For a small smartphone charger, if it’s not warm to the touch, it’s using less than a penny a year. This is true of almost any powered device.1.
If we divide up the world’s land area evenly, there’s enough room for each of us to have a little over 2 hectares each, with the nearest person 77 meters away.
In conclusion, if the Sun went out, we would see a variety of benefits across many areas of our lives. Are there any downsides to this scenario? We would all freeze and die.
Sometimes it’s nice not to destroy the world for a change.
X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast.
What if every day, every human had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a human?
Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They’d want to join the club, so they’d get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They’d marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family.
High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. – Hendrik Willem Van Loon.
I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you’ve just bricked something important because you didn’t pay enough attention to a loose wire.
Do not build the seventh row.
GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it’s one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations.
Introverts understand; the loneliest human in history was just happy to have a few minutes of peace and quiet.
It’s weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it’s literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.
To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the tenth story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.
Cheaper trade: Time zones make trade more expensive; it’s harder to do business with someone if their office hours don’t overlap with yours. If the Sun went out, it would eliminate the need for time zones, allowing us to switch to UTC and give a boost to the global economy.
You may actually receive a lower dose of radiation treading water in a spent fuel pool than walking around on the street.
As Tim Minchin put it in his song “If I Didn’t Have You”: Your love is one in a million; You couldn’t buy it at any price. But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves, Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.
At supersonic and hypersonic speeds, a shockwave forms around the steak that helps protect it from the faster and faster winds. The exact characteristics of this shock front – and thus the mechanical stress on the steak – depend on how an uncooked 8-ounce filet tumbles at hypersonic speeds. I searched the literature, but was unable to find any research on this.
DISCLAIMER Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.
That’s if everything goes as planned.