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

[DDE]

2 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Side question: I know most mono cultures smile far less than Americans do - including in photos... 

Would Russians see the above photo as 'the man seems angry' or 'this is normal photo face'? 

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/why-americans-smile-so-much/524967/

 

No, that one's exceptionally grumpy even for us.

[GuessingEveryDay]

 

[DDE]

In case of glass wool exposure, the washdown must be done with cold water because otherwise the particles may enter the open pores.

That's exactly the same advice as with radioactive contamination.

[DDE]

In spring of 1876, Friedrich Engels tried writing an essay verbosely but accurately titled "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man", but never finished it. It forms the part of the Communist Grand Dialectical Theory of Everything - i.e. it posits apes became humans through labour, and that capitalism bad, of course. Because Engels was far from a polymath, he ended up using the slightly obsolete paleontological theories of Ernst Haeckel as the jumping point for his elucidations.

In short, he wrote that modern humans had evolved on Lemuria. You know, the lost continent between India and Madagascar, briefly posited by Haeckel due to apparent similarity between lemurs and small primates and the misinterpreted geological evidence of Gondwana (from a couple hundred million years earlier), which eventually entered the esoteric canon thanks to Elena Blavatskaya.

It's a forgivable mistake, were it not for one thing: this sort of off-handed takes were enshrined as the absolute canon of science in the Soviet Union. For example, Engels's claim that the Mayans were at the "barbarian" stage of the Communist grand unified theory of history, combined with his claim that syllabi-based writing systems are only possible under the later "tech level" of a 'slave-owning regime', meant that Knorozov (from a couple of posts above) was quite worried that he would be arrested for ideological deviance upon publication of his decryption of Mayan syllabary.

The Soviets thus very narrowly avoided having to constantly "debunk" Western research on plate tectonics and the like, looking like absolute fools who repeated the wild fantasies of New Age hippies and the Thule Society (yes, both got their mythology from Blavatskaya). One could only imagine the ensuing mental gymnastics - especially when looking back on how the Soviets pretended Darwin was a supporter of Lamarckism, and renamed mainstream, genetics-driven Darwinism into Weissmanism-Morganism.

Edited Thursday at 09:56 AM by DDE

[darthgently]

5 hours ago, DDE said:

In spring of 1876, Friedrich Engels tried writing an essay verbosely but accurately titled "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man", but never finished it. It forms the part of the Communist Grand Dialectical Theory of Everything - i.e. it posits apes became humans through labour, and that capitalism bad, of course. Because Engels was far from a polymath, he ended up using the slightly obsolete paleontological theories of Ernst Haeckel as the jumping point for his elucidations.

In short, he wrote that modern humans had evolved on Lemuria. You know, the lost continent between India and Madagascar, briefly posited by Haeckel due to apparent similarity between lemurs and small primates and the misinterpreted geological evidence of Gondwana (from a couple hundred million years earlier), which eventually entered the esoteric canon thanks to Elena Blavatskaya.

It's a forgivable mistake, were it not for one thing: this sort of off-handed takes were enshrined as the absolute canon of science in the Soviet Union. For example, Engels's claim that the Mayans were at the "barbarian" stage of the Communist grand unified theory of history, combined with his claim that syllabi-based writing systems are only possible under the later "tech level" of a 'slave-owning regime', meant that Knorozov (from a couple of posts above) was quite worried that he would be arrested for ideological deviance upon publication of his decryption of Mayan syllabary.

The Soviets thus very narrowly avoided having to constantly "debunk" Western research on plate tectonics and the like, looking like absolute fools who repeated the wild fantasies of New Age hippies and the Thule Society (yes, both got their mythology from Blavatskaya). One could only imagine the ensuing mental gymnastics - especially when looking back on how the Soviets pretended Darwin was a supporter of Lamarckism, and renamed mainstream, genetics-driven Darwinism into Weissmanism-Morganism.

Throw Lysenkoism into the mix and the state had a big deficit in credibility 

Edited Thursday at 03:19 PM by darthgently

[DDE]

1 minute ago, darthgently said:

credulity

Credibility?

