I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2

Ipso · 07-04-2020 3:43pm

So he was French.

07-04-2020 3:47pm

Ipso wrote: »

So he was French.

His parents were Irish, can be viewed either way.

New Home · 07-04-2020 3:49pm

He may have been French, but he'd have been allowed to apply for an Irish passport.

Ipso · 07-04-2020 7:13pm

I know, I just find it funny that there’s a recent thread complaining about people not being born in Ireland calling themselves Irish.

Capt'n Midnight · 10-04-2020 11:30am

Professor Moriarty · 10-04-2020 11:53am

If the Saxons were bad... Here is Gerald of Wales, having travelled in Ireland in the 12th century, describing the Irish he encountered:

The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts – a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life. In the common course of things, mankind progresses from the forest to the field, from the field to the town and to the social conditions of citizens; but this nation, holding agricultural labour in contempt, and little coveting the wealth of towns, as well as being exceedingly averse to civil institutions – lead the same life their fathers did in the woods and open pastures, neither willing to abandon their old habits or learn anything new.

This people then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner, just like the modern fashion recently introduced; indeed, all their habits are barbarisms. But habits are formed by mutual intercourse; and as these people inhabit a country so remote from the rest of the world and lying at its furthest extremity, forming is it were, another world, and are thus excluded from civilised nations, they learn nothing and practice nothing, but the barbarism in which they are born and bred and which sticks to them like a second nature. Whatever natural gifts they possess are excellent, in whatever requires industry they are worthless"

LostinBlanch · 10-04-2020 2:02pm

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

If the Saxons were bad... Here is Gerald of Wales, having travelled in Ireland in the 12th century, describing the Irish he encountered:

The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts – a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life. In the common course of things, mankind progresses from the forest to the field, from the field to the town and to the social conditions of citizens; but this nation, holding agricultural labour in contempt, and little coveting the wealth of towns, as well as being exceedingly averse to civil institutions – lead the same life their fathers did in the woods and open pastures, neither willing to abandon their old habits or learn anything new.

This people then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously in an uncouth manner, just like the modern fashion recently introduced; indeed, all their habits are barbarisms. But habits are formed by mutual intercourse; and as these people inhabit a country so remote from the rest of the world and lying at its furthest extremity, forming is it were, another world, and are thus excluded from civilised nations, they learn nothing and practice nothing, but the barbarism in which they are born and bred and which sticks to them like a second nature. Whatever natural gifts they possess are excellent, in whatever requires industry they are worthless"

Ah yes Giraldus Cambrensis, the royal clerk and chaplain to King Henry II, who wrote his totally unbiased account above. Of course a different view might be that he wrote such things to justify the Norman invasion of Ireland and to curry favour with the King and the Holy See. Less than 30 years before, the only English Pope Adrian IV wrote the papal bull Laudabiliter which was used to justify the invasion of Ireland and bring the Irish church under the control of Rome. So no conflict of interest there then. :rolleyes:

johndaman66 · 10-04-2020 2:46pm

You could probably substitute 21st century for 12th century in that passage and for the very most part it would hold relevant

Professor Moriarty · 10-04-2020 3:01pm

johndaman66 wrote: »

You could probably substitute 21st century for 12th century in that passage and for the very most part it would hold relevant

Actually, much English stereotyping of the Irish right through to the 18th century was based on Gerald's descriptions.

Ipso · 10-04-2020 3:21pm

One reason the vikings were seen as barbarians was that they were pagans. The Anglo Saxons didn’t exactly woo the native Britons with gentle sonnets to get into power.
I read The Last Armada by Des Ekin recently. After the Spanish landed at Kinsale the O’Neills spent several weeks plundering their neighbours and then decided to march down. The O’Donnells marched earlier plundered their way down, so on their retreat back they ended up getting attacked by their prior victims.
Of course the English were fond of kicking the shyte of each other, they just had nicer titles.

‘When the devil took our saviour Jesus Christ to the pinnacle of the temple and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, he kept Ireland hidden … to keep it for himself. For I believe that it is the inferno itself, or some worse place.’

– Don Juan del Águila, Spanish Commander at kinsale

LostinBlanch · 10-04-2020 6:39pm

Ipso wrote: »

‘When the devil took our saviour Jesus Christ to the pinnacle of the temple and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, he kept Ireland hidden … to keep it for himself. For I believe that it is the inferno itself, or some worse place.’

– Don Juan del Águila, Spanish Commander at kinsale

Obviously not one of the Cork Del Águilas so.

Ipso · 10-04-2020 7:32pm

LostinBlanch wrote: »

Obviously not one of the Cork Del Águilas so.

One of descendants was at Beal na Blath.

branie2 · 10-04-2020 8:52pm

Ipso wrote: »

One of descendants was at Beal na Blath.

Free State or IRA side?

