Today I Learned #2: Gone for a Wiki Walk

[Zkribbler]

The Dutch King works part time as a pilot for KLM.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Mount Everest Adds a Few Feet to Its Peak Performance

KATHMANDU, Nepal— Mount Everest just got a little taller.

China and Nepal, the two countries Everest straddles, said the world’s tallest mountain is now officially the equivalent of 29,032 feet.

The new height of 8,848.86 meters (29,031.69 feet) was determined following what geologists said was the most thorough survey of the summit ever. More important, it was the first time a single height was calculated and certified by both Nepal and China. Previously, they had different official heights. China said it was 29,017 feet. Nepal said it was a little taller, at 29,028 feet.

“The respect and pride of all Nepalis has risen along with this increase in the height” of Mount Everest, Padma Kumari Aryal, Nepal’s minister for Land Management, Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation, said at an event in Kathmandu to celebrate the announcement. Nepali scientists wouldn’t speculate on the reason for the higher measurement this time, saying it may have more to do with improvements in technology and calculations.

“In this latest measurement, we used the best technologies available now at this time, and arrived at this slightly higher number,” said Damodar Dhakal, director and spokesman for Nepal’s Survey Department. Geologists said the new height was in line with most others in recent years. Measuring mountains isn’t an exact science as it has to take into account everything from theoretical sea levels to how gravity would affect that sea level near the mountains being measured. Everest does grow, very slowly—less than a fifth of an inch a year—some geologists say, from the movement of tectonic plates below it. But that growth can be erased or reversed by earthquakes or other effects.

People have been measuring and remeasuring the world’s highest peak for more than 170 years, using the latest tech to try to add precision on each attempt. For many years, European estimates, which were determined from hundreds of miles away because they weren’t allowed near it, set the mountain’s of- ficial height. The story of why the two countries couldn’t agree on the height and resolve the world’s highest border dispute is part geopolitics and part geodesy. It is a matter of pride for both that they have done it on their own.

From the Yellow Sea to the peak of Chomolungma, China’s Tibetan name for Everest, Chinese teams measured the distance from sea level and gravity, while teams in Nepal, where the mountain is called Sagarmatha, did the same going south to its border with India. Both sides used the latest technology along the more than 2,000-mile journey.

The teams from China and Nepal used everything from old-fashioned trigonometry and surveying equipment, to satellite positioning and gravity meters. Nepal had planned to do this all on its own, but figured it was better to work with China so there would be a single number.
Nepal has been growing closer to China in recent years and has massive infrastructure projects planned under Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative, including a railroad through the Himalayas and a tunnel under them connecting the two countries.

“China-Nepal friendship will rise across the Himalayas and reach new heights,”

A Chinese surveyor setting up equipment on the summit of Mount Everest in May. FROM LEFT: TASHI TSERING/XINHUA/ASSOCIATED PRESS; SUNIL SHARMA/ZUMA PRESS

Wu Wenzhong, head of China’s surveying and mapping department, said through a video link to Kathmandu. “An even brighter future lies ahead for scientific cooperation between China and Nepal.”

 

[Hrothbern]

The Dutch King works part time as a pilot for KLM.

Just like his grandfather did,
And he needs to make enough hours per year to be allowed doing that hobby in those big air planes.
Our PM still teaches half a day per week on a secondary school. Did not gave that up although he is already 10 years PM.

 

[Samson]

Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass

Here we quantify the human-made mass, referred to as ‘anthropogenic mass’, and compare it to the overall living biomass on Earth, which currently equals approximately 1.1 teratonnes. We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020 (± 6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20 years, will surpass all global living biomass. On average, for each person on the globe, anthropogenic mass equal to more than his or her bodyweight is produced every week.​

Nature Paper

 

[The_J]

I don't think that includes microbial biomass, but I'll read the article tomorrow.

 

[Samson]

I don't think that includes microbial biomass, but I'll read the article tomorrow.

They say:

A recent survey of Earth’s remaining living biomass [11] has found that, on a mass basis, plants constitute the vast majority (about 90%) [16], followed by bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists, and animals.​

I wonder how they estimate phytoplankton and soil and rock bacteria, but it is too late tonight for me to figure it out.

 

[Kyriakos]

The poor/lower class students in 17th century Oxford were called "servitors".
More flesh for the god of the machine.

