Today I Learned

  • Thread starter Greg Bernhardt
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In summary: Today I learned that Lagrange was Italian and that he lamented the execution of Lavoisier in France during the French Revolution with the quote:"It took them only an instant to cut off this head and a hundred years might not suffice to reproduce it's...brains."
  • #3,466
strangerep said:
Or just (allegedly) violating copyright?
If it was violating copyright, youtube would remove the video entirely.

Anyway, the video/audio is beautiful on so many levels ...
 
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  • #3,467
strangerep said:
I wonder how long it will take for automated political correctness to ban chess completely.
:oldbiggrin:
 
  • #3,468
Tom.G said:
"Video unavailable" ... plays fine on youtube
There are numerous questions about this or similar issues.
 
  • #3,469
TIL that you can get a waterproof endoscope that plugs into your cell phone for under $12!
See here.
 
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  • #3,470
BillTre said:
TIL that you can get a waterproof endoscope that plugs into your cell phone for under $12!
See here.
No, I do not want to imagine what it is intended for ...
 
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  • #3,471
fresh_42 said:
No, I do not want to imagine what it is intended for ...
It can be used on car engines too.
 
  • #3,472
BillTre said:
It can be used on car engines too.
Did you recently look under the hood of a modern car? The times when you could repair a v-belt with a pair of nylons are long gone.
 
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  • #3,473
Last car I worked on had a carburetor.
 
Last edited:
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  • #3,474
BillTre said:
TIL that you can get a waterproof endoscope that plugs into your cell phone for under $12!
See here.
Nice! I'm going to see if Amazon has them as well...
 
  • #3,475
I recently got my daughter (a budding field biologist) a wireless microscope take connect with her phone.
It was something like $30 or $40.
Very handy in the field.
Others in her lab group decided to get similar things also.

Another thought I had for the endoscope was looking into animal burrows.
Maybe getting a snake to bite one.
 
  • #3,476
BillTre said:
I recently got my daughter (a budding field biologist) a wireless microscope take connect with her phone.
It was something like $30 or $40.
Very handy in the field.
Others in her lab group decided to get similar things also.

Another thought I had for the endoscope was looking into animal burrows.
Maybe getting a snake to bite one.

Interesting! Where have you bought that thing? I think I need to buy one for me
 
  • #3,477
waternohitter said:
Interesting! Where have you bought that thing? I think I need to buy one for me
Amazon probably. I'm sure their on ebay too.
 
  • #3,478
I learned that to remove the n right-most (leftmost) characters in an Excel (Workbook) file, where data is stored in column C, we can use:

Edit: LEFT( C:C, LEN(C:C)-N)

For example, to remove the 6 right-most characters ( which is what I did) from column B in a workbook, we use:

LEFT( B:B, LEN(B:B)-6)

Sounds counterintuitive to use LEFT here, but I assume it means the last n characters starting left.

At any rate, I used it to remove units from a file in order to analyze the data; so that the workbook contained only numbers.

Also , learned the leftmost r' used in the pd.read_ function is used to escape the slashes in strings.

Hopefully also finally internalized, after so many years and mistakes, that the 4extension for my files is .xlsx and not .xlsx. Computers are "autistic" .
 
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  • #3,479
Is that really an "=", not a "-"?

"LEFT" takes the first x characters from the left, if you take LEN(...)-6 characters you get rid of the rightmost 6 characters.
 
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  • #3,480
mfb said:
Is that really an "=", not a "-"?

"LEFT" takes the first x characters from the left, if you take LEN(...)-6 characters you get rid of the rightmost 6 characters.
Ah, yes, it is a - , not an =. Let me edit.
 
  • #3,481
WWGD said:
I learned that to remove the n right-most (leftmost) characters in an Excel (Workbook) file, where data is stored in column C, we can use:

Edit: LEFT( C:C, LEN(C:C)-N)

For example, to remove the 6 right-most characters ( which is what I did) from column B in a workbook, we use:

LEFT( B:B, LEN(B:B)-6)

Sounds counterintuitive to use LEFT here, but I assume it means the last n characters starting left.

At any rate, I used it to remove units from a file in order to analyze the data; so that the workbook contained only numbers.

Also , learned the leftmost r' used in the pd.read_ function is used to escape the slashes in strings.

