Interesting Stuff Thread

joseph brand

Ladies and Gentlemen. I present, The Tesla Guitar Suit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3knD7m0-pk

There is NO way I will ever do anything this cool in my life.

Dades

Nodin wrote: »

A planet with conditions that could support life orbits a twin neighbour of the sun visible to the naked eye, scientists have revealed.
The world is one of five thought to be circling Tau Ceti, a star just 12 light years away that is almost identical to the sun.
Astronomers estimate the Tau Ceti planets to be two to six times bigger than Earth. One of them, with five times the Earth's mass, lies in the star's "habitable zone".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec/19/habitable-planet-discovered-tau-ceti

Support HUMAN life. The star's "habitable zone" for HUMANS.

Always annoys me! :pac:

ninja900 wrote: »

Message to Christians - get over yourselves - your god didn't create the vastness of the observable universe just so he could watch you masturbate.

Don't forget the internet wasn't about back then...

robindch

Not sure if this one has been posted -- the best and wittiest parody of anything I've seen for a long time. Worth watching in HD if available.

Only 997 million views needed to catch up with the original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sar5WT76kE

Hotblack Desiato

Dades wrote: »

Support HUMAN life. The star's "habitable zone" for HUMANS.

Always annoys me! :pac:

We can make certain assumptions about the requirements of carbon-based life. Liquid water needed, etc.
Then again, we assumed that all earthly life depended upon photosynthesis, or eating the products of photosynthesis, etc... until we discovered life that lived upon chemical energy - and that's just stuff on Earth we had no idea about.

Don't forget the internet wasn't about back then...

Surely ghod has seen not only all porn that has been produced, but all porn that will ever be produced in the observable universe. It's his job to watch out for this stuff after all.

magicbastarder

neil degrasse tyson busts a move.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQBE4oylqHk&feature=youtu.be

PopePalpatine

A paper has been released on the origin of life on Earth. This link also contains a link to the paper itself, if anyone wants to read it.

Galvasean

Turns out Friends character Ross Geller is actually real!
http://www.krank.ie/category/internets/meet-the-real-ross-geller/

He is one sorry... "polontologist".

Galvasean

It kind of sucks for him though, considering Schwimmer's Dr. Geller was widely discredited and not thought of very highly in his field...

Galvasean

Galvasean wrote: »

It kind of sucks for him though, considering Schwimmer's Dr. Geller was widely discredited and not thought of very highly in his field...

Can't have been that bad, went from working in a museum to a university didn't he? Then he presented that paper in the Bahamas. That's more of a career than anyone in this country under 20 can dream of. :pac:

Anyone else miss the internet from 10 years ago? It was more interesting to talk to and meet people online who weren't friends you'd made in school.

Anyway, a fun and happy Christmas to everyone!

There's an old torrent doing the rounds for The Daily Show from I think 99-05. In it is a few episodes with Hitchens on them, just watching one now from the 1st of December 2004 when Hitchens had his Love, Poverty, and War book out. It funny how it's over 8 years ago and yet a lot of when he says sounds novel.




I love how John Stewart asked him to repeat "excellent point" into the camera. I still don't like Stewart but I just caught a little bit more respect with that.

Gordon

Deleted User wrote: »

There's an old torrent doing the rounds for The Daily Show from I think 99-05. In it is a few episodes with Hitchens on them, just watching one now from the 1st of December 2004 when Hitchens had his Love, Poverty, and War book out. It funny how it's over 8 years ago and yet a lot of when he says sounds novel.




I love how John Stewart asked him to repeat "excellent point" into the camera. I still don't like Stewart but I just caught a little bit more respect with that.

FOI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJDXME47K7s

FOI?

That's the one I have that's out of sync, so thanks!

Gordon

For others' info as opposed to yours!

Turtwig

baliansback 2013 wrote: »

or as opposed to yours Gordo lol.....seeya

???

Sulla Felix

Haha, not a regular reader of the Prison I see, Jernal.

PopePalpatine

I just found this amazing video on YouTube, I apologise if this is a repost:

ShooterSF

PopePalpatine wrote: »

I just found this amazing video on YouTube, I apologise if this is a repost:

If you haven't seen them do yourself a favour and watch his deconversion series from start to finish. Fantastic video serious that was introduced to me on this forum a couple of years ago.

Thread here (lol at the URL ending in 666, paging RTDH)

Zillah

Well, it turns out that the IONA Institute have teamed up with the US National Organization for Marriage to produce a rather vile anti-gay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0xOGVw3KJE

Loathe as I am to boost its views, it is getting utterly hammered in the comments and votes. Remind me, how are we defining "think tank" these days?

