I bet you didnt know that

Peregrine

AllForIt wrote: »

Yes correct it's 500,000 miles per hour, not per second. That's 3,600 times slower than I said it was. No wonder it takes so long to do one revolution

That's still almost 8 times faster than the earth's orbital speed around the sun — a mere 30 kilometres per second :P

valoren

After the quiz show scandals of the 1950's there were no 'question and answer' game shows on US network TV. Game show host, Merv Griffin and his wife Julann, were mulling over ideas for a new Q&A show. They came up with the concept for such a show where the answer was given and contestants were asked to determine what the question was. The original title was as simplistic as the premise i.e. "What's the Question?" which would subsequently be re-named to what we now know as Jeopardy!

For the show, there was a final 'jeopardy' round and for this Griffin needed a piece of music to play while the contestants mulled over potential options. As a placeholder he composed a brief piece of music that is now the famous 'Think' doodle from Jeopardy! This doodle was a lullaby called 'A Time for Tony' that Griffin used to soothe his then infant son and thus took less than a minute to compose. It was never subsequently replaced as originally intended.

Griffin was a shrewd business man when it came to his intellectual property rights. He created a company which held nothing but the intellectual property for the 'Think' music he'd created. During that first season, CBS offered Griffin $150,000 in exchange for his holding company but he declined the offer. Before his death in 2007, he estimated that the royalties from 'Think' had earned him $70 million since he created the holding company. If CBS had persuaded Griffin to sell in 1964 then it's estimated that during the 2009 recession royalties from 'Think' would have accounted for 1.5% of the annual earnings of the century old corporation. All from a piece of 'doo-doo-doo' music composed in less time than it takes to fill your car with fuel.

Realt Dearg Sec

valoren wrote: »

After the quiz show scandals of the 1950's there were no 'question and answer' game shows on US network TV. Game show host, Merv Griffin and his wife Julann, were mulling over ideas for a new Q&A show. They came up with the concept for such a show where the answer was given and contestants were asked to determine what the question was. The original title was as simplistic as the premise i.e. "What's the Question?" which would subsequently be re-named to what we now know as Jeopardy!

For the show, there was a final 'jeopardy' round and for this Griffin needed a piece of music to play while the contestants mulled over potential options. As a placeholder he composed a brief piece of music that is now the famous 'Think' doodle from Jeopardy! This doodle was a lullaby called 'A Time for Tony' that Griffin used to soothe his then infant son and thus took less than a minute to compose. It was never subsequently replaced as originally intended.

Griffin was a shrewd business man when it came to his intellectual property rights. He created a company which held nothing but the intellectual property for the 'Think' music he'd created. During that first season, CBS offered Griffin $150,000 in exchange for his holding company but he declined the offer. Before his death in 2007, he estimated that the royalties from 'Think' had earned him $70 million since he created the holding company. If CBS had persuaded Griffin to sell in 1964 then it's estimated that during the 2009 recession royalties from 'Think' would have accounted for 1.5% of the annual earnings of the century old corporation. All from a piece of 'doo-doo-doo' music composed in less time than it takes to fill your car with fuel.

I'll take "anal bum cover" for 200 Alex.

That's "an album cover".

sbsquarepants

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

I'll take "anal bum cover" for 200 Alex.

That's "an album cover".

BaZmO*

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Hedgehogs tend to have fleas because they can't groom so easily.

Itself moreso ticks than fleas. Horrible big ticks filled to bursting point with the poor hedgehogs blood. Pricks with ticks!

Ten of Swords wrote: »

In 2014 scientists from MIT and NASA demonstrated that they could transmit a wifi signal to the moon using four telescopes in New Mexico. The telescopes are each 6 inches in diameter and are channeled by a laser transmitter that beams information in coded pulses of infrared light. They transmit an uplink signal to a satellite orbiting the moon. Earths atmosphere bends the signal as it travels to the moon so the four telescopes transmit the light through different columns of air, each one with a different bending effect. This ensures that at least one of the beams will establish contact with the receiver and establish a connection with the moon. The scientists sent data from Earth to the moon at a rate of 19.44 megabits per second and a download rate of 622 megabits per second.

