The world’s most populated island completely surrounded by fresh water is…
Montreal (Canada) - 2,014,221.
The name for the otter-like water rodent nutria comes from the Spanish word ‘nutria,’ which means. . . ‘otter.’ The Spanish word for nutria is ‘coypu,’ coming from some South American indigenous language. I’ve yet to find out what the word means in that language, but I suspect it’s something like ‘water rat.’
Here’s something I learned when working in a metrology lab:
When you weigh something on a balance, it does not report the true, “inertial” mass of the object being weighed. It reports a different value, called “conventional mass.” This the case for all balances, even the very expensive analytical balances made by Mettler.
This doesn’t cause a problem for most applications. One area where it can cause a problem is in the pharmaceutical industry. If a drug requires a precise amount of an ingredient, you need to know if the quantity specified (in mg) is true mass or conventional mass. If the quantified specified is true mass, and you’re using analytical balance, you had better convert the reported value to true mass.
It will also cause a problem if the object you’re weighing will be accelerated in a horizontal plane. Your F=ma equation won’t be precise because your m has error.
Abraham Lincoln is the only U.S. President to have been granted a patent, for a mechanism to lift boat over obstructions in a river:
duplicate
So did singer Bobby Darin.
Nitpick: the leg incident occurred during the Mexican-American War (1846-48). The Spanish-American War occurred in 1898, over two decades after Santa Anna’s death.
There is a monument to Benedict Arnold’s boot at the Saratoga Battlefield National Historic Park. Arnold was the hero for the American cause at that battle, but because he turned traitor later on in the war, the monument raisers didn’t want to name him on the plaque. He was shot in the leg at Saratoga, so they honored his wounded boot.
Response from the pharmaceutical industry: Eh?
I worked 35 years in the industry, using all manner of balances; did weighing for compounding, weighing for analyses, writing and reviewing of compounding instructions and analytical procedures involving weighing, drug licensing with all its weighing-related issues and negotiations with national (etc) regulatory bodies - and I have never heard of this.
j
What does the moon smell like? I bet this isn’t a question many of us ponder, but the Apollo astronauts reported that it smells like burnt gunpowder. No one know why. One theory is that it results from rapid oxidization when moon dust is first exposed to moist air, comparing it to a dry desert that’s been dry for billions of years and is suddenly exposed to oxygen and moisture. It’s intense and distinctive but apparently doesn’t last long. None of the lunar samples brought back to earth have any smell. Another theory is that it’s the result of ions created by millions of years of bombardment by the solar wind.
2+2=5
Take a calculator and set it so it reads only whole numbers, no tenths, hundredths, etc… Enter 2.48 (rounds down to 2) + 2.49 (rounds down to 2) and enter equal. Should read 5. 2.48 + 2.49 = 4.97 which rounds up to 5.
When Chevy made the Nova in the 70s other GM divisions got a model based on this car.
N = Nova sold by Chevrolet
O = Omega sold by Oldsmobile
V = Ventura sold by Pontiac
A = Apollo sold by Buick
2+2=5
Take a calculator and set it so it reads only whole numbers, no tenths, hundredths, etc… Enter 2.48 (rounds down to 2) + 2.49 (rounds down to 2) and enter equal. Should read 5. 2.48 + 2.49 = 4.97 which rounds up to 5.
When Chevy made the Nova in the 70s other GM divisions got a model based on this car.
N = Nova sold by Chevrolet
O = Omega sold by Oldsmobile
V = Ventura sold by Pontiac
A = Apollo sold by Buick
And all four were assembled at the same GMAC assembly plant, on the same assembly line. One of those plants was located in Van Nuys CA.
I once owned a Chevy Nova.
No, not the Chevy Nova you’re talking about…a NUMMI Chevy Nova. They partnered with Toyota and produced what was essentially a Chevrolet Corolla. It was an excellent car.
Speaking of Chevy, remember the Vega? It was bad partly because the workers who built it wished it to be so.
“…labor relations at the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant that built the Vega were notoriously awful. Originally a Chevrolet plant, Lordstown was turned over to the General Motors Assembly Division during 1971, and the number of employees was cut even as line speed was maintained. Morale among Lordstown UAW workers sank, and some resorted to sabotaging cars on the line or simply doing lousy work.”
Lordstown is the plant Trump wanted to bring back, right?
Sabotage is throwing a shoe into the mechanism of an assembly line. A sabot, a French wooden shoe like a Dutch clog. The original American car industry equivalent term was “monkey wrenching”.
For the bonus: Savate, traditional French street fighting style, is the same word as sabot.
Bonus bonus: The stiletto shoe was the traditional weapon of the French prostitute, but they used a knife fighting style rather than a kick-boxing style.
I’m not saying what you did was right or wrong. But there’s an important distinction between conventional mass and real mass when mg count. You must do your homework.
The most common name given to baby boys in Israel is…
Muhammad (your spelling may vary).
“A popular but false account of the origin of the term’s present meaning is the story that poor workers in France, who wore wooden shoes called sabots, used to throw them into the machines to disrupt production.[1] This origin story is told in the 1991 movie Star Trek VI. This account is not supported by the etymology.[1]”
(The source Wikipedia quotes) sabotage | Etymology of sabotage by etymonline
A middle school teacher of mine told our that there was once an invading army coming into some town and the citizens decided to put on their wooden shoes and head over to the cobblestone street. Just milling around created so much noise that the army could hear it from far away and decided they were outnumbered…and left. I’ve never found a cite for it on line, however.
And in the vein of fooling an enemy goes, how about the Ghost Army? Hitler’s reconnaissance mistook inflatable tanks for the real thing, but also the allies also had trucks blasting soundtracks that could be heard 15 miles away.
“The Ghost Army’s sonic illusions, in this case, were so convincing that they fooled Axis Sally, the radio propagandist, into reporting that an entire Allied division was preparing for battle in a spot that actually contained, at the time, no troops at all.”
There may be an important distinction there, but I’m not sure who it’s important to. In 35 years in pharma, nobody I knew ever had to do their homework on this one. The most precise balances we used (which, if I remember correctly, were readable to 10 micrograms - extremely specialised) were very temperature sensitive, because at that level temperature affects the buoyancy of the alu foil weighboats. Maybe that’s what you’re talking about. But nobody ever mentioned the distinction between conventional mass and real mass - and that was when micrograms counted. For milligrams condensation is an issue - take reference standards out of the fridge an hour before you weigh samples of them.
So my point is:
Not as far as I know, and I was there for a long time, and this is right in my specialist area. Nor do I see why anyone would care (practically speaking) if there is such a distinction, so long as convention dictates that you stick to one or the other.
j