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2nd January 2019, 01:01 PM | #201 |
Penultimate Amazing
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2nd January 2019, 01:11 PM | #202 |
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2nd January 2019, 01:24 PM | #203 |
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2nd January 2019, 01:28 PM | #204 |
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2nd January 2019, 02:30 PM | #205 |
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2nd January 2019, 03:23 PM | #206 |
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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 (Molière) 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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2nd January 2019, 03:29 PM | #207 |
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Having sex with hedgehogs is dangerous.
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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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2nd January 2019, 04:24 PM | #208 |
Penultimate Amazing
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2nd January 2019, 06:16 PM | #209 |
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Alas, while possible, the claim is impossible to substantiate. The problem is that nobody knows for certain exactly how long a stadion was. See Wikipedia for a brief discussion.
Or rather, it's possible that Eratosthenes was exactly correct, but there is no firm consensus about exactly how long his units were. |
2nd January 2019, 06:21 PM | #210 |
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A fly lands on the ceiling by doing a half-loop, rather than a half-roll.
A bumblebee can be shown to be incapable of flight. As long as you pretend it is a fixed-wing aircraft powered by piston engines and propellers. When a boulder erupts from the earth during a winter's worth of freeze-thaw cycles, it is pulled up rather than pushed. The reproductive channel of the human female is remarkably hostile to human sperm. There exists a species of slime mold with 20,000 sexes. There exists an insect which produces sperm which are longer than the producer's body. |
2nd January 2019, 07:07 PM | #211 |
Penultimate Amazing
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2nd January 2019, 07:22 PM | #212 |
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Also, Columbus would have known what the current consensus was wrt to the Earth's circumference because "the savants of Spain" had told him.
Actually, everyone he talked to told him that.
Quote:
To keep his shipmates in good spirits he also "cooked" the books on the way over. |
2nd January 2019, 11:07 PM | #213 |
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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 (Molière) 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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3rd January 2019, 02:03 AM | #214 |
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I know you didn't start that, so no offense to you, but that is one of the dumbest (and most incorrect) pieces of "trivia" making the rounds. If you are talking about the easternmost (or westernmost, southernmost, or northernmost) point of something you are talking about from the perspective of that something. Period. Full stop. In no logical sense would you ever be talking about its most easternmost point from the perspective of something else. So from the perspective of the "USA", the "USA's easternmost point" would be in Maine. It is entirely illogical to talk about it from the perspective of the Earth and its hemispheres unless you specifically said that is what you are discussing. It would be as dumb as saying "the easternmost point in the USA changes twice a day" and leaving out "from the perspective of the sun". Again, unless you qualify it, the perspective of the "something" can only be the "something" and nothing else. So unless you implicitly add "from the perspective of the Earth and its hemispheres and not from the perspective of itself" that piece of trivia is hogwash. |
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3rd January 2019, 02:05 AM | #215 |
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3rd January 2019, 02:09 AM | #216 |
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Eleven plus two = twelve plus one
In more ways than one |
3rd January 2019, 02:15 AM | #217 |
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What do Narwhals, Magnets and Apollo 13 have in common? Think about it.... |
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3rd January 2019, 06:59 AM | #219 |
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Any sufficiently advanced idea is indistinguishable from idiocy to those who don't actually understanding the concept. |
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3rd January 2019, 07:24 AM | #220 |
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The "dark side of the Moon" is not the same as the "far side of the Moon". Except sometimes.
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Science is self-correcting. Woo is self-contradicting. |
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3rd January 2019, 10:26 AM | #221 |
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There's no blue pigment in blue jay or bluebird feathers. The blue color comes from a light scattering effect.
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3rd January 2019, 10:34 AM | #222 |
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You can make a lead balloon that does float in air.
Mythbusters did it! |
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3rd January 2019, 03:23 PM | #223 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Now you've gone and made me feel sad...
I tell people in my classes that the evolutionary "invention" of sexual reproduction was also the invention of death. Two of my gametes, ~half my DNA sequence, and a part of the cell guts that made up my sperm went to my sons and will continue in this billions of years saga, but all the other 10 trillion cells of which I am comprised will die. Well, that's the way it is I guess... |
3rd January 2019, 04:35 PM | #224 |
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I'm not sure what the meaning of pound is exactly.
