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Showing content with the highest reputation on 10/22/22 in Posts

  1. Best car commercial ever! Why we really never went back to the moon!
    2 points
  2. I found this a helpful breakdown of the types of propaganda that Russia is using to gaslight its citizens.
    1 point
  3. If you have a time-varying magnetic field, you can be realigning domains of a ferromagnetic material. The domains take up a different amount of space depending on their alignment. It’s called magnetostriction, and it’s responsible for the humming you can hear in transformers http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/magstrict.html
    1 point
  4. I have extensive personal experience of this, as well as anecdotal reports from mature adults I have no reason to doubt. As to the personal, when I was doing art, I often dreamed images of something I wanted to create. The dream would take a fairly obvious form. For example, I went to a craft fair (something i often did in waking life), looked at many attractive items and bought the one I liked best. But some authority would not allow me to take it out of the building. The message: Since I owned it, I was free to make a replica in the real world. Or I might dream of acquiring a house and deciding how to allocate the spaces in it. Again, a fairly plain reference to organizing a project. Even more directly, I would often repeat in my dream, actions I had to perform in the learning of a skill : practice through visualization. A close friend used to solve problems in computer program design in his sleep, sometimes even starting awake to write it down or test it; another came up with story ideas. Emotional interpretation is much more difficult, subject to a private vocabulary and image library. I understand my own by now, and can take a shrewd stab at those of people I know well. I know many of the 'universal' symbols - they're not, really; many are culture- and vintage-dependent, and there is always individual variation on common themes. With a stranger, especially one with a very different background, I would be guessing and asking, guessing and asking, until the dreamer herself arrived at an answer they recognize.
    1 point
  5. Yes. People absorb their society's cultural mores and habits and speech. Most English-speaking people, whether they are Christian or not, use the same Jesus- and God-related swear words when they drop a can of soup on their toe, or when their spouse fails to comprehend the argument they're making. Similarly, when growing exasperated with their employees or teenaged children, they tend to raise their eyes and hands toward heaven in a beseeching gesture, and might even mutter "Give me strength!". Not because they really expect help from that direction; simply because it is a habit of their culture to place a sympathetic deity up there. A Roman father would probably roll his eyes at his household shrine and a Druid would gesture toward the holly grove. Similarly, when people are spared a tribulation, encounter a favourable outcome, they are quite likely - atheist, agnostic and undecided, equally - to exclaim "Thank God!" or "Saints be praised!" Not because they really believe the good luck came from that deity; simply because it is the habit of their culture. And so, when a person who is not a believer, but neither is he locked in a dead-set vendetta against the Christian version of godhood, is the beneficiary of a great piece of good luck, his "Thank you" is automatically directed to the heaven of his cultural tradition. Emotionally, that's both more direct and more satisfying than trying to apportion the credit among designers, engineers, car factories, highway construction crews, traffic law makers, other drivers, the luck of weather conditions, etc. Just as, having scored a goal, football players look up and thank the sky, which they know had nothing to do with their three seconds of triumph. If they thought Jesus was scoring their goals, they wouldn't train and practice so hard, would they? People who really believe God will heal them don't go to the hospital in the first place. But people who trust in doctors, nurses and medicine, still thank God for their recovery. It's an emotionally satisfying habit.
    1 point
  6. Put your computer in a metal trash can and ground the can to the earth. Actually modern military equipment is hardened against EMP.
    1 point
  7. Raw coal-fired power station flue gas is hot. So to use it, you have to cool it down to a level that will not kill your vegetation. When you cool it to that degree much of the water content condenses out, dissolves the SOx and NOx combustion products, and produces a very acidic 'rain', which will likewise kill your vegetation. At least partial removal of the NOx and SOx is possible (I was involved in commissioning a few stages of the Flue-gas Desulphurisation Project at Drax Power Station in the 1990s) but it is a seriously expensive process.
    1 point
  8. Passing CO2 over poor soil won’t improve its fertility, but increasing the CO2 content of air in a greenhouse does accelerate growth. This has been widely done for years in the Netherlands, where a gas engine is used to generate electricity to light them in winter months, exhaust is used to promote growth and waste heat to warm them. This is done commercially to produce tomatoes, capsicums etc all year round for supermarkets.
    1 point
  9. Plants need: CO2, H2O, NH3 and/or NH4OH and/or NH4NO3 and other nutrients with various other elements. Higher availability of CO2 will be of course welcome, but soon other bottlenecks will be reached in other areas. i.e. lack of light (artificial or from the Sun), lack of nitrogen-rich nutrients.
    1 point
  10. An audio speaker is a mixture of a magnet and an electromagnet attached to a diaphragm (or reverse). When current flows through the electromagnet, it begins to tremble and causes air molecules to move..
    1 point
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