Picture clearly isn't real. There are neither lego nor playmobil characters in it.
Geo-boffins drill into dino-killing asteroid crater, discover extinction involves bad smells, chilly weather, no broadband internet...
Geologists believe they have found rocks that filled the impact crater of the gigantic asteroid that pummeled Earth and killed off the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. These rocks may have clues to the conditions on our planet shortly after the cosmic prang. The catastrophic crash was about as powerful as setting off at …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 14:31 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
Bambiraptor. And Stenonychosaurus is another that could probably pick up toys.
And can't you pick up Lego between your toes?
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 07:22 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Hooray for science!
So in order to reverse climate change, all we need to do is build a few thousand Tsar Bombas and set them off somewhere remote. Australia maybe? We've got to make sure we do a good enough job on the wildlife that there's no danger of any radioactively enhanced super-mutants though. I for one do not fancy coming across a 20m tall drop bear with a bad attitude. And the less said about Spider Kong, the better.
Come to think about it, the mutant soapstar / popstar cross-overs don't sound too appealing otherwise. Maybe make it 20,000, just to be safe.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 08:51 GMT imanidiot
Re: Hooray for science!
Oh and minor nitpick, to get the same energy as the Chicxulub impact you need a bit more than a few thousand Tsar bombs. Copied from Wikipedia:
The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 11–81 kilometres (6.8–50.3 mi), and delivered an estimated energy of 21–921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs 1.3*10^24 and 5.8*10^25 joules, or 1.3–58 yottajoules). For comparison, this is ~100 million times the energy released by the Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear device ("H-bomb") that remains the most powerful man-made explosive ever detonated, which released 210 petajoules (2.1*10^17 joules, or 50 megatons TNT).
My own calculation based on the numbers in the article would come at just over 3 million Tsar bombs, so I don't think the number of little johns in the article is entirely accurate.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 09:10 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Hooray for science!
My own calculation based on the numbers in the article would come at just over 3 million Tsar bombs, so I don't think the number of little johns in the article is entirely accurate.
I also wonder how much of the problem was stuff being ejected into the atmosphere vs how much atmosphere got ejected. So massive blastwave reaching out & up compressing the atmosphere, and given the scale, what would happen if that reached space. Either way, rather extreme turbulent mixing.
And speaking of extremes, fear the 8-legged, giant, cassowarydropcroc.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 09:11 GMT Peter Clarke 1
Re: Hooray for science!
What you require is a Footfall weapon of the right size. Just zip out to the asteroid belt, find one the right size and nudge it in the direction of Earth. Mass and velocity will provide the energy. Precise aiming could be a problem. Unfortunately we have no SG1 team to provide a Failsafe rescue
You didn't think asteroid exploration was for raw materials did you??
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 14:36 GMT R3sistance
Re: Hooray for science!
people literally died from the heatwaves this year in the UK... great time for wearing a winter coat for sure. We have had two extremely hot summers in a row, it is becoming far more common place now with 2018 competing for hottest summer on record and 2019 having the hottest July day on record for the UK. This is what some people would call a worrying trend.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 07:25 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
I demand an immediate retraction...
"A small mammalian ancestor or two survived the big chill and went on to evolve into us."
I think this is incorrect. Mummy and daddy and that funny over-friendly man from the church who liked me to stay behind after choir practice always told me that we were created from dust and clay by an omnipotent and benevolent higher power. The only possible alternative to this is that we are the descendants of lizard men that came from space just before the tea-time of when those rowdy South American Norte Chicos were getting themselves organised. I think you'll find that both of these are totally legit explanations that would almost stand up to more scrutiny than your ludicrous theory of us all being the descendents of bloody hedgehogs!!!
Tut!
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Friday 13th December 2019 19:17 GMT CPU
Re: I demand an immediate retraction...
Fool! The flat-earth society know full well that when the asteroid hit, the world spun like a spinning coin and all the dinosaurs were flung out into space because they had little arms and couldn't hang on. Our ancestors on the other hand had opposable thumbs so we hung onto the trees until the world stopped spinning. Pah, religion knows nothing but mumbo-jumbo for simple minds!
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 14:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Fahrenheit?
But do they actually work in F ?
(Answering my own question, there was a mythbusters that used a NASA piece of kit that was marked ni miles/hour .....)