I thought this was an amazing feat, even though nobody has been to the moon since the 70s!

Speaking of lasers to the moon.

Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a mirror on the lunar surface almost 50 years ago to allow Earth-based astronomers to fire lasers at it to prove that the moon is moving away from Earth. The experiment was ended by American science chiefs in 2009. The experiment also provided Nasa and other scientists with compelling evidence to refute the claims of moon-landing deniers who claim the Apollo lunar mission were hoaxes filmed in an Earth-based studio.

RiderOnTheStorm

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Why did the hedgehog cross the road ? to see his flatmate.

How do hedgehogs have sex?

,........ carefully!

The piece on Jeopardy reminded me...
Double Jeopardy is a crime novel / film staple, where a guy cannot be tried for the same crime twice (which is true, afaik). But this is often misused in stories where a guy is tried for murder of (for example) his wife. Then wife turns up and guy is found innocent....then he goes and kills wife for real, under the protection of double jeopardy. But.....the (actual) murder of the wife is a 2nd "crime", and does not come under the DJ rule. IE in 1st case he would be accused of "on the night of x you killed your wife", and 2nd case is "on night of y you killed your wife". 2 different cases with different clues, locations, time, motive, witness, etc. So not same crime.

But when has reality stopped Hollywood?

Also on subject of Hollywood lies, did you know that when a phone call is made and they need to keep caller on the line to trace it? BS.....when call is connected its known straight away where call was made. Well, it is now, might not have been in earlier films. But the idea has stuck.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

RiderOnTheStorm wrote: »

How do hedgehogs have sex?

,........ carefully!

The piece on Jeopardy reminded me...
Double Jeopardy is a crime novel / film staple, where a guy cannot be tried for the same crime twice (which is true, afaik). But this is often misused in stories where a guy is tried for murder of (for example) his wife. Then wife turns up and guy is found innocent....then he goes and kills wife for real, under the protection of double jeopardy. But.....the (actual) murder of the wife is a 2nd "crime", and does not come under the DJ rule. IE in 1st case he would be accused of "on the night of x you killed your wife", and 2nd case is "on night of y you killed your wife". 2 different cases with different clues, locations, time, motive, witness, etc. So not same crime.

But when has reality stopped Hollywood?

Also on subject of Hollywood lies, did you know that when a phone call is made and they need to keep caller on the line to trace it? BS.....when call is connected its known straight away where call was made. Well, it is now, might not have been in earlier films. But the idea has stuck.

In the novel the accused is a man and in the film it's a woman.

New Home

In the Simpsons, Squeaky-Voiced Teen (Steve Freedman) has a mother. It's Lunchlady Doris (a.k.a. Doris Freedman).

Realt Dearg Sec

New Home wrote: »

In the Simpsons, Squeaky-Voiced Teen (Steve Freedman) has a mother. She's Lunchlady Doris (a.k.a. Doris Freedman).

Of course she disowned him for not giving her a lane at the Bowlarama on league night.

New Home

I forgot about that.

Are Am Eye

uuuggh. It's happened again Mr. New Home.

Ted_YNWA

Are Am Eye wrote: »

uuuggh. It's happened again Mr. New Home.

That's Ms New Home to you.

New Home

Someone give this Ted a biscuit!

BaZmO*

Also in the Simpsons, God and his son are the only characters that have five fingers. All the rest have four.

Peregrine

BaZmO* wrote: »

Also in the Simpsons, God and his son are the only characters that have five fingers. All the rest have four.

Which begs the question of why they count in base 10!

Most societies developed a base 10 number system through counting on both hands. Although it's not unusual to find ones that count in base 33 or 60 using everything from knuckles to nipples. So how did these 8-digit humans develop a base 10 number system?

