Today I Learned

[kyphysics]

I used to drive to Reston area every week for LSAT prep classes (never went to law school, but at one point was interested). It's very nice. If I could afford to live there, I would.

 

[Borg]

I didn't realize that I had so many neighbors on PF.

 

[berkeman]

I didn't realize that I had so many neighbors on PF.

Well, we have been known to organize regional reunions. Just sayin'.

 

[BillTre]

I grew up in Bethesda.
The property trends and weather seem to be pretty similar there also.
There were big changes in a lot of things in Bethesda when the subway was finished.
So say my parents. I had moved away by then.

 

[kyphysics]

I grew up in Bethesda.
The property trends and weather seem to be pretty similar there also.
There were big changes in a lot of things in Bethesda when the subway was finished.
So say my parents. I had moved away by then.

Good gracious. Are we ALL mid-Atlantic residents here? lol

I think the job market overall is better in NOVA vs. Maryland, but housing may be more affordable.

 

[gmax137]

Good gracious. Are we ALL mid-Atlantic residents here? lol

Not anymore. I left around 1980. Currently in northern Nevada.

 

[kyphysics]

Well, your roots are still here.

I think of all the places I've lived, mid-Atlantic has felt the best mix (weather, population size, economy, local attractions, quality of life, etc.). I feel like having LOTS of government jobs and agencies gives a kind of permanent stability to this region.

Government isn't going anywhere. Military isn't going anywhere. It's not a narrowly focused private sector economy region like Detroit's automobile industry was. There's just a different pace and culture to life here. Stability is the word I'd use more than anything.

 

[PeterDonis]

Are we ALL mid-Atlantic residents here?

I was, but am not now. I now live in Florida. (But not in an area that has alligators coming into backyards...)

 

[pinball1970]

T.I.L. A little bit about "Squeezing" https://phys.org/news/2023-10-ligo-surpasses-quantum-limit.html

 

[BWV]

There is only one video of John von Neumann, a teen Q&A show on NBC in the mid 50s

 

[BillTre]

 

[kyphysics]

Some veteran Costco cashiers make mid-$60K's. . .not bad.

 

[Swamp Thing]

View attachment 334565

Why is the top-hatted head smiling?

 

[BillTre]

Why is the top-hatted head smiling?

Because its a happy emotion?

 

[Tom.G]

A case of body dysphoria?

 

[Algr]

Today I learned that Hamlet wasn't a specific real person. I thought he was like Julius Caesar, where Shakespeare changed some things, but was ultimately a true story.

 

[Janus]

TIL that I'm a mutant, in more ways than one. I have blue eyes, which is due to a mutation which prevents melanin from being produced in the iris. ( it is actually Rayleigh scattering that produces the blue. )
I am also missing a muscle in my forearm. ( To test for this, touch your thumb to your little finger. If a line like a tendon showing appears, you have this muscle, if not, you don't.)
This muscle was useful back when our ancestors were swinging from branch to branch, but it is extraneous now, so it wasn't a big deal when a mutation appeared without it. About 15% of people have this mutation.

 

[Swamp Thing]

TIL that people in Baud, France worshipped an ancient pagan statue (called the Venus of Quinipily) and performed rituals around it well into the 17th century until the church put a stop to these practices.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vénus_de_Quinipily

 

[Algr]

TIL that I'm a mutant, in more ways than one. I have blue eyes, which is due to a mutation which prevents melanin from being produced in the iris. ( it is actually Rayleigh scattering that produces the blue. )

Is it possible to not be a mutant? I thought all DNA structure was from mutation.

 

[pinball1970]

TIL "The Muon g-2 Collaboration recently reported a new measurement of the so-called positive muon magnetic anomaly, based on the data collected at Fermilab between 2019 and 2020. This measurement is consistent with their previous measurements, while reducing error by over a factor of 2 due to improved experimental conditions."https://phys.org/news/2023-11-muon-g-positive-anomalous-magnetic.html

 

[pinball1970]

Is it possible to not be a mutant? I thought all DNA structure was from mutation.

Yes, but I suppose we are talking "modern" Homo sapiens.

Lactose intolerance for example was what was the "wild type" and the mutation gave us the ability to metabolise it about 10,000 years ago.

