Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Gravity is a lie.  The Earth just sucks. 

An common flat earth brain fart idea is that gravity is a lie, its density relative to air who matter. And yes stuff with less density than air like helium floats. while wood floats in water. 
It would still not matter without gravity and stuff inside of vacuum chambers still feel gravity. More so gravity is not the half if air pressure is halved at high mountains. 
 

[kerbiloid]

The main reason of the Dark Matter ^(tm) invention discovery acquisition was the fun fact, that the galaxies are moving like a whirlpool, while the mass distribution was not matching that.

Guessing, that soon they will discover that the Dark Matter is the Aether, and the galaxies are its whirlpools around the sinkholes, which are erroneously treated as blackholes.

Edited May 27, 2023 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

Because Kelvin water drops.

4 Mars!

Spoiler

 

 

[darthgently]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The main reason of the Dark Matter ^(tm) invention discovery acquisition was the fun fact, that the galaxies are moving like a whirlpool, while the mass distribution was not matching that.

Guessing, that soon they will discover that the Dark Matter is the Aether, and the galaxies are its whirlpools around the sinkholes, which are erroneously treated as blackholes.

So if we could make a keel that interacted with the Dark Matter aetheric flux and use electromagnetically interactive "solar sails" we could ply the space oceans leveraging the difference gradient.  I'm 0.23% sure of this

Edited May 28, 2023 by darthgently

[kerbiloid]

28 minutes ago, darthgently said:

I'm 0.23% sure of this

So, you are more sure than me.

But we should try.

[DDE]

Back in the 1990s, Kamov ran in Turkey's gunship competition with a specially developed Ka-50-2.

And it had a name:

They say it just meant 'warrior' and the politician of today was actually in jail at the time for being so far in opposition to the powers-that-be.

[SunlitZelkova]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Back in the 1990s, Kamov ran in Turkey's gunship competition with a specially developed Ka-50-2.

And it had a name:

They say it just meant 'warrior' and the politician of today was actually in jail at the time for being so far in opposition to the powers-that-be.

I guffawed upon seeing this 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

Back in the 1990s, Kamov ran in Turkey's gunship competition with a specially developed Ka-50-2.

And it had a name:

They say it just meant 'warrior' and the politician of today was actually in jail at the time for being so far in opposition to the powers-that-be.

Windows don't look well armored, also it don't have an gun so not an gunship. 
Now an missile helicopter makes sense but I say they fall into the narrow slot between ground launched systems and fixed wing ones. Granted this was before everyone had drones. 
The heavy armored helicopters don't work in Ukraine but has been very useful in countering irregular forces. 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

Back in the 1990s, Kamov ran in Turkey's gunship competition with a specially developed Ka-50-2.

And it had a name:

They say it just meant 'warrior' and the politician of today was actually in jail at the time for being so far in opposition to the powers-that-be.

Looks like it's a real trump card.

(No-no, I don't mean that I give an advice...)

4 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Windows don't look well armored

Spoiler

 

 

[DDE]

14 hours ago, magnemoe said:

also it don't have an gun so not an gunship

The 30 mm is right next to the stenciling. I'll admit it's barely visible here due to the shadows.

Spoiler

 

[DDE]

For their postgrad degree, Gagarin and a host of other cosmonauts worked on a spaceplane design dubbed "Buran-68".

Spoiler

Pic is actually unrelated - the model can be found in Gagarin's memorial office at Zhukovsky and it's clearly too elongated to be a Shuttle lookalike and has a ventral stabilizer - but I accept no liability for the current state of your screen and keyboard.

The actual Buran-68/YuG is this:

Yes, he had been hanging out with the Spiral team and Belotserkovsky the grid fin guy.

 

Edited May 29, 2023 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

(Just after describing the brave new world in the AI thread, and mentioning the strawberry taste in the stupid questions forum game).

An obsolete, mammoth-old reference from late XIX - early XX encyclopaedia, which chemicals are used to emulate "fruit" tastes in drinks for plebeians, and how easy they are produced from primitive synthetic substances.

https://ru-wikisource-org.translate.goog/wiki/ЭСБЕ/Эссенции_фруктовые_и_ликерные?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru&_x_tr_pto=wapp

As google failed to properly translate the fruit/berry names in the tables, here are proper names:

	Apple . _	Abri- oblique .	Ba- nan- naya.	Hedgehog . _	Vish- not- vaya.	Kryzhov is a nickname .	Grape . _	Lemon . _	Melon .	Orange blue .	Peach . _	Pear . _	Ana- us- naya.	Drain . _	Mali- new .	Cherry .	Currant . _	Earth is nothing .
	Apple	Apricot	Banana	Blackberry	Cherry	Gooseberry	Grape	Lemon	Melon  (Cantaloupe or so, not watermelon)	Orange	Peach	Pear	Pineapple	Plum	Raspberry	Sweet/wild/bird cherry	Currant	Strawberry

That's what you call "strawberry".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_anthranilate

Much better than spend real berries, more predictable, perfectly storable.

That's what the future food will be in space, like it's been being on Earth for a century.

This in turn illustrates how far from reality are all terraformation and outland farming projects.

All you need is starch and proteins. No crystal domes with Martian gardens. Only starch and protein algae in vats.

And the same substances in the balanced daily ration for the Earth population.

***
Upd.

Forgot to mention the juice with pulp.
(The forum users from Russia have seen that recipe in the Fitness series.)

natural juice with pulp = artificial instant juice without pulp (made out of the chemicals described above) + fine toilet paper (i.e. purified food cellulose, exactly what the juice pulp is) + mixer

Thus we'll go to starz!

