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Got one of those here in Glasgow on the M8. Always carnage.
Yeah, just like that one. I thought my girlfriend was going to have an aneurism. If you're only in Glasgow you probably heard her.
we’ve run out of mind-blowing facts after a page and a quarter,
Oh, no, that can't be right at all.
Here's one: Samsung have a pneumatic arse that they use to test how their phones cope with being sat on.
….and we’ve run out of mind-blowing facts after a page and a quarter, that one having appeared halfway down the first page.
Oh balls. Sorry, I missed it in all the Exciting Motorway Chat.
Okay, not exactly mind blowing, but in any group of 23 people or more, at least two of them will probably share a birthday.
Another: The woodpecker can lick its own brain. (Its tongue can be drawn up the back of its skull to cushion its brain when pecking wood.)
Here’s one: Samsung have a pneumatic arse that they use to test how their phones cope with being sat on.
Not exactly mind-blowing - have you seen the number of pneumatic arses there are on the politics threads, posting 24/7?
oi, it's a while since I've been called pneumatic.
One familiar to the xkcd massiv:
there are species of orchid which are pollinated by bees, imitating a female bee to entice a male to pseudo copulation...
I know. An easy mistake to make but moving on. (Note: these are not honey bees, where it's only the sterile female workers which get out and about round the flowers, most bee species are actually not social insects, so the males have to get heir own food, etc.)
Anyway, closing on the mind-blowing fact: some of these species of orchid have become self-pollinating, because the species of bee they evolved to attract have become extinct (I dunno, too much pseudo-copulation?) So we only know about these extinct bee species because of the idealised pictures of the females preserved by orchid species (themselves heading for extinction, self-pollinating not being a great long-term strategy).
Whew. Wish I hadn't started...
Some people may know the story of the rice and chessboard - there are various versions but basically a king promised a reward to the inventor of the game of chess who asked for 1 grain of rice on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 etc, doubling each time.
If you actually did that, by the time you got to the 64th square, you'd have 18 quintillion grains of rice on the board which is about 210 billion tonnes. And more than just covering the chessboard, it is about 275x the world annual production of rice.
TLDR: Numbers get big quickly.
The Eiffel Tower grows six inches in summer.
And here's me thinking it was a long way down to the chemist....
As well as space being quite big, time is quite long.
And yet - if you had had one of the latest generation atomic clocks at the exact point the universe was born, and pressed start on it at exactly that moment...... it would have drifted by about 0.1s up until today. 100ms in 13.7 billion years. In fact, when i make a cup of tea in a moment i might make a brief detour and go and look at the UK's master timepiece, that everything else synchronizes to (through a security controlled lab window, they don't let me touch it I quickly add)
In a strange twist, the bloke that knows how it works better than most and leads the team that maintains it can pretty well be relied on to always be late for meetings.
And here’s me thinking it was a long way down to the chemist….
That's just peanuts compared to space.
The most startling fact for me on that video is that Mars is (comparatively) dinky
One teaspoon of soil contains several miles of fungal mycelium.
There is an individual tree in America that covers 100 acres and has over 10,000 trunks.
In a strange twist, the bloke that knows how it works better than most and leads the team that maintains it can pretty well be relied on to always be late for meetings.
Late by how much? Oh and what is an atomic clock compared with to determine the drift?
There is an individual tree in America that covers 100 acres and has over 10,000 trunks.
I misread that for a moment and thought it must be one hell of an impressive elephant.
All the gold that's ever been extracted from the ground would fit in a 23x23x23 metre cube
If you launch a black hole out of a galaxy it can leave a trail of new stars, big enough for us to see, in its wake as it travels through space.
I love how this discussion of “mind-blowing facts” evolved into a discussion of the technicalities of motorway junctions and numbering within a page. So British.
Wait til they get started on railway junctions 😉
Late by how much?
If that was always the same we could calculate in an offset. It is, alas, a random factor.....
Oh and what is an atomic clock compared with to determine the drift?
I knew i'd get hauled up on this. It hasn't exactly drifted (truth be told we didn't start it at the dawn of time either) - rather that's the uncertainty in the measurement. So we know it's correct to within that level.
The second is actually defined as equivalent to "the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom" which is measured by tuning microwave lasers to this transition. The accuracy comes from uncertainties induced by other external fields which currently are down in the 1/10^13 range per second of measuring, or if you measure and average over long periods can be at 1/10^16 levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock
Of course, 'a second' is also a fraction of the time it takes for the earth to revolve, and because that's not at a constant rate every now and then the timekeepers have to agree to add in or subtract a leap second to keep them aligned. So far, only positive additions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_standard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
Mike the Headless Chicken (April 20, 1945 – March 17, 1947) was a male Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off.
