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A strange world full of odd facts


Beardie

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9 minutes ago, Ratch said:

No structure is truly rigid

A rather inflexible statement?

I remember eating Colcannon & bangers in a Leicester pub and the bottle of sauce supplied looked like tomato but tasted like brown.

It was Irish, and the brand was country something?

If the animals that the vegans want to kill off produce noxious gases due to their diet, surely the vegans produce the same gases? Can we kill them off instead?

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In the 18th Century it was common for the 'gentry' to drink themselves into insensibility at hostelries in Edinburgh, Glasgow etc. and large, burly highland gentlemen were employed for the express purpose of carrying said 'gentry' to their homes or lodgings once they reached the nirvana of unconsciousness. 

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19 hours ago, Rich B said:

Canada is the home of the OPEC of the maple syrup world, Fédération des producteurs acéricoles du Québec (FPAQ), to promote, market and control the supply and price of maple syrup. FPAQ produces 94% of syrup in Canada and 77% of the world supply. They maintain an International Strategic Reserve of some 12,200 tonnes of syrup. A barrel is worth about $1,200, 10-18 times the price of a barrel of US crude oil.

 

Cheers,

Rich

 

That's because most of the sugar maples grow in Quebec. There sure as hell aren't any growing up here!

 

 

Chris

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21 hours ago, Beardie said:

Here is an interesting fact.... There are very few things in this old universe of ours that are even close to being a perfect sphere but one that is, is the electron. If I recall correctly, if you blew an electron up until it was a couple of feet in diameter, the variance in it's diameter would be less than the width of a human hair. 


Surprisingly this is a problem for physics as it was hoped that it would be found to be less than spherical which would have hinted at the existence of other exotic particles as predicted in the standard model of particle physics. 

Ah! But isn't an electron considered to be both matter (and spherical) and energy (and therefore of no shape at all)?

On the subject of electrons ... I seem to recall there is a theory that states that there is just one electron in the universe and it's constantly moving at effectively infinite speeds between all places in space-time. The probability of finding it at any particular place at any particular time leads to the probability-density fields that have replaced the "orbitals" in atomic theory.

 

My head hurts. :drunk:

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I read tonight that research done at Exeter University and University of Texas indicates that really smelly farts are probably good for your health. Not a fact till further research done. I have volunteered Mrs T as their perfect subject for study. The original silent but deadly :sick:

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Ah @NigelC I think you might be meaning the Photon rather than the electron. Photons are massless which is why they can travel at the speed of light and are considered/thought to be, quantum 'packets' of energy that exhibit the characteristics of both particles and waves. (Don't me sound brainy!😜) 

 

As to the other one about there being only one electron that is the entire universe, yup that is one theory I have also come across. The crazy thing about this old universe is that there are many theories which sound absolutely insane but are actually as possible as any other theory and can't be disproved by our current level of knowledge.

 

When it all boils down I don't think we have actually gotten very far from the start of our quest to understand the universe so far and it might be that we never will reach the answer to it all. There may not even be a straight answer and, heck, there might even be a 'Supreme Scientist' looking down into our petrie dish and nudging us around and examining the evolution of life throughout his creation. 

 

@JohnT Masterful entry there sir! I wouldn't let the Mrs. see it though!

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Butterflies taste with their feet and have a suction tube for a mouth. Their eyes are made of 6,000 lenses and can see ultraviolet light.

 

 

 

 

On June 28, 2009, the late Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travelers. The next day, he sent out the invitations. "Copies of it will survive in one form or another for many thousands of years," Hawking later said in the documentary "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking."

"Maybe one day, someone living in the future will find the information and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible," he said.

Nobody attended Hawking's party. Perhaps some curious future humans will ride the wormhole to Hawking's interment service, which will be held at Westminster Abbey in London on June 15. According to The Stephen Hawking Foundation, time travelers are cordially invited to that ceremony, too.

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Sadly, or possibly happily, I believe that it is absolutely impossible to travel back in time, wormholes or no wormholes and I am pretty sure Steven Hawking was of the same opinion. I don't believe it is actually because of the rule that nothing can exceed the speed of light but, rather, it is to do with the need for the universe to operate on a principle of uncertainty and, if time travel to the past was possible, it would violate that uncertainty and spoil the whole game. Time travel forwards in time is perfectly possible and does not violate the principles of uncertainty because the traveller cannot influence the flow of the world by his actions as his travel is purely relative to his own experience of time and does not affect the rest of the universe.

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deviation: In a pub I used to visit occasionally there was a chap who used to bet punters that he could empty a glass of beer/whiskey/brandy without touching it. The punter would buy the drink for him. He would pick it up and drink it. Punter would say 'you lost, you touched it!', so chap would agree and pay over the 50p or £1 bet.

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7 hours ago, Beardie said:

Sadly, or possibly happily, I believe that it is absolutely impossible to travel back in time, wormholes or no wormholes and I am pretty sure Steven Hawking was of the same opinion. I don't believe it is actually because of the rule that nothing can exceed the speed of light but, rather, it is to do with the need for the universe to operate on a principle of uncertainty and, if time travel to the past was possible, it would violate that uncertainty and spoil the whole game. Time travel forwards in time is perfectly possible and does not violate the principles of uncertainty because the traveller cannot influence the flow of the world by his actions as his travel is purely relative to his own experience of time and does not affect the rest of the universe.

We’d know if time travel were possible as the discussion threads on here would be chock-full of plane nerds from the far future stopping off on this forum to show off their knowledge of the precise paint shades of planes, sell rare kits they snaffled at launch and chortle at the sci-fi section

Edited by LostCosmonauts
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On 11/22/2019 at 2:20 AM, Beardie said:

Ah I do love maple syrup though it is quite expensive here and a number of times I have grabbed a bottle only to find it was maple 'flavoured' syrup which is nothing like the real thing.

I hate that when they try to sell you something that's disguised as something else such as your "maple syrup" or cartons of , for instance, "cranberry fruit drink", which is sold in cartons designed to look like proper juice cartons upon which the cranberry part is written in large letters & the fruit drink part is invariably in much smaller writing not to mention the fact that the product is displayed in the middle of genuine juice.

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18 hours ago, Pete in Lincs said:

If the animals that the vegans want to kill off produce noxious gases due to their diet, surely the vegans produce the same gases? Can we kill them off instead?

OOOH nail him up, nail him up, going against the hipsters & trendies, stonings too good for him!

 

I think we are fairly safe on this site but I'm still standing by for someone to be truly outraged & really asking for your termination (& now possibly mine)

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