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Old 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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Old 31st December 2018, 11:06 AM   #82
Squeegee Beckenheim
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Originally Posted by Loss Leader View Post
Neither parallel lines nor infinity actually exist in nature.
Unless the universe actually is infinite, or there actually are an infinite number of universes within a larger multiverse. It's also currently thought that the centres of black holes are infinitely dense.
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Old 31st December 2018, 11:06 AM   #83
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Originally Posted by JoeMorgue View Post
- 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.
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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Old 31st December 2018, 11:08 AM   #84
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Originally Posted by Squeegee Beckenheim View Post
Unless the universe actually is infinite, or there actually are an infinite number of universes within a larger multiverse. It's also currently thought that the centres of black holes are infinitely dense.
There are numerous different types of infinity, each a different size. That's another fact.
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Old 31st December 2018, 11:19 AM   #85
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Originally Posted by bruto View Post
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?
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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Old 31st December 2018, 11:21 AM   #86
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Originally Posted by baron View Post
There are numerous different types of infinity, each a different size. That's another fact.
Vsauce's lecture on infinity and concepts like the “Aleph-null” and countable vs uncountable infinities was both really interesting and really hard for me to my head around completely.
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Old 31st December 2018, 11:29 AM   #87
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Originally Posted by baron View Post
There are numerous different types of infinity, each a different size. That's another fact.
An infinite number of them in fact.
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Old 31st December 2018, 11:34 AM   #88
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Originally Posted by baron View Post
The male silkworm moth can smell a female moth from seven miles away.
Are you sure that's not the Gypsy Moth?
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Old 31st December 2018, 12:40 PM   #89
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Originally Posted by TheGnome View Post
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.
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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Old 31st December 2018, 12:40 PM   #90
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Originally Posted by JoeMorgue View Post
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.
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.

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Old 31st December 2018, 01:09 PM   #91
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Originally Posted by Cheetah View Post
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.
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.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:09 PM   #92
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Originally Posted by Guybrush Threepwood View Post
Are you sure that's not the Gypsy Moth?
Not sure about gypsy moths, although I could probably smell a real gypsy from seven miles away if the wind was in the right direction.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:19 PM   #93
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Originally Posted by Myriad View Post
Polar bears, even if they're starving, don't eat penguin eggs.

Only because the penguin is extinct.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:23 PM   #94
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Originally Posted by FenerFan View Post
Regardless, neutron stars are cool, that's a fact.
Exact values depend a bit on age, but AFAIK most are still much hotter than the surface of the Sun.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:23 PM   #95
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Originally Posted by Mojo View Post
Only because the penguin is extinct.
Or maybe because penguins live in the antarctic and polar bears live in the arctic.

I'm sure if you gave a starving polar bear some penguin eggs the bear would eat them.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:23 PM   #96
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Originally Posted by Mojo View Post
Only because the penguin is extinct.
I was going to say, Polar Bears don't eat Penguin eggs because there are no Penguins in the Arctic, and no Polar Bears in the Antarctic. But I guess there used to be.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:24 PM   #97
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Originally Posted by Ziggurat View Post
Fishsticks are not fish nor sticks. They are a fungus.
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.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:25 PM   #98
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Originally Posted by lobosrul5 View Post
I was going to say, Polar Bears don't eat Penguin eggs because there are no Penguins in the Arctic, and no Polar Bears in the Antarctic. But I guess there used to be.
The Great Auk wasn't a penguin. Names got confused due to similar appearance.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:29 PM   #99
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Originally Posted by RecoveringYuppy View Post
The Great Auk wasn't a penguin. Names got confused due to similar appearance.
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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Old 31st December 2018, 01:29 PM   #100
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Originally Posted by RecoveringYuppy View Post
The Great Auk wasn't a penguin. Names got confused due to similar appearance.

The Southern Hemisphere penguins were called “penguins” because they looked like the Northern Hemisphere ones.
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Old 31st December 2018, 01:50 PM   #101
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Licking wounds really does help the healing process.
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Old 31st December 2018, 02:00 PM   #102
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Originally Posted by Myriad View Post
Polar bears, even if they're starving, don't eat penguin eggs.

