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

[DDE]

Hippos are an invasive species in Columbia thanks to escaping from the late Pablo Escobar's personal menagerie when his hasienda was sacked by his enemies.

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, DDE said:

Hippos are an invasive species in Columbia thanks to escaping from the late Pablo Escobar's personal menagerie when his hasienda was sacked by his enemies.

It was an 19th century stupid idea to introduce hippos to the Mississippi river. 
It folded because cost and they could not monetize it also an question if meat would sell. 

[magnemoe]

Plane takes off in 2025 and lands in 2024. 
https://abc7.com/post/cathay-pacific-flight-880-new-years-departs-hong-kong-2025-lands-lax-2024/15736032/?utm_source=sdrn%3Avg%3Aarticle%3AeMXKJK

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Minoan (Bronze Age) maritime trade generally traveled in a counter clockwise path around the Eastern Mediterranean.  From the Island of Crete it was fairly easy to get to Egypt and the southern Levant... But not very easy to go straight back.  So trade would go north from Egypt along the Levant to Anatolia and Cyprus before making it's way back to Crete. 

 

In other news, Egypt conducted a naval attack on/using the Euphrates River.  Talk about commitment! 

https://seapower.navy.gov.au/media-room/publications/semaphore-16-06

 

[kerbiloid]

The Egyptians had to use water ships in absence of desert ships, the camels.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

26 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

camels

Special Forces Camels secured the far side prior to the operation! 

 

 

 

[boriz]

Fun fact: Star Trek used to be good.

[kerbiloid]

Interesting fact: while the Bible mentions the camels, the Egyptian furry temples don't depict them.

[SunlitZelkova]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Interesting fact: while the Bible mentions the camels, the Egyptian furry temples don't depict them.

Well of course, why make designs of camels when you can make art about cats.

https://egypt-museum.com/cat-eating-fish-under-a-chair/

[kerbiloid]

The Egyptians weren't aware of camels, living in the desert...

The Bible depicts volcanic eruptions, while the nearest volcano is in Italy, and to some extent, in Turkish mountains...

Noah has built the ark from wooden planks which require mechanic lumberyard (first built n XIV cent. Germany), exactly like the "Christopher Columbus" / "A Dove, Carrying Christ" project ships from 1492.
From that exact 1492 AD = 7000 from World Creation, which was the  XV century horror, as the last year of world existence (cuz 1 Day = 1000 humans years), so that even the Easter tables weren't continued until it passed.
And what a funny coincidence that a half of the Northern star map consists of parts of the former "Navis" / "Ship" (aka Ship of Argo, Columbus Ship, Noah Ship) constellation, later divided into a ten of minor constellations (Carina / Keel, Vela / Sails, Puppis / Stern, Pyxis, Antlia, Columba), representing the 1492 expedition in search of the New World instead of the doomed to sink Old World, of course performed by a fictional epic hero "Christopher Columbus", rather than the whole Catholic Roman Empire, to transfer chosen people to a new land which had to be over there.

King Solomon, using a large transparent glass (technology from XV/XVI) to fool the Sabean Queen.
A thing, daily usual for a writer from XVI, but absolutely unknown for a person even from XIV, let alone the "ancient" times.
The same Solomon, using a special magic worm to make curved holes in stones. The usual building technology from early XVI concrete building, put a gypsum'ed rope into concrete, let them freeze, them just pull out the rope.
The so-called Phoenicians, building wooden plank ships (technology of XV) in the MidEastern desert, providing Solomon with them and various wooden plank lumbery.
And almost exactly same biographies of Solomon and Suleiman the Magnificent, who lived exactly in the XVI, when all Solomon's technologies were up-to-date and absolutely usual.

All of that really makes to believe in reality of Ancient Egypt and its friends.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Noah

Is a story the Israelites picked up from the Mesopotamians 

 

... Which is just one part of a bunch of ideas they picked up during the exile.  Along with the idea of one God, heaven and hell and the duality of good vs evil they took from the Zoroastrians just before Cyrus II let them leave Babylon. 

[magnemoe]

On 1/5/2025 at 11:49 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

Well of course, why make designs of camels when you can make art about cats.

https://egypt-museum.com/cat-eating-fish-under-a-chair/

Had an cat eating part of an fish under my  chair  while I was eating the rest at an outdoor restaurant in Egypt  
My guess is that camels come to late to be included among the gods. 

