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Your Esoteric Knowledge, Please!
The world is a weird and fascinating place, filled with surprises and forgotten gems. What information do you have that deserves a little sunlight?
1. As many know, the commander of the English militia unit that started the Seven Years’ War was none other than our beloved George Washington. The most incendiary aspect of the incident concerned the death of Ensign Jumonville at the hands of Tanacharison, Washington’s Iroquois ally and guide. Washington subsequently signed a confession admitting that he had Jumonville “assassinated,” though he later claimed that he was misled by the translator, and that Tanacharison acted without his knowledge or consent. What is not terribly well known is that the incident was the subject of a great deal of anti-English French propaganda including this a lengthy (and very bad) epic poem that depicts Washington (unnamed) as a blood-thirsty backwoods villain.
He [Jumonville] falls at the feet of his executioners.
Three times he lifts his heavy eyelid,
Three times his dulled eye closes to the light.
In dying, the tender memory of France
Comes to delight his great soul.
He dies: trampled under the feet of an inhuman band,
His torn members throb on the ground.
2. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and kai-lan are merely different pieces of different cultivars of the same species. Not the same family, but the very same species.
3. In contrast, Asian and African elephants are not particularly closely related; rather, they’re the two surviving members of the Elephantinae family, which also includes mammoths and paleoxodon (the Elephantinae are, themselves, the sole survivors of the order, the Proboscidea, which includes all kinds of weird, tusked-and-trunked mammals). Asian elephants, in fact, are much better thought of as a species of tropical mammoths, while African elephants are a different matter entirely.
4. Liquid hydrogen contains less hydrogen per volume than — and about a quarter the energy of — gasoline.
Published in General
At any given moment, it is always possible to find two points on the surface of the Earth that are on opposite sides of the globe (separated by exactly 180 degrees) and are at exactly the same temperature.
There may be three surviving members of the Elephantinae family. Several recent studies claim that the African bush elephants and the African forest elephants are different species.
This, of course, doesn’t include Steve Martin portraying the Elephant Guy.
I have Mark Witton’s book about pterosaurs, published in 2013, although I don’t have it with me. I don’t recall that the chapter on Azhdarchidae mentioned that they were flightless. Also, this presentation by Michael Habib discusses evidence that these animals were in fact capable of flight, and if I recall states that all known pterosaurs flew.
However, I note this site, which disputes that last claim by Habib, suggesting that there were in fact flightless pterosaurs.
EDIT- I should add that the most direct disputing I’ve noticed was done in a comment at that Youtube presentation by (Dr.?) Michael Habib.
My favorite esoteric topic in recent years has been procedural generation. It is use of rules and mathematical relationships to empower software to produce compelling content at a scale or pace that would be too burdensome otherwise. It can also circumvent hardware limitations by generating content on-the-fly, so storage requirements are minimized.
In 2006, Bethesda Softworks incorporated geological relationships into procedural software to simulate terrain and vegetation.
Companies like SpeedTree now develop tools for helping game developers more accurately simulate foliage down to individual leaves blowing in the breeze. Again, these trees are produced by mathematical formulas, rather than by individual sculpting.
In 2008, Will Wright of Maxis used procedural animations extensively. Perhaps his most impressive innovation was to enable his evolution-themed game Spore to animate an endless variety of fictional creatures on-the-fly with believable and useful movements. In other words, it could analyze any skeleton and figure out how that animal would walk, run, jump, and so on.
And today? Well, allow Sean Murray of Hello Games to demonstrate what a sine wave looks like when applied to topography and watch as he gradually adds further equations to the mix. No Man’s Sky combines math with physical and aesthetic rules to produce an entire universe of stars, planets, animals, and much more to be explored.
Correct, though my understanding is that the two African species — if indeed they are different — are still very close related to each other and equally distantly related to Asian elephants, who are really mammoths.
Don’t know where do begin as I am chock full of useless information.
Among the most useless: The Danes call Danish Pastries “Viennese Bread.” The Queen owns all the swans in England and Wales. And she is the only one that can legally eat them. And the Bubi Tribe of Bioko has a language so dependent on hand gestures they are unable to converse in the dark.
Work those factoids into your daily conversation.
I recently learned on Wikipedia that a century before Rosa Parks, Chester A. Arthur argued, and won, a case defending a black woman who couldn’t ride with whites on a streetcar. This led to desegregation of streetcars in NY.
The words “guest” and “ghost” are the same in Russian. This causes some discomfort for visitors….
