Yes but for some reason it’s never in the night sky.
- Great Wall visible from space
- Polaris brightest star
- Zigzag to outrace crocs
- We use 10% of the brain
- Bullets explode gas tanks
- Bulls hate red
- Lightning never strikes twice
- Glass is solid
- Penny dropped from skyscraper kills
- No gravity in space
Agreed that this really did not need to be in video form, especially since they spent so little time on each myth. The last one especially needed at least one more sentence explaining why the astronauts appear weightless if gravity is only 10% weaker in orbit.
This is exactly what I think of videos! Unless it’s something that needs to show motion or 3D that can’t be seen from a picture, videos are usually not a good choice.
I had never even heard of number 8.
I read somewhere that glass does flow, but it takes a really really long time, something like 10,000+. I swore I read it in one of Cecil’s columns, but I can’t find it.
But yeah, that video screwed the pooch on that one.
Really? It’s one of my favourite integers.
The master speaks:
Lesser folk might prefer it otherwise, but there’s no sharp line dividing liquids and solids. A supercooled liquid, the term applied to glass for many years, has been rapidly chilled past its normal freezing point and become apparently solid without assuming the regular crystalline structure typical of solids. The term du jour, amorphous solid, means an apparently solid substance that lacks crystalline structure and instead has the random organization of liquids. In other words, we used to think of glass as a solidlike liquid, and now we think of it as a liquidlike solid. Big frickin’ deal.
I concede that changes in the properties of glass once it cools past the “glass transition temperature” are an argument for calling it a solid. But to my mind the real question is whether glass flows, as liquids do. I’m happy to say it does, just not very fast. In the original column I wrote, “At room temperature [glass’s] rate of flow is so slow that it would take billions of years to ooze out of shape.” In the October 1999 issue of Discover, Yvonne Stokes, a mathematician at the University of Adelaide in Australia, says that it would take a mere ten million years for a windowpane to get 5 percent thicker at the bottom.
Ah, thanks. I was only off by a factor of 1000.
I repeated the crocodile one just last weekend :smack:
The number 8 is actually a Common Science Myth.
Is it true that if I could skate, I would be great?
If I could make a figure eight?
That’s a circle that turns 'round upon itself?
And if I turned it on its side it becomes infinite?
Me too. If something is online in video form that does not really need to be in video form, then I usually give it a miss. It is not the experience I want and enjoy from the internet. When I want to passively consume entertainment or info I will watch TV.
What is worse, half (or more) of the online videos these days seem to have an unskippable ad before them. :mad:
Unless I am on a specifically video oriented site like youtube or…youtube, I like at least having the option of a transcript or something. (Actually, even on youtube I like it when there’s a transcript.)
I’m pretty sure the same can be said of other solids though, so glass isn’t unique (isn’t permanent warping or deformation under pressure an example of a solid flowing?). Another example, rocks flow inside of Earth, even when they aren’t so hot that they are molten, or the example I gave with ice in a glacier. All of these also occur on much shorter timescales, mainly due to the amount of stress.
Thanks.
-D/a
Yep. Having to watch a video to get the story is like being stuck sharing a book with the slowest reader in the universe at school.
LOL, exactly!
I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to see until reading further down the page. It looks like Bing NZ doesn’t have Videos. I did manage to view by searching for “video 10 science myths” and clicking on the Yahoo au site.
I hadn’t heard of the zigzag to outrun a croc before, but I knew they didn’t go fast on land except when they lunge at something within their reach. So, not running but striking.
Everyone know the brightest star in the southern skies is Sirius. We can’t even see Polaris in NZ.
Not just that they can’t run fast–they can’t run far. They’re build for that powerful tail to power them around under water. Those stubby little legs on dry land, not so much.