That's because they would have to swim all the way to the Southern hemisphere to find them.
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Old 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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Old 31st December 2018, 02:11 PM   #104
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Originally Posted by lobosrul5 View Post
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.
By Spanish, Portuguese, and Welsh speakers apparently. Since this is an English speaking board that seems a stretch beyond the breaking point.
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Old 31st December 2018, 02:21 PM   #105
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Originally Posted by baron View Post
There are numerous different types of infinity, each a different size. That's another fact.
Yeah, integers go to infinity, the real numbers between 1 and 2 are a bigger infinity that that.
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Old 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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Old 31st December 2018, 02:24 PM   #107
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Originally Posted by Diablo View Post
Licking wounds really does help the healing process.
Yes I suppose Saint Francis proved that didn't he. Mind you he had divine help at the time.
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Old 31st December 2018, 02:51 PM   #108
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Originally Posted by Thor 2 View Post
Yes I suppose Saint Francis proved that didn't he. Mind you he had divine help at the time.
There ain't no saints, and no divine help neither, though you may need both.
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Old 31st December 2018, 02:59 PM   #109
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Originally Posted by Diablo View Post
There ain't no saints, and no divine help neither, though you may need both.

Double negative hidden in there. Perhaps a Freudian slip betraying a belief in saints.
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Old 31st December 2018, 03:06 PM   #110
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Originally Posted by kellyb View Post
Interesting article!
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Old 31st December 2018, 04:27 PM   #111
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Originally Posted by kellyb View Post
Is it ****!
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Old 31st December 2018, 04:30 PM   #112
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Quote:
There are more stars in the heavens than all the grains of sands covering the world's beaches.
Carl Sagan.
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Old 31st December 2018, 04:39 PM   #113
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Every breath of air you take contains at least one molecule exhaled by Caesar as he died.

(souce)
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Old 31st December 2018, 05:04 PM   #114
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Originally Posted by Loss Leader View Post
Every breath of air you take contains at least one molecule exhaled by Caesar as he died.

(souce)
I’ve seen this before, but can’t get my head around it. I might buy the book you reference.
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Old 31st December 2018, 05:06 PM   #115
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Originally Posted by Loss Leader View Post
Every breath of air you take contains at least one molecule exhaled by Caesar as he died.

(souce)
Wasn't there something about every litre of water you drink containing x number of molecules peed out by Napoleon?

Source: Unknown
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Old 31st December 2018, 05:17 PM   #116
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Originally Posted by Loss Leader View Post
Every breath of air you take contains at least one molecule exhaled by Caesar as he died.

(souce)
Originally Posted by jonesdave116 View Post
Wasn't there something about every litre of water you drink containing x number of molecules peed out by Napoleon?

Source: Unknown
You are telling me that the air I am inhaling is actually Cesar's dying breath. The water I am drinking is actually Napoleon's pee. Next, you'll probably tell me that this bread I am eating is actually the flesh of Jesus.
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Old 31st December 2018, 05:21 PM   #117
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Originally Posted by DevilsAdvocate View Post
You are telling me that the air I am inhaling is actually Cesar's dying breath. The water I am drinking is actually Napoleon's pee. Next, you'll probably tell me that this bread I am eating is actually the flesh of Jesus.
Nah, I think that bit was made up.
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Old 31st December 2018, 05:29 PM   #118
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Originally Posted by Mojo View Post
The Southern Hemisphere penguins were called “penguins” because they looked like the Northern Hemisphere ones.
Wouldn't that mean that Great Auks are penguins and antarctic penguins aren't penguins, penguins just look like penguins?
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Old 31st December 2018, 05:44 PM   #119
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Originally Posted by lionking View Post
I’ve seen this before, but can’t get my head around it. I might buy the book you reference.
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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Old 31st December 2018, 05:51 PM   #120
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