Good job you don’t teach maths. 😁
I’m this case a fair point
Ironically i spend a huge amount of my time teaching maths. One of the things I must say every day is to work in standard form. To avoid errors like this
The word pool as in pool of money comes from the French word Poulet. It derives from a game where people would throw stones at chickens.
If you replaced every atom, in a 12 gram piece of charcoal, with a table tennis ball, the table tennis balls would cover the USA to nearly the top of the atmosphere
the table tennis balls would cover the USA to nearly the top of the atmosphere
Which could only be a good thing.
There is an individual tree in America that covers 100 acres and has over 10,000 trunks.
Pando! Being America, there a chance they’re going to put a road through it 🙁
andylc
Free Member
Mike the Headless Chicken (April 20, 1945 – March 17, 1947) was a male Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off
Stretching things a wee bit there. Sadly though, he only died as he choked on a seed
Seeing as we've done chess and the universe:
There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the observable universe!
Sauce:
Wait til they get started on railway junctions 😉
I see we've descended to points scoring as usual!
The surface area of the inside of your lungs is the same as a tennis court - and all your blood vessels if put end to end would reach halfway to the moon
In Roman times Cs in latin were pronounced hard, Caesar was pronounced Kaiser. It was only when the French started to speak latin in the Middle Ages that Cs became soft.
There's enough protein in a single ejaculation from a blue whale, to feed a human for an entire year.
Got one of those here in Glasgow on the M8. Always carnage.
Sounds like fun! Any opportunity to hoof it down an on-ramp! 😁
Before they split the kingston bridge up it was 7 lanes each way ( its now divided) and one exit came out of lane 5 ie with two lanes to the right and 4 to the left.
I watched a video a while back, a man talking about atoms, not sure of his qualifications to speak about them but he appeared to my uneducated mind to be very knowledgeable and persuasive. Anyway something about everything that makes up an atom doesn't exist (because we can't measure it in the same way we measure ordinary stuff) ergo we don't exist, nothing exists, sure, okay. Quite startling, as I say, he was persuasive. Another fact he stated was the scale of the atom, I don't remember exactly, but say you scaled up an atom to be a mile in size, the nucleus would still only be the size of a grain of sand - - - note the empty space of nothing. However I did a quick google recently and what I found said a marble in a football pitch.
Any recommendations for free resources to satisfy my curiosity and delve a little deeper into the subject? Free online courses perhaps?
Cleopatra lived closer to today than to the building of the pyramids.
Although she was Greek, she would have lived in Egypt, which is where the pyramids you're referring to are I presume. I don't think there's even a place called today.
Another fact he stated was the scale of the atom, I don’t remember exactly, but say you scaled up an atom to be a mile in size, the nucleus would still only be the size of a grain of sand – – – note the empty space of nothing. However I did a quick google recently and what I found said a marble in a football pitch.
It depends on the atom, because more massive elements have larger nucleii, but the ratio is in the ballpark of 1:50,000.
So, if the nucleus was 1 cm in diameter, the electron cloud would be 50,000 cm, or 500 meters. So, if the atom was one mile in diameter, the nucleus would be roughly an inch or two in diameter, depending on the specific element.
...and what I found said a marble in a football pitch.
It depends on the atom, because more massive elements have larger nucleii, but the ratio is in the ballpark of 1:50,000.
I see what you did there.
the concept of secularism was an invention of medieval French priests and clerics
Many astronomy stats are mind blowing, even if some of them are just estimates. For example our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains we think around 200 billion stars. If you hold a grain of sand at arm’s length you blot out several hundred other similar sized galaxies.
Kenny’s contribution is based on this image. The Hubble deep field. As he says it’s the area of the sky covered by a grain sand at arms length. It contains 4 stars in our galaxy. Every other spot is a galaxy containing 100s of billions of stars. There are I think 1200 Galaxies in the image
Here is a video of me going on about galaxies and the Hubble Deep Field
Before they split the kingston bridge up it was 7 lanes each way ( its now divided) and one exit came out of lane 5 ie with two lanes to the right and 4 to the left.
It's 5 lanes each side, outer to inner, westbound you enter from the Clydeside Expressway x1, city centre x1, A804 x1 and M8 x2 then exit to Tradeston x2 and M8/M77 x3. Eastbound you enter from Tradeston x2 (segregated for the length of the bridge) and M8 x3 then exit to Clydeside Expressway x1, city centre x2 (one for each side of the segregation that merge on the slip) and M8 x2.
I can only assume it's the amount of cross flow on the eastbound side that means its still divided, not sure how they're going to square that with the new ULEZ as that is the alternative route since forever.
@ampthill thanks for posting that image. I couldn’t recall where I’d heard that stat, or even what the quoted figures were, but figured I wouldn’t be too far wrong. Would be surprised if I heard it from Brian Cox though. I find him quite irritating. Takes him about 500 words for each fact, and delivered in a patronising tone too. The only thing I’ve enjoyed him in is Monkey Cage.