Asthma is another weird one, the over reaction of the immune system was to cope with the amount of parasites we had to deal with (i will have to add detail on that) EDIT: https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/28/6/1258

My mother lacks or has defective tyrosinase so I will have one of those recessive genes, the mutation.

 

[Swamp Thing]

Lactose intolerance for example was what was the "wild type" and the mutation gave us the ability to metabolise it about 10,000 years ago.

Asthma is another weird one, the over reaction of the immune system was to cope with the amount of parasites we had to deal with

 

[pinball1970]

Digging up remains infected with Yersinia pestis?
What could possibly go wrong!
A quick google, they do not produce spores but still….

 

[berkeman]

Well, I found something really useful yesterday, so I thought I'd share...

Probably like most of you, I am really annoyed with my Win10 PC/laptops when I have a Word (or Excel) file open and miniized down on the Taskbar, and as I open another document, the first one pops back up into the active window. Arrgg! So I've done Google searches several times in the past to try to figure out how to disable this "feature", but never found anything useful until yesterday.

After reading yet another article about how to edit your Registry to disable it (and replies in that discussion saying that it did not work), I found a suggestion to use the middle (scroll wheel) button on your mouse to open the new file instead. So if you have a Word file open and minimized on the Taskbar, middle/wheel click that icon and you will be given a new pop-up small icon that you can click to get into the File, Open Word window. Then just browse to the file you want to open, double click it, and boom! Like magic, the file opens and the previously minimized one stays where it belongs!

 

[DaveC426913]

TIL that you can forget how to ride a bike.

Bought it yesterday. Oiled it, put a new seat on, spent an hour dressing warmly for a 500 yard milk run to the gas station to fill the tires.

Never even made it out of the driveway.

Went ass over tea kettle in the first ten feet. (In truth, the kickstand is on the wrong side. When I mounted the bike from the right, the kickstand caught on the left. I had no way to counter balance, so I went across the bar and onto the pavement pretty much head first.

Damn lucky the first thing I bought along with the new seat was a helmet. If I hadn;t been wearing it, I'd be typing this from a hospital guerney.

 

[pinball1970]

Webb doing it's thing https://phys.org/news/2023-11-secon...-webb.html?utm_source=webpush&utm_medium=push

 

[Swamp Thing]

The British Limpet Mine Mk-I used a dissolving candy ball^* as a delayed (~35 min.) firing device.



* It was aniseed flavored, BTW.[/size]

 

[kyphysics]

Top pest control workers can make equal to or more than average college grads in the same career phase. I've been chatting with a few termite/crawl space guys from different companies and they let me in on their income.

A tech makes ~$60,000/year w/ zero college experience and a 3-week course for certification. An inspector at a different company brings in between ~$100K to $120K a year (depending on sales/commission that year). I actually tried to tip him $20 for something and he declined, saying he is paid very well. Dumb dumb me LOL.

Both are honest good men. I've met those on the opposite end, who are shady and get paid only $15/hour. . .they are unreliable, unprofessional, and not very skilled. But, good pest control guys do make a good living for having no degree.

 

[pinball1970]

T.I.L the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed was detected in 1991 and clocked in at 3.2 x 10 to the 20 eV

I learned about this because of the second highest detected described in an article here.

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-telescope-array-second-highest-energy-cosmic-ray.html

 

[BillTre]

TIL (from CNN) we might be getting less snow in the future:

 

[OmCheeto]

TIL how big grains of sand are:

"If the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, the distance to Proxima Centauri would be about 200,000 miles. This is because the width of a grain of sand is about 2,000 miles."

This was the 'AI' response to me googling; "if the sun was the size of a grain of sand how far away would proxima centuri be?"

My question was inspired by Neil deGrasse Tyson's assertion that if the the sun were shrunk to the size of a period at the end of a sentence, the nearest star would be 4 miles away. I did the math and came up with 20 miles. Hence, my query.

 

[Ibix]

I make four light years to be about 27 million solar diameters. One 27 millionth of 20 miles is about 1mm, which sounds reasonable for the size of a full stop written with a pen. 0.2mm, which is what NdGT has presumably used, sounds a bit small to me, so I agree with you.

Whatever AI you consulted has apparently slipped some pot into its cookies

 

[PeterDonis]

Whatever AI you consulted has apparently slipped some pot into its cookies

I thought brownies were the usual food of choice for that...