Thanks to money NASA was throwing around in the ’90’s for research in ceramic matrix composites for high temperature (up to 2000C) engine materials, I can tell you quite a bit about microstructural transformations in chemical vapor deposition silicon carbide fibers at elevated temperatures. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a precise mechanism for the thermal aging noted by numerous experimenters, which is what I set out to find.
CHUCK ENFIELD
Personally, I am down with micro structural transformations in chemical vapor deposition silicon carbide fiber at elevated temperatures, particularly as it relates to the development of high temperature ceramic matrix composites. But, if you ever do figure out the precise mechanism for that thermal-aging-thingy, which you set out to find but couldn’t, please do let us know, because that sir, would be esoteric.
American TV used to be 30 frames a second to match our 60 hertz AC current. That’s why European TV, despite it’s admirable detail, has always been 25 frames a second, because they have 50 Hz current.
The powers that be quietly adjusted US TV to 29.97 fps to avoid heterodyning (buzzing) in the audio. The set’s own timebase ‘flywheel” bent the speed of the incoming picture just enough offset the 30 kilocycle margin to make it appear perfect.
But when videotape came in there was a new problem: the math didn’t add up. So for decades, video editing suffered the tortures of the math-damned. There were two time scales, “drop frame” and “non drop frame” to cover the two hostile micro-timekeeping systems for analog video. It was a pain. Digital made it go away.
Want to impress New Yorkers? When visiting the main library on 42nd Street, try out the famous echo in the Central Reading Room!
There are 72 glyphs common between the Ronorongo script from Easter Island, and the Indus Valley script. They are 2000 year apart. Both are un-deciphered.
Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer.
Between 1842 and 1843, she translated an article by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with an elaborate set of notes of her own, simply called Notes.
These notes contain what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Lovelace’s notes are important in the early history of computers. She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities.
I’m pretty sure I’ll never know. The overwhelming tedium of that thesis research convinced me to abandon the materials science R&D career path I had been preparing for. I think we should torture terrorists to death by locking them in a lab and forcing them to perform experiments on creep mechanisms in ceramic fibers. They’ll find a way to kill themselves within 6 months.
PS – I miss the scanning electron microscope though. Everybody should have one of those. Soooo much fun.
CHUCK ENFIELD
Well, naturally I and other like minded Ricochetti will be disappointed your thermal-aging-thingy will be left forever unsolved.
Your idea however, of forced ceramic fiber creep mechanism experiment therapy for terrorists, sounds promising. Nothing quite like practical and well applied science.
Any MMORPG that doesn’t have in-world exchanges between game currency and non-game currency, and make most of its money that way, is idiotic. Discuss. :-)
Speaking of funky echoes, the ceiling of the Parliamentary Dining Room in Canada’s parliament features a series of domes, which reflect sound in such a way that if you sit in just the right spots you can hear conversations from the other side of the room as if the person was right next to you.
It is not known if this phenomenon was intentional, but it has the effect of discouraging politicians from using the dining room to discuss “confidential” matters.
Have you read REAMDE? The story becomes pretty idiotic in the second half, and the ending is pure deus ex machina, but the first half is fascinating and discusses this exact topic.
Thanks to a patent case on which I once worked, I can tell you quite a bit about chemical vapor deposition in a fluidized bed. It turns out that this technology makes possible neat applications like “Indiglo” wrist watches.
Rare photo of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage playing “Grand Theft Hansom Cab” on one of their earliest computers, the PostScript 2.
I know from tactile experience that the forward-most piece of the F-15A Eagle is a Philips head screw that holds the tip of the radome on.
The SR-71 Blackbird’s engines and airframe were optimized for Mach 3 flight above 70,000 feet. Aerial refueling behind a KC-135 took place at 200-some knots around 20,000 feet, which is like trying to slowly and gently push a boat trailer uphill with a sick shift Ferrari. As it took on fuel, the Blackbird would gain weight and the pilot would have to add engine power to maintain airspeed. If he was taking on a full load from the tanker, the throttles would reach full military power (the highest non-afterburner setting) before refueling was complete. If he lit the afterburners, the twin J58 turbo-ramjet engines would provide far too much thrust to remain safely mated to the refueling boom. To overcome this, Blackbird pilots perfected a maneuver to light just one afterburner and smoothly crab the jet into a new, yawed and banked trim condition without overtorquing the boom or disconnecting the refueling nozzle.
It that some sort of in-flight adjustment screw?
No, just holds the metal cap on.
This was a joke by the way.
In-flight adjustment screw? Didn’t I see Dean Martin doing that with a flight attendant in one of the “Airport” movies?
Sorry Jim, went right overy my head.