Ask Lemmy

One common definition of a hole defines a hole specifically as the opening. If the definition applies only to the opening, this implies that the hole exists on a 2-dimensional plane. Despite the fact that the openings are connected along a tunnel, we don't care about the structure of a hole beyond the 'opening', we can ignore everything else. If we continue on that path, there are 2 visible holes on a straw.

Its one

Judging by what this video by Vsauce about how many holes a human has it should be one in a straw. A straw is basically just a long doughnut and there's one hole in those.

I can't even understand the thinking that produces 2.

One long hole that goes all the way through the straw

Matt Parker did quite a good video on this exact question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF1bp-qrjU

It has one hole. While it appears to have two holes, if both are closed, you get a hollow sphere, which has -1 holes.

One. Imagine a cube of steel. Now you take a drill and you drill an hole into this cube. Now you saw around that hole so it has a wall thickness of 1mm. Now you have a straw made out of steel and you’ve drilled only one hole.

No.

I thought one hole intuitively, then I started thinking... what about those y shaped straws or medical hoses that split.... one hole? Two holes? Three?

It’s one hole. Imagine a solid cylinder, how many times do you need to go through it to make it a straw? Only once :)

A regular straw has zero holes. The central cavity, through which beverages flow, is not part of the straw, and hence it's endpoints are not holes in the straw.

None. Colloquially, we use "hole" in all kinds of weird ways. As others have pointed out, topologically a straw is no different to a torus (donut) that clearly has one "hole"... but I'd like to focus instead on the linguistic definition of "hole", not the colloquial or mathematic definitions.

A hole can either mean:

1. a perforation ("a hole in my shirt", "a bullet hole", etc) - which is, specifically, "a hole or pattern made by or as if by piercing or boring"
2. a gap ("a hole in your reasoning", "a hole in my heart", etc)
3. a hollowed out or burrowed place ("a hole in the road", "a fox hole", etc)

i think we're not talking about 2. It seems to require some larger uniform structure or set of items in which an item is missing. 1 and 3 seem really similar to me: both seem to require some active removal of matter to qualify. All of these definitions point towards a subtractive process, where something of a larger whole (heh) is removed or absent.

Most straws, I'll venture a guess, are not manufactured solid and then bored out.. so I don't think it applies here. So I don't think a straw matches a fitting definition of "hole". A straw is created additively by assembling the "shell" by some means, not subtractively. Donuts, by comparison, had holes punched in them. A subtractive operation. Rubber bands have not had holes punched in them... they're additive. Not holes.

Similarly (because I see a lot of talk about buttholes and mouths here too), your esophagus and digestive tract (and veins and all kinds of other things) were formed in a similar additive manner, not by forming a mass of meat and boring through the passage, and thus would similarly not qualify as "holes" (in my opinion).

By the logic of most of the comments in here, does this mean most people are wrong when they say they are digging a hole???

Define a "hole".

A hole is an opening on (something), and a TUNNEL is an end that leads to a hole that leads to another hole and to another end. Therefore, it has zero holes, but one (very small) tunnel.