Sadly, some do.
I think I remember reading one Mars mission failed to make orbit because the designers fumbled the conversion of imperial to metric. The fools had designed a space craft using slugs, ft/sec and whatever instead of the proper metric unites that they were required to use in the documentation they gave to NASA.
So when NASA used that documentation to make course corrections things didn't quite work out.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 18:02 GMT Dropper
Re: Fahrenheit?
Never really understood why anyone cared about what set of units a person uses. They're just numbers. As long as the person using them is consistent, it doesn't matter which are used.
As a child of the 80s I was brought up using both imperial and metric numbers and like most of my generation I just automatically convert one to the other.
I suppose the other part of that is base 10 is a poor fit for a world dominated by technology, which prefers base 2 or 16.
There's a fair argument to be had that base 10 is the mathematic language of simpletons who can't count beyond the number of fingers and toes they usually have. Of course imperial is even worse.. because it uses random quantities as it leaps from one measurement to the next.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 09:49 GMT Spherical Cow
Re: Fahrenheit?
I was also brought up using both and I am equally familiar with both.
But are you really saying you can't see the inherent awkwardness of imperial compared to the clean logic of metric? Seriously??? You talk about bases but really the most important thing is that it's the same base used for everything (like metric has). OTOH imperial uses different multiples for different things including 3, 8, 12, 16, 22, and that's just off the top of my head I'm sure there are others! Imperial is CATS saying "All your base are belong to us". It's just bonkers.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 20:26 GMT Simon Reed
Re: Fahrenheit?
I am too young to understand Imperial measurements.
As a child of the 1970s, I was brought up solely using metric and the SI. I have never used the Imperial system with the exception of milk, ale and, for a while, petrol.
I don't actually know what Fahrenheit temperatures mean. I know 40 is cold and 140 is hot, but that's about it.
The sooner the Imperial system dinosaurs and the 'metric martyr' wankers die off, the sooner it will suit me.
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Thursday 12th September 2019 00:49 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
So the sooner we all die, the sooner you won't have to worry your pretty little head over something you don't understand? That's a hell of a way to get through life ... "MAKE IT GO AWAY! I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT, IT FRIGHTENS ME!!!"
I think I'll live forever, just to spite the likes of you, Simon.
(Does the hacker spirit still exist anywhere the metric infection has set in?)
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Friday 13th September 2019 03:12 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Fahrenheit?
I don't actually know what Fahrenheit temperatures mean
It's very simple. 32 is the freezing point of water at sea level, and 96 is a dog's1 rectal temperature.
So when it's 30 degrees out, you say "damn, it's freezing out here!". And when it's 97, you say "christ, it's hotter than a dog's bum!".
(Why 32 and 96? Subtract the latter from the former, and consider graduating a scale by successive halving. Yes, the point of Fahrenheit is that it's binary. But for technical purposes SI makes more sense, of course, thanks to ease of converting units.)
1Specifically, Fahrenheit's dog.
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Thursday 12th December 2019 13:27 GMT Spanners
Re: Fahrenheit?
I am too young to understand Imperial measurements.
At less than a month short of 60, so am I. I can do the sums to work out what someone from the USA actually means then they say that the temperature outside is "over 100 degrees" - subtract 32 and divide by 1.8 to get about 37.78 actual degrees. I can multiply miles by 1.6 to get a rough conversion to distance and if someone wants to talk about flooding you get litres if you multiply their unit (Acre Foot) by 14.8 million!
There is a difference between being good at sums and actually "understanding" units that are pretty unchanged since the time of Shakespere.
Anyway, about degrees. "Who else remembers being taught that "one Rad subtends 1 metre at a distance of 1 kilometre". How many of those to a degree?
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 08:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Fahrenheit?
I've noticed a creeping return of non-metric units in UK TV too. From scientists who should know better.
I don't mind miles so much - since our roads are (and will always be) marked in miles. But some of the other units ... inches, pints, pounds. No thank you.
I am 53, and know for a fact that no one younger than me would have used imperial as part of their UK education, and anyone who does is doing it as an affectation. Like that twat Jacob Rees Mogg.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 09:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Pints
For all the frothing by our Brexity brothers, the pint and mile are safe forever in the UK (as indeed are all non-metric measures. But I didn't want to lower the tone with facts).
