packbat | Ivory Soap in Space and Other Oddities

I think I mentioned Making Light a couple times before in other contexts, but the recent Open Thread 59 is really something. Just in what I've read so far, there's been:

Discussions of the effects of vacuum on unwrapped bars of soap (the original subject of the thread)
Discussions of the effects of unwrapped bars of soap on vacuums
Discussions of what sort of music a 12 to 14 year old kid at computer camp in 1980 would listen to (Kraftwerk seems to be among the likely candidates)
Discussions of explosive decompression in general, ranging from the modern consensus on what would occur to popular depictions in sci-fi (esp. the famous sequence in 2001 that I've never seen), including the comment which triggered this post:

Charlie Stross ::: (view all by) ::: January 30, 2006, 06:30 AM:

Hmm. Question for Jordin and Graydon: do you suppose you could reduce or stop the O2 loss through your lungs, if you knew you were going to be spaced, by drowning yourself first? I'd expect a couple of lungs full of water would take quite a while to empty in vacuum, and while there's water in the way the diffusion rate is going to be a lot lower -- same pressure gradient, but the exposed surface area goes from something like a couple of tennis courts down to a couple of square centimetres.

Of course, recovery afterwards (when they hook you out of the airlock) is going to be a bitch ...

I gotta start reading these Open Threads more. Just ... whoa.