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For the Motorway geeks this is a strangely satisfying YouTube channel.
For the Motorway geeks...
Almost tempted to go off and create a thread about favourite motorway facts but it seems to be existing happily here as a thread within a thread!
There are billions of galaxies! This gas cloud would take 10,000 years to fly across at Mach 1!
The M25 is not continuous!
secrets of the motorway is fab - not just the facts but the guys delivery is good
The Eiffel Tower grows six inches in summer.
At Mach 2, depending on various conditions (humidity, air pressure, interior temps etc) Concorde used to grow between 150 and 200mm.
You could actually see the growth if you were sat near one of the joins in the aisle carpet on the earliest flights. All the other panels and joints inside the cabin had sliding/overlapping joints, the carpet didn't. So it'd be too short by the time you were in the mid atlantic. Later versions of the carpet were stretchy due to a) the trip hazard when Concorde cooled down and b) gappy carpets look cheap.
This is one of my favourites:
Sharks, have been around for longer than Trees.
Bonkers.
Aeroplane fuel tanks - quite big really.
Boeing 747-8 holds nearly a quarter of a million litres!
So that's enough to fill up the 50 litre tank on my car 5,000 times. I can do 500 miles on a tank, so that would be enough to drive 2,500,000 miles.
The different types of infinities and the fact that some are bigger than others hurt my head.
Diesel tanks on a site I work on had 300,000 litres of diesel. Just as a back up. And they were only 2/3's full.
The 11kV gensets use 500 litres an hour when running at full load.
We turned 50,000 litres into heat, smoke and noise when testing them. As we weren't allowed to use the building as a load we had to hire a 50kW 11kV load bank which in itself needed two 400V generators to feed it's cooling fans.
Glad I didn't have to pay the fuel bill.
@didnthurt shiiiit, at least we can synch ours to grid! That said the MG sets need a load bank for testing, thankfully that's just a wee trolley.
Aeroplane fuel tanks – quite big really.
Boeing 747-8 holds nearly a quarter of a million litres!
So that’s enough to fill up the 50 litre tank on my car 5,000 times. I can do 500 miles on a tank, so that would be enough to drive 2,500,000 miles.
And at full chat the engines on a 747 will go through nearly 100000 litres an hour.
But at full chat the engines won't last an hour...
the maths thing that really hurts my head is that pi is such a silly number. It should be a whole number. Somethings wrong with maths that it is not. Makes my brain hurt
TREE(3)
Just don't go there.
There are slightly more bacteria in your body than there are cells (around 4 trillion bacteria vs around 3 trillion cells).
However, a really big poo can skew the number in your body's favour...
the maths thing that really hurts my head is that pi is such a silly number. It should be a whole number. Somethings wrong with maths that it is not. Makes my brain hurt
Irrational numbers are just weird. You have a number line with an infinite number of whole numbers. Half way between each of those is a fraction, so you now have twice as many numbers as your original infinite set. But half way between each of that new, doubled set of numbers, there is another fraction, so you've doubled the set again. You can repeat this an infinite number of times and keep generating new rational numbers. But, it doesn't matter how many infinities of infinities times you keep doing that, there are irrational numbers that always fall between the gaps, so there are an infinite number of those too.
it doesn’t matter how many infinities of infinities times you keep doing that, there are irrational numbers that always fall between the gaps, so there are an infinite number of those too.
and what about imaginary numbers?
which is where I and maths parted company. Unfortunately my A level exams were still some way in the future at that point.
TREE(3)
Just don’t go there.
Uh? 'tis a shame there's only two of us.
thols - there are only 9 numbers. Everything else is made up of multiples and bits of those 9 numbers. Zero is not a number.
🙂
there are only 9 numbers.
10 actually, 0 and 1. You can create all the others through logical operations on those 10.
Water is very sticky.
Water is very sticky.
There is a fly so small, that it actually paddles through the air as if it's swimming through water.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/05/swimming-led-flying-physicists-say
Water is very sticky.
And humans don't actually feel wetness.
Thanks to @mattyfez, after watching Secrets of size I now know the smallest wasp is Megaphragma caribea, with a body length of 0.17mm. Something that small doesn't fly through the air, it swims.
DOH! Just seen your post.
@sirromj for some light but facinating relief, check out 'the magical world of moss' on iPlayer.
But also check out 'Einstiens nightmare'
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/einsteins-nightmare/
and what about imaginary numbers?
Useful for electrical engineering when describing inductance and capacitance IIRC.
I'm not an electrical engineer.
Many astronomy stats are mind blowing, even if some of them are just estimates.
