Post: #201

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Edward Louis James Bernays, pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda and Freud's nephew, promoted a bunch of ideas we now take for granted:

Bacon for breakfast: Bernays used his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas to help convince the public, among other things, that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.

Dixie Cups: In the 1930s, his Dixie Cup campaign was designed to convince consumers that only disposable cups were sanitary by linking the imagery of an overflowing cup with subliminal images of vaginas and venereal disease.

Fluoride in water: Bernays helped the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) and other special interest groups to convince the American public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health. (Fluoride is a by-product of something to do with aluminum manufacturing)

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Edit: Also, most mammals (larger than rats) take 21 seconds to pee.

Post: #202

Here's a truly random one.

The largest acquisition ever was the Vodafone group's acquisition of Mannesman : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_la...quisitions

The largest one that most Americans are familiar with (since it took place entirely inside the US) was the AOL-Time Warner deal.

Post: #203

Why Isn't the Sky Blue? (it's a really short RadioLab, one of the most fascinating)

Historically, after cultures/languages understand black and white, they develop the colors red, yellow, green, blue in that order. There's some variation, but red is always the first color, and blue is always the last color.

Despite humans' rods and cones being able to detect the entire color spectrum for millions of years, we only perceive colors because of perception, which depends on language.

The original Hebrew text of the bible does not have a color for blue. Homer's Odyssey has no reference to blue.

In fact, there's a tribe in Namibia that cannot differentiate the color blue. They simply don't have a term for it. If you show them images, all green with one blue mixed in, they have a difficult time detecting which image is different, despite it being obvious to everyone else in the world.

Post: #204

John Tyler, who was born in 1790 and from 1841-1845 served as the tenth U.S. president, has two grandsons who are alive today.

Post: #205

(08-12-2017 08:10 PM)Oswaldo Guimaraens Wrote:  John Tyler, who was born in 1790 and from 1841-1845 served as the tenth U.S. president, has two grandsons who are alive today.

If you're interested in more of those examples, I posted about the above and others a few pages back:

/thread-26172...#pid723524

Post: #206

Great thread. Should be revived and kept alive.

Post: #207

I had no idea that some of the fighting of the American Civil War occured on a world wide scale. This Confederate ship actually sailed as far as Australia and the Arctic Circle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_Shenandoah

Quote:CSS Shenandoah, formerly Sea King, was an iron-framed, teak-planked, full-rigged sailing ship with auxiliary steam power chiefly known for her adventures under Lieutenant Commander James Waddell as part of the Confederate States Navy during the American Civil War.[3]

The Shenandoah was originally a British merchant vessel launched as Sea King on August 17, 1863, but was later re-purposed as one of the most feared commerce raiders in the Confederate Navy. During a period of ​12 1⁄2 months from 1864 to 1865, the ship undertook commerce raiding around the world in an effort to disrupt the Union economy, resulting in the capture and sinking or bonding of thirty-eight merchant vessels, mostly New Bedford whaleships. She finally surrendered on the River Mersey, Liverpool, England, on November 6, 1865, six months after the war had ended. Her flag was the last sovereign Confederate flag to be officially furled. The Shenandoah is also known for having fired the last shot of the Civil War, across the bow of a whaler in waters off the Aleutian Islands.[4]

Post: #208

For posterity, I'll quote my post about Google's AlphaZero:

(12-27-2017 07:33 PM)Saccade Wrote:  This would be interesting to any RVF chess lovers, and is an important moment for computation in general. Check this out:

On December 5th, there was a series of 100 games between Stockfish 8 (the previous number 1 chess machine in the world) and Google child company's DeepMind product: Alpha Zero. AlphaZero, born from AlphaGo, a program that destroyed the world's top Go players, has made a big wave in the chess world.

Now, Stockfish 8 is unbeatable by any human; the best Grand Masters in the world can only hope for a draw with this beast. But, the result of those 100 games with Stockfish? AlphaZero didn't lose a single game. It's final score: 28 wins and 72 draws. Yeesh.

The poignant part of this:

Quote:Indeed, AlphaZero was calculating roughly 80 thousand positions per second, while Stockfish, running on a PC with 64 threads (likely a 32-core machine) was running at 70 million positions per second.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-future...arns-chess

The program is more human in its approach, slashing brute computational force in favor of analysis of patterns of what it determines as good moves. Basically, it ain't thinking about the shit ones.

What's more, it was given no opening databases, and no other help other than the moves of the game. It self-learned in 24 hours...

