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30th December 2018, 03:48 PM | #1 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Name one or more favorite scientific facts!
I'll start.
The stars you see in the sky at night are snapshots of the distant past, and the stars themselves could be long dead. |
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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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30th December 2018, 04:06 PM | #2 |
Illuminator
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Every one of your ancestors, in spite of the odds, lived long enough to reproduce.
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30th December 2018, 04:21 PM | #3 |
Philosopher
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There is more carbon missing from agricultural soils worldwide than the extra carbon in the atmosphere causing AGW.
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Scott "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless labour; & of looking at plants & animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system." Bill Mollison Biome Carbon Cycle Management |
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30th December 2018, 04:30 PM | #4 |
Penultimate Amazing
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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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30th December 2018, 06:15 PM | #5 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Er, um, not really. Most visible stars are within 200 light years. The furthest is about 16K light years. And it's not terribly likely any of the stars we can see is actually dead now. Betelgeuse is one of the few visible stars expected to explode "soon" but soon in this context is thought to be something like a million years. At 640 light years away that gives about 1 in 2,000 chance that it has already gone supernova.
ETA: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ancient_stars.png ETA: The one major galaxy we can see is a couple million years old. |
30th December 2018, 07:32 PM | #6 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection.
Useful in photography, billiards, racquetball, jai-alai, marbles, light waves, sound waves, radio waves, too much to count. |
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Science is self-correcting. Woo is self-contradicting. |
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30th December 2018, 07:53 PM | #7 |
Philosopher
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When you turn your heater on in Winter you are not trying to get more hot, but trying to cool down at a more comfortable rate.
Norm |
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Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in Vain |
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30th December 2018, 08:06 PM | #8 |
Thinker
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To continue in RecoveringYuppy's vein, things people consider to be scientic facts sometimes aren't.
This e.g. is definitely not true in the case of ball games like the four you mentioned, except as a rough first order approximation. It neglects the rotational momentum of the balls. |
30th December 2018, 08:08 PM | #9 |
Penultimate Amazing
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The non-existence of the intra-mercurial planet "Vulcan", a planet, first proposed over 100 years ago, in order to try to explain the errors in Mercury's precession measurements...
Turns out that Mercury's precession errors are caused by the massive gravity well of the Sun due to General relativistic effects. This is beautifully explained for the layman in this short missive by Isaac Asimov - an oldie but a goodie http://geobeck.tripod.com/frontier/planet.htm |
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If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong. Its TRE45ON season... convict the F45CIST!! |
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30th December 2018, 08:12 PM | #10 |
I would save the receptionist.
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If you were to disassemble a man into his constituent atoms and then weigh those atoms, they would be about the same weight as the man. But if you disassembled the atoms into protons, neutrons and electrons and weighed each of those, they would only weigh about 5% of the guy.
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30th December 2018, 08:16 PM | #11 |
Penultimate Amazing
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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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30th December 2018, 08:30 PM | #12 |
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Scott "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless labour; & of looking at plants & animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system." Bill Mollison Biome Carbon Cycle Management |
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30th December 2018, 08:40 PM | #13 |
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- About 1% of the static you saw when not tuned to channel on an old analog television set was background radiation from the Big Bang.
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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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30th December 2018, 08:45 PM | #14 |
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"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" -Mark Twain "Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all" -Rosencrantz, on Hamlet |
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30th December 2018, 09:36 PM | #15 |
I would save the receptionist.
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30th December 2018, 10:19 PM | #16 |
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Banana trees "walk"
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30th December 2018, 10:24 PM | #17 |
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From the genetic standpoint we are more like yeast than unlike it.
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Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal (Moličre) A pedant is a man who studies a vacuum through instruments that allow him to draw cross-sections of the details (John Ciardi) |
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30th December 2018, 10:45 PM | #18 |
Penultimate Amazing
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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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30th December 2018, 10:55 PM | #19 |
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Per size and ratio, gonorrhea is the strongest (known) creature on earth.
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30th December 2018, 10:57 PM | #20 |
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You have been alive for more than 4.5 billion years, sort of.
Literally every living cell in your body has been functioning continuously for all that time. |
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"... when you dig my grave, could you make it shallow so that I can feel the rain" - DMB |
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30th December 2018, 11:04 PM | #21 |
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30th December 2018, 11:08 PM | #22 | |||
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Found it
7-10
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30th December 2018, 11:17 PM | #23 |
Incurable Optimist
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There were many facts in 'Living With The Stars' by Karel and Iris Schrijver - far too many to remember - but there was one about thousands of C4 atoms in each of our cels every second breaking down into something else, nitrogen iirc. Sorry to be a bit vague!
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30th December 2018, 11:50 PM | #24 |
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The biomass of all humans is roughly equal to the biomass of all ants.
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31st December 2018, 12:17 AM | #25 |
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That is cool tbf
Presumably with ants being so strong, that if every human sat together on every ant together the ants could all carry us to the pub. Would need to be a big pub though.......Actually we could get all the ants to build the worlds biggest anthill and the humans could fashion it into massive pub. Coasters and glasses might be an issue, but we could get the ants to collect nuts and other finger food |
31st December 2018, 01:03 AM | #26 |
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31st December 2018, 01:17 AM | #27 |
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31st December 2018, 01:17 AM | #28 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Yep, one of my favourites too;
"a small proportion of the the atoms in your gold wedding ring/engagement ring/necklace/whatever were formed the the fires of supernovae, but the majority those atoms come from an even more spectacular event, the collision of two neutron stars." |
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If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong. Its TRE45ON season... convict the F45CIST!! |
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31st December 2018, 01:24 AM | #29 |
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31st December 2018, 02:34 AM | #30 |
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Knowing that we do not know, it does not necessarily follow that we can not know. |
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31st December 2018, 03:09 AM | #31 |
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Paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than with you or me.
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31st December 2018, 03:10 AM | #32 |
Muse
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Not so much a specific fact but the way some things in the math keep turning up like pi, e and sequences like the Fibonacci series or sines and cosines or how often parabolas turn up. It's impressive to me how universal some of these things are.
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31st December 2018, 03:48 AM | #33 |
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31st December 2018, 04:01 AM | #34 |
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31st December 2018, 05:25 AM | #35 |
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...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015 |
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31st December 2018, 05:27 AM | #36 |
Penultimate Amazing
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The male elephant has a motile penis.
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...our governments are just trying to protect us from terror. In the same way that someone banging a hornets’ nest with a stick is trying to protect us from hornets. Frankie Boyle, Guardian, July 2015 |
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31st December 2018, 05:30 AM | #37 |
Thinker
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Would you have a link or something to support this? Just offhand I plain don't believe this.
Most of what you call static is thermal noise generated in the receiver. Very little is picked up by the antenna as you could see when you disconnected it. Also I think there is only little background radiation from the Big Bang in the VHF and UHF range (up to about 1 GHz) that could be picked up by a TV receiver. I would be quite interested if you could prove me wrong. That would be one more thing I didn't get. |
31st December 2018, 05:34 AM | #38 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Science is self-correcting. Woo is self-contradicting. |
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31st December 2018, 05:46 AM | #39 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Will Ferrell has been funny to some people some of the time.
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31st December 2018, 07:46 AM | #40 |
Penultimate Amazing
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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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