What is more annoying is the UK could have been metric in 1895, if a couple more MPs had been in Westminster. There was no (ludicrous) emotional attachment to imperial, and some very good reasons to switch to metric.
Ah, what might have been ....
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 08:34 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
Who the hell cares. as long as you're being consistent? If I can brew an acceptable pint of beer (or bake a loaf of bread) according to your instructions, does it really matter what the units are in?
I think the affectation is whining about people who don't do it the way you do (and yet somehow they manage to survive quite nicely).
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 09:48 GMT jmch
Re: Fahrenheit?
"Metric system is based in absolute science"
erm... not really. how do you think the original metre was defined. NOW it's defined based on the distance that light can travel in a given time, but we defined that 'given time' based on a physical object, and that physical object was defined by a bunch of toffs in Ancient France*
What is more accurate to say is that the metric system is based on decimal units and so it makes conversions and working at different scales considerably easier since it matches our commonly used decimal number system. But it could work equally well in a base-12 number system, for example 12 inches to a foot, 1728 inches to a kilo-inch etc. (with kilo, mega etc defining powers of 12 instead of powers of 10).
The metric system is superior to imperial because of that internal consistency, but the basic units are equally as arbitrary.
*not exactly, but close enough
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 12:34 GMT Pen-y-gors
256 p in the pound?
Not sure about that, but in the dim and distant I worked for a large Life Assurance company which still had many policies in force that went back decades before decimalisation. Obviously impossible to accurately convert 2s. 11½d. to decimal, so every financial amount was converted into farthings (960 to the pound) and stored as an integer. Only finally converted to decimal currency when it became necessary to make a payout.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 11:33 GMT FrogsAndChips
Re: "Metric system is based in absolute science"
how do you think the original metre was defined
It was defined as 1/40,000,000th of the Earth circumference, which was as close to absolute science as they could do at the time. OK they didn't get perfectly right, but the precision was quite remarkable given the technologies they used. Anyway, what they produced was a standard length which wouldn't vary, contrary to feet and ounces which differed from one region to the other (one unit to rule them all).
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 12:53 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: "Metric system is based in absolute science"
feet and ounces which differed from one region to the other
The dominant distance measure in the ancient world (the cubit - for short distances) was defined as "the length of the ruling king's[1] forearm from the elbow to the fingertips".
Which eventually ended in a rough standard no longer based on the current king but just the kings measurements when they kinda-standardised.
[1] King/pharoah/emperor. Delete as applicable.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 10:23 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Fahrenheit?
"Metric system is based in absolute science, whilst imperial is based upon the size of some dead guy's foot."
<Cough>
Metric is based on most people having 10 fingers or, if you prefer, 10 toes. Not very different to a foot, really.
Imperial, at least as pounds and ounces are concerned, is binary.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 10:43 GMT Mike 137
Re: Fahrenheit?
Actually, decimal is based on most people having 10 fingers. Metric is a decimal system but that's not what makes it metric. Although the definitions of the standards have been "refined" progressively in terms of objective physical constants, the fundamental basis unit - the metre - started out (in 1793) as a ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole. This standard was adopted from 1801, but in 1858 the distance was found to be incorrect (and thus the metre not based on absolute science). The adopted definition was nevertheless left unchanged. The metre is to the present thus an arbitrary standard. As most of the other metric units are derived from it, they are essentially arbitrary too (just like the king's foot).
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 09:37 GMT Umbracorn
Re: Fahrenheit?
If your recipe calls for a drachm of soda, a gill of milk, and two dozen ounces of flour, I'll say "you've got to be firkin kidding me" and give up. But if it lists the equivalent in grams, I can meet you halfway.
Maybe not so important in this age of the Babelfish, but translations help your message reach a wider audience.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 11:17 GMT jmch
Re: Fahrenheit?
"If your recipe calls for... "
One of my personal recipe bugbears is actually not just using unintelligible (to me) weights such as pounds and ounces, but the use of weight at all, even grams. I have kitchen scales, which have to be set up, set to the correct system (metric v imperial), and recalibrated if you use a different-weight empty container.
