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31st December 2018, 07:59 AM | #41 |
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"If everyone in the room says water is wet and I say it's dry that makes me smart because at least I'm thinking for myself!" - The Proudly Wrong. |
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31st December 2018, 08:01 AM | #42 |
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I actually think it's wrong as he stated it, but something like it is true.
He said:
Quote:
However, something like what he said is true, not of the atoms, but of the nucleons: if you were to disassemble the protons and neutrons (somehow?) into their constituent quarks, on the other hand, then you'd find that most of the mass was missing. Because the mass of a proton really is mostly in the form of the binding energy (the gluons I guess), and the quarks' mass makes up a small proportion of the total. |
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"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Isaac Asimov |
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31st December 2018, 08:09 AM | #43 |
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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31st December 2018, 08:19 AM | #44 |
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Quantum tunneling actually happens
As a moving particle approaches a barrier it can’t cross, uncertainty in its position means there is a chance it will already be on the other side of said barrier and keep moving as if the barrier didn’t exist at all. |
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31st December 2018, 08:25 AM | #45 |
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One of my favourites is that if you look at a spot 13 billion light years away in that direction:
<-------------------- And look at another spot 13 billion light years away in that direction: ---------------------> You will be looking at two points that are (well, were) much closer to each other than they are to you. point 1 <----------13 billion light years------------- you -------------13 billion light years------------> point 2 Weird right? In fact, I think those two points are actually only tens of millions of light years apart, but don't quote me on that. |
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"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Isaac Asimov |
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31st December 2018, 08:27 AM | #46 |
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"Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen" |
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31st December 2018, 08:29 AM | #47 |
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- The counter-intuitive solution to the Monty Hall / Three Prisoner problem.
- The Birthday Paradox - The fact that if you well shuffle a standard deck of cards you've with near certainty created an order of cards that have never before appeared in the universe. - The Banach-Tarski Paradox - The Zipf Phenonoma |
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31st December 2018, 08:31 AM | #48 |
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"Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen" |
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31st December 2018, 08:37 AM | #49 |
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31st December 2018, 08:44 AM | #50 |
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31st December 2018, 08:50 AM | #51 |
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I don't trust atoms. They make up everything. |
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31st December 2018, 08:53 AM | #52 |
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Yeah. lolmiller is certainly right that those two points are both much further away from us now than 13 billion light years, and also much further away from each other.
But we aren't seeing them now. We see two points, separated in the sky by 180 degrees, as they were 13 billion years ago. And at that time they were very* close together. *Relatively speaking, anyway. |
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"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Isaac Asimov |
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31st December 2018, 08:55 AM | #53 |
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The blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever existed.
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I don't trust atoms. They make up everything. |
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31st December 2018, 08:56 AM | #54 |
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Polar bears, even if they're starving, don't eat penguin eggs.
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31st December 2018, 08:58 AM | #55 |
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Originally Posted by Mojo
Well, no. But it is a scientific fact. ETA, should have read page two before replying. |
31st December 2018, 08:59 AM | #56 |
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Humans use about 1/3 of all energy captured by photosynthesis on the earth.
This takes into account agriculture, lumber, fishing, etc. I may be misremembering that number, but it was something like that. I read it in E O Wilson's Diversity of Life, which, IIRC was written in the 90s, so if anything it's probably higher now. |
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"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Isaac Asimov |
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31st December 2018, 08:59 AM | #57 |
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Oh, and if we count History as a science, this one always gets a "really?" from people who don't already know it - Oxford University was a fully-fledged university compete with halls of residence nearly 100 years before the origination of Aztec society.
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I don't trust atoms. They make up everything. |
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31st December 2018, 09:00 AM | #58 |
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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31st December 2018, 09:00 AM | #59 |
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"... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Isaac Asimov |
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31st December 2018, 09:03 AM | #60 |
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'A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggardly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, superservicable, finical rogue;... the son and heir of a mongral bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."' -The Bard |
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31st December 2018, 09:08 AM | #61 |
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The original Star Wars was in theaters when France used the guillotine for the last time.
Mammoths were still alive on one island in Northern Siberia when the Pyramids were being built The Pyramids were as ancient to the Ancient Greeks as they Ancient Greeks are to us. Tyrannosaur lived closer to us then it did to Stegosaurus. The fax machine was invented before the modern doorknob. We put men on the moon before it occurred to anyone to put wheels on luggage. Warner Brothers Studio was founded a couple of months before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. |
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31st December 2018, 09:28 AM | #62 |
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I don't trust atoms. They make up everything. |
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31st December 2018, 09:29 AM | #63 |
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Much of the water in your body has been previously peed by something. Or someone.
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31st December 2018, 10:01 AM | #64 |
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Fleas can jump as high as 38 times their body length, about three inches. And the acceleration is so intense that fleas have to withstand 100 Gs.
