The "Really Interesting Stuff" Thread.

Started by: Devour | Replies: 23 | Views: 4,205

Devour
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Jul 12, 2012 6:22 PM #696283
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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.
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Jul 12, 2012 8:03 PM #696357
It's 90% the speed of light, bro. But yeah, I now look forward to Tuesdays with eager anticipation.

After a moment's thought I realised that, depressingly, I have nothing interesting to say. I just have to hope that commenting on other people's interesting stuff is a valid use of the thread.

Unless anyone is interested to know that driving is only 20% of a pizza delivery driver's job. He also has to take orders, make boxes, take pizzas out of the oven, and cut them up. Obviously most of those jobs are smaller than the driving one, but still it's something I didn't know before I took the job.
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Jul 12, 2012 8:19 PM #696363
I thought delivery boys just delivered the pizza, while the workers at the pizza place makes em, since ive seen job listings for just 'delivery driver'
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Jul 12, 2012 8:29 PM #696366
"Delivery driver" is what I applied for. "Delivery expert" is my job title. But we help out in the store whenever we're not actually delivering, and it turns out that's a fairly large proportion of the time.

I'm not complaining. Making boxes is fun (it's like origami!) and taking pizzas out of the oven and cutting them up is pretty easy.

In-store workers do a similar job but they don't do deliveries and they take the orders if at all possible. Drivers only do it if all the in-store people are tied up.
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Jul 12, 2012 8:53 PM #696373
oh okay, you work at a pizza place, i didn't get that from your post. but yeah, that makes sense that in your downtime you would be doing at least something

also, heres a child's skull before losing their baby teeth.
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Jul 13, 2012 2:34 PM #696821
Every single atom heavier than helium or hydrogen was created via stellar nucleosynthesis. The high pressure inside the core of a star fuses light elements together to form heavier ones.

This includes every single atom in your body. You're literally made of stars.
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Jul 13, 2012 7:04 PM #696956
The sound in many English dialects that's represented by the letter "r" has never been documented to occur in any other language in the world, at any time in history.
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Jul 13, 2012 7:37 PM #696972
Quote from Fusion
The sound in many English dialects that's represented by the letter "r" has never been documented to occur in any other language in the world, at any time in history.


You sure?

It's pretty common in Mandarin Chinese, AFAIK. Though it's still a LOT less common than I'd expect.
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Jul 13, 2012 9:15 PM #697000
Image

This is the inside of a camera lense.
Fusion
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Jul 13, 2012 10:04 PM #697028
Quote from Exilement
You sure?

It's pretty common in Mandarin Chinese, AFAIK. Though it's still a LOT less common than I'd expect.

Yes, I am sure. It's not a pure alveolar approximant in English, at least for most people, and it's not alveolar at all in Mandarin anyway.
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Jul 13, 2012 10:46 PM #697054
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Jul 13, 2012 11:13 PM #697069
thats awesome, thanks
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Jul 15, 2012 2:17 PM #698186
what the pen for wacom tablets look like on the inside http://home.earthlink.net/~archvillain/images/m275pen.jpg
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Jul 15, 2012 3:10 PM #698212
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARxfNM3vBrI

Gang banging will never be the same...
Fusion
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Jul 15, 2012 3:58 PM #698238
You can lose up to 75% of your liver and it will still grow back to full size.