If you'd like to see some of its games, 10 have been released for your perusing. I recommend ChessNetwork's videos (who is the best youtube chess channel bar none, in my opinion).
Start here:

Do any of y'all have any experience at chess tournaments/local clubs? I do, and I've participated in various events and seen what the chess world has to offer. I'm a slightly above average player ELO around 1200-1300, so these are the people I'm paired up with.

I've never met a group of people as strange as in the chess world. It seems the further you get up the ranking ladder, guys tend to be more well adjusted and usually very smart. But the guys around my level? Hoo boi. I've seen some funny situations in only 2 years in lightly dabbling in the scene, but this is what I can tell you: At my level, chess seems to attract people along the autism spectrum. Not everyone, but it's loaded.

There was this one time when I was playing rapid time controls, we were playing for money ($50 at a club) in a group of four. This one opponent was, I kid you not, the slobbiest man I've ever seen in my life. About 18 years old, new balance old man shoes (usually untied), dad jeans that his ankles swam in, and matching glasses and frizzled hair -- Like some cheap, young Doc Brown. It was a goddamn parody. In his game, he brought this small lil' tray of fries, the kind you get at a high school lunch.

Picture this, dead silent, munching on those fries, glasses all the way down the nose. The kicker? He was sliming the time clock with his greasy ass fingers the whole time. I mean, fuck, I thought this was a nice establishment and here is this guy. Somehow, it seemed he covered his whole half of the clock with the grease, but you don't even need to touch half of what was covered with grease?? Haha, anyway he lost his game and complained to the game judges that noise distracted him, and that this was inexcusable. I'll let you picture his voice, it's exactly what you'd guess. They caved and gave him a month of membership to the club to make up, really to shut him up.

I also once this met this big guy, out of shape but a good dude. Early 30s I think. We played some games, shared some laughs, and the guy took me to Subway and bought me a sandwich. He told me, late at night at those plastic subway tables, "Saccade, you wanna hear the secret to getting laid at a wedding? You gotta get on the dancefloor and dance." I thought, this guy fucks? He was funny as hell but there was no way he was laying 8's on the d-floor ala Samseau. Thinking now, it's good advice, and maybe he did get laid. I really liked that guy.

Anyway, this is just a short anecdote of the chess world. I'd highly suggest going out some day and seeing what your local club has to offer. You never know what kind of fun you'll find.

Post: #209

CIA has its own venture capital firm called In-Q-Tel which heavily invests in Silicon Valley startups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

Post: #210

The Sweaty T-shirt Study (source references removed from quote)

Quote:Claus Wedekind is a Swiss biological researcher notable for his 1995 study that determined a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) dependent mate preference in humans.

This study is often known as the "sweaty T-shirt study". In it, men each wore the same T-shirt for two days. The shirts were then put into identical boxes. Various women were asked to smell the shirts, and to indicate to which shirts they were most sexually attracted. The results showed that women were most attracted to men with an MHC most dissimilar from their own.
...
It has been suggested that MHC plays a role in the selection of potential mates, via olfaction. MHC genes make molecules that enable the immune system to recognise invaders; generally, the more diverse the MHC genes of the parents, the stronger the immune system of the offspring. It would obviously be beneficial, therefore, to have a system of recognizing individuals with different MHC genes and preferentially selecting them to breed with. Yamazaki et al. (1976) showed this to be the case for male mice, who show such a preference for females of different MHC. Similar results have been obtained with fish.

In a 1995 experiment by Wedekind, a group of female college students smelled t-shirts that had been worn by male students for two nights, without deodorant, cologne or scented soaps. Overwhelmingly, the women preferred the odors of men with dissimilar MHCs to their own. However, their preference was reversed if they were taking oral contraceptives. The hypothesis is that MHCs affect mate choice and that oral contraceptives can interfere with this. A study in 2005 showed similar results.

This is a great example of the downside of birth control, and one you can talk about with chicks. It's not to say birth control is evil, but that it has huge downsides on a macro level.

Post: #211

Found this tidbit on the "Disgust" entry on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Wrote:In some cultures, such as Cambodia, Chinese in Southeast Asia, northern Manchu tribes along Amur River, Sambians in Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Telugus of India, Hawaii and other Pacific Islanders, briefly taking the penis of a male infant or toddler into one's mouth was considered a nonsexual form of affection or even a form of ritual, greeting, respect, parenting love, or lifesaving. It is especially a Chinese custom for grandmothers, mothers, and elder sisters to calm their babies with fellatio.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust

Post: #212

The halting problem; the limits of machines and logic. This video has huge implications outside of the computing world.

