Things you don't need to know...

Things you don't need to know :

SWTOR classes as MBTI types : http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=828813

pibbur who will say no more

In cricket, England (David Bowie pictured) regain the Ashes with a victory against Australia in the fourth Test of the series.



pibbur who has reached the conclusion that the sport is similar to the Danish language, in the sense that nobody understands it.

pibbur who said:

pibbur who for has reached the conclusion that the sport is similar to the Danish language, in the sense that nobody understands it.

Click to expand...

I think it was essentially designed to give the colonials a sporting chance.

Pancor Jackhammer: The Real One

Time for some astronomy.

The Sweden Solar system is a 1:20 000 000 scale model of the Solar System in the eyes of the swedes:

1. The Sun is the Globen Arena in Stockholm (110m diameter, 70 of which is the sun itself, the rest is the major part of the corona).
2. Mercury is a 25 cm heated ball in the Stockholm Stadsmuseum, Slussen, 2.9 km from Globen.
3. The earth is a 65 cm globe, still in Stockholm, but 7.6 kms from Globen.
4. We found Jupiter, represented as an arrangement flowers at Arlanda airport, 40 kms from the sun, a new model is planned.
5. The last planet, Neptune is in Söderhamn, 229 km from the Sun Globe.
6. We've got the Kuiper Belt dwarf planet, the Pluto-as-a-planet-destroyer, Sedna as an 11-12 cm ball in Luleå, 932 km from Globen@Stockholm
7. And the end of the Heliosphere is in Kiruna.

Several other objects are positioned around the country, a couple of comets, and a couple of asteroids. One of the latter is "Asteroid 5025 PL" , represented as a 0.2 mm dot on piece of art, a relief in the small town of Kvista. Distance from the sun Globe: 60 km.

You can read about it http://www.swedensolarsystem.se/en/, which also includes a nice map: http://www.swedensolarsystem.se/en/

pibbur who seems to be in the neighborhood of Sedna. The ozzies are, no surprise, well into the Oort cloud.

If string theory is correct, strings are about 10 to the -33 centimetres long. If an atom were the size of the Solar system, a string would be about the size of a tree.

Ahh, I suspected there was a small ephemeral error in the length estimate...

pibbur who otoh may have seen things that wasn't there

pibbur who said:

Ahh, I suspected there was a small ephemeral error in the length estimate…

pibbur who otoh may have seen things that wasn't there

Click to expand...

Yes, the number formatting betrayed me, but I spotted its crime before much harm was done.

Ripper said:

If string theory is correct, strings are about 10 to the -33 centimetres long. If an atom were the size of the Solar system, a string would be about the size of a tree.

Click to expand...

I recently had a dream ... a really weird dream ... About humans being filled too much with energy (like The Force in an Star Wars setting) so that their bodies would grow and grow and grow and at one point burst and then become super-structures, super-strings that span around several galaxies ... "Galaxies are their eyes", I wrote in a try to catcxh that dream on paper that night, and their bodies are nothing more than super-structures no-one can really see anymore, so huge are they, but in a way they are still thinking and feelking beings ... Only so large that they span acros several galaxies ... If you see in RL in the sky the cloud-like lines made by planes high above in the sky ... That's a bit what i had in mind when I dreamt that dream ...

That was really crazy. And I had that dream very likely becuse we had been visiting a theme park that day ...

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I recently had a dream … a really weird dream … About humans being filled too much with energy (like The Force in an Star Wars setting) so that their bodies would grow and grow and grow and at one point burst and then become super-structures, super-strings that span around several galaxies … "Galaxies are their eyes", I wrote in a try to catcxh that dream on paper that night, and their bodies are nothing more than super-structures no-one can really see anymore, so huge are they, but in a way they are still thinking and feelking beings … Only so large that they span acros several galaxies … If you see in RL in the sky the cloud-like lines made by planes high above in the sky … That's a bit what i had in mind when I dreamt that dream …

That was really crazy. And I had that dream very likely becuse we had been visiting a theme park that day …

Click to expand...

That's awesome... literally!

As you all (should) know, I, in many ways, consider it my duty to enlighten you about the ... interesting ... sport named cricked. If possible, after all there are elements in there not meant for human understanding.