17-04-2020 3:53pm

The numbat, a sort of marsupial anteater (though it prefers termites) from Australia has more teeth than any other land mammal (52)

Buford T. Justice XIX · 17-04-2020 7:25pm

During the first half of the twentieth century, the Russians grew subtropical plants in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius -- outdoors, and without the use of glass or any fossil fuel-powered assistance.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cultivating-subtropical-plants-in-freezing-temperatures.html

Their solutions to the micro climate they were working in were very interesting, thinking outside the box solutions.

Their twitter account is worth a follow if you're interested in low tech solutions.

LostinBlanch · 18-04-2020 3:49pm

An Irishman James Martin from Co Down invented the ejection seat. To date it has saved over 7500 lives.

But it wasn't invented for the likes of this fella. :eek:

secondrowgal · 20-04-2020 12:21pm

Did you know that dogs sneeze when they are play fighting to let you know it's not a real fight?? I didn't know that

https://www.rover.com/blog/dogs-sneeze-play/

Dog behavior experts believe this particular sneeze is part of a set of a communication tools dogs use to relate to one another—to signal cooperation, warning, deference, or an invitation to play. The sneeze in this context is a reminder to the playmate that the scrimmage is just play, not a true fight.

ohnonotgmail · 20-04-2020 12:29pm

LostinBlanch wrote: »

An Irishman James Martin from Co Down invented the ejection seat. To date it has saved over 7500 lives.

But it wasn't invented for the likes of this fella. :eek:

at least the french bloke gets to wear this rather natty tie as a memento

Capt'n Midnight · 21-04-2020 11:08pm

The aisle that divides the government and opposition MPs in the House of Commons measures 3.96 metres.

Which is, according to tradition, the length of two swords.

joujoujou · 22-04-2020 11:29am

Perhaps not the best place to ask (point me to better one if there's on here) but I wonder what they used to achieve this:

Evade · 22-04-2020 11:36am

Chemicals that react to create a lot of gas and washing up liquid.

Ryath · 22-04-2020 11:39am

Hydrogen peroxide and potassium iodide with soap and food colouring.

New Home · 22-04-2020 12:33pm

There was something of the gif thread in CVPL a while back, I'll see if I can dig it out later on.

Cordell · 22-04-2020 2:41pm

I can't stop watching it.

Ryath · 22-04-2020 2:47pm

Cordell wrote: »

I can't stop watching it.

It's a lot larger than it looks in that!

Badly Drunk Boy · 22-04-2020 7:48pm

joujoujou wrote: »

Perhaps not the best place to ask (point me to better one if there's on here) but I wonder what they used to achieve this:

This has the making of it. You can probably skip the first 7 minutes and still see enough...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXn4fP3CnJg

New Home · 22-04-2020 8:43pm

The best thing for me is how it changes colour, from rich green to turquoise.

joujoujou · 22-04-2020 9:38pm

Thanks lads, much appreciated.

24-04-2020 2:23pm

Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, is the only African capital city more than 1000km from any other capital city.

Capt'n Midnight · 24-04-2020 6:51pm

'Woman wiring an early IBM computer' from the 'Documenting Science' series (1938-58) by US photographer Berenice Abbott

Except it's not a computer but an IBM 405 "Alphabetic Accounting Machine" from 1934 which you could rent for $1,000 a month.

It could process up to 150 cards a minute.
That's 2.5Hz = 0.000 000 002.5 GHz

more info http://www.righto.com/2017/11/identifying-early-ibm-computer-in.html

mikhail · 24-04-2020 8:29pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It could process up to 150 cards a minute.
That's 2.5Hz = 0.000 000 002.5 GHz

That's not quite a fair comparison. The processor speed quoted for modern computers is in terms of the clock speed. In one clock cycle, they can do 1 operation, like adding two numbers. I don't know what a card contained, but I expect it required a sequence of quite a few operations to process all the data, so the equivalent of the processor speed may have been literally tens of times faster than 0.0000000025 GHz.

The real limitations of devices like that is that they weren't programmable. The cards would have presented different data to the machine, but it couldn't be reprogrammed to do something new. That kind of machine emerged in the US and UK the 40s (and to a lesser extent in Germany), largely driven by the need for wartime calculations around decryption, calculations for the atomic bomb, etc.

Capt'n Midnight · 25-04-2020 12:07am

mikhail wrote: »

That's not quite a fair comparison. The processor speed quoted for modern computers is in terms of the clock speed. In one clock cycle, they can do 1 operation, like adding two numbers. I don't know what a card contained, but I expect it required a sequence of quite a few operations to process all the data, so the equivalent of the processor speed may have been literally tens of times faster than 0.0000000025 GHz.

It's not doing real number crunching it's just counting. Pipelining and multiple cores means you can probably still average a card processing per cycle

You could also throw the problem at a GPU which can have thousands of cores.

mikhail · 25-04-2020 3:05am

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It's not doing real number crunching it's just counting. Pipelining and multiple cores means you can probably still average a card processing per cycle

You could also throw the problem at a GPU which can have thousands of cores.

