TIL: Today I Learned

[Valka D'Ur]

I wonder what kind of scandal there would be if the Pope confessed to not actually being Catholic.

It would finally be out in the open that it's more of a political job than a spiritual one.

 

[cardgame]

TIL combined yearly CO2 emission of all vulcanos are at about 0.65Gt/a. In comparison CO2 emission caused by use of fossile fuel is about 29Gt/a.
Large vulcanic eruptions like Mount st. Helens are between 10-50Mt.
=> it is worth about 15h of normal fossile fuel consumption.

What is that, gigatons per annum?

 

[Kaitzilla]

TIL the universe is improbable.

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-ba...didnt-collapse-into-a-black-hole-2feea3b51b27

What’s remarkable is that the amount of fine-tuning that needed to occur so that the Universe’s expansion rate and matter-and-energy density matched so well so that we didn’t either recollapse immediately or fail to form even the basic building-blocks of matter is something like one part in 10²⁴, which is kind of like taking two human beings, counting the number of electrons in them, and finding that they’re identical to within one electron. In fact, if we went back to a time when the Universe was just one nanosecond old (since the Big Bang), we can quantify how finely-tuned the density and the expansion rate needed to be.

Cutting things close for life in the universe.
0.2 grams per cubic centimeter too much and it would already be over.


Everything is now also 1100 times farther away from each other than when the universe was 477,000 years old.

https://thecuriousastronomer.wordpr...shift-of-the-cosmic-microwave-background-cmb/
https://www.quora.com/How-large-was...moment-of-recombination-in-Big-Bang-cosmology

All the stuff in the whole observable universe was packed into a sphere with a diameter of 84 million light years back then.
A billion times less volume than now.

 

[Takhisis]

As much as space can have ‘volume’ if it's infinite, eh?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Since we are here and under our current circumstances, I would guess that our attempts at modeling probabilities about the Big Bang are probably wrong.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Why is it called the Big Bang anyways? I can't imagine it made any sort of noise.

 

[sophie]

I knew that once & was a letter. The other nine came as a surprise.

& is not, nor has it ever been, a letter. It is a ligature combining the letters "e" and "t", and representing the Latin word "et" (and). If anything, ~, ^, and " (diaeresis) are more letters than & is.

æ is also a ligature, a combination of a and e, but unlike &, it represents a single, distinct sound in many of the languages which now employ it, or have employed it historically (e.g. Old English, Danish, and Norwegian). It wasn't that way in the original Latin, though.

 

[Cutlass]

Why is it called the Big Bang anyways? I can't imagine it made any sort of noise.

The scientist that first had the theory of the universe didn't call it that. The name was a sort of derogatory rejection of the theory. But over time, as the theory became widely accepted, the name stuck. Like a lot of names, it wasn't really an intentional creation, but rather just became common usage over time.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I guess it stuck because it was catchy.

 

[Takhisis]

& is not, nor has it ever been, a letter.

Insofar as English grammar, just like English law, has never been officially codified, it was considered to be ‘and, per se, and (→ampersand)’ a symbol if not actually a letter. I'd put it down as an abbreviation myself.

 

[BenitoChavez]

TIL that global warming will affect the ratio of male and female babies born.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/health/climate-change-infant-sex-ratio-intl/index.html

Samuli Helle, a senior researcher in the Section of Ecology, Department of Biology at the University of Turku in Finland, also found that "warmer temperatures bring sons." In his study of the Sami people of Northern Finland, he was also able to quantify the effect: For every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature, there was a 0.06% increase in the ratio of newborn boys compared with girls. For example, he said, an annual increase of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) would translate to a 0.18% higher ratio of male-to-female newborns. "Not a dramatic influence at first sight but it should be remembered that in large populations such effect size might mean thousands of 'extra' boys annually," Helle wrote in an email.

...

Though scientists do not know how stress affects gestation, Fukuda theorizes that the vulnerability of Y-bearing sperm cells, male embryos and/or male fetuses to stress is why "subtle significant changes in sex ratios" occur.

 

[Phrossack]

TIL about the HHMS Kaimiloa, the first and only ship--really a small gunboat-- of the Hawai'ian Royal Navy. She was armed with 4-inch guns and a pair of Gatlings, and driven by sails and a 60hp steam engine. She went on a voyage to Samoa to attempt to build pan-Pacific ties to resist European imperialism--only to find a German force already there in "negotiations" to annex the place. Unfortunately for all small Pacific island nations, their entire geopolitical situation could always be described in a single rude word, so it was all for nothing.

 

[Kyriakos]

Apparently (?) the famous inscription at the athena polias (ie athena of the polis) temple at Priene, noting how it was built with funds provided by alexander the great, was deliberately placed six metres above the ground, so as to escape casual attention. Cause it was considered sacrilegious to self-promote at sacred sites.

 

[Zkribbler]

Today's mail brought my Honorable Mention Certificate for last quarter's Writers of the Future Contest for unpublished writers.

 

[Yeekim]

Apparently (?) the famous inscription at the athena polias (ie athena of the polis) temple at Priene, noting how it was built with funds provided by alexander the great, was deliberately placed six metres above the ground, so as to escape casual attention. Cause it was considered sacrilegious to self-promote at sacred sites.

Interesting... but begs a question what was the intended point of such an inscription then.

 

[Kyriakos]

@Yeekim : to present how the new hegemon of the greek world was tied to symbols of hellenism and unity of culture (which temples were). It was still far less blatant than what philip did at olympia, one of the main panhellenic culturally/religious sites, where he had a small temple built, named after him and hosting in it statues of his family as if they too were gods
At Priene alex wasnt around to watch the inscription, i suppose. Though he did stay in the city for a little while.

 

[777]

TIL: I l learned about human history and human development when after some search time found this site:

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-evolution-timeline-interactive

It's funny how long time it took to get basic things "right" such as walking, crafting tools and farming and how little time from there it took to create for example a space shuttle.

 

[AdamCrock]

TIL : You should not attempt eating a coconut without proper power tools - man I got so tiret banging that thing with a hammer, trying to pry it open Man ! Eating coconuts sure is exhausting, they taste great though.

 

[Kyriakos]

Τιλ that Aristotle arrives to the conclusion that the sensory ability of touch must lie below the actual skin in the following manner:
-it cannot lie outside(on some intermediate like air), cause then it would not be there if some light (eg membranous) external body would be placed between the skin and the sensed object.
-it cannot lie on the actual skin, cause all senses are dulled when the sensory object is directly placed on the sensory organ. Also due to the many possible layers of membranous external object mentioned above it would already be less likely that the skin itself isnt a similar layer covering the actual sensory organ.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Aristotle put something on his eye, then tried to see it?
He put something in his ear and tried to hear it?
Shoved something up his nose, then tried to smell it?
Placed something in his mouth and tried to taste it?

Well, he looks mostly right here.
3 out of 4 of those are fails.

And feeling happens in the skin under the outer layer of dead skin, so sounds correct to me.