I always liked:

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal--Panama!

Air molecules at room temperature are banging off each other at something in the vicinity of 800 mph.

But how is a seed not a "fruit or seed"?

Another fun fact, people who argue whether something is a fruit or vegetable are tools. A vegetable is anything edible from vegetation, i.e. plants. All fruits are vegetables.

Did you know, Mexican Coke and regular Coke taste exactly the same?

Sugar tastes sweet and that is all. Coca-Cola's own research indicates no discernable difference in taste between so-called Mexican Coke and regular.

No wonder, all sugar tastes sweet, and that's all it tastes. Those who rail against HFCS are ignorant, it's actually "better" for you in that it tastes sweeter with fewer calories than plain corn syrup. The "highness" of the fructose is intentional, it just means added, not excessive. But it's a mixture of sugars, and tastes exactly like all sugar.

I won't argue that it's not somehow subectively better drinking it from glass, same as beer. But in a blind taste test they are indistinguishable. The opposite of "a big difference"!

Interesting, but this could only possibly matter if you drink your Coke warm. Blech.
Okay, how about: Mexican and regular Coke taste indistinguishable at proper serving temperature.

No, no, no, that is not what happened. From Wikipedia:
In fact, Coca-Cola began allowing bottlers to remove up to half of the product's cane sugar as early as 1980, five years before the introduction of New Coke. By the time the new formula was introduced, most bottlers had already sweetened Coca-Cola entirely with HFCS.

Oh yeah, another fun fact: Pepsi sucks! Can we at least agree on that?

Deep delve into HFCS and why it's unfairly vilified: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-fructose-corn-syrup/

They must not be counting stand-up films, Eddie says "fuck" over 450 times between just Delirious and Raw.

Even though they were quite successful movies, in theaters...

I see they went by the "scripts" which would explain that.

Or you could try, I dunno, Googling it?

Turns out it's a myth (still interesting, but not a fact) or "cooking lore," as evidenced by the fact that "in Escoffier’s standard tome of French cooking, “Guide Culinaire” from 1903, you’ll find 143 ways to prepare an egg."

Does the thread title need to distinguish between "true facts" and "alternative facts"?

Sorry, that one's BS.
https://www.liveabout.com/the-definition-of-dork-has-nothing-to-do-with-whales-3970586

Dork.

(Besides which, if it were true, whales are already gigantic, so you would have been calling them a regular-sized whale penis.)

Except... simply insisting that something is true is not a debate. I cited an article stating that no one around whales calls it that. You can't just counter with "is too" and think that is any kind of valid argument.

Actually, "dork" is simply a variant of "dick" and gained popularity in the 60's. Must've been during that big whaling fad back then, huh?

How can you not take 5m long, prehensile penises seriously?
https://time.com/3306405/whale-penis-pelvis/

I'm pretty sure the raising of the pigs, the slaughtering, the butchering, the packaging and distribution are all still performed by Americans, who still need the jobs for money to feed their families.

Not disposable butane lighters, they weren't.

Wait, you can piss off your wife with a flint stone? (Couldn't you chuck just any old stone at her?)

Or start a fire by pissing off your wife? (Assuming arson is her go-to retort?)

Or is it a reference to Fred Flintstone smoking above, somehow? I'm lost.

According to volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, the Langstrom 7″ wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.

Note it doesn't say socket.

Everything moves at the speed of light through spacetime.

We have mass, so we experience it as time. The faster we move, the more time slows down for us to compensate, albeit imperceptibly. Photons have no mass, so they "experience" it as moving at 300000 km/s.

Percy Spencer, who invented the microwave oven after a candy bar melted in his pocket while he was playing with a magnetron (the tube, not the pin!), received no royalties for his invention, but was paid a one-time $2.00 gratuity from Raytheon, the same token payment the company made to all inventors on its payroll at that time for company patents.

Time to wake this thread up! I had forgotten it and almost started a new one.

This graphic surprised me at first, but makes sense upon reflection. Our "Blue Planet" is more like "painted blue"...

all-the-worlds-water (resized).jpg

And Paul Revere did not call out "The British are coming!" Ms. Ludington would not have, either, since there were British troops hiding out that would hear, and because not every colonial considered themselves rebels. Many were still loyal to Great Britain. These rides were planned and discreet.

We are all in "space," all the time.

When people say "space," they usually mean "outer space."

However, with Earth (and the Sun) moving at about 220,000 kilometers/second around the galaxy, and Earth's diameter being 6378 km, the very space you occupy WAS outer space less than 1/34th of a second ago, and will be again in another 1/34th of a second!

And if one considers our galaxy's motion relative to the Great Attractor and the Cosmic Background Radiation, it's even quicker than that!

The point is that what seems like a lot of water is not all that much, compared to the size of Earth. If it could be somehow pulled together into a sphere itself, that's how big all the water is compared to the planet. No one needs to advocate melting the ice caps -- that's already happening. Not a good thing.

And if it were an apple, the entire atmosphere would be as thick as the peel.

Nor did French kissing, toast, bulldogs, dressing, horns, or braids!

This one blew my mind. Electrical power is not transmitted by electrons flowing through wires.

I'll say it again to help it sink in: Electrical power is not transmitted by the electrons flowing through the wires!

When "current is flowing," the electrons in a wire only move at something like a tenth of a millimeter per second, a far cry from the speed of light. The actual energy is contained in and propagated by the resultant electrical and magnetic fields around the wire!

Shoving the electrons around, back and forth in the case of AC, even that slowly (~0.1mm/sec) does use up some of the energy, which (hopefully) dissipates as heat. But not in a superconductor.

Virtually every elementary particle on Earth, in your body, or anywhere else is as old as the universe.