Either way, AFAIK Book 1 of "Rockets and People" contains the line to the effect of "When the scientific report began with an extended Marx quote, we knew things would go downhill quickly".

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

Credibility?

Yes, auto incorrect bites again

4 hours ago, DDE said:

Either way, AFAIK Book 1 of "Rockets and People" contains the line to the effect of "When the scientific report began with an extended Marx quote, we knew things would go downhill quickly".

The greater the agenda, the less the science

[DDE]

Rakthamichthys rongsaw is a fish.

Not only that, subterranean swamp eels have separately evolved on three continents.

[DDE]

Torpedo, amongst other things, used to be the term for a style of a car body. This term was chosen by Ivan Likhachev of the Stalin Plant (ZiS), later Likhachev Plant (ZiL), for its sports club. Eventually the name would spread throughout the Soviet Union and, I kid you not, there's an FC Torpedo Bristol out there, and it's not a coincidence.

That's not important, though. What's important is that ZiL's vast territory in the meander of the river Moskva has been turned into a huge residential development, and Moscow's public transport strategy for such developments includes electric ferries where possible.

Route 3 of such ferries just got announced, and it will cover that meander, including a pier/stop titled "Torpedo" after the football club.

Which means that (low) thousands of people, every day, will be hearing the announcement "Next stop, Torpedo!"

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

Torpedo, amongst other things, used to be the term for a style of a car body. This term was chosen by Ivan Likhachev of the Stalin Plant (ZiS), later Likhachev Plant (ZiL), for its sports club. Eventually the name would spread throughout the Soviet Union and, I kid you not, there's an FC Torpedo Bristol out there, and it's not a coincidence.

That's not important, though. What's important is that ZiL's vast territory in the meander of the river Moskva has been turned into a huge residential development, and Moscow's public transport strategy for such developments includes electric ferries where possible.

Route 3 of such ferries just got announced, and it will cover that meander, including a pier/stop titled "Torpedo" after the football club.

Which means that (low) thousands of people, every day, will be hearing the announcement "Next stop, Torpedo!"

Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. Note that back then sea mines was called torpedoes, the self propelled torpedo was not invented until later.

[AckSed]

Lightning on Earth can produce antimatter (positrons), and then X-rays and gamma rays when they annihilate electrons, through the radioactive decay of isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen. The isotopes are themselves produced by gamma rays.

The trouble is, we don't know where these come from. Gamma-ray glows and downward-pointing Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes have been measured with energies in ranges of 1-40 MeV - up to about the energy of a linear accelerator in a hospital. But there shouldn't be enough energy density or length in a thundercloud to cause them in the first place. The gamma rays only happen in about 1 in 10 thunderstorms on Earth as it is.

The best hypothesis so far is that the electric fields inside a thundercloud may accelerate electrons to relativistic energies, which strip off more electrons, which finally emit bremsstrahlung gamma rays as they interact with ambient atmospheric nuclei.

However, not all the gamma-ray glows (ramp-ups in emission before a strike) happen with TGFs (flashes produced in a strike) and the opposite - TGFs without ramp-up - is also true. So there's still more to learn.

Edit: More recent research points to special types of lightning strikes: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024GL113194

Edited Saturday at 02:26 PM by AckSed
Found newer paper

[darthgently]

3 hours ago, AckSed said:

Lightning on Earth can produce antimatter (positrons), and then X-rays and gamma rays when they annihilate electrons, through the radioactive decay of isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen. The isotopes are themselves produced by gamma rays.

The trouble is, we don't know where these come from. Gamma-ray glows and downward-pointing Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes have been measured with energies in ranges of 1-40 MeV - up to about the energy of a linear accelerator in a hospital. But there shouldn't be enough energy density or length in a thundercloud to cause them in the first place. The gamma rays only happen in about 1 in 10 thunderstorms on Earth as it is.

The best hypothesis so far is that the electric fields inside a thundercloud may accelerate electrons to relativistic energies, which strip off more electrons, which finally emit bremsstrahlung gamma rays as they interact with ambient atmospheric nuclei.

However, not all the gamma-ray glows (ramp-ups in emission before a strike) happen with TGFs (flashes produced in a strike) and the opposite - TGFs without ramp-up - is also true. So there's still more to learn.

