xkcd

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Wikipedia has lots of info on cousin marriage, including various maps. Also see cross cousin marriage from the University of Manitoba.

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Big G: 6.6719 * 10^-11 m^3 / s^2 kg Earth: 5.972 * 10^24 kg Product: 3.98445868 * 10^14 m^3 / s^2 It's difficult to get high precision values for the masses of astronomical bodies because it's hard to make precise measurements of big G. But we can measure orbital periods quite well, so we have good...

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Eebster the Great wrote:I think his statement would be correct though if the distance to the moon were not so much greater than its diameter.

And if the Moon's orbital plane were near Earth's equatorial plane rather than being a few degrees off the ecliptic plane.

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BTW, if the digits of pi contain every finite sequence of digits, then pi is a normal number. That may be true, but we currently don't know how to prove that a given real number is normal.

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(And I imagine that if you don't watch out, doubling up and doubling up a RTG either in scale or by banking more units together will start to create something that, while maybe staying subcritical by keeping spot density down, does start to go through the prompt phase, requiring extra shielding. Or...

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Reading uninitialised memory is undefined behaviour, so any program that does that is already skating on very thin ice.

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Just occurred to me: The One Ring was a Horcrux. (Or, rather, the Horcrii/Horcruxen were as derivative of such older examples as most of the rest of the stories.) From the Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange : Tolkien took many influences from JRR Rowling - think of the Ring like a Horcrux...

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What rmsgrey said. Iterated trig functions are pretty rare, compared to powers of trig functions. I guess iterated trig functions can be used to make fractals, and of course there's the Dottie number, but there's not much practical application for them.

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And thus the Carnot cycle merges with the Pornot cycle.

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gd1 wrote:q=(s*s)+p(s-x)*(p+y);
This is the final calculation that does some mathematics and stores the result in the variable q.

You should fix that typo. p isn't callable.

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In this recent Stack Exchange Physics question about a home-made cloud chamber, the OP mentioned he was using IPA, meaning isopropyl alcohol. Some readers thought he meant India Pale Ale.

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We can look at the phase diagram of CO 2 to see how it behaves, but of course that doesn't explain why it behaves that way. Courtesy of Wikipedia (click the image for a SVG). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Carbon_dioxide_pressure-temperature_phase_diagram.svg/636px-Carbon_...

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In Australia and New Zealand, the term bogan is used to refer to that class of person you're not comfortable with. I've always thought that "bogan" was the Aussie equivalent to the American "redneck", although of course there are some differences. In particular, "redneck&quo...

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I'm waiting for The Trump Show, starring Drew Carey. Or Mariah.

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Right, then. Momentum does not, in fact, equal mass times velocity. Wow. Thank you, chenille. Exactly. p = mv is just a Newtonian approximation. OTOH, momentum is velocity times relativistic mass, but in modern treatments of SR relativistic mass is a deprecated concept because it can be misleading,...

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But for a given volume/radius of black hole, you cannot add anything more without it becoming greater in volume/radius, so in that sense any size black hole is “full”. Sure, but that's just talking about the event horizon, which is a mathematical surface, it's not a physical object. Inside the EH, ...

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Also see Dyck words . In the theory of formal languages of computer science, mathematics, and linguistics, a Dyck word is a balanced string of square brackets [ and ]. The set of Dyck words forms Dyck language. Dyck words and language are named after the mathematician Walther von Dyck. They have app...

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Wikipedia says The Serbo-Croatian standard languages (Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian) have one of the more elaborate kinship(srodstvo) systems among European languages. [...] There are four main types of kinship in the family: biological aka blood kinship, kinship by law (in-laws), spir...

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For extra fun, make the chlorine trifluoride using 36 Cl, which is a beta emitter with a half-life of around 300,000 years, and a maximum decay energy around 709 keV. I guess you could just get some regular ClF 3 and put it inside a fission reactor to irradiate it with neutrons, but the reactor peop...

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Did someone say rhombic dodecahedron? I'm rather fond of those, as you might be able to tell from my avatar. :) The spoilered image shows the relationship between the cube, octahedron and rhombic dodecahedron (ray-traced using POV-ray). http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y43/PM2Ring/RhombicH3S.jpg As ...