When things settled down after the big bang, they combined into atoms of mostly hydrogen, with a smidgen of helium and lithium, and the heavier elements were only subsequently assembled over billions of years in the nuclear furnaces of previous stars as they died and went supernova.

Yes, we are literally, as has been said, stardust.

I also like to say it another way: We are the foam on the cosmic ocean.

It's hard to conceive of how low the odds are of winning the Powerball jackpot.

Well, suppose at every drawing, three days a week, you bought TEN THOUSAND TICKETS?

Doing that, you can still only expect to win the jackpot on average once every 187 years!

52!

52 factorial, the number of different ways a deck of 52 cards can wind up shuffled, is a big number, right? Way(!) short of a googol, never mind a googolplex, but still pretty incomprehensible.

Suppose you set a timer to count down 52! seconds (that's roughly 8.0658x10^67 seconds).

Now, stand on the equator, and take a step forward every billion years. (Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment.)

When you've circled the Earth once, take a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean, and keep going with the one step per billion years...

When the Pacific Ocean is empty, lay a sheet of paper down, refill the ocean and start over.

When your stack of paper reaches the sun, take a look at the timer.

The 3 left-most digits won't have changed. 8.063x10^67 seconds left to go. Repeat the whole process 1000 times to get 1/3 of the way through that time, with still 5.385x10^67 seconds left to go.

This is getting old, right? So now for a change of pace, start doing this instead, to use up the rest of that timer:

Shuffle a deck of cards and deal yourself 5 cards every billion years.

Each time you get a royal flush, buy a lottery ticket.

Each time that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand in the Grand Canyon.

When the Grand Canyon's full, take one ounce of rock off Mount Everest, empty the canyon and carry on dealing for Royal Flushes once per billion years.

When Everest has been levelled, check the timer.

There's barely any change. 5.364x10^67 seconds left. You'll have to repeat this process 256 times to run out the timer.

Hard to believe such a big number lurks in that innocent looking deck of playing cards!

This is a paraphrasing of a blog entry I ran across a while ago and I just noticed I left it unfinished in the draft buffer. Too good to just clear, so I finished cleaning it up.

To see the longer original or if you're curious about some of the assumptions made:
https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

Now for the reason I came here tonight, here's a cool video showing the relative sizes of Jupiter's 80 known moons, if they were all plopped down gently on the Earth.

An impressive feat, but one particular sequence is just one group of 52 cards out of more than 80658000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 possibilities. But I do suppose that rules out correctly guessing!

Those memorization adepts use tricks like imagining a house containing weird items laid out in a row, each item somehow reminiscent of the thing it represents, and like that. That never struck me as natural memory, somehow. We normies generally use no such tricks while remembering stuff.

And now, typing all those zeroes, I am reminded that, in my previous post about the googolplex, I was afraid I was not as clear as I wanted to be.

I had pointed out how a googol "written out" is a one with a hundred zeroes after it, easy enough to write:

10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Furthermore, I explained how if you wanted to "write out" a googolplex, that is, a one with a googol of zeroes after it, if you could somehow write a zero on every elementary particle in the universe, you'd run out of particles before you got done writing all of the googol of zeroes. Wow, right?

However, my fear was that it was lost on everyone how that was just writing it out, and the actual number represented by the word "googolplex" absolutely dwarfs the measly googol of zeroes, by a factor of, yes, a googol! Now that's a big number!

Ya, hey. Furthermore, if every human who has ever lived spent their entire lives shuffling a deck every ten seconds, 24 hours a day, altogether we would have gotten through no more than 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000169% of the possible combinations by now.

There is even an online tool that will find them for you, up through the first 200 million digits, anyway.

https://www.angio.net/pi/

My parents' old phone number is found at position 1833946, for instance.

You can find 12345678 at position 186557266...

Although it seems there is some question as to whether the original assertion is true: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/does-%CF%80-contain-all-possible-number-combinations/

This reminds me of the silly assertion that "if the universe is infinite, there must exist other exact copies of you" and the like.

Back when my parents were alive, we didn't need to dial the area code so I left it off.

No wonder you didn't find the 10 digit number. As it points out in the link under the search box, the odds of finding a 7 digit number in the first 200 million digits is 99.995%, while a 10 digit number only has a 0.995% chance. More to do with the 200 million limit than with pi itself.

I came up with another nugget regarding 52!:

You would be more likely to win the Powerball jackpot eight drawings in a row than to correctly predict the order of a deck of fairly shuffled cards.

Hmm, maybe I'll try warming up before my next pinball tournament by playing basketball...

Not the only way Wisconsin got screwed, it was to originally include Chicago!

Sad, how the reason why involves slavery...

map (resized).jpg

Akshually ,

For you, that is. More precisely, time would cease to exist, and you would exist at all points along your path simultaneously.

Also, you would attain infinite mass, more massive than any black hole, so you would subsequently swallow up the Earth which you were trying to show off by orbiting 7x/s.

If all that sounds silly, it is because it is impossible to accelerate any mass to light speed.

The fact that light speed means light can circle the globe 7x/sec is amazing enough, why drag an impossibility into it?

Yeah, same. That brought back memories of the time I inadvertently started an ant war. I was all of 7 or 8, and I was making them fight by catching some black ants in a jar and then inverting it over a red ant hill. I came back out the next day and... dead ants everywhere!

That was the extent of my insect torturing career, thankfully. Now, the neighbor kid...

I know you're joking, but she was riding in a car.

They must be counting the end zones, as it was 6962.6 meters long, which is 22843+ feet, which divided by 63 would be 362ish feet or just over 120 yards.
(Over 4.3 miles)

Been there!

https://maps.app.goo.gl/RjQpyYPVd2ztx5rz7

Sadly, the little park's marker is in the wrong place! So close, and yet so far...