Edit: More recent research points to special types of lightning strikes: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024GL113194

Maybe the gamma rays come from a supernova or a neutron star collision and the thunderstorm is just a side effect.  Our atmosphere being a big cloud chamber and getting kicked like a hornet’s nest by a focused GRB.  I imagine researchers have ruled this out, lol

[DDE]

Over the 1950s and the 1960s, the technical reliability of interstellar travel and the skill level of the pilots of the intergalactic community must have both increased dramatically. The 1950s were rife with reports of UFO crashes, with circa 30 instances in the US alone. Of those, only Roswell made it into the subsequent ufology canon, with saucers and "greys". The third UFO era, the golden age, saw a drastic shift from aliens in distress to alien abductions.

Notably, aliens in distress were preceded by humans in distress. In the late XIXth century and mostly in America, the proliferation of the yellow press led to the forgotten first era of UFO sightings - that of airships crewed by fellow Americans, often of the mad scientist variety, by funny foreigners, or nudist Amazons (this last variant curiously made into a 1950s Brazilian alien abduction story... it is hardly a surprise the abducted farmer was returned sans pants). However, a lot of the tropes were already there - thr fliers of hovering cigar-shaped silver aircraft, often sweeping the ground with spotlights, were disembarking due to technical failure, and were not above marauding the local cattle for an impromptu barbecue. There were, indeed, reports of abductions and displacements of people on the ground.

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

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

Over the 1950s and the 1960s, the technical reliability of interstellar travel and the skill level of the pilots of the intergalactic community must have both increased dramatically. The 1950s were rife with reports of UFO crashes, with circa 30 instances in the US alone. Of those, only Roswell made it into the subsequent ufology canon, with saucers and "greys". The third UFO era, the golden age, saw a drastic shift from aliens in distress to alien abductions.

Notably, aliens in distress were preceded by humans in distress. In the late XIXth century and mostly in America, the proliferation of the yellow press led to the forgotten first era of UFO sightings - that of airships crewed by fellow Americans, often of the mad scientist variety, by funny foreigners, or nudist Amazons (this last variant curiously made into a 1950s Brazilian alien abduction story... it is hardly a surprise the abducted farmer was returned sans pants). However, a lot of the tropes were already there - thr fliers of hovering cigar-shaped silver aircraft, often sweeping the ground with spotlights, were disembarking due to technical failure, and were not above marauding the local cattle for an impromptu barbecue. There were, indeed, reports of abductions and displacements of people on the ground.

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

The mystery airships are fascinating. Airships was an new bleeding edge technology and they was popular in stories. 
So people believe they saw them, and its not implausible for them it was an secret military airship project. 
However military secret projects in peacetime back then was rare. Some students managed to get an tour of HMS Dreadnought pretending to be an African royalty. 
Dreadnought was an new revolutionary battleship. 

[SunlitZelkova]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

Of those, only Roswell made it into the subsequent ufology canon, with saucers and "greys".

This is not entirely true. Roswell is more like the center of the UFO religion, and the American UFO religion at that. Ufology is a bit more open (well, some ufologists are), with instances like the Ubatuba case (1957) remaining prominent in discussions of the history of the phenomena.

That was less so a "crash" than a mid-air explosion though. It notably didn't feature any government cover up or humanoid bodies, which is perhaps why fanatics don't really take interest in it.

------

As an addendum to your fun fact, Edgar Mitchell, LM Pilot of Apollo 14, was a very strong believer of the veracity of the Roswell UFO incident. He grew up near Roswell and was thus acquainted with many in the community, and by his own account believed the incident was true on the basis that these people were unlikely to be lying (paraphrasing, I can pull out the exact quote from the book I've got later if anyone requests it).

I find this pretty impressive considering he was (of course) also a very strong believer in the UFO phenomena, and many serious researchers discount the Roswell incident. This is despite Mitchell and these serious researchers both roughly adhering to the same UFO hypothesis (the interdimensional one).

Mitchell also called for science to somehow meet the spiritual demands of humanity, so I guess that reinforces my view that Roswell has less to do with the actual UFO phenomena and more to do with people who build mystical/religious belief about UFOs.

