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31st December 2018, 11:06 AM | #81 |
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There's a Andy Warhol drawing of a penis on the moon.
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31st December 2018, 11:06 AM | #82 |
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31st December 2018, 11:06 AM | #83 |
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I also seem to recall reading recently that someone found a dinosaur that may have been even bigger than a blue whale. I've at least temporarily lost the reference, and I'm not sure how sure they are. Any help here?
e.t.a. looked it up and it seems that although there may have been a dinosaur longer than a blue whale, the whale still wins on total mass. I saw one last year. They're BIG! |
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31st December 2018, 11:08 AM | #84 |
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31st December 2018, 11:19 AM | #85 |
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Well... maybe sorta.
Okay it's really hard to fine exact, to the decimal point stats for the maximum length and weight of a blue whale since... they are too big to like just stick on a scale so all "official" measurements have come from animals that have been cut into segments and weighed in pieces. Officially the longest was a male killed near the South Shetland Islands in 1926 at 104 feet long and the heaviest was 181 tonnes, but I'd be willing to fudge those numbers a percent or two in either direction. We'll round up and say 105 feet long, 190 tonnes as "the biggest" blue whale. Now if we're going by length several of the very largest Sauropod dinosaurs are a bit longer, with lengths of up to 115 feet being fair and reasonable estimates for creatures like Argentinosaurus and 121 feet for Patagotitan. Now weight... that's a whole other story. Even the heaviest estimates for the biggest Sauropods put them at half the weight of even an average blue whale with aforementioned Argentinosaurus high estimates at only about 80 tonnes. You're just not going to get raw, pure mass like that from a land animal. Although another wrinkles is just how much of an extreme outlier the Blue Whale is in size. Take it out of the equation and the next biggest whale, The North Pacific Right Whale, is only about 50-60 feet long and weighs in about 60 tonnes which does put it closer in scale to some of the very biggest dinosaurs, again with the over-reaching caveat that getting numbers from extinct animals requires a lot of educated guesswork. Why the Blue Whale is so bloody big is almost an interesting question in itself. |
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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, 11:21 AM | #86 |
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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, 11:29 AM | #87 |
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31st December 2018, 11:34 AM | #88 |
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31st December 2018, 12:40 PM | #89 |
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Would you believe Universe Today?
https://www.universetoday.com/25560/...ang-tv-signal/ "when you are between channels on an analog television, the snow that you see on the screen is made up of interference from background signals that the antenna on your TV is picking up. Some of the “snow” is from other transmissions here on Earth, and some is from other radio emissions from space. Part of that interference – about 1% or less – comes from background radiation leftover from the Big Bang, called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The same is true for FM radios – when the radio is tuned to a frequency that is between stations, part of the hiss that you hear, called “white noise”, is leftover radiation from the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago." Would you believe physics.org? http://www.physics.org/featuredetail.asp?id=45 5. It's in the air around you - even in the room where you are now It had absolutely nowhere to go since it was bottled up in the Universe, and the Universe, by definition, is all there is. Every cubic centimetre of space is currently being traversed by 300 photons from the big bang. Tune your TV between the stations and about 1% of the static on the screen is from the big bang fireball. EDIT: BTW, "Every cubic centimetre of space is currently being traversed by 300 photons from the big bang." that is a very cool fact! |
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31st December 2018, 12:40 PM | #90 |
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Oxford University was already 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.
Cleopatra was alive closer to the present day, than when the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. Eratosthenes calculated the size of the Earth to only a very small margin of error 1600 years before Columbus tried to sail west to get to the Far East. He should have known it would've been impossible for him to reach China without running out of fresh water, even had the Americas not existed. |
31st December 2018, 01:09 PM | #91 |
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Maybe I'm just nitpicking here, but when a cell reproduces itself it doesn't simply 'divide'. Chromosomes duplicate themselves using molecules taken from the environment (ie: the food you eat). A new set of chromosomes made of new DNA copied from the previous chromosome's DNA goes off into a new cell. The original cell eventually dies, the new cell continues the process of taking in more food and producing copies of itself and then dying.