Post: #213

[Little Bill tells the real story of English Bob's gunfight]

Little Bill Daggett: First off, Corky never carried two guns. Though he should have.

W.W. Beauchamp: No, no, he was, he was called "Two-Gun Corcoran."

Little Bill Daggett: Yeah well, a lot of folks did call him "Two-Gun" but that wasn't because he was sporting two pistols. That was because he had a dick that was so big it was longer than the barrel of that Walker Colt that he carried. And the only "insultin' to a lady" he ever did was to stick that thing of his into this French lady that Bob here was kind of sweet on.

Post: #214

While most people have given up on finding many extinct animals, it's interesting to read about the lengths that Australians (and others) are going to find evidence of living Tasmanian tigers (thylacine).

The article is long and meanders in the middle discussing aboriginals, but here's the link for those that want to read the whole thing:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/...nian-tiger

Some choice quotes:

Quote:Like the dodo and the great auk, the tiger found a curious immortality as a global icon of extinction, more renowned for the tragedy of its death than for its life, about which little is known. In the words of the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan, it became “a lost object of awe, one more symbol of our feckless ignorance and stupidity.”

But then something unexpected happened. Long after the accepted date of extinction, Tasmanians kept reporting that they’d seen the animal. There were hundreds of officially recorded sightings, plus many more that remained unofficial, spanning decades. Tigers were said to dart across roads, hopping “like a dog with sore feet,” or to follow people walking in the bush, yipping. A hotel housekeeper named Deb Flowers told me that, as a child, in the nineteen-sixties, she spent a day by the Arm River watching a whole den of striped animals with her grandfather, learning only later, in school, that they were considered extinct. In 1982, an experienced park ranger, doing surveys near the northwest coast, reported seeing a tiger in the beam of his flashlight; he even had time to count the stripes (there were twelve). “10 A.M. in the morning in broad daylight in short grass,” a man remembered, describing how he and his brother startled a tiger in the nineteen-eighties while hunting rabbits. “We were just sitting there with our guns down and our mouths open.” Once, two separate carloads of people, eight witnesses in all, said that they’d got a close look at a tiger so reluctant to clear the road that they eventually had to drive around it. Another man recalled the time, in 1996, when his wife came home white-faced and wide-eyed. “I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have seen,” she said.

“Did you see a murder?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “I’ve seen a tiger.”

As reports accumulated, the state handed out a footprint-identification guide and gave wildlife officials boxes marked “Thylacine Response Kit” to keep in their work vehicles should they need to gather evidence, such as plaster casts of paw prints. Expeditions to find the rumored survivors were mounted—some by the government, some by private explorers, one by the World Wildlife Fund. They were hindered by the limits of technology, the sheer scale of the Tasmanian wilderness, and the fact that Tasmania’s other major carnivore, the devil, is nature’s near-perfect destroyer of evidence, known to quickly consume every bit of whatever carcasses it finds, down to the hair and the bones. Undeterred, searchers dragged slabs of ham down game trails and baited camera traps with roadkill or live chickens. They collected footprints, while debating what the footprint of a live tiger would look like, since the only examples they had were impressions made from the desiccated paws of museum specimens. They gathered scat and hair samples. They always came back without a definitive answer.

In 1983, Ted Turner commemorated a yacht race by offering a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for proof of the tiger’s existence. In 2005, a magazine offered 1.25 million Australian dollars. “Like many others living in a world where mystery is an increasingly rare thing,” the editor-in-chief said, “we wanted to believe.” The rewards went unclaimed, but the tiger’s fame grew. Nowadays, you can find the thylacine on beer cans and bottles of sparkling water; one northern town replaced its crosswalks with tiger stripes. Tasmania’s standard-issue license plate features an image of a thylacine peeking through grass, above the tagline “Explore the possibilities.”

Quote:Tiger enthusiasts are quick to bring up Lazarus species—animals that were considered lost but then found—which in Australia include the mountain pygmy possum (known from fossils dating from the Pleistocene and long thought to be extinct, it was found in a ski lodge in 1966); the Adelaide pygmy blue-tongue skink (rediscovered in a snake’s stomach in 1992); and the bridled nailtail wallaby, which was resurrected in 1973, after a fence-builder read about its extinction in a magazine article and told researchers that he knew where some lived. In 2013, a photographer captured seventeen seconds of footage of the night parrot, whose continued existence had been rumored but unproven for almost a century. Sean Dooley, the editor of the magazine BirdLife, called the rediscovery “the bird-watching equivalent of finding Elvis flipping burgers in an outback roadhouse.” The parrots have since been found from one side of the continent to the other. Is it more foolish to chase what may be a figment, or to assume that our planet has no secrets left?

