You… did not need to do that to us, Icarus.
Actually, I was talking about to study the effects. But of course that’s doable. Was supposed to be a funny.
Ladies and gentlmen…dust mites:
Google search of “dust mite electron microscope”
Was it in the movie “Wildcats” with Goldie Hawn that the cheerleaders were chanting “You’re ugly! You’re ugly! Your mama said you’re ugly!”?
I live on a gravel road, with a gravel driveway and a mountain yard. I also have two dogs. Dust I know.
I agree about pets and dust but I noticed something about an hour ago.
I’m trying to learn guitar. And today was in some real bright sunshine. I look down at the strings and finger placements often. I noticed that the guitar is dusty with some tiny, tiny specks on the neck. Odd, it’s kept in a case.
Then I thought of this thread… ‘That’s my skin’.
To round up the stories about football I can contribute the following: I once read the story of Niels Bohr, the famous theoretical physicist, being congratulated by a stranger on 10. December (the day the Nobel Prize is awarded) in a tramway in Copenhagen: he assumed it was because of the Nobel Prize he had won and proceeded to talk about quantum stuff and relativity, but the stranger interrupted him to say: “No, I meant the fantastic save you managed against so-and-so’s close up header in the game between XXX [his team] and YYY [the other team], several years ago.”
I am sure the quote is right: I remember the date (not the year) because it’s my birthday. I have forgotten the name of the teams, but I am sure it was football, which he and his brother both played (his brother even made it to the Danish national team), but I have never been able to find it again. Perhaps it was in “Der Teil und das Ganze”, by Werner Heisenberg? He wrote a lot about Bohr. Or did Feynman write about it? I have too many books by him to check them all again. Search engines have not been able to help me. Perhaps I have stated the question wrongly.
That Niels Bohr story rings a bell, but I also don’t remember where I’ve read it, must be a long time ago. In a magazine, perhaps? Der Spiegel?
According to this week’s oglaf.com, it’s mostly dead perverts.
People talk about the miracle of life as though it’s this amazing thing that happened billions of years ago, when it really just makes the planet gross.
You’re telling me!
Look at what happened after cyanobacteria evolved and started exhaling/excreting free oxygen all over the place. In less than half a billion years the atmosphere was full of the stuff and anaerobic species were dying off left and right.
Which is why I don’t feel the least bit guilty about animals eating plants. The only way most animals could survive in an oxygen atmosphere was to secure some source of reduced organics to buffer the oxygen, and the plants were the only option. They started it!
The Jack, Queen, and King of each suit is named in French card decks.
| Rank/Suit | Spades | Hearts | Diamonds | Clubs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| King | David | Charles[4] | Cesar | Alexandre |
| Queen | Pallas | Judith | Rachel[5] | Argine[6] |
| Jack | Hogier[7] | La Hire[8] | Hector | Lancelot[9] |
It’s interesting, too, that other places use other suits. In Swiss-German decks they have roses, bells, acorns, and shields.
Truly a winning post!
Antimatter does not fall upwards
Talk about stumble across… while I was looking for a scene from old BBC sitcom The Likely Lads, my eye caught a reference to The Returning Soldier Effect:
Some more about it:
There is now evidence that, at least among the British soldiers who fought in World War I, those who survive battle and return home to be reunited with their wives are taller than those who die (and therefore never have another chance to have a child). A comparison of the physical characteristics of the British soldiers who survived or died in World War I shows that surviving soldiers are on average nearly one inch taller than fallen soldiers. The average height of the surviving soldiers is 66.4 inches, while that of the fallen soldiers is 65.5 inches. Even in the small sample that is examined, this one-inch difference is highly statistically significant.
As we explain in Chapter 5 of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, taller parents are more likely to have sons than shorter parents are. So the excess boys born during and immediately after the World Wars might be a consequence of the fact that taller soldiers, who are more likely to have sons to begin with, are more likely to survive the war and return home, whereas shorter soldiers, who are more likely to have daughters, are less likely to survive the war and return home to have daughters.
Even after all that… 
j
I would assume that correlation (taller parents = more males) cuts across the entire population and not just the subset of “random war survivor”?
Sure. The point the authors were making was that there is some evidence that war survivors are taller than war victims (I’m talking about soldiers here) and as it’s the survivors that reproduce then post war fathers have a greater average height - and so produce more boys.
Still somewhat though.
j
I’m wondering about the “taller soldiers survive” thing. Seems like they would be more likely to get shot (head over the trench, bigger target when going over the top, etc).
But they can probably run faster. Also, taller people generally have less vital organ density in their torsos than shorter people making it slightly less likely a bullet will hit one.
The English town of Maidstone has a Coat of Arms that depicts an Iguanodon:
Well, it’s what they used to think an iguanadon looked like. Considering that heraldic animals don’t always look like real animals, though, that ought not to be a problem.