[FleshJeb]

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Mitchell also called for science to somehow meet the spiritual demands of humanity

Well it provides a provable, repeatable epistemology. I find that somewhat comforting, as far as it goes.

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

Well it provides a provable, repeatable epistemology. I find that somewhat comforting, as far as it goes.

Well, his definition of science includes the kind of science that by his own account has already produced repeatable, verifiable results proving the existence of psychic phenomena.

What he proposes is more on par with Nikolai Fyodorov's intention to build rockets for the purpose of traveling into space to retrieve the lost energy of dead people so they can be revived, and everyone can become immortal and live in a utopian society. As opposed to just mentally reinterpreting the meaning of science.

Actually, I'm scanning the Russian cosmism Wikipedia page right now and at least judging by the title, Tsiolkovsky's The Will of the Universe, Unknown Intelligent Forces sounds remarkably similar to Mitchell's description of what he came to believe after an experience akin to the samadhi of Hinduism and Buddhism during the return flight from the Moon. He claimed all 14 LM pilots underwent the same experience (although they interpreted it in ways different than him).

As a result of the experience, he came to believe the universe was composed of intelligent information and that tapping into this information unlocks higher physical possibilities (what UFOs use to move around) as well as higher possibilities in humans (immortality et al).

When he said that science should serve the spiritual means of humanity, he meant that the study of that phenomena ought to be what science should focus on, as doing so would better serve humanity than its current, comparatively material aims that are mentally unsatisfying for the common person (per his own opinion).

This view is not isolated. In the opening of his 1968 book Passport to Magonia, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee somewhat poetically stated:

"My only guide has been the persistent feeling that science had offered no answer to some basic needs in our hearts, and that perhaps the present loneliness of man, echoed in the great miseries of times past, had provided most of the emotional power, most of the intellectual quality, mobilized in that unreachable goal: Magonia- a place where gentle folks and graceful fairies dance, and lament the coarse world below."

(the book compares then-modern UFO sightings to folklore dating as far back as a dozen centuries, and Vallee points out correlations between descriptions of demons, fairies, the 1897 airships, and finally UFOs, and makes a case for them all being an identical, sort of shape-shifting phenomena that has no clear purpose or origin)

Vallee had worked on the Mariner 3/4 Mars flybys and Mitchell was of course involved with Apollo. While surrounded by advanced technology, the world was on fire around them, with both France and the US being rocked by turmoil and civil unrest. It's difficult to imagine what that would be like, but given that context, it's understandable that they might go looking in odd places to find answers to it all. I have a quote of Mitchell's where he very plainly states how going to the Moon made him pretty fed up with petty conflicts on Earth, but I can't post it because it has an expletive.

[DDE]

"Gun bluing" did not sound particularly marketable in Russian, so it was marketed as gun ravening (воронение), which sounded suitably BadS, and all "blackening" techniques got retroactively renamed.

Corvus Corax would approve...

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

On 4/6/2025 at 3:54 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

 

Mitchell also called for science to somehow meet the spiritual demands

I've known some exceptional pilots who believed some weird things. 

(I've also met Infantry Officers who believe in the ability to 'far-see the ancient civilization of Mars that colonized Earth') 

The unique combination of skills to become an astronaut don't necessarily preclude odd ideas that cannot be proven or disproved. 

Shrug. 

Great Spaghetti Monster anyone?

 

 

...

 

(there are people who don't get the joke!  GSM is real - they'll say...) 

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I've known some exceptional pilots who believed some weird things. 

(I've also met Infantry Officers who believe in the ability to 'far-see the ancient civilization of Mars that colonized Earth') 

The unique combination of skills to become an astronaut don't necessarily preclude odd ideas that cannot be proven or disproved. 

Shrug. 

Great Spaghetti Monster anyone?

 

 

...

 

(there are people who don't get the joke!  GSM is real - they'll say...) 

The thing is, everyone has a spaghetti monster.   Even if it is the firm belief that they do not have a spaghetti monster.   Consider the current alignment problem in AI and how nature would solve it.   Anything counterproductive to the furtherance of life would be misaligned.