One theory is that it was passed on from The Simpsons God

New Home

Peregrine wrote: »

Which begs the question of why they count in base 10!

Most societies developed a base 10 number system through counting on both hands. Although it's not unusual to find ones that count in base 33 or 60 using everything from knuckles to nipples. So how did these 8-digit humans develop a base 10 number system?

One theory is that it was passed on from The Simpsons God

Maybe they've 12 toes. :P

New Home

In Bhutan, killing a single crow is a crime comparable to killing a thousand monks.

Realt Dearg Sec

New Home wrote: »

In Bhutan, killing a single crow is a crime comparable to killing a thousand monks.

I watched the Anthony Bourdain episode in Bhutan recently, one of the last he made, it's an incredible country. They run their economy based on a principle of "Gross domestic happiness" rather than productivity, measuring their success on the overall happiness of their people. They also put enormous emphasis on maintaining the environment in all decisions about development and so on. It's changing somewhat, and they're more open to outside relations and so on than they used to be, but it's a remarkably isolated place. They also strictly limit the number of tourists who visit each year.

Kind of like North Korea, we're fascinated by a country that so firmly isolated itself from the world. But without the forced labour camps and the insanity.

cdeb

Bhutan is pronounced like "Butan"

But I always pronounce is "Vutan" cos it's got a séimhiú...

pleas advice

Kiribati is pronounced kiribass

They were known as Gilberts Islands before independence from the UK, and Kiribati is the rendition of Gilberts in the local language, Gilbertese

Fourier

Peregrine wrote: »

This discrepancy was one of the major pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter.

Yeah, basically the stars at the outer edges of most galaxies, including our own, spin around the galactic core too fast for the gravity of the stars in the galactic core to hold them in place.

One possible explanation (though the vastly most likely one as of 2018) is that there is extra material, beyond the stars we can see, that increases the core's gravity, allowing it to hold onto the outer stars. It turns out you need so much of this extra stuff that there's far more mass in it than in the stars we can see. This extra stuff being called Dark Matter.

The other possibility is that gravity doesn't work like we think, but that's gotten more unlikely as the 2010s have progressed.

AckwelFoley

Advbrd wrote: »

A 2 X 4 is really 1-1/2 inches by 3-1/2 inches.

Only PAO

In RWD it will measure 100 x 44

Riddle101

Civil War Veteran Jacob Miller of the 9th Indiana Infantry was shot in the forehead on September 19th 1863 at Brock Field at Chickamauga. He survived the shot, later writing that he had a constant reminder of the Chickamauga Battlefield and the constant pain he suffered from that wound.

Ipso

Fourier wrote: »

Yeah, basically the stars at the outer edges of most galaxies, including our own, spin around the galactic core too fast for the gravity of the stars in the galactic core to hold them in place.

One possible explanation (though the vastly most likely one as of 2018) is that there is extra material, beyond the stars we can see, that increases the core's gravity, allowing it to hold onto the outer stars. It turns out you need so much of this extra stuff that there's far more mass in it than in the stars we can see. This extra stuff being called Dark Matter.

The other possibility is that gravity doesn't work like we think, but that's gotten more unlikely as the 2010s have progressed.

Is it true that bananas offer some kind of proof for dark matter?

Ineedaname

Ipso wrote: »

Is it true that bananas offer some kind of proof for dark matter?

That’s antimatter. Different thing entirely. Antimatter is identical to normal matter but with the opposite charge.

Bananas contain an isotope of potassium known as potassium-40. During the decay process it releases a positron (an electron with a positive charge) at a rate roughly one every 75 minutes.

When antimatter and regular matter particles meet they annihilate each other so it won’t last very long.

pleas advice

49 years and about 12 and three quarter hours ago, the Soviet spaceship Luna 15 crash landed on the moon. It's mission was to collect and return samples of lunar soil to earth, and so be the first to do so in the 'space race'...