Most of them are. One star alone that I was reading about earlier yesterday has staggering stats! VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant, while light takes eight minutes to get from the sun’s surface to Earth, it would take a photon six hours to travel around the circumference of VY Canis, and it could accommodate almost 3 billion stars the size of Earth… 🤪
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/vy-canis-majoris/
Canis Majoris means "big dog" I think
Photons take thousands to millions of years to escape from the core of the sun.
This is good for star size comparisons
But also check out ‘Einstiens nightmare’
It's excellent!
I could watch Jim Al-Khalili documentaries all day long.
the maths thing that really hurts my head is that pi is such a silly number. It should be a whole number
It is. The problem is with the base 10 system we use to try and describe it. If we just use base pi, there'd be no problem. There's always a way to refer to these numbers without using decimals, for example Physicists will give an answer as √3/2
The numbers exist independently of the digits we use to write them down.
there are only 9 numbers
Similarly there may only be ten digits in our common base ten system but there's an infinite number of positive integers. You could replace the digits with fruit machine symbols and nothing would change. But you'd still need ten different symbols not 9!
Base 16 is in common use in IT and that used 0-9 and A-F but similarly it could use any symbols.
I am sure I have been told zero is not a number because it refers to no quantity
i once had a long conversation with a maths geek where we tried to devise arithmentic that used base pi.
Now my head really hurts 🙂
The numbers exist independently of the digits we use to write them down.
Hmmmm that is interesting to contemplate, difficult, but interesting. My brain will give up contemplating it shortly, if not already! Binary then really is the purest of number bases, it's all we need. Err.. Well floating point has it's issues in binary, well and decimal too. Hence some fractions easy to express as fractions have infinite digits in base 10. Imaginary numbers... I took an open source Mandelbrot set plotting program several years ago and reimplimented it using arbitrary precision floating point math libraries (GMP and/or MPFR). I'm pretty shit at maths though (GCSE grade C!). It's easy to zoom into the Mandebrot set and hit the wall of hardware implemented floating point calculations. The slow down was massive when switching to the arbitrary precision libraries, a small render could easily take hours and that's on modern hardware. Then along came Kalles Fraktaler* created by people who actually understand maths and so my little program killed instantly. I've seen several people talk about the zoom levels achieved exploring the M-set saying it's the equivalent to the size of the universe multiple times over, and leaves the planck length for dust. Used to love exploring it, spent a lot of time in there. If you know what you're doing in the paths taken when zooming down into it you can build up patterns by iteratively zooming into the same sequence but each time you do this the frequency of the sequence doubles and it can be difficult to keep track of it. *if you're a maths/fractal geek it's well worth a look around that website, way beyond my understanding though.
I am sure I have been told zero is not a number because it refers to no quantity
A lack of "something" is just as important than a "number" of things.
Without zero, we'd all be ****ed.
Oh we need zero. Its just is it a number or just a placeholder.?
Is 0.0000000000000001 a number or almost a placeholder?
I am sure I have been told zero is not a number because it refers to no quantity
It's the abscence of quantity.
I have one pork pie. I eat the pork pie, how many pork pies do I have?
2 more in the fridge but that's besides the point.
Oh we need zero. Its just is it a number or just a placeholder.?
How do you feel about "10"?
How do you feel about “10”?
Its OK
I prefer 7
But in the case of 10 the zero is not a zero, this is where numbers become meaningless/meaningful.
If instead of 10 our numbering system used X the existence of 0 would not matter.
There are loads of integers, big big numbers. So many grains of sand, stars, a googol, a googolplex, Graham’s number, tree(3) all increasingly mind boggling.
However, whilst each of these numbers have a square and a cube of their own, 26 is the only number that sits directly between a square and a cube. That blows my mind!
But in the case of 10 the zero is not a zero, this is where numbers become meaningless/meaningful.
Sure it is. This is primary school maths, 10 is one "tens" and zero "units".
If instead of 10 our numbering system used X the existence of 0 would not matter.
That's not maths, it's geometry. You could represent 10 as 😁😢 for the difference it makes. Your X still represents zero whatever symbol you choose.
There’s enough protein in a single ejaculation from a blue whale, to feed a human for an entire year.
Channel 5 are on the phone ...they want to talk to you about your pitch for a new reality TV show ..
Im still not sure if I believe Edinburgh is further west than Bristol
Im still not sure if I believe Edinburgh is further west than Bristol
Exhibit A:
Edinburgh is pretty much on the same longitude as Cardiff.
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Edinburgh is further north than both toronto and Moscow ( russia) but they get freezing cold winters. that just seems wrong