The "Did you know" thread.....

[bp666]

Originally Posted by jomama

The moon looks quite different in the Southern Hemisphere than what it looks like in the Northern Hemisphere. They see the moons upside down, so the dark side in the north is illuminated in the Southern Hemisphere.

Not quite. Each hemisphere sees the same moon & phase just from a different perspective. We all see the same sunlit moon, whether part or full.

https://earthsky.org/moon-phases/do-...me-moon-phase/

[Sir Honkers]

In 2001, a 13-year-old Boy Scout named Cody Clawson went missing for over 18 hours near Yellowstone Park. Clawson resorted to using his belt buckle to signal to planes overhead. Eventually, he got a pilot’s attention - and that pilot was none other than Harrison Ford - who rescued Clawson.

[orphen20]

Octopuses don’t actually have tentacles. They have eight limbs, but they're arms (for most species). Technically, when talking about cephalopods (octopuses, squids etc), scientists define tentacles as limbs with suckers at their end. Octopus arms have suckers down most of their length.

[DTravel]

It would take 76 workdays to read every online privacy policy we agree to in an average year.

[Sir Honkers]

At the time, LazyTown was the priciest kids' TV series ever made. Originating from Iceland, each episode came with a hefty price tag of about $1 million.

[DTravel]

Apparently "infinity" is bigger than we thought.

Physicists Think The Infinite Size of The Multiverse Could Be Infinitely Bigger
ScienceAlert

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...2608583e&ei=95

Not only does God play dice, that great big casino of quantum physics could have far more rooms than we ever imagined. An infinite number more, in fact.

Physicists from the University of California, Davis (UCD), the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne have redrawn the map of fundamental reality to demonstrate the way we relate objects in physics could be holding us back from seeing a bigger picture.

For about a century, our understanding of reality has been complicated by the theories and observations that fall under the banner of quantum mechanics. Gone are the days when objects had absolute measures like velocity and position.

To understand the fabric from which the Universe is made, we need mathematics that breaks down games of chance into likely measures.

This is far from an intuitive view of the Universe. In what has come to be known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, it seems there are waves of possibility until there isn't. Even now, it's not at all clear what ultimately decides the fate of Schrödinger's cat.

That hasn't stopped physicists from considering the options. American physicist Hugh Everett suggested in the 1950s that all possible measures constituted their own reality. What makes this one special is merely the fact you happen to be observing it.

Everett's 'many worlds' model isn't quite a theory so much as a way of grounding the absolute weirdness of quantum mechanics in something tangible.

We start with an impression of the infinite multiverse of maybes, or what physicists might refer to as the sum of all energies and positions known as a global Hamiltonian, and then zoom in on what interests us, constraining the infinite within a finite and far more manageable Hamiltonian subsystem.

Yet as a means of comprehending the infinite, could this 'zooming in' be holding us back? Or as the researchers behind this latest exercise frame it, is it "too provincial an approach, born out of our familiarity with certain macroscopic objects?"

To put it another way, we might readily ask whether Schrödinger's cat is alive or dead inside its box, but not consider whether the table beneath is warm or cold or if the box is starting to smell.

In an effort to determine whether our tendency to keep our focus on what's inside the box even matters, the researchers developed an algorithm to consider whether some quantum possibilities known as pointer states might be a little more stubbornly set than others, making some critical properties less likely to entangle.

If so, the box describing Schrödinger's cat is to some degree incomplete unless we're considering a long list of factors that may potentially stretch far across the Universe.

"You can have part of the Earth and the Andromeda galaxy in one subsystem, that's a perfectly legitimate subsystem," UCD physicist Arsalan Adil explained to Karmela Padavic-Callaghan at New Scientist.

In theory, there is no limit to the way subsystems could be defined, adding long lists of states near and far that could fence off a reality in subtly different ways.

Starting with Everett's 'many worlds' the team have come up with what they refer to as a 'many more worlds' interpretation – taking an infinite set of possibilities and multiplying it with an infinite range of realities that we might not normally consider.

Much as with the original interpretation, this novel take is less a comment on how the Universe behaves but more about our attempts to study it one bite at a time.

The researchers emphasize they haven't attached a lot of conceptual significance to their algorithm, but do wonder if it might have applications in developing better ways of probing quantum systems, such as those inside computers.

No doubt in some other reality, they already have their answer.

This research is yet to be peer-reviewed and is available on arXiv.

[Mal Hombre]

The tense hostage scenes in From Dusk Till Dawn 1996 including dialogue were based on similar scenes in Disney's That Darn Cat 1965, Quentin Tarantino has confirmed. Neville Brand and Frank Gorshin play the roles of bank robbers on the run completely straight, Brand in particular is convincingly sinister.

[Sir Honkers]

British biochemist and historian of magic Edwin Dawes, was given a gas mask as a boy and decided to test it out by making Chlorine gas in the family shed.

[Dr Pepper]

Originally Posted by Sir Honkers

British biochemist and historian of magic Edwin Dawes, was given a gas mask as a boy and decided to test it out by making Chlorine gas in the family shed.

Presumably -since he lived to the ripe old age of 98-the tests were completely successful..........