At the time of its crash, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the surface of the moon with Apollo 11, getting ready to finish up and head back to earth with their own samples. In one of the first instances of co-operation between the two nations space agencies, the flight path of Luna 15 was released beforehand, to ensure the two missions wouldn't cross paths.

Fourier

Ipso wrote: »

Is it true that bananas offer some kind of proof for dark matter?

As Ineedaname has said, this is Antimatter as opposed to Dark Matter. Although bananas don't provide proof of antimatter (never thought I write that), its existence being established in the 1930s. They just happen to emit incredibly minute amounts of antimatter, but the rate is so low (one particle every 75 minutes as Ineedaname said) that it's not particularly special in this regard.

To explain antimatter:
Every matter particle has a twin with all of its properties reversed, except for mass and something called spin (I won't explain what spin is right now as it would overload this post). These twin particles being what is called antimatter. Usually the twin is named by putting "anti" in front of the usual version:
Proton -> Antiproton
Neutron -> Antineutron

Though in some cases for historical reasons it has its own name:
Electron -> Positron

Antimatter is important in the history of physics as it was the first thing discovered purely mathematically without any evidence of its existence or trying to explain something already seen in experiments.

In 1927, Paul Dirac, a British scientist:


wanted to use quantum mechanics to model the electron. This had already been done, but nobody had done it in a way that worked with Einstein's Relativity. All equations for modelling the electron (there were a good few) either obeyed quantum mechanics (these ones tended to be used for experiments on atoms) or they obeyed relativity (those ones tended to be used in experiments where the electron was fired fast from a cathode tube or detected in the atmosphere). Nobody had an equation that obeyed both. Dirac's hope would be that an equation that obeyed both would explain some of the slightly odd emissions of light from hydrogen found by Charles G. Darwin (grandson of the Charles Darwin who discovered evolution):



Dirac worked on this for a while before in 1928, while looking into the fireplace around 7pm, in St. John's College in Cambridge, he realised that although there were several that obeyed either relativity or quantum mechanics, there was only one possible equation that obeyed both. Here is the fireplace:



He went to his room to work on this equation, expecting nothing more than it just to give slightly more accurate predictions for atomic experiments compared to the equations then in vogue for the electron. So as he worked on it he found what he wanted at first. Not just the emission lines that Darwin had found, but also an explanation of phosphorescence, unexplained at that time.

Then he found something bizarre. Although the equation did give improved predictions, it also kept spitting out extra terms that didn't make sense to him. He realised shortly the extra terms were a new particle, almost identical to the electron, just with opposite charge. At first he thought he must have gone completely wrong somewhere and stopped working on the equation for a bit. He went through three years of trying to figure out what this things was, he thought maybe he was wrong or maybe it was the Proton, before doing something nobody had ever done. He published a paper in 1931 saying his equation was predicting something that had never been seen, not explaining better something already well known. A new particle.

This was criticised on the grounds that there was no reason to expect this particle. No experiments could see it, he hadn't an intuitive explanation or an explanation grounded in physics for why you'd expect it, just "The maths says so".

Then on August 2nd 1932, a odd track was found in a cosmic ray detector at Caltech university in California:


Further experiments at Caltech were able to find more of these tracks. Identical to those of an electron except curved the opposite way. So same mass and spin, but opposite charge. The particle predicted by the Dirac's equation and the first detection of antimatter. Carl David Anderson would go on to win the Nobel Prize for this discovery:


Dirac then proposed that all particles had a twin, because they all obeyed relativity and quantum mechanics, nothing special about the electron in that regard.

And he was right.

I really enjoy Fouriers contributions to this thread. Even if I don't really understand most of them.

Fourier

Candie wrote: »

I really enjoy Fouriers contributions to this thread. Even if I don't really understand most of them.

I'm trying something new with this one, adding in the human element/story, to make it a bit less Robocop.

Fourier

Fourier wrote: »

I'm trying something new with this one, adding in the human element/story, to make it a bit less Robocop.

It worked out well!

I was going to post about Demodex mites but it's just too boring now