[magnemoe]

Now this sounds like some cool stuff 

You know the idea of flying an plane using large wire based ion engines, stupid idea but looks like it works pretty well for small airflow in laptops and similar and its silent. 
Downside is that it needs 5000 volt so an power ramp up system who takes up more space than the fans so you will not use just one tiny one unless they can scale that down but unlikely an device with one small makes sense. 
Not sure how well it scales up probably well up to an scale and 120 mm fans moving slowly don't make much sound anyway. 

 

[AckSed]

Greek artist and scientist fell in love with silica aerogel, calling it "sky in a bottle". He became so good at working with the material he literally wrote the textbook. ARPA-E invited him to give a talk:

The money shot is at the end, where he shows off the woman's handbag he made out of aerogel. People complained that it couldn't hold much, barely a lipstick or some keys...

Spoiler

...but it could hold a whole bottle of molten brass.

 

[darthgently]

38 minutes ago, AckSed said:

Greek artist and scientist fell in love with silica aerogel, calling it "sky in a bottle". He became so good at working with the material he literally wrote the textbook. ARPA-E invited him to give a talk:

The money shot is at the end, where he shows off the woman's handbag he made out of aerogel. People complained that it couldn't hold much, barely a lipstick or some keys...

  Hide contents

...but it could hold a whole bottle of molten brass.

 

Evacuated aerogel would be the ultimate cryotank insulation

Edited January 21 by darthgently

[Codraroll]

5 hours ago, darthgently said:

Evacuated aerogel would be the ultimate cryotank insulation

The ultimate insulation would be a material with closed pores that are too small to hold anything but a vacuum. A vacuum insulation panel that can be cut on site, because the vacuum is maintained by the material itself and not by a sealing bag around it. However, such a material is essentially sci-fi, because it's essentially impossible to make closed pore walls for pores too small to fit individual molecules inside. A closed-pore material that holds partial vacuum by itself would be an amazing breakthrough, though.

Thermal insulation materials are porous, which gives the solid material a very low thermal conductivity (if I recall correctly, and my memory is a bit hazy at this exact point, it's because the path travelled by heat through the material is very long with all the pores in the way, making the material behave equivalent to a much thicker massive slab where the heat can travel in a straight line). However, the gas that permeates the pores also conducts heat. If the porous material is of sufficiently low conductivity, the total thermal conductivity value will be dominated by that of the gas. Hence, to create a material that insulates better than air, you have to fill its pores with a gas that insulates better than air.

The thermal conductivity of a gas is dependent on how much energy is transfered in collisions between its molecules. Lower the gas pressure, and there will be fewer molecules floating around, hence fewer collisions and less energy transfered, and the thermal conductivity goes down. That's the logic behind vacuum insulation panels (VIPs for short). They are essentially porous materials with very low thermal conductivity, sealed in an airtight bag at a very low pressure.  This gives them a thermal conductivity 5-10 times lower than conventional insulation (~0.004 W/mK, for those who like to keep track. A typical value for mineral wool is 0.037 W/mK, extruded polystyrene [XPS] around 0.032 W/mK). Entirely stagnant air [no convection] is around 0.020 W/mK).

Currently, vacuum insulation panels provide amazing insulation performance, but using them is a bit like building something out of balloons (only the pressure is on the outside, rather than the inside), with all the disadvantages balloons have as a building material. You can't cut them to fit tricky corners or on-site modifications, but have to order them cut to size from the factory; you have to ensure not to puncture them; there will be gaps between them even if you put them very close together; and leakage will become an issue over time. A punctured vacuum insulation panel is a bit more useful than a punctured balloon, it still insulates better than the equivalent thickness of XPS, but you're down to one-fifth of the intended insulation value, which is a massive drop in performance.

Hence, vacuum insulation panels remain reserved for niche applications (where just using 8x the thickness with XPS, which would be vastly cheaper, is not an option), holding back their mass adoption, hence production volumes are rather low, hence the cost stays high. Everyone is waiting for that breakthrough in materials science. Arguably, vacuum insulation panels represent a bit of a breakthrough already (8x better than XPS is pretty dang good), but it has to compete against the "primitive" solution, which is more cost efficient for mass industrial adoption. Aerogel is somewhere in the middle. Better performance than XPS, though not amazingly so, because its thermal conductivity is capped at that of the air that permeates it, and still quite expensive. So that too is reserved for niche applications, like translucent walls.

