Found this on hacker news, but much of it is science related and is too good not to share!
[The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics]
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It is possible to travel downwind faster than the wind: this one is a trip. I am having a hard time understanding why it has enough force to push against the wind, when its powered by the wind the vessel is being pushed by. Wouldnt it just average out = wind speed. What black magic is this?
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Blackbird (wind-powered vehicle) - Wikipedia.
This has been an insane wormhole for years. My chemistry teacher senior year of highschool in 2008 was super excited about all of this.
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Go sailing or kite boarding and it will make sense. Learning to sail was a complete trip.
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Amazing post by the way. I’ll be looking at this daily until I can comprehend each one. Wonderful concepts for expanding understanding of the world around us.
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This one gets me
Like wtf lol
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My first rule about common sense/intuition is that it doesn’t exist. There is only common experience.
Science is the same way. There is more heat in an iceberg than a lit match.
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Never thought about it that way… But fuck, an iceberg probably has more kinetic energy than an Olympic swimming pool full of boiling water. Depending on the berg, it could take a fleet of propane trucks with torches to melt one (assuming it wasn’t being cooled by the ocean simultaneously)
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Id assume its a similar idea as lift on a wing. your actually creating a pressure differential that adds a force.
Their are multiple forces in action here.
fluid mechanics and physics
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we are strictly talking enthalpy
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Right, an iceberg has more “heat” than x number of lit matches, pots of boiling water, potential from propane on those trucks
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This is exactly why in engineering/science the more useful unit to use to compare things is specific enthalpy or heat, which is heat per unit mass i.e. BTU/lb or J/kg.
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The fact that snow balls doesn’t melt when you expose it directly to a flame, but rather first hardens and gets dark… which made a whole lot of US internet people starting to believe that snow was made of plastics spread by the government…
Later I saw another ghetto variation of the conspiracy dealing with fresh cabage, then an Afro version with dry Chinese Rice, and finally a Fench version with those fake toast cheese… alledgedly all made of plastic because they do not burn as one would expect.
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Number games are so quizzical to me, good post.
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0.9999999999999-> infinity is equal to 1. There is some sort of proof for this, I forget.
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1/3 is .33
1/3 time 3 is 1
1/3 plus 1/3 plus 1/3 is .999 though
Basic proof
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The Gabriel’s horn in the article above builds on that a bit.
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.9999 just sounds like scientific notation for “not first”.
A wiseman once said in the early 2010s that “if you ain’t first, you’re last”.
1 > .9999
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