That this process has been going on since the first strand of self-replicating molecules billions of years ago, evolving and changing over time into its current configuration is not the same as saying: "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."That was the original comment I was replying to and I still think it is wrong. A cell is more complex than a strand of self-replicating DNA. A cell contains various organelles and it exists for a finite amount of time. Any given cell now living inside any organism on earth is descended from a long line of previous cells all the way back to the origins of life, but none of those individual cells in your body has been functioning continuously for 4.5 billion years. |
31st December 2018, 01:09 PM | #92 |
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31st December 2018, 01:19 PM | #93 |
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31st December 2018, 01:23 PM | #94 |
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"Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen" |
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31st December 2018, 01:23 PM | #95 |
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31st December 2018, 01:23 PM | #96 |
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31st December 2018, 01:24 PM | #97 |
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An Egg cream contains neither egg nor cream.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_cream *one might argue that it does not contain any Chocolate either. From an interseting thread over on reddit. |
31st December 2018, 01:25 PM | #98 |
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31st December 2018, 01:29 PM | #99 |
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It seems to have been called penguin by someone before penguins were even observed in the antarctic, since that is where the modern penguin got its name from (I'm reading about them on Wiki). So they were penguins in a sense. Just not closely related to the birds we now call penguins. And thir range seemed to have overlapped with Polar Bears at least marginally. I would be curious to know if Polar Bears did indeed eat their eggs.
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31st December 2018, 01:29 PM | #100 |
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31st December 2018, 01:50 PM | #101 |
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Licking wounds really does help the healing process.
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31st December 2018, 02:00 PM | #102 |
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31st December 2018, 02:02 PM | #103 |
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Can we please not turn this into "Pedantic little brain teasers: the Thread?"
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31st December 2018, 02:11 PM | #104 |
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31st December 2018, 02:21 PM | #105 |
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31st December 2018, 02:23 PM | #106 |
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Hydrinos are real!!!
I read it on the Internet! [Ooops..] |
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31st December 2018, 02:24 PM | #107 |
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Thinking is a faith hazard. |
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31st December 2018, 02:51 PM | #108 |
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31st December 2018, 02:59 PM | #109 |
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Thinking is a faith hazard. |
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31st December 2018, 03:06 PM | #110 |
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Julia |
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31st December 2018, 04:27 PM | #111 |
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31st December 2018, 04:30 PM | #112 |
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Quote:
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“There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.” - Victor Hugo “Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.” - George Carlin |
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31st December 2018, 05:04 PM | #114 |
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31st December 2018, 05:06 PM | #115 |
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“There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.” - Victor Hugo “Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.” - George Carlin |
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31st December 2018, 05:17 PM | #116 |
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31st December 2018, 05:21 PM | #117 |
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“There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the priest.” - Victor Hugo “Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.” - George Carlin |
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31st December 2018, 05:29 PM | #118 |
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31st December 2018, 05:44 PM | #119 |
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It just comes down to the fact that there are more molecules in a breath of air than there are breaths of air in the atmosphere.
Say you have a box of tennis balls. You pull out a ball, then put it back in the box and stir. Then I come along and pull out a ball. Chances are I've got a new ball. But now let's say that they are ping-pong balls. You pull out a handful, then put it back in and stir. Then I pull out a handful. If a handful contains five balls, but there are only 3 handfuls of balls in the box (15 balls), I've probably picked up one of your balls. The total volume of ping-pong balls might be the same as the total volume of tennis balls, but it's the fact that there are more of them, and we mix them up in between, that means I'll probably take one that you'd touched. Molecules in the air are really small, and they do get mixed up over time. |
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31st December 2018, 05:51 PM | #120 |
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Eulers's Identity.
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