Cool Pictures IV: The Awesomeness is Volatile

[madviking]

The spring thing is true in theory, but very hard to prove in actuality.

If you put 1,000 joules of energy into a spring its mass would increase 1.11e-14 kg, which, according to Wolfram Alpha is about an eighth of the mass of a human red blood cell.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

First of all, spoiler that ******** crap. And i say ******** because of useless sentences like: "Mind not blown yet? Things are about to get REAL" / "Too much ? Just breathe." It's stuff like these that make me hate early days cracked articles. (Nowadays they seem to post an intresting article every few weeks.)

And second, all those are just about as true as any cracked articles.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

"The pyramids were as old to the Romans as the Romans are to us" is only true depending on which Romans. The early days of the Roman Republic (or the monarchy it replaced) were presumably closer to the building of the pyramids than to today.

 

[Monsterzuma]

At the main Pondicherry temple, an elephant will bless you — by tapping its trunk on your head — if you hand it some money. Of course this is a temple elephant and it is also a Mengerian elephant. The elephant has no use for money but understands that it is a general medium of exchange. The elephant hands the money over to the temple authority and is later rewarded with food.

The elephant is not merely trading, but it is engaged in indirect exchange and thus in monetary economics.

There is in fact a sign up forbidding such Mengerian transactions, but the elephant seems not to notice it.

And yet this is not the end of the story. In many parts of Tamil Nadu, temple elephants have attained so much prosperity through Mengerian indirect exchange, and been able to consume so much leisure, that now elephant obesity is a more serious problem than elephant malnutrition.

http://marginalrevolution.com/margi...ts-engage-in-mengerian-indirect-exchange.html

 

[Lillefix]

"The pyramids were as old to the Romans as the Romans are to us" is only true depending on which Romans. The early days of the Roman Republic (or the monarchy it replaced) were presumably closer to the building of the pyramids than to today.

The year 274BC is the watershed year if we use the Great Pyramid. So most Romans we've heard about are closer to us than the Great pyramid.

edit: Pyramid built in 2560 not 2650.

 

[DroopyTofu]

The one about Zackary Tyler's grandkid is true; my US history teacher mentioned it last week. I'm sceptical about the one about dropping a book to the center of the Earth. I think the book would move faster as it got closer to the center because gravity would pull harder on it.

 

[Monsterzuma]

I think the book would move faster as it got closer to the center because gravity would pull harder on it.

isn't it the other way around? at the center it would be subject to no net gravitational pull at all since all the matter is around rather than "below" it. the closer it gets to that, the weaker the gravity.

 

[madviking]

isn't it the other way around? at the center it would be subject to no net gravitational pull at all since all the matter is around rather than "below" it. the closer it gets to that, the weaker the gravity.

This is true. There is no gravity at the center of the Earth.

 

[DroopyTofu]

isn't it the other way around? at the center it would be subject to no net gravitational pull at all since all the matter is around rather than "below" it. the closer it gets to that, the weaker the gravity.

Sorry, I got that backwards. Closer to the center; the slower it goes. That measure does make sense I guess. I seem to remember seeing a study about the physics behind buidling subways through the center of the Earth, but the details are fuzzy.

 

[cardgame]

>Closer to center, slower it goes

>Further from center, slower it goes (inverse square)

 

[Meteor Man]

Link to video.

Minute physics to the rescue.

Warning: includes pyramids.

 

[madviking]

>Closer to center, slower it goes

>Further from center, slower it goes (inverse square)

 

[Monsterzuma]

http://www.geekologie.com/2012/12/at-least-theyre-not-a-hurricane-giant-fi.php

Video inside.

 

[Monsterzuma]

“The Lions Mane Jellyfish is the largest jellyfish in the world. They have been swimming in arctic waters since before the dinosaurs (over 650 million years ago) and are among some of the oldest surviving species in the world. The largest can come in at about 6 meters and has tentacles over 50 meters long.”

http://darksideoftheshroom.tumblr.com/post/5183528014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion's_mane_jellyfish

 

[Meteor Man]

Spoiler :

Beautiful.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Spoiler :

http://imgur.com/gallery/yZc7P

so... are all of these true?

I remember criticizing the Africa size comparison map before, on the grounds that the European countries still look bigger than they should. The map makes it look like the British Isles have a slightly larger area than Madagascar; Madagascar is actually more than 86% larger then the British Isles. This was clearly not based on a globe or an equal-area map projection, as any map purporting to demonstrate the true size of something ought to be.



The time comparisons are obviously rounded.



We are inside the closest Spiral Galaxy, so at least some of the light from the closest spiral galaxy is emitted very close to us and hardly takes any time to get here.

The next closest spiral galaxy may be 2.5 million Light Years away, but that does not actually mean that the light we see from there took 2.5 million years to reach us. That would be true if the universe were static, but it isn't. The light redshifts due to the expansion of the space it passes through. The distances we calculate from this are actually the current distances, measured in terms of how long it would take light to travel between the too points if the two points remained the same distance from each other. They would have been somewhat closer than this when the light was first emitted though, and the light would have traveled a shorter path (and thus a shorter time) during the early portions of its journey. We cannot actually know how long the light took to reach us unless we know the rate at which the space through which it traveled was expanding during its journey. The rate of the expansion (or contraction) of space is not a constant, and in theory can be significantly faster than the speed of light traveling through the space. This makes it much harder to accurately guess how far away an object was at the time it emitted its light.

 

[Monsterzuma]

http://imgur.com/gallery/l96xY

 

[Meteor Man]

Spoiler :

http://imgur.com/gallery/yZc7P

so... are all of these true?

Sorry to beat this like a dead horse, but the claim that a spring weighs more when compressed than when relaxed is bull. What, does it gain more mass? Ridiculous. Not to mention that that's practically impossible to accurately measure.

 

[madviking]

Sorry to beat this like a dead horse, but the claim that a spring weighs more when compressed than when relaxed is bull. What, does it gain more mass? Ridiculous. Not to mention that that's practically impossible to accurately measure.

The spring thing is true in theory, but very hard to prove in actuality.

If you put 1,000 joules of energy into a spring its mass would increase 1.11e-14 kg, which, according to Wolfram Alpha is about an eighth of the mass of a human red blood cell.

e=mc^2, brah

 

[Meteor Man]

e=mc^2, brah

Yeah, but come on. For something as small as that, it's ridiculous. Maybe if it's going .9999c, but in real, practical life, nope.