Volume is simply much easier than weight. i don't care if 'cups' isn't in a recognised system, it's much easier to work with volume for both fluids and powders, what's important is the ratio, and the volumes can be simply adjusted by using bigger / smaller cups instead of having to recalculate weights on the fly.
I do draw the line though, at the recipe that demanded 'a cup of butter'
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 11:42 GMT Kubla Cant
Re: Fahrenheit?
Measuring cooking ingredients by volume raises the question of packing density. How do Americans measure potatoes? Obviously not by the cup. Do they use some weird unit of volume like a bushel?
For small volumes of liquid it's more accurate to weigh, unless you have a narrow measuring jug. It's also easier to measure additively by weight. Most modern scales can be zeroed for each new ingredient.
I can't help suspecting that people who were educated before metrication may be more adept at mental arithmetic in consequence of having to perform calculations in a variety of imperial units.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 07:10 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
"Maybe a burette should be standard kitchen equipment."
I have a couple in my kitchen, but then I do a lot of R&D for commercial production. For the most part, that kind of accuracy isn't necessary. Even baking can usually be 10% off (in either direction) without screwing up the recipe to the point of being inedible.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 07:07 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
"How do Americans measure potatoes?"
In bulk, it's pounds. Last time I bought bulk spuds in England, they were in a large bag that ever so logically was labeled "hundredweight", which equally logically is 112 pounds (or 8 stone, of course, which everybody knows).
"I can't help suspecting that people who were educated before metrication may be more adept at mental arithmetic in consequence of having to perform calculations in a variety of imperial units."
Direct observation suggests you are correct.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 18:02 GMT jake
Re: And wtf is a 'stick' of butter?
Never heard that one, but given that the Pennsylvania Dutch
wereare often dairymen, it would make some sense. I always heard that it was because of the long, narrow shape if the Eastern-pack ("Elgin") quarter pound. (Sorry, my OED is out of reach at the moment.)What happens if you ask your waitress to pat your knob in Blighty?
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 07:23 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
"And wtf is a 'stick' of butter?"
Back in the day, the PTB decided that butter for sale should be of a standard weight. This was to keep rogue butter dealers from stealing from the poor ("poor" here meaning "couldn't afford a cow to make their own butter"). They decided butter should come in bricks of one pound (16 American ounces) in weight. To make life easy, each brick was cut (and wrapped) into four equal portions of 4oz each, which also equal 1/2 a cup. These half cup portions soon became known as "sticks" of butter. To further make life a trifle easier, the wrapping for each stick is labeled with markings for 1/3cup, 1/4 cup and individual tablespoons. No need to measure, you cut on the line and use it.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 01:26 GMT ThatOne
Re: Fahrenheit?
> 'cups' isn't in a recognised system
What kind of cups are we talking about? Mocha cups, tea cups, mugs, C-size cups, DD-size cups?
The point of a unit is to standardize things so people get the exact same result. A "cup" is as vague as recipient as a "pot" (which can go from doll house tiny to witches' cauldron huge).
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 07:27 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
"What kind of cups are we talking about?"
That would obviously be standardized measuring cups for the use in food preperation. Are you kitchen challenged? Or simply hard of thinking? I know that England has a standardized measuring cup, because I've used them. Even John Lewis sells 'em!
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Thursday 12th September 2019 12:11 GMT ThatOne
Re: Fahrenheit?
> Are you kitchen challenged? Or simply hard of thinking?
No need to get insulting, Jake. We simply don't have those "standardized measuring cups" you seem familiar with around where I live. We use graded measuring recipients (usually .5 liter sized), in plastic or glass, with graduations for various volumes of common ingredients (like liquids, rice, sugar, etc.).
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Friday 13th September 2019 03:12 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Fahrenheit?
We simply don't have those "standardized measuring cups" you seem familiar with around where I live.
So they don't exist?
Look, I understand disliking weird Imperial or other non-SI measures, whether they're for recipes or other purposes. But jake is entirely correct that for quite a long time,1 there has been a "cup" as a standard measure for cooking, widely used in recipes published in English; and indeed this is still in use the US, which is a voluminous publisher of such. So it's either disingenuous or simply ignorant to claim otherwise.