Depends on the specifics of the algorithm. Not everything parallelises, but yeah, probably fair point.

Capt'n Midnight · 27-04-2020 11:06pm

Chancer3001 · 28-04-2020 3:19pm

Ethiopia follow their own calendar.

So they're about 7 years behind us. 2013 there now i think

BaZmO* · 28-04-2020 7:58pm

Chancer3001 wrote: »

Ethiopia follow their own calendar.

So they're about 7 years behind us. 2013 there now i think

Same as Cavan

Buford T. Justice XIX · 29-04-2020 8:03am

A nice gif about the center of the Universe and planets orbits around it.
https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1255115660490752001?s=19

lapua20grain · 29-04-2020 2:21pm

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1255472469487599622?s=19

Realt Dearg Sec · 29-04-2020 2:48pm

These posts are making me miss Fourier!

its_steve116 · 02-05-2020 2:13am

The Simpsons and Family Guy are animated in South Korea.

maudgonner · 18-05-2020 11:58am

Baby porcupines are called porcupettes.

I just thought everybody would like to know that.

(And their quills are soft when they're born, hardening up a few hours after birth. Which makes sense, otherwise there would be a lot of one-porcupette families and traumatised porcu-mammies :eek:)

Chancer3001 · 18-05-2020 5:43pm

97% of birds species dont have a penis.

But ducks, swans, geese and ostriches do.

mikhail · 20-05-2020 9:29pm

In a similar vein, some species of animal (including humans) have a gall bladder, and some do not, which is not terribly interesting. Much stranger: some giraffes have a gall bladder and some do not. I've never heard of a species with a variable number of organs before!

21-05-2020 10:17pm

If you did Leaving Cert Physics I'm sure you'll know this but the image on our retina is upside down. Somewhere from there to the brain it gets turned upside-up.

21-05-2020 10:41pm

Deleted User wrote: »

If you did Leaving Cert Physics I'm sure you'll know this but the image on our retina is upside down. Somewhere from there to the brain it gets turned upside-up.

Patterns of light are perceived by photoreceptors in the retina, and the information is sent to the brain via the optic nerve and there it gets translated into the picture. The retina and optic nerve are outcrops of the brain. It's all an interesting jigsaw of assembly-line data interpretation.

Evade · 21-05-2020 11:01pm

Your brain can adapt reasonable quickly to strange vision. If you wore glasses that inverted or mirrored your vision you'd adjust to it after a few days and would be able to function normally again.

EDIT: If you want to experimentally see that your vision is upside down cover one eye with your hand and gently poke the bottom corner of the open one through the lid. You should see the shadow created by the pressure you're putting on your eye in the top opposite corner of your field of vision.

21-05-2020 11:11pm

Evade wrote: »

Your brain can adapt reasonable quickly to strange vision. If you wore glasses that inverted or mirrored your vision you'd adjust to it after a few days and would be able to function normally again.

And there's always tooth-in-eye surgery to restore sight to people who have bad surface damage or scarring to the eye. Amazing stuff altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis

BonnieSituation · 21-05-2020 11:48pm

New Home wrote: »

I heard someone say yesterday that the combined data collected for the photo of the black hole was too big to be transmitted by internet, and was physically brought to one place to be collated.

Too big for the internet!

sunnysoutheast wrote: »

It's very common practice to move very large data sets into the cloud via physical means rather than over the internet.

AWS will send you out ruggedized drives if you ask for one, or even a shipping container!

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

This reminded me of this:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

and this:

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

New Home · 22-05-2020 11:28am

Candie wrote: »

And there's always tooth-in-eye surgery to restore sight to people who have bad surface damage or scarring to the eye. Amazing stuff altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis

Some people would have given their eye-teeth for that!

KAGY wrote: »

I think it's the opposite, though we could be talking about either end of the seeing process. the eyeball can't see anything that it stationary relative to itself. but our eye compensates by being constantly in motion itself. they did an experiment where they glued a target to a contact lens and it disappeared.

Now, this was in the maps thread, but I'm going to ask here - is that why you "forget" you can see floaters in your eyes unless you're looking at a white surface?

Badly Drunk Boy · 23-05-2020 4:53am

Evade wrote: »

Your brain can adapt reasonable quickly to strange vision. If you wore glasses that inverted or mirrored your vision you'd adjust to it after a few days and would be able to function normally again.

A very basic version of that, but a storage machine in work was changed recently. I told a colleague that it was now a bit counter-intuitive; if you want a high number shelf, go 'down'. He said "Is that a thing? Up is down? Like some film said?". Within seconds I found that he was thinking of the film 'Pirate Of The Caribbean 3'. I haven't seen it but I presume the ship sank and they had to co-ordinate their perception to the new reality (The Poseidon Adventure from my youth.) :pac:

I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2

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