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Descriptions

Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.

Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.

Comments on Everyday Science

Post

Everyday Science

Site Name

Everyday Science

Description

For interdisciplinary questions about the world around us, examining reality from an XKCD perspective.

Topics

Topics covered would include:

  • Lay science questions about common household objects (e.g. "Why is icing sugar less dense than granulated sugar?", or "why can cheese both harden and soften when left out?") or easily observed aspects of the natural world ("Why is the sky blue?"), especially if they are seemingly simple ideas that need an interdisciplinary examination to answer in detail

  • The inner workings of household appliances and gadgets and commonly-encountered objects like street lights (i.e., the sort of things examined on this Youtube channel)

  • Designs for simple DIY devices, furniture etc., and the engineering considerations involved (e.g. why diagonal bracing improves the strength of furniture and how to incorporate it in a design, or what materials/thicknesses are required to support a safe load)

  • Applied mathematics around the home, e.g. "home economics" questions like "how cheap does X have to be before I should consider substituting it for Y in my recipe?"

Exclusions

These topics or types of posts would be out of scope:

  • Questions with a legal or political aspect, even if they have a practical consequence (e.g. "what driving speeds are 'safe'?", "why is the tax code so complex?")

  • Questions related to the operation of a business

  • Questions about devices that are neither commonly used around a modern household, nor interacted with on a daily basis either by urbanites (city infrastructure) or rural dwellers (farm equipment)

  • Questions purely about budgeting, that don't relate to the specific nature of a specific good or service being budgeted for (such questions should go to Accounting, Finance or Mathematics)

  • Localized or regional questions that don't require calculation or scientific knowledge to answer (e.g. "Which grocery chain offers the best price on X?"; but e.g. calculating unit prices and factoring in transportation costs for a hypothetical situation would be on topic, and "should I have groceries delivered or pick them up myself?" should work as well)

  • Speculative or theoretical questions belong on Scientific Speculation instead; this site would be for understanding actually observed phenomena and solving practical problems related thereto.

Special Features

Probably none.

Overlaps

Overlap with Physics, Cooking, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering all seem possible. Cooking and food-oriented questions in the new site should be focused on the science behind cooking rather than on actually working out recipes and such; similarly, the technical questions should have an explicit layperson orientation. The idea is to sit at the existing intersection of these sites and have a place to marvel at the subtle complexity of the world around us.

Some overlap may also be possible with the new Home Improvement proposal.

History
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4 comment threads

Economics (1 comment)
"Domestic" is confusing (9 comments)
Overlaps (5 comments)
Active user (1 comment)
Overlaps
Lundin‭ wrote about 1 year ago

This overlaps with a lot of other communities, existing or proposed. Most notably the Home Improvement/DIY proposal, but also the existing Scientific Speculation site. The DIY aspect questions is a direct overlap, and any "lay science" question of the nature "what if..." is probably on-topic at Scientific Speculation. Pure math or physics questions also overlap with those communities. Overall I feel that this proposal is too similar to a lot of what already exists or has been proposed - the scope overlaps would have to be addressed for sure.

Lundin‭ wrote about 1 year ago

Also, (and while it is not a must) ideally a new community should spring from a need such as "oh boy we are sure getting a lot of these lay science questions here at Scientific Speculation, it would be nice if there was another community where we could direct those questions". The Home Improvement/DIY site for example partially does that, since we can direct electrician questions from Electrical Engineering there, and the EE site does get such questions, best directed elsewhere. Power Users did the same thing for Software Development when that community was launched.

Peter Taylor‭ wrote about 1 year ago

I don't think we've had an explicit scope discussion on Cooking Meta, but my impression is that the Cooking site would already accept any food-related question which fits this scope. Certainly there are some questions with a quite scientific angle.

r~~‭ wrote about 1 year ago

oh boy we are sure getting a lot of these lay science questions

Physics has seen a number, and yeah, I think we'd prefer they go somewhere else:

https://physics.codidact.com/posts/287828 https://physics.codidact.com/posts/287309 https://physics.codidact.com/posts/286662

Lundin‭ wrote about 1 year ago

@r~~ That's nice input then, seems like the Physics site would benefit from this proposed one.