Today I Learned

[lekh2003]

No idea.

Oh, but I did forget to mention the time my sister put a chocolate with metal wrapping in the microwave. We heard sparks followed by smoke and my sister ran out of the kitchen screaming.

 

[Borg]

TIL that things can explode in a microwave.

Before you laugh and write things like "I could have told you", I bet you wouldn't had expected to be goulash in that category either!

I've seen it with various types of food. Beans can really explode if you cook them too long.
I knew someone who put a hot dog on a plastic plate for 10 minutes in a microwave. It didn't explode but it really shriveled up and welded to the plate.

 

[Tom.G]

We usually keep a jar of peanut butter in the refrigerator so it doesn't separate. Occasionally the peanut butter will get too thick to spread, in which case a 10 second zap in the microwave is applied. Now the jars have a paper and foil laminate seal which gets removed upon opening. Occassionally a small scrap of the the seal will stick on the rim of the jar. Well, {thin metal foil} + {microwave oven} = {impressively bright plasma cloud} + {LOUD buzzing sound from oven}.

No further tests are planned.

 

[jim hardy]

Never try to hard boil an egg...

 

[DrGreg]

Today I learned that Barry Manilow's hit record "I Write the Songs" was not written by Barry Manilow.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

Yesterday I learned that if making a snowman seems like too much effort, you can just put a small snowball on a big one and call it a snow BB-8.

We had 4 inches of snow Thursday. That's the most we've had here since at least 1992 and possibly longer. As we rarely get more than a dusting of snow here in the south of England, the authorities don't consider it financially worth while to provide much in the way of gritting and snow-clearing, so that really brought everything to a halt. Any road with a slight gradient (lengthways or sideways) became impassable. Hundreds of people were stuck overnight on blocked main roads and in trains (using the third rail electric system) where ice on the rails was causing them to lose power. Fortunately it's all melting rapidly now.

 

[OmCheeto]

TIL that Steven King wrote the book which was the basis for the movie "The Shawshank Redemption".

 

[Borg]

TIL (actually yesterday) a way to leave a message if you know that your plane is going to crash.

A secret 9/11 note from beyond the grave

I was describing the plot of my book, asking whether there’s any way a person could leave a hidden message inside his body before he died.

The room went silent. The mortician told me that if you’re on a plane that’s going down, if you handwrite a note and eat it, the human stomach has enough liquids to protect the note from burning.

“The ultimate message in a bottle,” the mortician said. “And it really happened.”

“What’re you talking about?” I asked. “When?”

“9/11.”

Right there, the story came out. On 9/11, the victims of the Pentagon attack were brought to Dover. When the morticians worked on one of the bodies, they found a note inside. Apparently, as the plane was going down, one of the victims on Flight 77 actually ate a note, which was found by a Dover mortician.

And, speaking of messages - Oldest message in a bottle found on Australian beach.

An Australian woman has found the world's oldest known message in a bottle nearly 132 years after it was thrown into the sea

 

[dlgoff]

And, speaking of messages - Oldest message in a bottle found on Australian beach.

Really amazing. Here's a picture of the bottle and message compliments of Smithsonian.

 

[Bystander]

Here's a picture of the bottle and message compliments of Smithsonian.

An early ocean currents survey?

 

[CWatters]

Today I (and a few others) learned the personal mobile phone number of a BBC Radio 1 presenter after he gave it out live on air as some sort of dare. It immediately started ringing so much he couldn't get to the screen to put it into airplane mode and shut it up. Despite thousands of people calling him one of the first few calls he answered was a wrong number.

 

[mfb]

This Deutsche Seewarte doesn't exist any more, but the successor to its successor still exists, and it is still in Hamburg: "Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie"

I don't think they need the bottle for ocean current surveys today.

 

[fresh_42]

I don't think they need the bottle for ocean current surveys today.

Nope. The problem had been successfully tackled in 1992.

 

[NascentOxygen]

And, speaking of messages - Oldest message in a bottle found on Australian beach.

The message in the bottle was found in dunes behind the beach, so it's not as though it was washed up only last week.

It's only a couple of weeks since news that a letter posted during WW1 was finally delivered. No one knows why delivery took so long, or if someone does know they're keeping quiet about it.

 

[CWatters]

Today I learned that Knotty Ash is a real place. RIP Ken Dodd...

 

[Drakkith]

Today I learned about the existence of Chlorine Trifluoride, an extremely reactive compound that can burn through sand, asbestos, and even concrete. A report describing an incident where a container of the substance cracked, leaking chlorine trifluoride onto the concrete floor, where it subsequently burned through 30 cm of concrete and then nearly a meter of gravel, said, "The concrete was on fire."

 

[david2]

Today I learned that humans are carrying more microbes in and on their bodies then there are cells.

In fact 10 times more...

 

[Bystander]

Today I learned that humans are carrying more microbes in and on their bodies then there are cells.

In fact 10 times more...

Source?

 

[fresh_42]

Source?

Oh, you can pick them up almost everywhere in the environment.

 

[Bystander]

Oh, you can pick them up almost everywhere in the environment.

And, presumably, these microbes are not massless?

 

[david2]

Oh, you can pick them up almost everywhere in the environment.

lol

Source?

There was a microbiologist on a dutch news webite who said that. He did not say that there were ten times more. That I read after a quick google search.