However, there is a sort of compromise way to get lower thermal conductivity, cheaper, and more flexible. Air is a good insulator, but heavier gases insulate even better. If you manage to entrap such a gas in a porous material, it will work better than a porous material filled with air. If those pores are sufficiently small, there will be no significant convection between the pores, lowering the exchange of heat between the gas molecules (and between the gas molecules and the pore walls). This is already done with gas-filled insulation materials, but they too use that sealing bag that makes vacuum insulation panels so vulnerable. But if you manage to find a manufacturing process that entraps this gas in closed pores (i.e., no convection between the pores at all), and then manage to scale that process to reap cost benefits, you'd make one heck of a splash in the building materials market. Just imagine the potential benefit of making walls 10 cm thinner in a high-end property market, how many more square meters of sellable space you'll get for each building then.

It's been a while since I checked up on former colleagues researching this sort of thing, but I hope they manage to achieve that breakthrough before retirement.

[farmerben]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/05/style/japan-wooden-satellite-hnk-intl/index.html

wooden satellites

[darthgently]

A semi truck with a 53’ trailer with 49,000 lbs of cargo (a bit less than max F9 payload) could drive 173,000 miles on 25,000 gallons of diesel (the amount of unchilled RP-1 a Falcon 9 fuel tank can hold).

 

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, darthgently said:

A semi truck with a 53’ trailer with 49,000 lbs of cargo (a bit less than max F9 payload) could drive 173,000 miles on 25,000 gallons of diesel (the amount of unchilled RP-1 a Falcon 9 fuel tank can hold).

Remember you also have to carry the fuel so your starting weight is much higher  The rocket equation is very true for planes and ships. Long haul flights is fuel limited also even transatlantic flights can not land with the fuel they carry so they need to burn it or dump it before landing. 
Its also an limit on the size of motor ships who can cross oceans, sail boats don't have this limit.  Carriers and battleships was often set up to refuel their destroyers. This was even part of their armor setup as layers of liquid and air kills the effect of mines and torpedoes. 

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Remember you also have to carry the fuel so your starting weight is much higher  The rocket equation is very true for planes and ships. Long haul flights is fuel limited also even transatlantic flights can not land with the fuel they carry so they need to burn it or dump it before landing. 
Its also a limit on the size of motor ships who can cross oceans, sail boats don't have this limit.  Carriers and battleships was often set up to refuel their destroyers. This was even part of their armor setup as layers of liquid and air kills the effect of mines and torpedoes. 

 No, the truck does not have to carry all the fuel. It is allowed to stop at the truck stop every 200 gallons or so.  Lol

Edited January 31 by darthgently

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

 No, the truck dies not have to carry all the fuel. It is allowed to stop at the truck stop every 200 gallons or so.  Lol

Who is kind of cheating. Kind of having two docking ports in KSP 1 who is half an meter apart facing each other inside an box. 
Set the magnetic of one and the other to max. You now have an reactionless drive who don't require power. You can scale this up using more ports. 

[AckSed]

A (partial) history of the small spy satellites that detected Soviet radar and thus ships: https://spectrum.ieee.org/reconnaissance-satellite

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 hours ago, AckSed said:

history

Great article - thanks! 

[DDE]

Anton Chekhov had, over his career, signed with over 60 various pseudonyms, including Acacius/Arcadius Tarantulov, The Man with no Spleen, A Doctor without Patients, The Irritable Man, Brother of my Brother (when publishing in the same works as Aleksandr Chekhov), Homo Sachaliensis, Ulysses, Laertes, simply Someone, and Z.

[Viking23]

42 minutes ago, DDE said:

Anton Chekhov had, over his career, signed with over 60 various pseudonyms, including Acacius/Arcadius Tarantulov, The Man with no Spleen, A Doctor without Patients, The Irritable Man, Brother of my Brother (when publishing in the same works as Aleksandr Chekhov), Homo Sachaliensis, Ulysses, Laertes, simply Someone, and Z.

Interesting.