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A strange world full of odd facts


Beardie

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2 hours ago, Beardie said:

That may well be, I wish I could remember where I first heard it- it wasn't that long ago. I can see how it would work but you would have to time your bombing runs in line with the radio broadcasts. I suspect that, if there is any truth in it, it is just that it occurred to someone at the beeb or in government that the Germans could possibly use it rather than that the Germans had any intention of using it.

I can't read it as i've got an ad blocker but didn't the Japanese home in on Pearl Harbour using radio signals from Hawaii...

Edited by Vince1159
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2 minutes ago, Vince1159 said:

I can't read it as i've got an ad blocker but didn't the Japanese home in on Pearl Harbour using radio siganals from Hawaii...

They did, but they didn't NEED to do so.

 

I'm not buying the idea of homing in on the sound of Big Ben over the Beeb either, it seems unnecessarily complicated.

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It's one thing to home in on a steadily broadcast radio signal using triangulation but the concept behind the Beeb one was supposedly that the German radio operators in the bombers would listen to the 'bongs' to see if they could hear their own engines in the live broadcast which would tell them that they were over London. Let's face it, the chances of them being in just the right place at just the right time were very, very, very slim.

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Here is an interesting and humbling fact - Of all the matter in the solar system, the sun makes up around 99.8% of it with all the planets, moons, comets, asteroids and assorted gases and debris accounting for a tiny 0.2%!

 

Ever thought about what the sun is? Hard to believe that big glowing ball in the sky is nothing but a giant dense ball of gas with nothing 'solid' about it and when it revolves around it's axis it doesn't all move at the same speed.

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On 11/5/2019 at 12:04 AM, Beardie said:

Not a strange or an odd fact but an interesting account which I wanted to share as we are heading towards the day of Remembrance..

 

This is an account of the Pipe major of the Tyneside Scottish at the battle of the Somme:

 

The pluckiest thing I ever saw was a piper of the Tyneside Scottish playing his company over the parapet in the attack on the German trenches near Albert. The Tynesiders were on our right, and as their officers gave the signal to advance I saw the piper – I think he was the Pipe Major – jump out of the trench and march straight over No Man’s Land towards the German lines. The tremendous rattle of machine gun and rifle fire, which the enemy at once opened on us completely drowned the sound of his pipes. But it was obvious he was playing as though he would burst the bag, and just faintly through the din we heard the mighty shout his comrades gave as they surged after him. How he escaped death I can’t understand for the ground was literally ploughed by the hail of bullets. But he seemed to bear a charmed life and the last glimpse I had of him, as we too dashed out, showed him still marching erect, playing furiously, and quite regardless of the flying bullets and the men dropping all around him.

 

Many, many pipers fell in WWI marching into the enemy fire with nothing to defend themselves and with the sole aim of stirring their comrades to do what they had to do. My God those guys must have been tough as all hell!

 

Others were not so lucky with this one being an account by Piper Griffith from the 21st Tyneside Scottish:

Fellow piper Willie Scott, a shipyard worker from Elswick in Newcastle, was still ahead of me playing. When I reached the German trenches and jumped in, the first man I saw was Willie – dead, but still holding his pipes. If ever a man deserved the VC Willie did

What a combination, Geordie Jocks (or Jockinese Geordies), no wonder they were hard, working on the River & Saturday night in the Bigg Market, excellent training for the Western Front.

Edited by spaddad
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Another interesting fact here -

 

Almost all, if not all, the gold that is available on Earth or which has been so far mined is thought to have been delivered to the planet via asteroid and meteor strikes. Although there are thought to be millions of tonnes of gold present in the mass of the Earth, being dense and heavy, it is believed that most, if not all, of it gravitated to the core of the planet when the Earth was in it's molten state and so is completely inaccessible to us.

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16 hours ago, Beardie said:

I heard this recently on TV, can't remember what the programme was. I don't think it was about weather but, rather, the sound of the bombers. If the Germans could hear their own engines in the broadcast of Big Ben they would know they were over London.