Historically and regionally, there is a well-established "cup" measure for cookery. That's a well-established fact. No one with any significant knowledge of recipes published in English will have failed to come across either old or regional recipes which refer to it, and it would be foolish for anyone interested in the subject to not at least recognize it. Confusing it with the other sorts of "cup" posted earlier is facile.
1A quick Google Books search confirms at least 150 years. I can't be bothered to check other corpora for older sources, or dig out the OED.
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Thursday 12th December 2019 13:44 GMT Spanners
Re: Fahrenheit?
I know that England has a standardized measuring cup, because I've used them.
I have scales and I have a glass measuring jug. The scales are set to grammes. I think the jug has pints on one side but I use the other one that shows ML and parts of a litre.
If there are measuring cups in the house, SWMBO hides them from me.
If I come across a US recipe I want to try, I either use mental arithmetic to convert to metric or I ask Google to tell me. I'm too young to fully understand most imperial measures. I won't be 60 for another 3 weeks!
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 07:01 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
"and recalibrated if you use a different-weight empty container."
That's called the "tare weight" and is usually set with a simple button press.
"i don't care if 'cups' isn't in a recognised system"
But it is. Or rather they are. Most countries have a standard measuring cup of one description or another. Even good old Blighty has one, which holds 10 Imperial ounces. Made a bit of a mess of my bread recipe when I first got to Yorkshire ... my own damn fault, of course. Once I educated myself, and converted my recipe (as any half-way decent hacker would) all was well with the world again.
A cup of butter here in the US is half a pound, or two sticks. No need to measure.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 13:11 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Fahrenheit?
If your recipe calls for a drachm of soda, a gill of milk, and two dozen ounces of flour, I'll say "you've got to be firkin kidding me" and give up. But if it lists the equivalent in grams, I can meet you halfway.
Architects are worse than chefs. So the Old Testament devotes a fair chunk of text for how to build the Temple. But due to the.. slight delay, nobody seems entirely sure how to convert those units to modern ones.
TV science gets it worse. Netflix's 'Another Life' had a scientist slowing pigeon song down to '1 hertz a second' amongst it's many sins. Like doing a sling shot around a star & switching to manual so hero can outfly AI.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 19:29 GMT Mephistro
Re: Fahrenheit?
Cheesus! Two days ago I watched the episode where an alien boron-based virus infected the crew. The script writers obviously had no fecking idea of what viruses are and how they work.
After watching the way they got rid of the virus, I had fantasies of of creating a Kickstarter project to hire mercenaries with orders to kidnap said scriptwriters and throw them from a plane into a live volcano.
;^)
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 06:50 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
"If your recipe calls for a drachm of soda, a gill of milk, and two dozen ounces of flour"
My recipe won't ... but I would have no difficulty following such an odd-ball recipe. Why would you give up on it? Too difficult for you? It's just measurements, after all, and no one measurement is easier or harder than any other similar measurement from a different system.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 17:14 GMT Stork
Re: Fahrenheit?
Sure, how much is a cup of not-yet-melted butter?
I found a claim that it is 1/2 a pound which sounds about right, 227g gives a density a bit below 1 for 240ml. Good enough for brownies.
I looked up Wikipedia for the entertainment, I learned that the US has both legal and customary cups (are the latter than illegal?) Then there are metric and imperial cups, as well as Russian and Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_%28unit%29
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 07:44 GMT jake
Re: Fahrenheit?
"Sure, how much is a cup of not-yet-melted butter?"
8oz, same as a melted 1/2 cup.
"I learned that the US has both legal and customary cups"
England has both legal and customary measurements, too. For example, a legal pint is 34.7 cubic inches, while a customary pint is 34.677 cubic inches.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 22:05 GMT Jonathan Richards 1
Re: Fahrenheit?
> tables on the back of the "red exercise book"
If I hunt really quite hard among the debris of decades, I am almost certain that I can find a Ready Reckoner, which, I will explain for the uninitiated, is a printed volume which simply lists the multiples of values. This is invaluable if you wish to know the price of one and a half gross of pen nibs at a penny-three-farthings each with a delivery charge of thruppence to be added. No billing in guineas, mind.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 08:37 GMT H in The Hague
Re: Fahrenheit?
"I am 53, and know for a fact that no one younger than me would have used imperial as part of their UK education, and anyone who does is doing it as an affectation. Like that twat Jacob Rees Mogg."