Anyway it is vile and we should oppose it, but I find myself getting really annoyed at all the people I know calling for it to be taken down. Knee jerk reactions to limit the free speech of others is a bad thing people.

Hotblack Desiato

If they're a 'think tank', are we a sceptic tank?

PopePalpatine

ninja900 wrote: »

If they're a 'think tank', are we a sceptic tank?

Wrong way around. :pac:

robindch

ninja900 wrote: »

If they're a 'think tank', are we a sceptic tank?

We might be a "skeptic tank", but Iona can get by without the 'k'.

Hotblack Desiato

'Skeptic' = EN-US
'Sceptic' = EN-GB

No?

robindch

ninja900 wrote: »

'Skeptic' = EN-US
'Sceptic' = EN-GB

Historically, that may well have been true, but in recent usage, 'sceptic' with a 'c' generally refers to traditional philosophical scepticism in which the theoretical possibility of certainty is formally denied and things tend to resolve quite quickly to a fairly useless quagmire of uncertainty, bootstrap-pulling and forelock-tugging. 'Skepticism' with a 'k' generally refers to scientific skepticism in which the rules of science are accepted and the likelihoods of various claims are, in turn, accepted roughly in proportion to the amount of scientific evidence which supports them.

Antiskeptic appears to believe the two are the same.

Hotblack Desiato

Yeah I know the 'skeptic' movement has mandated the 'k', that's the reason I used the 'c' word the joke, such as it is after three rounds of tautological explanation, didn't really scan with a 'k'

Quagmire? Giggity! :pac:

ShooterSF

Zillah wrote: »

Well, it turns out that the IONA Institute have teamed up with the US National Organization for Marriage to produce a rather vile anti-gay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0xOGVw3KJE

Loathe as I am to boost its views, it is getting utterly hammered in the comments and votes. Remind me, how are we defining "think tank" these days?

Anyway it is vile and we should oppose it, but I find myself getting really annoyed at all the people I know calling for it to be taken down. Knee jerk reactions to limit the free speech of others is a bad thing people.

Indeed I'm all for free speech and would be saddened to see a platform to air their bigotry taken away from bigots. How else are they meant to put people off? But it would not surprise me if say youtube have t&cs which limit speech on their site, a right any website owner (incuding boards.ie) has too. Many would limit "hate speech" along with pornography etc. and I guess it would be in their right to take down such videos even if I think they shouldn't.

The Black Oil

Alan Alda's flame challenge.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/12/alan-alda-challenges-scientists-.html

http://www.centerforcommunicatingscience.org/the-flame-challenge-2/

Thought this was pretty cool when I heard about it. Not the first time I've heard about him being nerdy/geeky/sciencey. So great to see someone trying to get kids interested in science, let's face it, it's not the best at communicating its message, and I'm a little weary of Mythbusters et al.

I hope we can all be as passionate about something when we're at his age.

Sulla Felix

The Black Oil wrote: »

Alan Alda's flame challenge.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/12/alan-alda-challenges-scientists-.html

http://www.centerforcommunicatingscience.org/the-flame-challenge-2/

Thought this was pretty cool when I heard about it. Not the first time I've heard about him being nerdy/geeky/sciencey. So great to see someone trying to get kids interested in science, let's face it, it's not the best at communicating its message, and I'm a little weary of Mythbusters et al.

I hope we can all be as passionate about something when we're at his age.

There's a really funny Scientific American 2 part podcast interviewing him. He did a SciAm/PBS joint production for years too.

Dades

http://sciencefriday.com/segment/03/23/2012/alan-alda-asks-scientists-what-is-a-flame.html

I listened to this podcast of him talking about the "flame" challenge last year.
Only things is it's really hard to differentiate between his voice and the host, Ira!

Also, my mum loves Alan Alda.

robindch

Can't remember if this page has drifted by...

The good folks at Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, have published two free books on the two telescopes.

http://hubblesite.org/ibooks/

The two PDF files are avaiable here:

http://hubblesite.org/ibooks/media/hst_discoveries_pub-v1-3.pdf
http://hubblesite.org/ibooks/media/jwst_science_pub-v1-2.pdf

Prepare for some pretty pictures!

Kivaro

Just keeping religion in context.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50348563/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.UOZRLm80WSo

And how many galaxies are there?

The Mad Hatter

Quantum gas created below absolute zero

It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery.

robindch

^^^

NS wrote:

Normally, most particles have average or near-average energies, with only a few particles zipping around at higher energies. In theory, if the situation is reversed, with more particles having higher, rather than lower, energies, the plot would flip over and the sign of the temperature would change from a positive to a negative absolute temperature, explains Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.

