Quote from Devour

The title is self explanatory. If you think you've got something, a fun fact, a story of something that really happened, or anything like it, post it here for us to read.

Here's one of mine. What if you threw a baseball at 80% the speed of light?

Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We'll suppose it's a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.


The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and a bunch of videotapes of nuclear tests and tried to sort it all out. What follows is my best guess at a nanosecond-by-nanosecond portrait:
The ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary. Even the molecules in the air are stationary. Air molecules vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball is moving through them at 600 million miles per hour. This means that as far as the ball is concerned, they’re just hanging there, frozen.
The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.


These gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. They start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. The wall of this bubble approaches the batter at about the speed of light—only slightly ahead of the ball itself.



The constant fusion at the front of the ball pushes back on it, slowing it down, as if the ball were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines. Unfortunately, the ball is going so fast that even the tremendous force from this ongoing thermonuclear explosion barely slows it down at all. It does, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny particulate fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments are going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.
After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. The batter hasn't even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does. Collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it goes. The shell of x-rays hits the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud hits.
When it reaches the batter, the center of the cloud is still moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It hits the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher are all scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrate. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma expands outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood—all in the first microsecond.
Suppose you’re watching from a hilltop outside the city. The first thing you see is a blinding light, far outshining the sun. This gradually fades over the course of a few seconds, and a growing fireball rises into a mushroom cloud. Then, with a great roar, the blast wave arrives, tearing up trees and shredding houses.
Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.

A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.

Baeball is dangerous.

Now imagine something bigger than a baseball, like a 30 foot boulder, going almost the speed of light. It would be crazy.

Holy shit.

Well, the more you know. The next time some faggot gets uppity about us involvement in Iraq, show them this.

..why would they give multiple countries the same color? What is that graph even about?

I think its in regards to the Iraqi war and the amount of troops per country that are involved. I thought the graph didn't make any sense either till i took a look at the color graph on the right again. It seems not only are they corresponding colors but also in order as the largest amounts to least amounts as shown a long with the graph to the left.

At first I was trying to line up each color and it didn't make sense to me either because many countries were gray / blue like the US and PMC.

Is that factoring in troop quality, or is it just raw numbers? Because if it's the latter, I got news for you from North Korea.


Edit@Stone: I think it must refer to the total military of each country, because there are no South Koreans in Iraq.


Edit2: And again if it's only counting troop numbers, it fails to take account of reserve forces which would push South Korea way above the UK, and God knows where it would fling Switzerland and Israel to.


Edit3: Just found out South Korea did actually send troops to Iraq, but only for a few months in 2003 so they still shouldn't be on that 2006 graph.

i reverse image searched it, its the percentage of troops stationed there in 2006 by country, its a shitty one though. like is that finland or US that is that big blue? probably finland..

Quote from stone

http://mrdoob.com/126/Or_so_they_say

If only this was 3d.....