Things that are allegedly ‘science’, but are self-evidently magic

Why an incline treadmill is harder work than a flat one, you are not actually running up a hill

a friend discovered the reason for that when he moved his treadmill-  he hadn’t adjusted the feet properly when he first set it up and the reason it was particularly hard work on an incline was because he was wearing a groove in his carpet

What about cycling! How the #*&@ does that work?

to bring together the x-ray crystallography and magnetism thoughts …

How the hell do CT scans and MRI work, that has to be magic

neutrinos what’s the bloody point 😕

What about cycling! How the #*&@ does that work?

You’re asking on the wrong forum, no-one rides bikes on here.
We just argue about them. 😉

computers and anything else that relies on microchips. It’s quite evident that they are actually powered by spirits and the design of the circuit board is actually a magic rune which tempts the spirits in to do your bidding.

This also explains why coding is gibberish as its basically magik invocation.

Printers go on the fritz or refuse to print documents because it’s a well known phenomena that demons that thrive on bad energy and stress, occupy the magic loci where the energy is most dense (such as an office) and intercept the spirits to take their essence before they can complete their printing task.   It can only be fixed by re-powering the rune (turning it off and on again) or chanting the sacred banishment spell of “work you ********” made even more powerful by the rhythmic banging of head on a desk or blood sacrifice

How the hell do CT scans and MRI work, that has to be magic

I haven’t had a CT scan , but I’ve had an MRI and I think the principle is that it’s so loud that it makes your bones shake, and it senses the vibration.

The migration of birds, fish, animals, butterflies etc over thousands of miles to an exact predetermined destination. Without any recourse to Google Maps even.

A swallow born here in August can fly around for 6 weeks and take off ofter his family all the way back to Africa and maybe be the only one to return to the exact nest he was born in the following spring. How?

the acceleration of a piston from top dead center…….is accelerating at 15,000 ms^-2,

I’ve seen up to 10,000 g quoted for F1 engines. Closer to 100,000 m/s2.

The figures for RC car engines are even more absurd – around 3 times that for a 1/8 scale car giving it some beans.

At full throttle it’s about 10tones of force, which is a lot.

Well… tones aren’t a unit of force, just saying. Tonnes are mass; only gravity makes the mass apply a force. Could say “like being crushed by 100 tonnes” I guess?

{engineer} opens thread, shrugs shoulders / slowly shakes head, leaves thread.

I don’t get this thread. If something intrigues you educate yourself.

Explain quarks strangeness and charm to me.  then gluons 🙂

computers and anything else that relies on microchips. It’s quite evident that they are actually powered by spirits and the design of the circuit board is actually a magic rune which tempts the spirits in to do your bidding.

I’m old enough to have been a home computer enthusiast from quite close to the beginning.  So I know (or I used to) how to build logic gates out of transistors; how to do arithmetic with logic gates; kind of a bit about how CPUs work, how device busses work (loosely); a bit about how device software is written, how OSes apps are written; how networking works and so on.  I also know how transistors work and at uni I learned how semiconductors work. So I have a reasonable idea of the full stack 🙂

I’ve seen up to 10,000 g quoted for F1 engines.

F1 engines are things of wonder. Anyone else remember when BMW got 1500bhp* out of what was essentially the block out of the then current 316? Granted it was only for a couple of laps…

*Wikipedia has reminded me this was an estimate as the dyno broke when they went past 1280bhp

The gold-white vs blue-black dress internet debate a few years prompted some pretty interesting research about colour perception

Nah, that was just a crap photo.

You’re asking on the wrong forum, no-one rides bikes on here.
We just argue about them. 😉

Surely then he’s in exactly the right place.

what about full-price birds?

something something “going cheep”

Before it got nicked on Saturday (£30k plus) my work surveying kit was magical the gps unit accurate to 15mm to OS grid (bit too big for fitting to bars) they say science but nah it’s proper magic first survey kit was premagic but worked in the rain!

I haven’t had a CT scan , but I’ve had an MRI and I think the principle is that it’s so loud that it makes your bones shake, and it senses the vibration.

CT is just a complicated X-ray.

