Unexpected Ways to Die!
When I was growing up in southern Indiana, there was an x-rated drive-in a few small towns over from where I lived. It sat off in a fairly secluded area.
Here’s the thing, though: depending on the time of the year, you could see the screen from the highway. If my parents knew this, they never let on. But we kids knew exactly when and where to look to catch a glimpse of a bared breast (or worse!).
Were you thinking of Dumb Ways to Die, by any chance?
Yes, but ‘Dumb’ didn’t quite seem to fit.
Today I learned that a chancre is not a person who works at a chancery.
I always spell the lesion “canker”.
The English word ‘muscle’ derives from the ancient Greek for mouse (via Latin of course); apparently the way muscles rippled under the skin looked to them like mice running around under there.
Now I’m imagining a horror movie in which hive mind mice eat their way into a corpse and animate it like a puppet.
you must be thinking of what has been said about the senator from Cancun
What has been said?
Unflattering things which do not really belong in this thread.
I think it’s a Ted Cruz reference.
I watched a plane fly by at maybe 2000’ overhead and thought about the sound and how it was not coming from where the plane was but from some distance back, where it had been, even though it seemed to be from right above.
You can see a spaceship approaching. It is about 5M miles away (well lighted, and you have good binoculars) moving at about 200Kmph. But, what you see is not where the ship is but where it was 20 seconds ago (that distance is around 20 lightseconds). As it gets closer, the light-distance decreases, so the image you see gets closer to the ship.
Hence, the speed you measure for the ship is faster than it is actually going (the image is catching up with the physical position). The difference is minute but enough that you might need to correct for the difference. As it flies by and heads off into the distance, it appears to slow down a tiny bit as the image falls behind.
I think there is something of import to this, but not sure what, since I do not work for JPL. I guess it must be that you should never rely on things being where you think they are.
I’m not sure if this is exactly the same sort of thing, but I’ve read that the Global Positioning System does account for relativistic effects in order to achieve the level of accuracy that it does.
There’s something called “relativistic aberration”, where an object traveling at a high percentage of the speed of light would look distorted because of how fast the object was moving in the time it took its light to reach you.
Today I learned about the “Wicked Bible.” it was a misprint in 1631 by the royal printers in London, that ended up saying “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Pretty funny. There are fifteen known copies of the Wicked Bible today in the collections of museums and libraries in the British Isles, North America and Australasia. if I had millions I’d buy one.
The GPS system accounts for special relativity effects (due to the difference between the velocity of the satellites and the velocity of the GPS receiver) and general relativity effects (due to difference between Earth’s gravitational acceleration on the satellites and on the GPS receiver). Without these corrections, the GPS system would be uselessly inaccurate.
In 2012 an educational game was released to help people understand relative aberration:
Shapes, velocities, and colors all become progressively more and more distorted as the speed of light gradually slows down over the course of the game to the point where it’s not much faster than the player’s walking speed, meaning you’re walking at a very high percentage of the speed of light.
You can download for free here:
http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/
It’s the shapes that blow my mind. It’s because your line of sight becomes non-conic (or alternatively, becomes conic in a non-Euclidean space), so you get a really weird “fisheye” effect.
Just curious: how inaccurate? 50 feet? 20 yards? 50 miles?