Post: #215

When looking for a way to restore the wood on an SKS rifle, someone on a local shooting forum said I should use shellac tinted with iodine. Despite always having thought that 'shellac' was just a generic term for varnish/stain, I looked it up on wikipedia (it was a slow day). Lo and behold, mind blown:

Quote:Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug, on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes (pictured) and dissolved in alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and wood finish. Shellac functions as a tough natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odour-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish. Shellac was once used in electrical applications as it possesses good insulation qualities and it seals out moisture. Phonograph and 78 rpm gramophone records were made of it until they were replaced by vinyl long-playing records from the 1950s onwards.

Wikipedia: shellac

Post: #216

If you put bay leaves in boxes of dry food it keeps the mice away. Place some bay leaves on the bottom shelves of your pantry and it keeps the mice from working their way up.

It works.

Post: #217

(07-04-2018 09:55 PM)ed pluribus unum Wrote:  When looking for a way to restore the wood on an SKS rifle, someone on a local shooting forum said I should use shellac tinted with iodine. Despite always having thought that 'shellac' was just a generic term for varnish/stain, I looked it up on wikipedia (it was a slow day). Lo and behold, mind blown:

Quote:Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug, on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes (pictured) and dissolved in alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and wood finish. Shellac functions as a tough natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odour-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish. Shellac was once used in electrical applications as it possesses good insulation qualities and it seals out moisture. Phonograph and 78 rpm gramophone records were made of it until they were replaced by vinyl long-playing records from the 1950s onwards.

Wikipedia: shellac

Related> Oakum has nothing to do with oak, everything to do with waterproofing and giving prisoners something to do.

Quote:Oakum is a preparation of tarred fibre used to seal gaps.[1] Its main traditional applications were in shipbuilding, for caulking or packing the joints of timbers in wooden vessels and the deck planking of iron and steel ships;[1] in plumbing, for sealing joints in cast iron pipe; and in log cabins for chinking. In ship caulking, it was forced between the seams using a hammer and a caulking iron, then sealed into place with hot pitch.[2]

Oakum was at one time recycled from old tarry ropes and cordage,[1] which were painstakingly unravelled and taken apart into fibre. This task of picking and preparation was a common occupation in prisons and workhouses,[1] where the old and infirm were often put to work unpicking oakum when they could no longer perform heavier labour. Sailors undergoing naval punishment were also frequently sentenced to unpick oakum, with each man made to unpick 1 pound (450 g) of oakum a day. The work was tedious, slow and taxing on the worker's thumbs and fingers.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakum

Post: #218

Never-before-seen Cold War videos declassified

Quote:The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California has posted the videos to its YouTube channel, all of which are now declassified, and they show countless explosions that took place on testing grounds in the U.S., from 1945 to 1962.

The piece states that “Operation Plumbbob was most controversial” but does not elaborate, however there is a full Wikipedia entry on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob

It describes many of the tests that were part of Operation Plumbbob, all fascinating, but this is just incredible:

Quote:Propulsion of steel plate cap

During the Pascal-B nuclear test, a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) steel plate cap (a piece of armor plate) was blasted off the top of a test shaft at a speed of more than 66 km/s (41 mi/s; 240,000 km/h; 150,000 mph). Before the test, experimental designer Dr. Brownlee had estimated that the nuclear explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, would accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's escape velocity.[8] The plate was never found, but Dr. Brownlee believes[9] that the plate did not leave the atmosphere, as it may even have been vaporized by compression heating of the atmosphere due to its high speed. The calculated velocity was sufficiently interesting that the crew trained a high-speed camera on the plate, which unfortunately only appeared in one frame, but this nevertheless gave a very high lower bound for its speed. After the event, Dr. Robert R. Brownlee described the best estimate of the cover's speed from the photographic evidence as "going like a bat!"[8][10]

The escape velocity for an object to leave the solar system from the Earth is about 26 miles a second, if the manhole cover didn't disintegrate, it would have left the solar system.

