- #36
BillTre
Science Advisor
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hutchphd said:Watson and Crick did their DNA work about the time of my birth
Hey, me too.
Born into The Age of Biology!
hutchphd said:Watson and Crick did their DNA work about the time of my birth
hutchphd said:It still seemed unkempt to me ...hence my physics education!
But it's all squishy !BillTre said:The challenge is to make order of it.
phinds said:But it's all squishy !
I'll bet if you add up the weight of all the biomass on the planet, you'll find that easily 90%+ of it is squishy. Probably more like 99%.BillTre said:Except for the shells, bones, spines, and hard plant things like wood.
First thing I thought of too.hutchphd said:Watson and Crick did their DNA work about the time of my birth.
But I've heard it can be dangerous!BillTre said:The challenge is to make order of it.
There is a very funny comic which I laugh at every time I think of it. I won't post the image here because it contains some foul words, but here's a link to it in a spoiler below:BillTre said:Not so recent (1979, >40 years ago) a surprise to me, but at the time it was figured out, a very large impact killed off the dinosaurs (except the birds).
Yeah, but have you ever had to dissect one of those? Every stepped on one and gone YUCK !BillTre said:Anyway stars have no hard surfaces, and nebulae are nebulous.
Yeah. I got slimy Betelgeuse all over my toes.phinds said:Every stepped on one and gone YUCK !
phinds said:Yeah, but have you ever had to dissect one of those?
Or, is it?DennisN said:2. The Universe is not only expanding. The expansion is accelerating!
Wrichik Basu said:Quantum Mechanics.
You may be interested in this story about Eli Whitney, from https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/eli-whitneyWes Tausend said:Time.
Many things have blown my mind. The first was probably a wind-up alarm clock my father gave me when I was about 6 or 7 years old. It began a fascination with time. I knew that wind-up toys go fast at first, then slow. So how could a wind-up clock possibly keep good time? My father gave it to me because it ran slower and slower and finally quit.
My father replaced it with a synchronous electric clock, something I never figured out until my teens. I immediately took the wind-up clock apart, I mean ALL apart, and cleaned it and oiled it. After I put the gears and springs back together, it worked perfectly... for a while. Meanwhile, I'd learned how the latch made it keep time by regulating the mainspring. And after finally looking at the back case, I discovered a slot with an F and S. I realized it provided access to adjust clock rate via the hair-spring. My father hadn't noticed it before and put up with inaccurate time for years. I was pretty proud of that discovery.
The latch mechanism on the wind-up allowed me to figure out how a pendulum clock regulated time in the school mimeograph room. The smell of the ink comes back to me when I remember.
The reason my free wind-up alarm clock quit was I had way over- oiled it and the open mechanism got full of dust- bunnies. I so loved the beautiful brass machinery that I'd left it open on my window sill by the bed. I took it back apart, put the parts in a small box, then went out to play. Some of the parts got lost before I got back to it. But by then I could afford a one dollar pocket watch from Ben Franklin. I could hear it tick under my pillow.
My next watch was a small water-proof Timex I got for Christmas when I was 10. I left it on while swimming just so I could tell concerned people it was water-proof and it never failed me. I had it until I accidently left it on the roof of my first car. Several reliable Timex's followed, barring misplacement.
I still have a cheap Casio left over from work. It has two time zones that I worked in and keeps military-style time to within a few seconds a month. For 20 some years I replaced various Casio's as the straps and/or batteries died. One kept time to less than a second lost per month. These cheap watches worked better than better looking quality watches I received as performance awards from work. I worked the last 20+ year's for a railroad that required accurate time.
Wes
I actually have experienced that, but only once, even though I have cuddled a lot with my different cats through the years. I noticed the effect in the dark when I was touching one of my cats. There were small sparks appearing between my fingers and the fur of the cat. It was a very weird and very cool experience. I can't say why I experienced it only at that particular time.Keith_McClary said:
I expect you live in a relatively humid place.DennisN said:I can't say why I experienced it only at that particular time.
James Propp's blogIs there a way to pack more than 4 disks of diameter 1 into a 2-by-2 square?
Obviously not. But is there a way to pack more than 4000 disks of diameter 1 into a 2-by-2000 rectangle?
Again, obviously not — except that there is a way! (See my essay “Believe It, Then Don’t” for details.)
For me it was when I read that Alfred North Whitehead took 600 pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2, in his enlightenment-era maths text. The it blew again when Kurt Godel showed that nothing in maths can be proven, using his clever incompleteness theorem...s00mb said:Hi, I figured I'd make a thread about this. What really blew your mind when you learned it or what continues to blow your mind when you think about it? I like learning really obscure mind blowing things so I figured I'd ask others about this to get some new ideas. For me it was things like uncountable/different "sizes" of infinity in real analysis, time relativity (it still blows my mind knowing most people go their entire lives not knowing time is not absolute) and currently things like fractional calculus. I think finding out you can take any order derivatives "Abusing" gamma functions and using certain integrals was ingenious. What is yours?
This is not even remotely what Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says. Why would you think that proving that nothing can be proven makes any sense whatsoever?GJ Philp said:For me it was when I read that Alfred North Whitehead took 600 pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2, in his enlightenment-era maths text. The it blew again when Kurt Godel showed that nothing in maths can be proven, using his clever incompleteness theorem...
Tomatoes and potatoes are also New World crops. In fact, tomatoes weren't a part of Italian cuisine at all until the late 1700s.Klystron said:After living and working in south Asia for years, I was astonished to learn that hot peppers (Capsicum) are indigenous to Central America and spread to Asia with the Columbian Exchange.
Hot peppers seem so essential to local cuisines and grow in such great variety in Asian agricultural regions such as the central basin in Thailand; one assumes chile peppers to be indigenous to the region or to have arrived with traders thousands, not hundreds, of years past. Live and learn, and enjoy those peppers.
Didn't Ludwig Wittgenstein (a guy whom Russell and Whitehead were ok with) explain numbers as definitional implying that 2+2=4 and show the proof and yeah he did it's in his TractatusTeethWhitener said:This is not even remotely what Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says. Why would you think that proving that nothing can be proven makes any sense whatsoever?
This! I'm learning new things every day!DennisN said:Same here.
Also, whenever I try to think of the stupendously large size of the Universe it blows my mind.