Today I Learned

[mfb]

I always thought "nucular" was just a simpsons joke and references to it.

 

[Bystander]

"nucular"

Michael "Dogulas:" China syndrome.

 

[NascentOxygen]

I always thought "nucular" was just a simpsons joke and references to it.

U.S. presidents who have used this pronunciation include Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular

 

[jim hardy]

U.S. presidents who have used this pronunciation include Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush

One of my pet peeves. I followed the word in Webster's... stylistic labels was i think the subsection...
Decades ago the pronunciation noo-kye-ler was upgraded
from substandard, meaning 'not used by educated people and in the same category as irregardless and drownded'
to nonstandard, meaning not correct but used by too many educated people, including two past presidents , to be labelled substandard.'

I think it's not even nonstandard anymore.. How avuncular.

 

[Hornbein]

How long before loose becomes nonstandard spelling for lose?

 

[gjonesy]

Today I learned that lose and loose are being used interchangeably Lose being most commonly a verb but sometimes an adjective and loose most commonly an adjective but some times a verb! I'm so afraid of losing my mind, so turn me loose and set me free!

 

[Sophia]

Today I learned that lose and loose are being used interchangeably Lose being most commonly a verb but sometimes an adjective and loose most commonly an adjective but some times a verb! I'm so afraid of losing my mind, so turn me loose and set me free!

What? Should I ask my English teacher to add a point to my test because she corrected a non-existent mistake?
I wonder if they keep tests for 8+ years...

 

[jim hardy]

rein-in vs reign-in I've done it myself... horsefeathers...

 

[gjonesy]

What? Should I ask my English teacher to add a point to my test because she corrected a non-existent mistake?
I wonder if they keep tests for 8+ years

Most definitely, in fact Id sue her for it!

#hukedownfonickswurkedfermi...

 

[Jonathan Scott]

How long before loose becomes nonstandard spelling for lose?

I think the word "led" as the past form of "to lead" has gone out of fashion too, being replaced by "lead" pronounced as in the metal.

 

[gjonesy]

I think the word "led" as the past form of "to lead" has gone out of fashion too, being replaced by "lead" pronounced as in the metal

Talk about confusing, " The US is now taking the environmental lead against lead contamination. This effort is being lead by the environmental protection agency, one of their biggest weapons is lead detecting canines. In the field these dog are put on a lead and walked across a property and can detect the slightest bit of lead in the soil. And we're not just talking about your run of the mill lead that leads are connected to on the battery in your car, we're talking about heavy metal contaminate in the environment that forced an entire town to evacuate, Picher Oklahoma. That's our lead story, for more on lead contamination in Picher visit": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma

 

[Jonathan Scott]

... effort is being lead ...

Hmmm. Google shows about 6,730 hits on "effort is being lead" compared with about 74,400 for "effort is being led", so the incorrect spelling as a proportion of the total is still only a bit more than 8%. Perhaps there's hope yet...

 

[gjonesy]

I always thought "nucular" was just a simpsons joke and references to it.

Its pronounced Newqueler (new-que-ler)

#hukedownfonickswurkedfermi...

 

[ProfuselyQuarky]

Today I learned that I share the same birthday as Erno Rubik.

Today I learned that Tumblr is considered social media.

Today I noticed that Chaplin and Hitler have the same type of mustache, but I still prefer the mustache of Poirot better.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

Today I learned that one of my Scottish great-great-grandfathers set off to work his way to Australia on a sailing ship but ended up in Calcutta after it hit a rock and sank in the Bay of Bengal in around 1855, after which he refused to go to sea again. I always wondered how that branch of the family ended up in India.

 

[Astronuc]

TIL that "ARP Instruments, Inc. was an American manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, founded by Alan Robert Pearlman in 1969. Best known for its line of synthesizers that emerged in the early 1970s, ARP closed its doors in 1981 due to financial difficulties."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP_Instruments

The main competitor was Moog.

Diana Lewis played an ARP Synthesizer on Elton John's Madman Across the Water.

 

[jim hardy]

Best known for its line of synthesizers

Wow - they were analog !

ARP entered the fledgling synthesizer industry with the introduction of the ARP 2002, which with twice as many switch rows on top, became the 2500 analog modular synthesizer. T

 

[dlgoff]

The main competitor was Moog.

Wow - they were analog !

I was on the front row when Robert Moog explained and demonstrated each of his synthesizer's analog functions at a colloquium for Kansas University EEs soon after he invented it. It was awesome.