Edited June 3, 2023 by kerbiloid

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

artificial instant juice without pulp (made out of the chemicals described above) + fine toilet paper (i.e. purified food cellulose, exactly what the juice pulp is) + mixer

Sign me up! 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Sign me up! 

Not my invention.

[Ben J. Kerman]

Everyone talks about how Russia's current anthem has the same melody as the USSR's anthem, but I feel like not as many people know that Mongolia's current anthem also has the same melody as the anthem (after 1950) of the Mongolian People's Republic (socialist Mongolia) even after the country effectively fell in 1992. It's quite a nice anthem, and I'm happy it was kept even though it could be associated with the former communist government.

Is that a fun fact or am I just a nerd who likes foreign songs?

[kerbiloid]

22 minutes ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

Is that a fun fact or am I just a nerd who likes foreign songs?

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

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

[Maria Sirona]

Deutschlandlied was composed before even Germany itself was a thing.

[steve9728]

Speaking of Deutschlandlied, in Ningbo, China, there's a senior high school that has 111 years of history using this for the school song.

In fact, the Chinese filling of their school song is really beautiful - that's an ancient style of writing and diction. It's difficult to translate the "power" of these words into English.  And the pupils, teachers, and headmasters of this school wrote their glory in the years of revolutionary resistance and anti-invasion.

Reading the comments below the video, it seems that there are students from this school who say that their school had a German exchange program...

And, well, there's one of the other uses Die Wacht am Rhein as a school song. And it used to be a girls' high school.

[SunlitZelkova]

17 hours ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

Everyone talks about how Russia's current anthem has the same melody as the USSR's anthem, but I feel like not as many people know that Mongolia's current anthem also has the same melody as the anthem (after 1950) of the Mongolian People's Republic (socialist Mongolia) even after the country effectively fell in 1992. It's quite a nice anthem, and I'm happy it was kept even though it could be associated with the former communist government.

Is that a fun fact or am I just a nerd who likes foreign songs?

It is indeed a fun fact!

[StrandedonEarth]

Cool animation...

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

16 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Cool animation...

 

That is a nice gif of how mid ocean rifts work - but they should have added additional volcanoes at the subduction zones. 

The problem is that they also show a major volcano atop the plume, which makes it look more like a hotspot volcano, like Hawaii or Yellowstone... But for that to be accurate, the oceanic / continental plate would have to be transiting over the hotspot.  Iceland is a possible example of what the gif depicts, but generally spreading ridges don't build big cones like that. 

Correction - as I look at it again, it's not a major cone... It's likely a conical subsurface section depicting how the spread zone is thin and thickens as the magma cools. 

So - yeah - cool animation! 

This guy does some really cool lectures on geology (pacific northwest focus) 

 

[SunlitZelkova]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

pacific northwest focus

Literally right up my alley!

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

19 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Literally right up my alley!

I used to live up that way (Seattle) and also in Northern California.  Was a regular at Lassen and Mount Shasta, and have climbed around Ranier and other Cascades for fun.  Thought I knew the 'story' of the topography.

Seems like the last 20 years or so have been transformative - there's a lot of really interesting paleo-mag data showing significant movement of the landforms we take for granted.  If interested, I also recommend the rabbit hole he opens up for how the Rockies were formed by processes other than a 'shallow Farallon plate' as was the traditional view.

The big part I did not know about was the implication that much of the Northern California to Alaska terranes were presumed to be off-shore island chains (think Philippines/Indonesia) that accreted to the continent as it overran Farallon and the Pacific Plate.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I used to live up that way (Seattle) and also in Northern California.  Was a regular at Lassen and Mount Shasta, and have climbed around Ranier and other Cascades for fun.  Thought I knew the 'story' of the topography.

Seems like the last 20 years or so have been transformative - there's a lot of really interesting paleo-mag data showing significant movement of the landforms we take for granted.  If interested, I also recommend the rabbit hole he opens up for how the Rockies were formed by processes other than a 'shallow Farallon plate' as was the traditional view.

The big part I did not know about was the implication that much of the Northern California to Alaska terranes were presumed to be off-shore island chains (think Philippines/Indonesia) that accreted to the continent as it overran Farallon and the Pacific Plate.

I posted these in the photo showcase thread, but they are related to West Coast geology, so here's some pics from Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, at a little place called Hole-in-the-Wall, where you can see where the sedimentary layers were folded in some ancient seismic event:

Spoiler

 

The "Hole" was originally drilled through the rock pile in order to make way for a pipeline (removed long ago) that provided water to the city of Port Alberni. 

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by StrandedonEarth

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

the sedimentary layers were folded

I've seen similar - and it kind of boggles the mind how something like that could happen.  Apparently, moving continents and massive terranes is both hot and heavy enough to treat rock like putty (given enough time). 

The other boggling thing that got me recently (staying on the Pacific NW theme) was just how aggressive erosion is.  Apparently, much of the Sierra Nevadas once looked like the Cascades with hundreds of volcanoes like Ranier.  But those typically don't last more than 2 million years, before eroding away and leaving terrain like Yosemite (exposed batholith granites).  There are evidence of scores of 'ghost volcanoes' (batholith remnants) all over the Cascades, some of which were bigger than Ranier.  Most of which have eroded so much that you would never know a 15,000 foot mountain once stood where ridges of lavas and sedimentary layers fan out from the batholith granites.  When you try to imagine the surface elevations of scores of statovolcanoes being gone, and how erosion would have had to transport millions of cubic acres of rock to explain the sedimentary layers?  Water, wind, temperature and sun are AGGRESSIVE. 

Edited June 10, 2023 by JoeSchmuckatelli