But Wiki says the folowing:

Humans are colonized by many microorganisms; the traditional estimate is that the average human body is inhabited by ten times as many non-human cells as human cells, but more recent estimates have lowered that ratio to 3:1 or even to approximately the same number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiota

Still a lot imho.

 

[Bystander]

Still a lot imho.

A new excuse for the over weight? And anti-biotics a new fad diet?

 

[david2]

A new excuse for the over weight? And anti-biotics a new fad diet?

nope! :)

...their total mass is about 0.2 kg.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/

 

[CWatters]

So if a man weighs 80kg and the microbes weigh 0.2 then these microbes must be a lot smaller and lighter than human cells.

 

[nsaspook]

Today I learned about the existence of Chlorine Trifluoride, an extremely reactive compound that can burn through sand, asbestos, and even concrete. A report describing an incident where a container of the substance cracked, leaking chlorine trifluoride onto the concrete floor, where it subsequently burned through 30 cm of concrete and then nearly a meter of gravel, said, "The concrete was on fire."

Nasty stuff. We used it to clean semiconductor process chambers. When we decommissioned the machine even the electric cables were scrapped because of possible contamination issues.

 

[mfb]

So if a man weighs 80kg and the microbes weigh 0.2 then these microbes must be a lot smaller and lighter than human cells.

Yes. We have many small cells from other species and not that many but much larger human cells.

 

[Buzz Bloom]

TIL that an electric clock I expected to be very accurate is losing 1/2 seconds each day.
I learned this when we got a new similar click because one of he features in the old clock was no longer working.

I also leaned why the old clock was not accurate. It was dependent on correcting its time by receiving a radio signal about once a day. In some locations, the clock failed to receive the signal. However, it was still a puzzle why its loss of time was at such a large rate since my 20 year old mechanical watch only loss a few seconds a year. The puzzle was resolved when I noticed the old clock used a 12 volt ac-dc converter, so the clock could not use 60 cycle current to keep accurate time.

 

[collinsmark]

TIL that an electric clock I expected to be very accurate is losing 1/2 seconds each day.
I learned this when we got a new similar click because one of he features in the old clock was no longer working.

I also leaned why the old clock was not accurate. It was dependent on correcting its time by receiving a radio signal about once a day. In some locations, the clock failed to receive the signal. However, it was still a puzzle why its loss of time was at such a large rate since my 20 year old mechanical watch only loss a few seconds a year. The puzzle was resolved when I noticed the old clock used a 12 volt ac-dc converter, so the clock could not use 60 cycle current to keep accurate time.

A quartz crystal gaining/losing a half second per day is typical without more advanced compensation techniques -- Well, at least 1/2 second per day matches perfectly with the Wikipedia article anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock#Accuracy

A purely mechanical watch losing only a few seconds per year?! I have a hard time believing that. I have a mechanical watch and it loses/gains more than a few seconds per day. People don't buy purely mechanical watches for their accuracy; they buy them for other reasons (and they can be very expensive: several thousand dollars [US]). Seriously, a cheapy, $5 quartz watch keeps way better time than my mechanical wristwatch.

Using the 60 Hz electrical grid (or 50 Hz depending on your location) for time keeping purposes is possible and not uncommon in practice. There are continuing efforts by utilities and associated standards committees to maintain and improve the long-term accuracy (averaged over at least the time period of typical load cycles). But there will always be short-term inaccuracies due to load conditions. Here's a link to something more specific than we are discussing, but sort of fits this topic on some level. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk...m-experiment-in-us-means-clocks-will-speed-up

 

[Buzz Bloom]

A purely mechanical watch losing only a few seconds per year?! I have a hard time believing that. I have a mechanical watch and it loses/gains more than a few seconds per day.

Hi Collins:

I took another look at my antique cheap watch. I don't remember how old it is. It's brand is Perry Ellis. Apparently this brand began in 1976, so that puts an upper limit on its age. I carelessly mistook the watch's analogue movement with "mechanical", but it says it has a quartz crystal, and somehow that accuracy controls the mechanical movement, including the second hand's go and stop every second.

Regards,
Buzz

 

[theb2]

TIL because I’m a white male with German heritage I’m responsible for slavery in America, the holocast in Germany, and suppressing women in the tech fields, never felt more awkward in a class discussion lol

 

[fresh_42]

TIL because I’m a white male with German heritage I’m responsible for slavery in America, the holocast in Germany, and suppressing women in the tech fields, never felt more awkward in a class discussion lol

Well, your president is as well ...

 

[pinball1970]

I learned something week. I bought a book off amazon without researching it properly, titled abiogenesis. I bought it without reading reviews or anything else (stupid) when I got it something rang a bell as soon as I flicked through the pages. It was wikipedia! Someone had printed off the pages reproduced the images very poorly and then bound it! They even left all the pointless refs and links on. I complained to Amazon and they refunded my account (actually my mrs)

Beware folks!

 

[BillTre]

I am half way through reading what seems to be a good book on abiogenesis.
It is "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane.
Its main focus is on where the energy flow came from and the origin of chemi-osmotic power for making ATP.
I find it very interesting and well written.

 

[theb2]

Well, your president is as well ...

The last of our white buffalo

 

[pinball1970]

I am half way through reading what seems to be a good book on abiogenesis.
It is "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane.

Reading that book made want to brush on my biochem! Great book as is "Life Ascending"