Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Casey Pelous]

Well this was fun: Is my blue your blue?



What is blue? what is green? is your green the same as my green or your blue?
Test the boundaries of how you identify colour and find what your blue is.

By about the 3rd example it moves from "well that's plainly blue/plainly green" into "er... welll... it's kinda both buuuut"
Ive taken the test a half dozen times now and each time I come out between 169 and 172 which seems more consistent than I expected. My colour boundary is greener than 77% of the population... which, if I'm interpreting it correctly, means that I keep on seeing blue long after most people are seeing green. I think. I could be wrong.

Article about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/sep/16/blue-green-viral-test-color-perception

There's also the not-inconsiderable matter of how one's monitor is calibrated ...

 

[Noodles]

Seems like these "we found a magic catalyst" deals almost always end with either, "Oh, it's only found in the heart of a neutron star" or "Oh, well, yes, it is insanely toxic. But only to living things ....."

Yeah, I was reading and thinking, "Great, and in 10 years it will end up causing the Ozone Hole 2, because some scientist didn't anticipate there would be so much of the "harmless" gas and now it's causing other problems.

 

[Govi]

There's also the not-inconsiderable matter of how one's monitor is calibrated ...

"...calibrated"?! Who does this at home, outside a narrow group of professionals who have to rely on such calibration to do their jobs properly? Wait, I forgot. I calibrated my monitor.

 

[Khamon]

Some of us piddle with all manner of electronic settings for no appreciable reason. We always have. Piddling fools we are.

 

[Govi]

At some point, back when I was modifying ("enhancing") my XT clone, I realized that there was -- in things computerly -- a very high fritter-factor. Finding things that had a high fritter-factor was something I bought PC Magazine (for example) to help me find. Video and audio cards had wonderfully high fritter-factors. Also, things like clock accelerators for the 8088/8087 combo. Zooooommm...!

 

[Free]

Earth will have a temporary 'mini moon' for two months. (Repeat!) (And I love when vehicles become measuring tools.)

 

[Free]

Um, sure. I've heard of weirder shit blamed on 2020.

COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Moon, Scientists Claim

Something strange happened when the Earth was gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020: the Moon got substantially colder.

futurism.com

As detailed in a recent article published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, scientists from the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, observed that lunar nighttime surface temperatures dipped substantially across six observation sites on the near side of the Moon.

They propose that this "anomalous dip" was caused by a sudden drop in radiation being emitted from Earth as human activity plummeted during global lockdowns, which limited the amount of pollution and overall heat released by our planet at night.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Holy smoke this one made me double-take. Around three hours ago the Sun just popped off an X7.15-class flare. That's really big.

To give some perspective, the July 2012 solar storm, which it was later estimated could've cost just the US more than $600 billion from infrastructure effects if the flare's coronal mass ejection had hit Earth squarely, had an intensity of X2.5.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

What's that in Chernobyls?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

What's that in Chernobyls?

Ugh, math. -_-

The best figure I can find for the power of a solar flare is between 10^32 and 5 * 10^32 ergs for an X5- to X15-class flare. I don't think the numbers are exact like on a per-magnitude basis. Our flare is X7.1 so let's make it easy on ourselves and go with the lowest end, 10^32 ergs.

An erg is equal to 10^-7 joules, and the calculator says 10^32 ergs is 10^25 joules, which sounds believable to me.

The big explosion at Chernobyl is estimated at about 225 tons of TNT equivalent according to wiki. 1 ton of TNT is 1 gigajoule of energy, or 10^9 joules. So, Chernobyl was 225 * 10^9 joules.

10^25 / (225 * 10^9) gives us 4.44... * 10^13, or 44 trillion Chernobyls. Assuming I keyed this stuff into the calculator right.

 

[Free]

2 billion year old microbes!

Scientists Cracked Open a 2-Billion-Year-Old Stone and Discovered Something Entirely Unexpected

An ancient rock — or rather, the living microbes inside of it — could offer an unprecedented glimpse into early life on Earth.

futurism.com

A very old rock — or rather, what's inside of it —might force scientists to rewrite what we know about the evolution of life on Earth.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Microbial Ecology, scientists discovered living microbes sealed inside a 2-billion-year-old stone.

It's "the oldest example of living microbes being found within ancient rock so far discovered," according to a press release.

"We didn't know if 2-billion-year-old rocks were habitable," said lead study author Yohey Suzuki, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo, in a statement. "Until now, the oldest geological layer in which living microorganisms had been found was a 100-million-year-old deposit beneath the ocean floor, so this is a very exciting discovery."

 

[Noodles]

Who needs COVID-19 when we can have COVID Negative 2000000000

 

[Essence Lumin]

Who needs COVID-19 when we can have COVID Negative 2000000000

Even weirder would be covid negative 214748346. Conspiracies abound.

 

[Free]

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

OMG Velikovsky!

 

[Free]

OMG Velikovsky!

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Free]

I'm sorry, but frozen supermarket pizzas are NEVER cooked to perfection.

 

[Casey Pelous]

I'm sorry, but frozen supermarket pizzas are NEVER cooked to perfection.

Hmmm .... I agreed, but then thought, Well, if you nuke a frozen pizza back to its constituent atoms, would that count as "cooked to perfection?"

I don't know. Hypothesis: there are subatomic frozen pizza particles (digiornons) that will survive even a nuclear blast.

I asked MS's large chatbot what would happen if I put a frozen pizza in the Large Hadron Collider.

You'd witness the world's most expensive (and least appetizing) food experiment. The Large Hadron Collider is designed to accelerate particles to near-light speeds and collide them to observe fundamental physics—introducing a frozen pizza would just create a mess. The intense energy would probably destroy the pizza, breaking it down into subatomic particles, but you wouldn't get any fascinating scientific data (or a midnight snack) out of it.

Probably. This is all hypothetical -- WE NEED TO DO THIS EXPERIMENT.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Hmmm .... I agreed, but then thought, Well, if you nuke a frozen pizza back to its constituent atoms, would that count as "cooked to perfection?"

I'd think the main constituent atoms in pizza are carbon and H20 hydrogen and oxygen. I'm not a fan of eating charcoal doused with water or pure charcoal if the hydrogen and oxygen float off in the air.

Perfection would have to be defined but usually in this case it would mean perfectly tasty.