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31st December 2018, 10:03 AM | #65 |
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At first I was also struck by your statement, thinking no he got it wrong, the amazing fact is that our DNA code represents a continuous line for the 3 billion years since the origin of DNA-based life on the planet. That is amazing enough and I've thought about it more than once: my DNA has been duplicated, mutated, rearranged, and altered dramatically in that time but what I have was copied from the DNA of my parents which was copied from the DNA of their parents which was copied....from the DNA of a shared ancestor with the chimps.. which was copied from a shared ancestor with all vertebrates... which was copied from the the DNA in original "first" organism.
But then I thought more about your post and I think you are right. All that copying of DNA took place in cells. So each of our cells originated from cells (including sperm and oocytes in sexual species) which originated from cells... all the way back. Many or most of the actual molecules in those cells may have been diluted out to zero during that time but the lineage of cell to cell to cell was absolutely continuous! Just one twist: some of those cells may have been metabolically inactive spores. But biologically they were cells nonetheless. Thanks! Neat idea! Everything now alive, including ourselves, are the unbroken children of children of children... from the very first life. We are the products of unbroken successful reproduction and selection at each step in that long trip. So don't drive drunk this NYE: it took 3 billion years to create who you are and it would be very disappointing to the primordial ooze that first invented DNA if their invention, and their cells, were to come to an end in you for such a stupid reason as being killed in a car crash. |
31st December 2018, 10:15 AM | #66 |
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31st December 2018, 10:22 AM | #67 |
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Quite so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclea...g_energy_curve A proton has a mass on the order of 900 MeV, so a nucleon binding energy on the order of 9 MeV gives you only about 1% difference in mass.
Quote:
Quote:
The bare mass of up quarks is so light, it cannot be straightforwardly calculated because relativistic effects have to be taken into account. Due to strong force mediated by gluons in the gluon field, the quarks move at roughly 99.995% of the speed of light, leading to Lorentz factor of roughly 100. As a result, the combined rest mass of quarks is barely 1% of proton or neutron mass.This is further complicated by the fact that you cannot actually separate all the quarks, since they cannot exist on their own. Pull them apart hard enough, and you just end up generating new quarks so that the parts you pulled apart each still have at least 2 quarks. |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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31st December 2018, 10:25 AM | #68 |
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Nope, cells die all the time and are replaced. They are replaced by another cell dividing in two. No cell is ever created from scratch, apart from the very first one. Ever since then they have been dividing until one became a sperm and one an egg and merged and started dividing etc. and became you. Edit: Oops, so I read the rest of the thread, ninja'd so many times. |
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31st December 2018, 10:27 AM | #69 |
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Ringworm is not a ring nor a worm. It's a fungus.
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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31st December 2018, 10:28 AM | #70 |
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Fishsticks are not fish nor sticks. They are a fungus.
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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31st December 2018, 10:32 AM | #71 |
I would save the receptionist.
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Neither parallel lines nor infinity actually exist in nature.
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31st December 2018, 10:33 AM | #72 |
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- Brontosaurus was a dinosaur. Then it wasn't. Now (last time I checked) it is again.
- The jury isn't all the way in yet, but there's some strong evidence that Torosaurus and Triceratops were the same animal. |
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31st December 2018, 10:37 AM | #73 |
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No here NASA is not good enough for me. They speak of a sizeable part (could not find the 1%) but if you cannot discern the differrence between connected and disconnected antenna that's not sizeable the way I use that word.
I really would need some quantitative data. Look I don't discount the fact that some CMB is picked up, I just contest the amount. |
31st December 2018, 10:40 AM | #74 |
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"If everyone in the room says water is wet and I say it's dry that makes me smart because at least I'm thinking for myself!" - The Proudly Wrong. |
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31st December 2018, 10:42 AM | #75 |
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The pistol shrimp kills its prey by means of a shock wave caused by the clicking of its claw, the generation of which momentarily attains a temperature hotter than the surface of the Sun.
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31st December 2018, 10:49 AM | #76 |
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The male silkworm moth can smell a female moth from seven miles away.
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31st December 2018, 10:55 AM | #77 |
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31st December 2018, 10:58 AM | #78 |
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Koala fingerprints are practically indistinguishable from human ones.
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"If everyone in the room says water is wet and I say it's dry that makes me smart because at least I'm thinking for myself!" - The Proudly Wrong. |
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31st December 2018, 11:04 AM | #79 |
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I haven't tried to derive percentages, but here's one source:
https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r...2-S!!PDF-E.pdf Page 6 shows a plot of noise from several different sources at different frequencies, including cosmic background. |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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31st December 2018, 11:05 AM | #80 |
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A neutron star is so dense and its gravity is so strong that if an object was dropped from one meter above the star’s surface, it would hit the surface at a speed of 7.2 million km per hour.
Also, a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh about a billion tons. Of course, it would be impossible to scoop up a teaspoon of neutron star or to suspend an object a meter above its surface before letting it go. Still, I believe the math works out. Regardless, neutron stars are cool, that's a fact. |
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