Hopefully also finally internalized, after so many years and mistakes, that the 4extension for my files is .xlsx and not .xlsx. Computers are "autistic" .
See what life is teaching you?! You must feel a lot better now! ... :smile:
 
  • #3,482
TIL... the word "braggadocio", after a journalist used the word to describe a recent press conference.
 
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  • #3,486
Today I learned that as late as the 1970's almost the entire world's supply of light bulbs was produced by just 15 machines scattered across the globe: https://blog.cmog.org/2017/01/27/the-machine-that-lit-up-the-world/
 
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  • #3,487
TIL something about SR which is actually useful here on PF:

Travelling time to Andromeda with 1g acceleration and deceleration (Einstein): 28 years boardtime
Travelling time to Andromeda with 1g acceleration and deceleration without the c constraint (Newton): 2,800 years boardtime
Reason why it won't work either way: CMB will work as resistor and additional energy meant for acceleration will be turned into particle production instead and arbitrarily close to c will be physically impossible, regardless which engine we constructed.

These easy arguments could shortcut many fruitless discussions on space travel.
 
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  • #3,488
This week I learned that carbon dating a fossilized life form is dependent on the diet of the life form.

Carbon from terrestrial plants, and herbivores consumed by carivores/omnivores, has 'younger' carbon than fish in the ocean. People with marine diets have a different proportion of carbon than people eating meat and plants from land.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/why-did-these-vikings-bones-appear-older-than-they-are/

I actually heard about it on a program related to archeological investigations of peoples in the Arctic region in northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Norway. The program was exploring the potential interactions between Norse Vikings and so-called Dorset peoples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture
https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/archeo/paleoesq/ped01eng.html
 
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  • #3,489
you can safely disregard anything that comes after the word ‘may’ in a popular science headline
 
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  • #3,490
BWV said:
you can safely disregard anything that comes after the word ‘may’ in a popular science headline
And anything ending in "?".
 
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  • #3,491
fresh_42 said:
CMB
+ also perhaps cosmic radiation (wherever in space it exists), scattered particles, small rocks and interstellar dust etc. ...
In other words, not an empty space, as we would ideally imagine ... Thus it would require very advanced 'Shields' ... (with such velocities) etc.
 
  • #3,492
Today I learned about the world's first underwater roundabout. It's at the junction of a Y-shaped undersea tunnel which will open later this month in the Faroe Islands. You can read about it (with map and pictures) in English and in Faroese.
 
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  • #3,495
TIL there are fun barcodes:
Screen Shot 2020-12-11 at 9.13.40 AM.png


Screen Shot 2020-12-11 at 9.14.42 AM.png


Screen Shot 2020-12-11 at 9.16.22 AM.png


Screen Shot 2020-12-11 at 9.17.20 AM.png
 
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  • #3,496
TIL that:
Pandemic lockdown has lead to more people gardening in Britain.
More people digging around in their gardens has new archeological discoveries.

Gardeners in Hampshire, a county in southeast England, were weeding their yard in April when they found 63 gold coins and one silver coin from King Henry VIII’s reign in the 16th century, with four of the coins inscribed with the initials of the king’s wives Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour.

The archaeological find was one of more than 47,000 in England and Wales that were reported this year, amid an increase in backyard gardening during Coronavirus lockdowns, the British Museum said on Wednesday.
 
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  • #3,497
BillTre said:
When my son was little we had a story book about a chameleon, one of those cardboard ones with wheels and flaps, so the chameleon changed colour. The last page had a wheel embeddedin it, and the back cover had the barcode with a chameleon-shaped cutout above. When you turned the wheel the chameleon would shift from green to having barcode stripes.
 
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  • #3,498
Ibix said:
When my son was little we had a story book about a chameleon, one of those cardboard ones with wheels and flaps, so the chameleon changed colour. The last page had a wheel embeddedin it, and the back cover had the barcode with a chameleon-shaped cutout above. When you turned the wheel the chameleon would shift from green to having barcode stripes.
What you did not know: It also changed while in store from £ 7.95 to £ 14.95.
 
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  • #3,499
jtbell said:
Today I learned about the world's first underwater roundabout. It's at the junction of a Y-shaped undersea tunnel which will open later this month in the Faroe Islands. You can read about it (with map and pictures) in English and in Faroese.
To illustrate the use of the tunnel:

tunnel.png
 
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  • #3,500
jtbell said:
Today I learned about the world's first underwater roundabout.
:oldsurprised:
 
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