Fresh Loaf

Superman is able to use his super strength to squeeze coal into diamonds. Theoretically, if someone had unlimited strength in real life, would it be possible to do this?
— marcusbrute

You realize, Marcus, we’re talking about what (a) a fictional character of virtually unlimited powers (barring kryptonite-related issues) could, (b) if real, be (c) theoretically but (d) realistically expected to do. Even by the Straight Dope standards this takes us into a pretty abstruse realm. That’s probably why I got into a big argument on the subject with my assistant Una, who’s normally as tranquil as a September morn.

Admittedly, I started off behind the eight ball owing to my scandalously inadequate knowledge of artificial diamond making. I submitted that squeezing coal into diamonds was impossible. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that fake diamonds were all made by a process known as chemical vapor deposition, and that CVD approximated how natural diamonds were made. CVD involved heat and pressure, but the main thing was you started out with a seed crystal you bathed in carbon-rich vapor and from this the diamond was basically grown. That was a far cry from the scenario in the comic books, where Superman grabbed a chunk of coal, squeezed, and voila, a diamond. For one thing, growing a diamond via CVD could take two or three days. Not to slight this achievement, but it wasn’t the kind of dramatic gesture that was going to thrill Lois Lane.

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(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

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What’s the final word about Y2K? We were told this was a serious problem, and that huge dollars and man-hours were needed to head off trouble. Why didn’t the sky fall, as predicted? Were the dollars spent before January 1, 2000, well spent or not? The date change seemed seamless to a layman. Was this because we headed off most of the trouble before it happened, or because it wasn’t as serious as predicted?
— Paul Wheeler

One may inquire: Why am I answering this now? Because the question keeps coming in, and at some point you have to ask, if I don’t take it on, who will? So here’s the best answer you’re likely to get: 1) While the true extent of Y2K issues will never be known, what we do know suggests the problem was wildly exaggerated. In retrospect, it would have been smarter to focus resources on a few truly high-risk areas, wait till 1/1/2000 for everything else, and fix what broke. Looked at in that light, the money spent on remediation, estimated at between $100 billion and $600 billion, was mostly wasted. 2) That’s hindsight talking. To put things in perspective (I realize the argument cuts both ways) many now say the world as we know it is going to end due to global warming. You think the smart choice is to say “relax”?

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There’s an old saw about God protecting drunks and fools. I’m particularly interested in the drunks part. Almost nightly, it seems, we hear on the news that a drunk driver killed one or more people in another car but the drunk survived, sometimes without injury. A family member suggested drunks are saved because they’ve passed out and are more relaxed, but I’m skeptical. Is it just the crashes where the drunk walks away after killing another that make the news?
— PLT, Indianapolis

If somebody’s going to walk away from a fatal car crash, you really want it not to be the inebriated loser who caused it. However, while all the facts aren’t in, there’s reason to think drunk drivers sometimes get a break they don’t deserve.

We’ll call what you’re describing the lucky-drunk hypothesis. Although it’s been floating around for a long time, scientists apparently first examined it seriously in a 1982 study of trauma victims treated at a Texas hospital (Ward et. al, American Journal of Surgery). Roughly a third of the 1,200 patients had been drinking.

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