He could have used JavaScript to emulate the title attribute, though. Barmar (talk) 21:38, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

What do people think of Hairstylist Wannabe's near-total rewrite of the explanation? While they added lots of technical details about radon, I think they missed much of the humor. Ponytail's comments are typical of the kind of things a home inspector or repair person will say to the owner, not really "flippant". Barmar (talk) 21:48, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

I like the facts but i changed the joke explantion back. Apollo11 (talk) 22:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)