Can somebody please explain this -- it makes no sense to me as written!

sink

Very Cool!:D

I can't wrap my head around it either. But one thing grabbed me, subzero particles can be repelled by gravity, could this be anti-gravity?

kiffer

It's not colder than cold, it's technically hotter than infinitely hot... Yeah. Needless to say it's crazy physics land.
The Wiki page for negative temp. is interesting but the first lines of first paragraph are a little misleading. You have to jump down to "Heat and molecular energy distribution" and the examples section, then you get a better idea of what's going on.

TPD

sink wrote: »

Very Cool!:D

I can't wrap my head around it either. But one thing grabbed me, subzero particles can be repelled by gravity, could this be anti-gravity?

They have a couple of years to get it polished and into a hoverboard!

Mark Hamill

robindch wrote: »

^^^ Can somebody please explain this -- it makes no sense to me as written!

Reading the wiki page on negative temperature, this is how I understand it:

While you can think of temperature as the sum of kinetic energy in a system (which I did for years, thinking I was smart and sciency for doing so, now I need re-evaluate it, thanks science! :rolleyes::pac:) it turns out its better to think of it defined by statistical mechanics instead.

Temperature is not just the amount of energy a system has in its various modes (vibrational, rotational etc.), its also effected by the ratio of particles in one particular mode versus another. The equation given is: where T is temperature, qrev is thermal energy and S is entropy.
Normally every mode is nearly equally populated and if you add energy, they can exchange energy with each other, so energy added gives a positive temperature.

But if you isolate a finite mode like nuclear spin (ie you can only have two nuclear spin modes, up or down) and use the right energy-giving techniques (eg radio frequency techniques), you can have the atoms in the lower energy node move to the higher energy node (down spin to up spin, or vice-versa). This results in an increase of the energy system (qrev), but because the modes aren't populated 50:50 any more, a decreases of the entropy of the system (S). This is what gives a negative temperature.

Mark Hamill

Some interesting things here:
27 science fictions that became science facts in 2012

magicbastarder

Kivaro wrote: »

And how many galaxies are there?

at *least* two dozen.

Sarky

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

Quantum gas created below absolute zero

That is f*cking amazing. SCIENCE!

Liamario

SCIENCE BE PRAISED!!!

I think I'm just gonna say "**** it, that's enough" because every time I think I understand something it turns out it's a bull**** model.

robindch

North Korea is famous for needing very short rulers:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/12439/20121001/penis-size-study-113-countries-shows-who.htm

joseph brand

Thorium Reactors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY

Liamario

RE Thorium-

He states at the end that we will never run out of this stuff, it's simply too common.

This doesn't make sense to me. It's either renewable or it's not. Can thorium be created?

sink

Liamario wrote: »

RE Thorium-

He states at the end that we will never run out of this stuff, it's simply too common.

This doesn't make sense to me. It's either renewable or it's not. Can thorium be created?

Well technically there is no such thing as renewable energy, so called renewables have their origin in either solar or geothermal energy both of which are nuclear in source. Nuclear fusion in the case of solar and radioactive isotope decay in geothermal. However they will not run out of fuel for billions of years so we tend to not get concerned.

Thorium is an extremely common element in the earths crust, it's found everywhere and is about as common as lead. We can dig up lakes of the stuff. Uranium 238 used in current reactor technology is on par with platinum and only slightly more common than gold, that is to say you could put all the uranium 238 we've dug out of the earth throughout history into a small stadium the size of Wimbledon.

Current uranium based reactors are only 0.5% efficient that is to say only 0.5% of the extremely rare isotope we put into the reactor comes out as useful energy. Theoretically an LFTR reactor could have efficiency of somewhere around 80-90%, that is to say that 80-90% of the extremely common element we put into the reactor can be taken out as useful energy.

Suffice to say that we aren't going to be running out of fuel for LFTR reactors for a very very long time.

robindch

Here's a flight nobody will ever make:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw

Sulla Felix

Wasn't sure where to put this but JP Donleavys interview by Grey Byrne is being aired this sunday. From the ad, neither of them are particularly impressed with the other. Might be interesting if Gay lets him finish a thought.

Hotblack Desiato

sink wrote: »

Uranium 238 used in current reactor technology is on par with platinum and only slightly more common than gold, that is to say you could put all the uranium 238 we've dug out of the earth throughout history into a small stadium the size of Wimbledon.

Current uranium based reactors are only 0.5% efficient that is to say only 0.5% of the extremely rare isotope we put into the reactor comes out as useful energy.

Nitpick - the fissionable isotope of uranium is U-235 not 238
0.5% would be (roughly, depending on reactor type) the proportion of the original natural uranium you started up with that you could 'burn' up in the reactor. Maybe half or two-thirds of the U-235 - the fuel gets less reactive with time and some reactor designs can tolerate this better than others.