According to https://ukma.org.uk/what-is-metric/uk-progress/uk-metric-timeline/
"1974 Maths teaching in metric in primary schools is now the norm – science has been taught in metric since the turn of the century."
That's around the time JRM went to school.
Like you, I was also educated in metric and much prefer it. I'm fairly bilingual in metric and imperial for linear measures but for areas and volumes I normally try to stick to metric only. Unfortunately I've got an American client who is in the habit of mixing fractional inches, decimal inches and millimetres :( on a single page of a document.
Incidentally there seem to be quite a few conspiracy theories around the introduction of metrication in the UK. Quite amusing .... or depressing?
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 08:27 GMT jake
I'm pretty sure ...
... this is old news. Seems to me that the drilling happened back in 2016 or thereabouts. I remember boffins at the USGS talking about finding shocked pink granite, an extreme lack of gypsum, suevite, and a very thick (hundreds of feet) bed of layered sand ... Seems to me there was a TV program about it, too.
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 14:11 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: I'm pretty sure ...
Especially as they'd ordered the kitchen work surface to be grey marble..
When they delivered it - they basically dropped it by the door, hit the bell and ran for their van.
All the disappointed dinosaur heard was one saying to the other, "d'you think 'e saw us?"
I'm sorry - I couldn't resist. I'm already getting it...
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Tuesday 10th September 2019 18:37 GMT Conundrum1885
Kaboom!
On the flip side, had the non-avian saurians not been wiped out we would not exist.
Picture the impact being a glancing one so still bad but more like a Mini KT not full extinction level event.
The good news is by just over 6.8MYa the descendants of one of the many bipedal species probably the Hadrosaur, or Troodon would have reached a late Stone Age existence, figuring out that growing their own crops was a much more reliable food source.
By maybe 5.2MYa they would have reached the early Space Age.
FTL Spin Drive (tm) breakthrough maybe by 4.7MYa assuming they figure out how to avoid blowing themselves sky high in the process.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 03:26 GMT DiViDeD
Enquiring minds need to know
Out of interest, in the elReg lexicon, where does the dividing line fall between boffin and egghead?
Is a boffin better at practical skills? Does an egghead employ more undergraduates to do the heavy lifting for him (or her)
Yes, this is the sort of thing that goes on in my head when reading elReg.
Welcome to my world
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 11:29 GMT STOP_FORTH
Re: Enquiring minds need to know
In my mind, boffins are corduroy-jacketed, leather-elbow-patched, pipe-smoking, absent-minded coves. Eggheads are lab-coated chaps. Former would be interested in physics, astronomy and maths, latter would be chemists.
I have no idea why this is, or why they are all male. Marie Curie was clearly head and shoulders above both categories.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 20:43 GMT Simon Reed
Re: Enquiring minds need to know
She's my science hero. Whenever I see her name I feel obliged to give a minute's silence.
My most recent discovery about her was what she did in the Great War, driving round trying to get the field hospitals to use this fancy gadget she had in a van that showed where the embedded shrapnel was in wounded soldiers. And, while at it, installing a telephone network in one field hospital.
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Wednesday 11th September 2019 17:43 GMT jake
Re: Correct me if I'm wrong here....
The asteroid hit roughly on the modern-day coastline of the Yucatán Peninsula, see a magnetic anomaly map for a good visual. The peninsula extends in a shelf extending far out into the Gulf of Mexico ... Eyeball a shaded relief map of the area to see what I mean.
The dinosaurs never died out fully, modern birds are their direct descendants. However, the bulk of them probably died within days or weeks of the asteroid strike. I have never heard the half a million years theory. Cite?
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Monday 16th September 2019 15:37 GMT MarcoP1
Mamalian ancestor or two survived
They appear to be guesses about the species surviving & evolving. Surviving can still be understood. It doesn't really makes sense. This is because the question of why has the evolution stopped? We still see other species who look like have evolved from Dinosaurs but we don't. There's more to it because we are also coming across huge skeletons of humans it's important to check their carbon dating too since it shed a light on when they lived. There may be species that looked like a evolving but it may be due to the habitat they were living in. For example; their level of tolerance to certain environmental conditions and their ability to protect themselves form the predators.