If it means weight as measured with a scale then of course this is trivially true. If instead it is a measure of mass, and we're doing the experiment in an atmoshpere, then the feathers will weigh a tiny bit less because of the different buoyancies. I'm not going to estimate by how much. What weighs more, a ... was a common joke question around here. I saw a small treatise once that said that that smartass kid who first mentioned this was actually the first one to answer the question the proper way. |
3rd January 2019, 05:44 PM | #225 |
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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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3rd January 2019, 06:44 PM | #226 |
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A pound of gold, of course,
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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant. |
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3rd January 2019, 08:26 PM | #227 |
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3rd January 2019, 10:11 PM | #228 |
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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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4th January 2019, 12:34 AM | #229 |
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The inventor of the cat flap was Isaac Newton Jupiter was originally the nearest planet to the Sun Tardigrades can survive temperatures one degree above absolute zero Men have nipples because during pregnancy the uterus is flooded with oestrogen |
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A MIND IS LIKE A PARACHUTE : IT DOES NOT WORK UNLESS IT IS OPEN |
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4th January 2019, 03:30 AM | #230 |
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The units of the Hubble Constant are an inverse time, whose value is approximately equal to one over the age of the universe.
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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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4th January 2019, 06:07 AM | #231 |
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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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4th January 2019, 08:30 AM | #232 |
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It's called "Irridescense". Easiest to see on pigeon necks. It's also related to "metallic" paints, which are actually small mica flakes in the paint. Mica flakes will also suspend in many liquids, like those shimmery shampoos. That effect is used in movie special effects, like "Worm Holes" and Star Gates. You can buy the powder on eBay as "mica powder dry lube". But it's cheapest at a pottery clay supplier. It's cheap enough to use it as a filler in plastics, like my wiper blade parts on my pick up truck. I guess the plastic has weathered away, now they are glittery.
And I saw a rainbow inside my new shotgun choke tube yesterday. I guess it was a combination of the conical taper and the texture of the ground surface. It made me think of a kaleidoscope. I suspect it will go away when the carbon of the first shot fills the surface texture. |
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4th January 2019, 08:32 AM | #233 |
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4th January 2019, 08:45 AM | #234 |
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You would want to use the density of the collagen that the feathers are made form. I don't think it would be any where near as big as the feathers.
But hmmm, feathers being hollow tubes, I wonder if birds can be filling the tubes with hydrogen?* That would make a big difference between weigh and mass, since the hydrogen would subtract from the weight but add to the mass. * If not, I wonder if we can GMO some kind of enzyme that separates the hydrogen from water? Make birds into blimps? No, I think they would be dirigibles. oooh, I just got rich- limitless free hydrogen without the electricity costs of electrolysis! Enzymes would be a really cheap catalyst. |
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Any sufficiently advanced idea is indistinguishable from idiocy to those who don't actually understanding the concept. |
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4th January 2019, 08:46 AM | #235 |
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Up the River! Anyone that wraps themselves in the Union Flag and also lives in tax exile is a [redacted] |
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4th January 2019, 08:46 AM | #236 |
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Not all blue feathers are iridescent. Some are (and some feathers of other colors are as well), such as those of grackles, hummingbirds, birds of paradise, and peacocks. But bluebird and blue jay feathers appear as a plain matte blue. In those cases it's internal scattering between the fibers, not surface iridescence. |
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"*Except Myriad. Even Cthulhu would give him a pat on the head and an ice cream and send him to the movies while he ended the rest of the world." - Foster Zygote |
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4th January 2019, 08:55 AM | #237 |
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It does make a good point though. It's why I phrased it as "...don't have blue pigment," rather than going overboard and claiming e.g. "bluebirds (or bluebird feathers) aren't really blue" as some gee-whiz popular science writers sometimes do. Which is silly, of course they're blue; they preferentially reflect blue light. It's just that the reason they do so is different from what we might expect. If you were looking for natural dyes and tried to develop a blue dye by mashing up a bunch of blue jay feathers, you'd be disappointed in the results. |
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"*Except Myriad. Even Cthulhu would give him a pat on the head and an ice cream and send him to the movies while he ended the rest of the world." - Foster Zygote |
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4th January 2019, 09:19 AM | #238 |
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through a scribbled morning waving necessary ankles
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If all the hydrogen in my body were replaced by deuterium, I'd be about 20 pounds heavier.
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4th January 2019, 09:31 AM | #239 |
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You would also die.
Deuterium can form all the same chemicals as hydrogen, but it's not chemically identical. In particular, chemical reactions happen a bit slower with deuterium than with hydrogen, and since complex organisms are very sensitive to reaction rates, the difference is enough to kill you. You can tolerate some fraction of H to D substitution, but not 100%. |
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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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4th January 2019, 09:41 AM | #240 |
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There is truth and there are lies. - President Joseph R. Biden, January 20th, 2021 |
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