Another test that was part of Operation Plumbbob:

Quote:The John shot on July 19, 1957 was the only test of the Air Force's AIR-2 Genie missile with a nuclear warhead.[3] It was fired from an F-89J Scorpion fighter over Yucca Flats at the NNSS. On the ground, the Air Force carried out a public relations event by having five Air Force officers and a photographer stand under ground zero of the blast, which took place at between 18,500 and 20,000 feet altitude, with the idea of demonstrating the possibility of the use of the weapon over civilian populations without ill effects.

Here is an NPR piece with video of the test:
Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

Post: #219

(01-15-2018 03:24 PM)Aurini Wrote:  The halting problem; the limits of machines and logic. This video has huge implications outside of the computing world.

What's really crazy about this is that you can use machine learning AIs to solve problems that algorithms can't halt on, but doing so necessarily adds fallibility (an AI always has some chance of getting the answer wrong, while a properly coded algorithm will always come to the correct solution). Actual thought seems to require the ability to come to the wrong conclusion.

Post: #220

I've a feeling this will be common knowledge to Americans (so just skip it if you know it), but I've just found this out today and thought I'd share it, as I can guarantee that most of the UK will be unaware;

The true meaning behind the lyrics in 'I don't like Mondays' by The Boomtown Rats.

Quote:According to Geldof, he wrote the song after reading a telex report[3] at Georgia State University's campus radio station, WRAS, on the shooting spree of 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children in a school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, US on 29 January 1979, killing two adults and injuring eight children and one police officer. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime and her full explanation for her actions was "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day".[4] Geldof had been contacted by Steve Jobs to play a gig for Apple, inspiring the opening line about a 'Silicon chip'.[5] The song was first performed less than a month later.

Explains why it did well in the UK but not in the US. The words take on a whole different meaning to me now.

Quote:I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with [Johnnie] Fingers and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said 'Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload'.[6] I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, 'Tell me why?' It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn't an attempt to exploit tragedy.[7]

Geldof is a vile individual but I always liked this song. Now I feel like he's capitalised on a terrible crime and even ignored the wishes of the family of the victims who reportedly didn't want it to be played.

In the UK, it's basically thought of as a jokey fun song that commuters can hum along to on the radio as they start yet another soul-crushing week of pointless drudgery.

I also can't believe I've got to my age without knowing this. I actually found out this morning while driving Mrs Richard Turpin to work. It came on the radio and she said how the song was ruined for her now that she knows it's about a school shooting. I nearly crashed the car and had to make her explain. Back at the office I duck-duck-go'd it and it blew my mind. She's now extremely smug that she 'knew something I didn't' and I'll be reminded of it for years to come I'm sure.

Full wiki entry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don't_Like_Mondays

Post: #221

There is one remaining Blockbuster video store, and it is in Bend, Oregon.

Post: #222

[Delete]

Post: #223

There was a British made Centurion Main Battle Tank that survived a nuclear (test) blast! Undamaged, it was scrubbed and went on to serve in the Vietnam War (where it withstood an RPG hit!)

https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/...lear-blast

Quote:Besides powering through the high mountains and subzero temperatures in North Korea and fighting through the dense, sweltering jungles of Vietnam, the biggest testament to the Centurion's toughness came in Australia in 1953. An Australian Army Centurion Mark 3 was left at ground zero of a 9.1 kiloton nuclear detonation -- engine running and loaded down with ammo, supplies, and a mannequin crew.

When test crews inspected the tank after the blast, they found the vehicle intact, if heavily sandblasted. The only reason the engine stopped was because the tank ran out of fuel. While the blast wave would have killed a real tank crew at that distance from the epicenter, the researchers realized they could have driven the tank off the test site.

Post: #224

^^^^

Oh fuck, in researching this Tank, this may not be quite as rosy a story as I hoped;

Quote:There's a potentially tragic postscript, unfortunately. It's all well and good that the tank survived so many remarkable encounters, but the men who crewed it were probably not so lucky. Certainly the crew out at Emu Field in 1953 had to have suffered some ill effects in the immediate aftermath of the test. In a 1990 article in the Geelong Advertiser, a veteran reports that 12 of the 16 soldiers who'd worked on the tank (mostly stripping it for parts) had died of cancer, and that he himself had cancer. It's difficult to trace individual cases of cancer to a specific cause, and the claims are unverifiable as far as how many of those veterans died and from what. This report also conflicts with the tank's history, which suggests it was decontaminated and tested at least twice and found fit for service.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-atomic-tank-...1542451635

Post: #225

Stuff newspaper in your shoes overnight to reduce odor and moisture. Works also under your car seat. The hard part now is finding a newspaper.