MRI/NMR is a huge magnet powerful enough to make all the hydrogen atoms in your body point he same way.  You then apply a smaller oscillating field and measure the response.

If you know where they are but not what they are (i..e a chemical sample) you can use the response to draw a graph and determine things about the length/energy in the bonds. If you know the energy in the bonds (i.e. you narrow it down to just looking for the spikes on the graph that indicated water) then you can work out where they are in the magnetic field and draw a picture.

Well… tones aren’t a unit of force, just saying. Tonnes are mass; only gravity makes the mass apply a force. Could say “like being crushed by 100 tonnes” I guess?

Well, yes. But you still measure your tyre pressure in psi don’t you? So people are comfortable with the concept of kgf / lbf.

And a layperson can visualize 10 tones, it’s a small lorry. 98,100N is a bit more abstract and implies accuracy that isn’t valid, 10 +/-1 is about right, 98,100 +/- 9,810 sounds like your making stuff up.

And how do you define a newton anyway, in the SI system it’s the force required to accelerate 1kg @ 1ms^-2.

And you used g’s as a unit of acceleration, which is the same thing (g being the not-a-constant between mass and weight).

^ Ohh shit, the scientists have arrived.

Ohh shit, the scientists have arrived.

We’re like bike mechanics.

Feed us biscuits if you want anything and try not to get us talking on our specialist subjects unless you want to be bored to death.

“Scientific Communicators” are the real wizards, how can Brian Cox and Hanna Fry be both that clever and able to communicate with the outside world is the real wizardry.

A swallow born here in August can fly around for 6 weeks and take off ofter his family all the way back to Africa and maybe be the only one to return to the exact nest he was born in the following spring. How?

Birds can see things that humans cannot see, eg the earth’s magnetic field. And I literally mean “see” as with their eyes.

The reaction to a visual stimulus is instinctive. As when a cat that sees a mouse and the reactions of both the cat and the mouse.

It is amazing though, especially to humans who lack the sensory perceptions.

Mirrors. A room with a mirror in it is fractionally colder than it would be without one. Measure it if you don’t believe me.

What else do they steal, apart from heat?

Before it got nicked on Saturday (£30k plus) my work surveying kit was magical the gps unit accurate to 15mm to OS grid (bit too big for fitting to bars) they say science but nah it’s proper magic first survey kit was premagic but worked in the rain!

Hmm that feels wrong. The OS grid is a flawed planar representation of a the surface of a sphere? Surely its 15mm accuracy to any point on the globe?

Anyone else remember when BMW got 1500bhp* out of what was essentially the block out of the then current 316?

two stories about the famed BMW F1 engine that used a 1.5lt 4 cyl. bock that originally developed 80bhp

Story one: they found that aged blocks were the best for building them so they starting tracing taxi drivers with the right car and more than 100,000kms on the clock and would offer them a brand new Beamer in exchange for their ratty old ones. When that source dried up, they had a bunch sitting outside the factory rusting away that BMW ‘encouraged’ the workforce to wee on to age them.

Story two: They had issues with detonation that they were really struggling to solve, until some old boy in the BMW fuel division piped up with “Ah yes, we used to have this problem with the engines in the Bf109, I’ve still got the fuel recipe at home we used to stop it happening”. For a while (until fancy fuel was banned) the Brabham team used fuel developed for Nazi warplanes..

Gerhard Berger said you didn’t really steer the car, just aimed it at the next corner and held on for grim death…

Hmm that feels wrong. The OS grid is a flawed planar representation of a the surface of a sphere? Surely its 15mm accuracy to any point on the globe?

^ Ohh shit, the nitpickers have arrived.

😉

We’re talking 15mm here. How big is the difference exactly depending on the mapping system?

Quantum physics and relativity is still a field of physics populated by some very clever monkeys with some very clever tools looking at some very hot fire and going “oooooohhhhhhhh”, Just like they did in a cave a million years ago.

Just because you said that I’m going to go and stare at them now

A time will come when, due to entropy, there will be no light in the universe.

Every star will have died. Any sentient being still around will see nothing but a uniform blackness in their sky.

Right now every square whatever of the sky is covered by stars, the blackness that you see (don’t see?) between the visible stars is still stars, just ones that are so far away their light hasn’t reached us yet.