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Could gravitational waves not be slowed by passing through masses interacting with them, much like light itself can be slowed moving through a medium? A "gravitation beach" would then be some kind of ginormous wall of mass, somehow? I don't think so, because matter is essentially transpar...

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Mathematicians used negative numbers for a long while, but they weren't considered to be proper numbers. They were just a bookkeeping trick that simplified calculation and algebra. But that's what numbers are . The lot of them! Jose Well, sure. But that's a fairly modern notion, and it took a lot o...

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Of course, another is the idea of negative numbers. Once you have negative numbers, complex numbers are a fairly small step... Oddly enough, the historical order was the opposite of that. Mathematicians used negative numbers for a long while, but they weren't considered to be proper numbers. They w...

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Not dumb. Saturn does have that photoshop look to it. I've seen lots of photos of Saturn, and saw it through a cheap telescope when I was a kid, but the first time I saw Saturn through a good scope I was blown away. Modern computer enhanced imaging techniques are great, and allow us to see high qual...

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When I was there in 2002-3, Australia had abandoned anything smaller than 5c - prices were still in any integer number of cents, but, at point of sale, if paying cash, the customer got to keep the odd cents (or the shop gave a few extra cents in change) to get to a multiple of 5c. I've heard someth...

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Soupspoon wrote:Everything was Created on Tuesday. Even this comic, and our memories of previously having read it…

Splitter. It was last Thursday.

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Surely an LED bulb has a lower effective temperature than a normal (incandescent) light bulb. They have about the same surface area, but an LED bulb emits less total EM radiation. LEDs only look "hot" because their spectrum is so different to that of a black body. It seems strange to me t...

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I associate "cactus plants" with the song A Fine Romance composed by Jerome Kern with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, published in 1936. The song came from the popular Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers movie Swing Time . A fine romance, my good woman My strong, aged-in-the-wood woman You never give th...

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Not to be confused with hyphae.

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FWIW, a previous discussion on solar roads is here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=123914

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I never encounter that "the reason being is" construction, and I really don't see why anyone would use it when they could just leave the "is" out and have something grammatically correct and shorter. E.g. "Unlike most people around here, Alice goes shopping every single day...

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But none of that is enabled by definitions. We don't really need a precise definition of any subgroup to act appropriately towards someone we know. Well, sure. But clear agreed-upon definitions are useful if you're trying to have a technical discussion. Or if you just want to articulate your positi...

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John Varley has several stories wherein bodies are adjustable. In one of the female protagonist first becomes male and then makes other changes. The collection is The Persistance of Vision, but I can’t remember the story title itself. The title of that particular story is Options . Several of Varle...

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"run through", as in "I'll run through the list", but also that thing with a sword.

Does "run by" fit the pattern?

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"pick down" is gibberish to me, but you could add "pick out" and "pick off". IIRC, English picked up this verb + preposition construction from the Vikings. Here's some support for that assertion Old English generally did not possess phrasal verbs as they are found in Pr...

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Ah yes, Jaffics Interchange Format. Giraffe-ics Interchange Format? Giraffics Interchange Format https://i.imgur.com/nCTjG87.gif Exactly. I've also heard of people pronounce JPEG as, "jay-peg," like Joint Potographic Experts Group. I thought it was Joyful Pornographic Entertainment Graphi...

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FWIW I'm looking for something like how a person with good attention is attentive, a person with good focus is focused, a person with good dedication is dedicated, a person with good memory is... memor... able? no... iful? that's not a word... what? How about memorious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

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I read an article that suggested that quantum entanglement could be explained without spooky action if causality breaks down at the quantum level - i.e. a particle sends a message back in time to its twin about how it should spin, etc. If true, IYHO would this qualify as a major revision of QM or j...

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The mean tropical year is measured at 365.24219 days, but is gradually getting smaller because the slowing of the earth's rotation is making the days longer. This means that in the long-run my system would be more accurate than either of those proposals. In discussions like this one the mean Gregor...

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aaronb1138 wrote:Need to find some way of getting the alt-text in the printout.

The mobile view at m.xkcd.com can display the alt text.

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