 

Just found this article from the Daily Fail that may or may not be accurate https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7420981/BBCs-wartime-gambit-Big-Ben-bonging-Nazis-scored-direct-bomb-hit.html

I’d started going down the rabbit hole of wondering if the time difference between the chime happening and it being received at the microphone would be enough to use the local speed of sound to calculate the current air pressure over London and correct altimeters/feed into weather forecasts. Possible but only if the time delay on transmission were known and reproducible and the clock was kept very accurate (or the microphone was quite far enough away that the resulting error was small compared to the time delay between striking and it being picked up by the mike)

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15 hours ago, bhouse said:

Any Saturn V fans? 

I thought so...

By the time a Saturn V rocket cleared the launch tower, it had already burned 4% of its fuel.

Source: NASA archives

Shame the Soviets moon shot failed to get off the ground !

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On 10/8/2019 at 11:17 AM, Tony C said:

A moving tank track, when in contact with the ground, does not actually move!

Conversely, the track returning to the front of the vehicle (assuming forward motion) moves twice as fast as the vehicle itself. 

 

This is is also true for simple wheels.

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28 minutes ago, Mick4350 said:

Shame the Soviets moon shot failed to get off the ground !

The Soviets couldn’t even get their moon rocket (the N-1) into orbit. They hadn’t begun to solve the problem of how to land on the moon and then get off it again. That wasn’t a trivial problem; NASA ended up building flying LEM simulators so that the LEM pilots could practice landing and maneuvering the LEM on Earth. One of them nearly killed Neil Armstrong.

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Prior to the recent big find in Iran, there was sufficient oil underground at today's consumption rates to last until 2360*.

There is enough gas underground on Alaska's North Slope to meet the demands of the United States for the next 200 years.

 

*excluding the presently closed 'uneconomic' wells, which have been found to be refilling.

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29 minutes ago, Beardie said:

Makes you realise that there must be an awful lot of oil in them thar wells! 

Discovery maxxed about 50 years ago but the trouble with reporting reserves is that organisation and countries have interests in over or under reporting and use different methods especially around whether they just report economically recoverable, potentially recoverable or total field size (and despite its importance to the global economy no-one really audits)

 

This book, although 10 years old, is very good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_101

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A major field that goes unreported is Gull Island, which is adjacent to Prudhoe Bay. Tests have confirmed they are separate fields. Gull Island was found and capped, and a gagging order placed on it.....until an insider let it slip.

Certain wells off the Louisiana coast, which were closed, have been found to be refilling. The oil appears to be coming from the Earth's mantle.

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1 hour ago, Beardie said:

Makes you realise that there must be an awful lot of oil in them thar wells! 

 

And in the oilsands and shales around the world. There is a lot in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where I worked and still live. Now, if our government just had the balls to put in those pipelines east and west, Canada could make some real money and cut back on the cost of importing oil from overseas.

 

 

 

Chris

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OK interesting fact for today :-

 

When your hippy types say 'we are all beings of light' they aren't actually wrong. We shooman beans and all other warm blooded animals actually 'glow' all the time as we lose energy ( radiate body heat). It's just that our eyes aren't able to see it. A thermal camera will show you how we are all constantly radiating light in the infra red spectrum.

 

Another interesting thought :- All matter, as proved by Einstein's theory of relativity, is simply energy in a different form. An atomic bomb is simply a rather 'lossy' and inefficient way of converting matter into energy.

 

On another note @spaddad you asked me a while back what the blast radius of a massive super nova would likely be. I have since done a little research and the generally accepted estimate for a superluminous super nova is a 'kill radius' of around a thousand light years (The distance travelled by light in a thousand years at 300,000 kilometres per second)  based on the brightest one yet observed which is aptly named ASASSN(assassin)-15LH. These things can wipe out any planetary atmosphere/life present in an entire galaxy using nothing but pure light energy.

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