 

[Takhisis]

TIL that around 1200 BCE a wave of counterfeiting started with silver objects.

I'll leave it to you to find out why and how Henry VIII (one of the worst kings England ever had) came to be known as ‘coppernose’.

 

[Berzerker]

Did Newton come up with the practice of putting edges on coins to deter people from scraping metal off?

 

[Birdjaguar]

TIL: Aristotle believed in and supported slavery. I guess that makes all the rest of his work not worth reading.
https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2019/09/10/aristotles-defense-of-slavery/

Aristotle often discusses natural slaves hypothetically: if there are any such people, this is what would be true about them. He is aware that some deny the existence of natural slaves[8]: some “believe that it is contrary to nature to be a master (for it is by law that one person is a slave and another free, whereas by nature there is no difference between them).”[9]

But Aristotle says that it is “not difficult”[10] to show that there are natural slaves, that there are people “as different from others as body is from soul or beast from human.”[11] It is not difficult, he claims, because the psychological deficiencies of natural slaves are physically observable: nature “tends to make the bodies of slaves and free people different too, the former strong enough to be used for necessities, the latter useless for that sort of work.”[12] Aristotle even believes that we can often tell who is a natural slave right from the beginning of life: “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”[13]

 

[Takhisis]

TIL: Aristotle believed in and supported slavery.

You discovered that only now.

 

[Birdjaguar]

You discovered that only now.

Yeah, Greek philosophers have never been high on my interest list.

 

[Takhisis]

Except when they were called Kyriakos and you wanted to infract them.

Moderator Action: Kind of PDMA-ish no? Be careful. --LM

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned that Windows Explorer can only display timestamps between 1980-01-01 00:00:00 — 2107-12-31 23:59:57.

If you use a program to modify a file's timestamps outside that range and switch to details view, it appears blank.

 

[The_J]

Did Newton come up with the practice of putting edges on coins to deter people from scraping metal off?

I thought this came way after, but seems you're right https://www.sbcgold.com/blog/why-do-some-coins-have-ridges/ .
Although there doesn't seem to be any reliably good internet source for this (the above already being the best).

 

[Kyriakos]

Yeah, Greek philosophers have never been high on my interest list.

It's your loss - though kind of late to start on that now

I'd suggest reading ancient drama instead, eg Oedipous is still the most impressive play of all time, and will leave a strong impression despite everyone knowing the gist of the story.
You can find it online, in english, at lots of sites. (Oedipus Rex)

 

[AmazonQueen]

TIL that for the last 2 years the Xmas No 1 have been sausage roll themed "joke" covers. Makes me glad I'm out of touch.

 

[Arakhor]

Did Newton come up with the practice of putting edges on coins to deter people from scraping metal off?

Sir Isaac Newton was Master of the Mint during the reign of Queen Anne, and he had all sorts of ideas about how to keep coinage pure.

 

[Birdjaguar]

TIL:
The Connection Between Autism and Invention

Our unique ability to analyze patterns is at the root of a psychological disability and the talent that drives human development.

BY SIMON BARON-COHEN

On the face of it, we shouldn’t expect any link between a neurological disability and one of the crowning talents of our species. But new research is revealing a surprising connection between autism and the uniquely human capacity for invention.

As the archaeological record shows, our ancestors started inventing things 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. This was when humans evolved the capacity to seek patterns—particularly to spot and experiment with the basic cause-and-effect relationship of if-and- then. With the development of this ability came the earliest examples of jewelry making (75,000 years ago) and the first bow-and-arrow (71,000 years ago). By around 44,000 years ago, we find the first evidence of counting.

The idea that if-and-then systemizing lies at the root of such technological invention derives from the work of George Boole, a 19th-century English logician. To get a simple idea of how it works, consider the earliest musical instrument, a flute made from the hollow bone of a bird, found in a cave in Germany and dated to about 40,000 years ago. Its maker must have thought: If I blow down this hollow bone, and I cover one hole, then I make sound A. That would be repeated with variations: If I blow down this hollow bone, and I uncover one hole, then I make sound B.