 

[ShayanJ]

Today I learned that the Dirac equation in the Schwarzschild spacetime has the following form:

$i\hbar (1-\frac{2M}{r})^{\frac 1 2} \left[ \gamma^0 \frac 1 c \frac{\partial \psi}{\partial t}-\frac{M}{2r^2} \gamma^1 \psi+\gamma^1 \frac{\partial \psi}{\partial r} + \frac{M}{r^2} \gamma^1 \psi \right]+i\hbar \left[\gamma^2 \frac 1 r \frac{\partial \psi}{\partial \theta}+\gamma^3\frac{1}{r\sin\theta} \frac{\partial \psi}{\partial \varphi}+\frac{\cot\theta}{2r} \gamma^2 \psi\right]=mc\psi$

Pretty complicated!

 

[jim hardy]

Pretty complicated!

TIL that some people seem to understand such things !

 

[Kevin McHugh]

I always thought "nucular" was just a simpsons joke and references to it.

Nucular was George Bush's arsenal.

 

[Buzz Bloom]

TIL a new word.

lapidate: 1. to pelt with stones 2. to kill by stoning. Nice metaphor.

Context

You are saying that if we don't find life of Europa, that will make possible for us to compare our environment with Europa's and possibly lapidate our current hypothesis for chemo-genesis.

 

[ComplexVar89]

Today, I learnt:

The key thing to bear in mind about this is that, if there is an underlying symmetry to the system, then any individual state that does not have that symmetry will be one of a set of states that, taken as a whole, does.

 

[rbelli1]

Breadfruit smells like banana bread when you cook it.

BoB

 

[Jonathan Scott]

Today I learned that the toy hot air engine which I used to play with when young and which I eventually inherited from my grandfather was made by George Carette between 1902 and 1911. It looks exactly like this one:

which I found on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Old-Carette-tinplate-toy-Hot-Air-Engine-Germany-/331819728988

I thought of it today and dug it out of my cupboard because my daughter and her boyfriend are currently revising thermodynamics including the Carnot cycle. The hot air engine uses the Stirling Cycle which I believe is a reasonable practical approximation. It chugged away beautifully for ages this afternoon, although it needed occasional oil to help seal the piston. My son was quite interested in it, but my daughter not so much; I think she's more into the theory than the engineering.

 

[jim hardy]

The hot air engine uses the Stirling Cycle which I believe is a reasonable practical approximation. It chugged away beautifully for ages this afternoon, although it needed occasional oil to help seal the piston. My son was quite interested in it, but my daughter not so much; I think she's more into the theory than the engineering.

I remember reading about Ford's experimental Stirling-engined automobile.
Looks like there were several others...

http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/...-drops-stirling-engines-in-some-odd-vehicles/

http://stirlingengineforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=1618

Hobbyists of the day liked the old Chrysler sv2 automobile Freon compressor for DIY Stirling projects because it is a 90 degree V giving you the offset you need...
http://diystirlingengine.com/sv-2-stirling-engine-generator/

old jim

 

[epenguin]

Today I learned that I share the same birthday as Erno Rubik.

Today I learned that Tumblr is considered social media.

Today I noticed that Chaplin and Hitler have the same type of mustache, but I still prefer the mustache of Poirot better.

Well Chaplin had it a long time before Hitler - and Hitler was often referred to as soon as anyone noticed him as the 'man with the Charlie Chaplin moustache'.

I am sure that fact this made him faintly comical helped the underestimation of how dangerous he was.

TIL "Chaplin's son Charles Jr. described his father as being haunted by the similarities in background between him and Hitler; they were born four days apart in April 1889, and both had risen to their present heights from poverty." (Wikipedia article).

The thing came weirdly together in Chaplin's film 'The Great Dictator' which would not have been the same thing without the already widely noticed resemblance, which I wonder whether it was total concidence.

 

[jtbell]

Today I learned that from 1978 to 1989, skateboarding was banned in Norway.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36077122

 

[Hornbein]

Today I learned that Dwight Eisenhower thought that dropping the atomic bomb on J was a terrible idea.

 

[JorisL]

TIL I hadn't installed gcc when I reinstalled my system back in the beginning of november (!)

So it's been almost 6 months without programming in C...

 

[jim hardy]

Today I learned that Dwight Eisenhower thought that dropping the atomic bomb on J was a terrible idea.

Waiting for the Russians to ravage J wouldn't have been very kind either.

It would be interesting to speculate how, were their roles swapped, MacArthur would have handled European and Ike the Pacific campaigns .

 

[1oldman2]

Today I learned that 4/22 is J. Robert Oppenheimer's birthday.

 

[ProfuselyQuarky]

Today I learned that 4/22 is J. Robert Oppenheimer's birthday.

Happy Birthday J.R.O. (yeah, I'm talking to a dead person, I know )

TIL how to convert a mp4 into a mp3. Yeah, baby!

 

[ProfuselyQuarky]

Today I learned that from 1978 to 1989, skateboarding was banned in Norway.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36077122

Those must have been dark days.

 

[1oldman2]

TIL how to convert a mp4 into a mp3. Yeah, baby!

That was a watershed moment in my life also, I keep all my music in MP3.