Today I Learned

  • Thread starter Thread starter Greg Bernhardt
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Today I learned that cleaning a white hat can be done with bleach cleaner, but it’s important to rinse it before wearing it again. I also discovered that "oyster veneering," a woodworking technique from the late 1600s, is experiencing a minor revival despite its labor-intensive nature. Additionally, I learned that the factorial of 23 (23!) equals 25,852,016,738,884,976,640,000, which interestingly has 23 digits, a unique coincidence among factorials. I found out that medical specialists often spend less than 10 minutes with patients, and that watching TV can contribute to weight gain. Other insights included the fact that a kiss can transfer around 80 million microbes, and that bureaucracy can sometimes hinder employment opportunities. The discussion also touched on various trivia, such as the emotional sensitivity of barn owls and the complexities of gravitational lensing around black holes.
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Screenshot 2023-10-31 at 9.20.14 AM.png
 
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Physics news on Phys.org
  • #5,612
Some veteran Costco cashiers make mid-$60K's. . .not bad.
 
  • #5,614
Swamp Thing said:
Why is the top-hatted head smiling?
Because its a happy emotion?
 
  • #5,615
A case of body dysphoria?
 
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  • #5,616
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.
 
  • #5,617
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.
 
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  • #5,619
Janus said:
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.
 
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  • #5,620
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
 
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Algr said:
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.
 
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  • #5,622
pinball1970 said:
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

 
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  • #5,623
Swamp Thing said:

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

1699451167486.png
 
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  • #5,624
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! :smile:
 
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  • #5,625
TIL that you can forget how to ride a bike.

1699725039275.jpeg

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.

:sorry:
 
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  • #5,627
The British Limpet Mine Mk-I used a dissolving candy ball* as a delayed (~35 min.) firing device.



* It was aniseed flavored, BTW.[/size]
 
  • #5,628
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.
 
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  • #5,630
TIL (from CNN) we might be getting less snow in the future:

Screenshot 2023-11-25 at 8.44.18 AM.png


Screenshot 2023-11-25 at 8.44.40 AM.png
 
  • #5,631
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.

o0)
 
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  • #5,632
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
 
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Ibix said:
Whatever AI you consulted has apparently slipped some pot into its cookies
I thought brownies were the usual food of choice for that...
 
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Ibix said:
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.
 
  • #5,635
PeterDonis said:
I thought brownies were the usual food of choice for that...
Maybe so, but programs have cookies, not brownies.
PeterDonis said:
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.
 
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PeterDonis said:
I thought brownies were the usual food of choice for that...
I had a friend who used it in spaghetti sauce. Marhinara.
 
  • #5,637
Ibix said:
...
Whatever AI you consulted has apparently slipped some pot into its cookies

Google apparently has its own AI now.

Google Generative AI.2023-11-25 at 15.31.15.png
 
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  • #5,638
maybe It learned that by reading PF?
 
  • #5,639
ChatGPT suggested 0.5 mm grain size and the result was 14.36 km.
 

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