Proceeding this way can create something new—an invention. If we think that the new device is better than a previous one, we retain it. This same exquisite if-and-then logic underlies the engineering of any complex tool or system, from agriculture and cooking to math, medicine and music. It happens that inventors and autistic people both love to repeat their observations of such patterns, over and over again, to uncover timeless laws. At Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre, which I direct, we set out to explore this convergence. Our research found an overlap between the minds of those gifted in invention and the minds of autistic people. Both are more likely to be pattern seekers, or hyper-systemizers, strongly driven to analyze or build systems by identifying and experimenting with if-and then patterns.

This overlap arises at least partly because some of the genes associated with hyper-systemizing are the same genes that code for autism. We also found that strong systemizing appears to come at a price, most recognizable in autism: The more your brain is tuned to seek such patterns, the less you can engage the brain’s parallel circuit for empathy, another important and uniquely human capacity.

Our team has uncovered these connections through three major studies. In the Brain Types Study, published in 2018, we tested 600,000 members of the general population and 36,000 people diagnosed as autistic. We used three brief questionnaires to test their relative tendency to empathize and systemize and how many autistic traits they have.

The result was a bell curve in which most people either were balanced evenly between empathy and systemizing or leaned one way or the other. But about 3% were on the extreme end for empathy or systemizing. Autistic people were far more likely to be on the extreme hyper-systemizing end. People working in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) fields—bastions of invention— had a higher number of autistic traits than those not working in STEM.

We called our second big research effort the Silicon Valley Study. We reasoned that if the link between talent at systemizing and autism is genetic, then autism should be more common in places where those with an aptitude at systemizing flock to work and then meet and raise families. We tested this prediction in Eindhoven, the Silicon Valley of the Netherlands. It has been home to the Phillips factory for 100 years and to the Eindhoven Institute of Technology; both have been magnets for those with STEM aptitude.

We found that autism was more than twice as high in Eindhoven compared with two other Dutch cities, Utrecht and Haarlem, which have similar-sized populations and are matched in relevant demographic variables, but are not information- technology hubs.

In my research I have met lots of autistic people who are hyper-systemizers. Take Jonah, who can see patterns on the surfaces of the ocean waves and points them out to the fishermen so they know where to fish. He can also listen to auditory patterns in the sounds of a car engine and hear which components need changing. Or consider Derek Paravacini, an autistic adult with a mental age of a 3-year-old who is congenitally blind. Yet he can play any jazz song on the piano after hearing it just once and can instantly transpose it into any key, or effortlessly play the same song in the style of a different composer, because he can spot the auditory patterns.

We can also think of great inventors like Thomas Edison, or great musicians like the pianist Glenn Gould, who loved patterns and experimenting nonstop, and whose biographies suggest they were high in autistic traits. Edison used to chant repetitively to himself as a child and would read every book in the public library in the order they were on the bookshelf. Gould would always eat the same meal at the same time in the same diner each night and had to have the same chair in each performance, wherever he performed.

The Silicon Valley Study hinted that the genesfor autism and systemizing were linked. But to prove that, we conducted our third piece of research, the Genetics of Empathy and Systemizing Study, working with the company 23andMe. Their customers are people in the general public who pay $100 to find out their genetic makeup. Among 50,000 people whose DNA was available and who had taken our tests, we found both empathy and systemizing were partly genetic, suggesting that both traits could have been selected in evolution because of the benefits they confer in different environmental niches.

Then we tested the big question: Is there any overlap between the common genetic variants associated with hyper-systemizing and those associated with autism? Indeed, it turned out that among genes coding for autism or for talent at systemizing, a significant portion coded for both.

Our research has discovered that modern-day inventors and autistic people share some traits to an elevated degree, and both have minds that are drawn to hyper-systemize, for partly genetic reasons. We can therefore assume that ancient inventors also had an elevated number of autistic traits, while playing a key role in human progress. Although autistic people struggle to navigate the social world, the study of autism has changed how we think about the human brain, and the study of human invention has changed how we think about autism. Dr. Baron-Cohen is director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre and the author of “The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention,” published Nov. 10 by Basic Books.

The more your brain is tuned to seek such patterns, the less you can engage a parallel circuit for empathy.

 

[Kyriakos]

Sir Isaac Newton was Master of the Mint during the reign of Queen Anne, and he had all sorts of ideas about how to keep coinage pure.

Which took precious time from his other interests, including creating potions which would make him invisible.
Newton also did experiments on optics on his own eyes, using needles which he inserted between the eye and the bone.. He was trying to establish how the retina works.