Here is an example from Bermuda:


Observe the hitherto unknown similarity between cricket and rugby

pibbur who isn't entirely sure how many scores the action resulted in, including which team was awarded said scores. It's probably a test. The test of the century.

Selfies kill more people than sharks.

http://www.sciencealert.com/selfies-have-killed-more-people-than-sharks-this-year-reports-show

@pibbur - but that video is from the northern hemisphere there are many strange behaviours and things up there!!

JDR13 said:

Selfies kill more people than sharks.

http://www.sciencealert.com/selfies-have-killed-more-people-than-sharks-this-year-reports-show

Click to expand...

Too bad there aren't more of them.

I promised I would come back to the 2015 Ig Nobel prizes.

Before we go into details, let me - for those unfamiliar with it - explain what the Ig Noble prizes are about. From their website (http://www.improbable.com/ig/):

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

Some publications are meant to be funny, but usually there is some solid science behind it, like the 2014 physics prize awarded a japaneze group "measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor."

Others are serious studies but with a humorous twist, as the 2014 the Neuroscience Prize which went to a group "trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast." It wasn't really about seeing Jesus, but a general study of Face Pareidolia - "the illusory perception of non-existent faces". And Jesus was just one example.

And of course some studies are involuntarily funny.

The 2015 awards are listed here: http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2015. I'll comment on a couple of them:

The chemistry prize went to Ormonde, Raston, Yuan, Kudlacek, Kunche, Smith, Brown, Pugliese, Olsen, Iftikhar and Weiss for "inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg." The study Shear-Stress-Mediated Refolding of Proteins from Aggregates and Inclusion Bodies was about a method for refolding proteins, that is making them go back to their original 3D shape (important for their function, destroyed by heating), which actually can be quite useful. Some of the proteins they worked on were from egg white lyzozymes. Hence the award.

The Diagnostic Medicine prize was awarded a group "determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps". They examined 101 patients admitted for assessment of possible appendicitis (just a few questions, no harm done to patients). They found that 97% of patients with confirmed appendicitis, who had traveled over speed bumps had experienced increased pain while doing so. Unlike patients without appendicitis, where significantly fewer had that particular symptom. They concluded that "Asking about speed bumps may contribute to clinical assessment and could be useful in telephone assessment of patients."

This study was obviously meant to be funny, but it isn't completely hogwash. One of the important symptoms of appendicitis is pain when applying pressure to the lower right abdominal area, and also when releasing it (rebound tenderness), and that mechanism is behind the speed bump pain. BTW: Appendicitis is still quite often a difficult diagnosis.

On to the Mathematical prize, awarded to Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer for "trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children." An example of applied mathematics, indeed.

And finally the Economics prize going to The Bangkok Metropolitan Police [THAILAND], for "offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes." Cute.

pibbur who has yet to be awarded any prizes, but who claims not to be troubled by this.

PS: One person, Sir Andre Geim, has won both the Ig Nobel prize and the Nobel Prize. DS.

Rumours say that Apple is working on an electric car which will compete with Tesla. I, and many others expect it to be called iCar. There are a lot of indications that the rumours are incorrect, but who cares?

I post this especially for the Joxer, who I assume will have a thing or two to say about it.

pibbur who, since it probably is an unsubstanciated rumour, doesn't bother looking for references.

pibbur who said:

Rumours say that Apple is working on an electric car which will compete with Tesla. I, and many others expect it to be called iCar. There are a lot of indications that the rumours are incorrect, but who cares?

I post this especially for the Joxer, who I assume will have a thing or two to say about it.

pibbur who, since it probably is an unsubstanciated rumour, doesn't bother looking for references.

Click to expand...

So the car will cost twice as much as a Tesla and have half of the features?

Or perhaps it is something Steve Jobs illustrated before he died, in which case it might revolutionize the entire car market!

Going to be interesting to see which of the two it is.

GothicGothicness said:

So the car will cost twice as much as a Tesla and have half of the features?

Or perhaps it is something Steve Jobs illustrated before he died, in which case it might revolutionize the entire car market!

Going to be interesting to see which of the two it is.

Click to expand...

We can at least expect a few proprietary interfaces, methinks? And a couple of default, non changeable properties? Power will be purchasede using iTunes?

pibbur