 

[PeterDonis]

1mm, which sounds reasonable for the size of a full stop written with a pen

It seems large to me. On a ruler with 1 mm lines, the width of a period written with a pen seems more like the width of a line, which is only a fraction of the width of the space between the lines. 0.2mm sounds a bit small, but 0.33 to 0.5mm seems about right.

 

[Ibix]

I thought brownies were the usual food of choice for that...

Maybe so, but programs have cookies, not brownies.

It seems large to me.

Depends on your pen and penmanship, I guess.

A colleague's son had a homework question to calculate how far away Proxima was if one AU was scaled to 1mm (4ly is about 260m, if you were wondering), which is a better question because the scale is properly defined.

 

[gmax137]

I thought brownies were the usual food of choice for that...

I had a friend who used it in spaghetti sauce. Marhinara.

 

[OmCheeto]

...
Whatever AI you consulted has apparently slipped some pot into its cookies

Google apparently has its own AI now.

 

[gmax137]

maybe It learned that by reading PF?

 

[fresh_42]

ChatGPT suggested 0.5 mm grain size and the result was 14.36 km.

 

[pinball1970]

This is a big one.

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-japan...actor.html?utm_source=webpush&utm_medium=push

 

[Swamp Thing]

TIL that the Ket people of Siberia use panes of sheet ice in the windows of their traditional winter tents.

 

[Mayhem]

This is a big one.

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-japan...actor.html?utm_source=webpush&utm_medium=push

I wonder how the fuel for fusion will be generated long-term. Can it be generated by feeding back some of the net-energy?

 

[pinball1970]

I wonder how the fuel for fusion will be generated long-term. Can it be generated by feeding back some of the net-energy?

Some of the physics and engineering guys have discussed this

https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...t-fusion-energy-coming-soon-dec-2022.1048101/

adding this link also https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/major-nuclear-fusion-milestone-ignition-achieved.1006180/

 

[PeterDonis]

I wonder how the fuel for fusion will be generated long-term. Can it be generated by feeding back some of the net-energy?

Deuterium can be mined from seawater; long term I would expect fusion to use D-D instead of D-T.

Less long term if tritium is needed for D-T fusion, it can be obtained by putting a lithium blanket around the reactor. (Lithium Deuteride can also be used as fuel.)

 

[pinball1970]

T.I.L.
Two articles this week on ancient human made structures.

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-closer-menga-dolmen-greatest-feats.html

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-oldest-fortresses-world.html (today)

From above fortress article “This discovery challenges the traditional view that permanent settlements, accompanied by defensive structures, only emerged with farming societies, thus disproving the notion that agriculture and animal husbandry were prerequisites for societal complexity.”

Gobekli Tepe is mentioned in the fortress article.

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology...-no-more/00000181-3ded-d207-a795-7ded6a9c0000

 

[DaveC426913]

TIL these bamboo water fountains are called "Deer scares".

And they serve a purpose. To scare deer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishi-odoshi

(This is significant to me because there was one of these set up in an indoor garden in my local mall when I was growing up and I was fascinated by it.)

 

[BillTre]

 

[Swamp Thing]

I have been playing with the online Software Defined Radios (SDRs) called KiwiSDR.

But today I learned that you can demodulate weather FAX stations within the same web page using the "extensions" button in the receiver controls.

The following link will open up a KiwiSDR receiver in Germany and also set it up to receive weather faxes from the German Weather Service on 13880 KHz.

http://s4wmv4hovyls5ebz.myfritz.net:8075/?f=13880.54&z=10&ext=fax,align:1,auto:1,stop:1

Frequencies and schedules of Wx FAX stations worldwide:
https://www.weather.gov/media/marine/rfax.pdfAnother receiver in the USA, tuned for FAXes from Point Reyes Station, CA.
198.40.45.23:8073/?f=12784.1/1100,2550usb&z=10&ext=fax,align:1,auto:1,stop:1

Sample FAX image from the German service :

Point Reyes Stn, CA :

And a greyscale cloud image (these need some adjustment of the receiver frequency for optimum brightness):

 

[BillTre]

New lego stuff (biological version).

Where's the black hole lego kit?

 

[BillTre]