^ Ohh shit, the scientists have arrived.

Just ye hope the spelling police don’t rock up.

For me it’s radio and other EM waves. Not that they exist, it’s just a frequency wave and I get frequency, V=fλ, etc.

It’s that you can transmit stuff in them. The wave’s the same frequency, but half a minute ago it was carrying Nirvana and now it’s Dua Lipa

Makes. No. Sense.

Boats, how can that many tons of steel float on water?

The wave’s the same frequency, but half a minute ago it was carrying Nirvana and now it’s Dua Lipa

Makes. No. Sense.

I know, I mean who would rather listen to Dua Lipa than Nirvana?

Boats, how can that many tons of steel float on water?

Archimedes principle innit.

Boats, how can that many tons of steel float on water?

They contain an awful lot of air.

slip gauges messed with head for a bit,

Wringing is the process of sliding two blocks together so that their faces bond. Because of their ultraflat surfaces, when wrung, gauge blocks adhere to each other tightly. Properly wrung blocks may withstand a 300 N (67 lbf) pull.[5] The mechanism is a combination of:[4][5][needs update]

Vacuum applies pressure between the blocks because the air is squeezed out of the joint[note 1]
Surface tension from oil and water vapor that is present between the blocks
Molecular attraction that occurs when two very flat surfaces are brought into contact; this force causes gauge blocks to adhere even without surface lubricants, and in a vacuum
It is believed that the last two sources are the most significant.[4] Experiments with friction of the blocks suggest also that the removal of the oxide film from the steel surface by wringing plays an important role in the wringing action.[7]

And electricity to a certain degree,

On our first day in the second year of Electronic/Mechanical Engineering our professor looked at us and said “forget everything you learned and understand from last year”, (or words to that effect) he wasn’t wrong………I developed a stress headache for the first few months and started grinding my teeth whilst asleep so had to wear a guard, I eventually cracked a molar.

I should’ve studied Art/Classics/English Literature or something easy as we never had free time.

25 years later I’m still unsure if I “actually” understand it or whether I “know enough” to get by without killing myself

Nah, that was just a crap photo

Striking individual differences in perception 

Older women more likely to see white/gold than blue/black. Depends on the wavelength your brain perceives/prefers and corrects for it. People who spend more time outdoors have different perception and people seeing the dress as white/gold had brain areas interfering in thier perception.

😉

We’re talking 15mm here. How big is the difference exactly depending on the mapping system?

I can’t  remember…. A bit… It just feels odd for a total station to be claiming accuracy to an inaccurate thing… And i am trying to appear more cleverer than wot i are.

Edit. About 5m and the extremes of OS grid.

They contain an awful lot of air.

It doesn’t make the boats any lighter.

Striking individual differences in perception

All of that may be true.  But for this specific example I ran it through a colour picker in a paint package.  It was nothing to do with perception or wavelengths or optical illusions or what have you, it was simply a poor photo which went viral.  There was another one with some shoes, that was the same story, there was nothing clever going on, just the white balance was poleaxed.

It doesn’t make the boats any lighter.

Except, it does.  You’ve got things which are much denser/heavier than water (steel) and things which are much less dense/heavy than water (air).  Add them together and you’ll float or sink depending on whether you’re at a net gain or not.

somafunk
Full Member
slip gauges messed with head for a bit,

Wringing is the process of sliding two blocks together so that their faces bond.

Interesting!👍

Except, it does.  You’ve got things which are much denser/heavier than water (steel) and things which are much less dense/heavy than water (air).  Add them together and you’ll float or sink depending on whether you’re at a net gain or not.

Nope, self evidently magic 😉

johndohFree Member

This is the problem – I am NOT at all fine with the universe expanding. What is it expanding into? What is it beyond the universe that enables the universe to expand into it? Is it something (it must BE something)? So what is it? Or is it nothing? If it is nothing, then how can the universe occupy nothing?

Don’t think of it as the universe expanding, think of it as the amount of nothing getting smaller

Don’t think of it as the universe expanding, think of it as the amount of nothing getting smaller

Stoppit! How can nothing get smaller? 🤯