TIL: Today I Learned

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Traitorfish said:
If we're going to accept actually-existing flags as an acceptable guideline for how flags should look, we'd be better off just abandoning the whole project and going back to animal totems on spikes.
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Yes, I've called them on you.
 
TIL why I sometimes get little spikes of ice sticking out of my ice cubes. Water tends to freeze at the sides of the tray. As the freezing water expands it pushes the water in the middle up out of a ever shrinking hole. If the freezing rate is just right the water being pushed up can freeze right at the edges of the hole gradually building up a little upside down icicle.
 
I read somewhere that the little spikes tend to only happen when the water is very pure, purer than most people's tap water.
 
hobbsyoyo said:
I read somewhere that the little spikes tend to only happen when the water is very pure, purer than most people's tap water.
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I get them all the time, with ice cubes made from tap water.
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
Today I learned that if you manage to convert an audio file into image (I imported a BMP as raw data into Audacity, and then managed to fudge the file header onto an audio before re-exporting) it looks a little like TV static.

Spoiler :
R2S48MJ.jpg
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You made art!!
 
hobbsyoyo said:
I read somewhere that the little spikes tend to only happen when the water is very pure, purer than most people's tap water.
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I'd guess this is a function in two variables; salinity and freezer temperature. @BenitoChavez and the article he linked address the spikes not forming if they increased salinity only marginally from the distilled water they were using for best results, but they were using a fixed temperature that was no doubt what a freezer is supposed to run at. But the average person's freezer in their house may run more or less somewhere hopefully close to that or might not, actually. Higher salinity lowers the freezing point, which may compensate for a freezer running at a lower temperature and form spikes without using distilled water.
 
So bats are a lot better than birds at moving through the air in like a maneuvering sense, but they need to keep "flapping" their wings (they don't actually flap) to keep airborne, while I think most birds are sort of able to glide a lot of the time.
 
I knew disease typically killed many more soldiers than fighting, at least prior to modern medicine/sanitation. But I didn't realize the numbers were this skewed:

More sailors died from scurvy than enemy action. In 1744, Commodore George Anson of the Royal Navy returned from a nearly four-year circumnavigation of the globe with just 145 men left from the original complement of 1,955. Four died as a result of enemy action. Most of the rest died from scurvy.

This was not unusual – 184,889 sailors were enlisted into the Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War and 133,708 died or were lost due to sickness, again mostly scurvy, and just 1,512 died in combat. There is no way that the navy could have maintained the blockade of France for so long without preventing this disease.
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Kaitzilla said:
TIL that Poison Oak can make your ears stick out sideways.
Higher res pics elsewhere on the net prove it is the same guy in all 3 pics.

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Wait, I'd expect the extreme swelling to go down in 5 hours to 2 days without any treatment...
 
Today I learned that the Guess Who's American Woman actually happened because Randy Bachman broke a guitar string, came up with the riff while tuning the replacement one, and then Burton Cummings improvised the lyrics on the spot. Then they found a kid who was making a bootleg recording and asked him for the tape.
 
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