Today I Learned

Anything that doesn't quite fit in elsewhere...
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Yuli Ban
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Today I Learned

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TIL about the mysterious worldwide epidemic of Encephalitis lethargica. The disease attacks the brain, leaving some victims in a statue-like condition, speechless and motionless. Between 1915 and 1926, 500,000 dead or incapacitated from it. It disappeared as mysteriously as it came in to the world.

They would be conscious and aware – yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies
Oh that sounds nightmarish.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Today I Learned

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It's always reassuring to know that humans have not changed
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wjfox
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Re: Today I Learned

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TIL - in Terminator 2 (1991), the guard and the T-1000 were played by identical twins, Don and Dan Stanton.


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Also, in the smelting plant at the end, Linda Hamilton’s twin sister makes an appearance.


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Yuli Ban
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Re: Today I Learned

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This is apparently one of the reasons why détente happened, as the Soviets realized the Americans weren't actually willing to destroy all humankind over ideological differences so there was some middle-ground where both sides could meet. There apparently wasn't a great geopolitik reason for this move either; the Americans just didn't really want to kill everyone, and neither did the Soviets.

It's certainly a somewhat heartwarming move that proves humans aren't THAT suicidally insane.

However, if you ask me, it's also a bit foolish. 1 because this ruins the effectiveness of MAD. The whole point behind MAD is that you won't fire precisely because the other guy will if you do, and you both die. If the other guy makes it clear that "I'm only going to launch some of my nukes no matter how bad it gets and only destroy some of your territory," what does that communicate? That nuclear war is survivable and there's a way to win it. The other guy's sentimentality could damn you both.

2 because all you've actually done is doom the survivors to a horrifyingly miserable existence trying to rebuild in a ruined world. Even a limited nuclear exchange between the USA and USSR would wreck industrial civilization and make agriculture extremely difficult to maintain for many years. Heck, a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan would cause massive global declines in quality of life, and they barely have more than 400 nukes between them.


That said, I wouldn't be surprised if this policy is still in place among all nuclear powers but isn't promoted to the world. Promote merciless brutality to the world, practice merciful sentimentality in secret.

Except Israel; I'm fairly sure they have the entire Middle East wired to blow should anyone make serious incursions into their territory.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Today I Learned

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Volcano vs typhoon: Island hit by double disasters in one day
On June 15, 1991, the island of Luzon in the Philippines was ground zero for the second-largest volcanic eruption of the 1900s when Mount Pinatubo blew its top. This historic natural event set massive amounts of ash and volcanic debris high into the atmosphere, burying areas surrounding the volcano and even influencing the weather around the globe.
On the same day that Mount Pinatubo erupted, Typhoon Yunya made landfall on Luzon in the Philippines.

The eruption was so powerful that despite the wind and strength of Yunya, a black plume of volcanic ash blasted through the clouds swirling around the center of the typhoon. Yunya then weakened to tropical storm strength, but its impact was significant.
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Re: Today I Learned

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Yuli Ban
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The mental image of an F16 pilot reaching the equator and then spontaneously flipping over at 500 Gs, screaming as he dies while the plane flies upside down all the way back to base before crashing, is darkly hilarious.
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Re: Today I Learned

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Surprisingly, we had absolutely no definitive evidence of anyone being killed by a meteor before now. Even the news story of an Indian man being struck and killed by one in 2016 was debunked.

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Re: Today I Learned

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Re: Today I Learned

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Speculative "habitable epoch"

c. 10–17 million years after the Big Bang

For about 6.6 million years, between about 10 to 17 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 137–100), the background temperature was between 273–373 K (0–100 °C), a temperature compatible with liquid water and common biological chemical reactions. Abraham Loeb (2014) speculated that primitive life might in principle have appeared during this window, which he called the "habitable epoch of the early Universe".[4][51] Loeb argues that carbon-based life might have evolved in a hypothetical pocket of the early universe that was dense enough both to generate at least one massive star that subsequently releases carbon in a supernova, and that was also dense enough to generate a planet. (Such dense pockets, if they existed, would have been extremely rare.) Life would also have required a heat differential, rather than just uniform background radiation; this could be provided by naturally-occurring geothermal energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronolog ... e_epoch%22
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