Mildly interesting
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@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
Several surprises here.
I had breakfast with my parish priest a few months ago. He told me that in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia post Covid Mass attendance is 12% of what it was before the lockdown.
The bishops closed the churches and told everyone to not go to Mass, and 88% of the Catholic still haven't returned.
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@Ivorythumper said in Mildly interesting:
The bishops closed the churches and told everyone to not go to Mass, and 88% of the Catholic still haven't returned.
Eventually they'll start selling indulgences on Amazon.
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@Ivorythumper said in Mildly interesting:
@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
Several surprises here.
I had breakfast with my parish priest a few months ago. He told me that in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia post Covid Mass attendance is 12% of what it was before the lockdown.
The bishops closed the churches and told everyone to not go to Mass, and 88% of the Catholic still haven't returned.
Wow. And this graph shows a 40 trend and stops well before Covid.
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Zebra stripes not just for camouflage:
Seeking a potential solution to this situation, a team of Japanese researchers cleverly applied lessons from research on zebras. Animal scientists have long pondered the function of zebras' dsitinct stripes, and a growing consensus now suggests that they deter insects, possibly by confusing bugs' motion detection systems that control approach and landing.
And so, the researchers painted six Japanese Black cows with black-and-white stripes, which took just five minutes per cow. They then observed the cows for three days, taking high-resolution images of them at regular intervals to count the insects on the animals and also recording any fly-repelling behaviors like leg stamping, tail flicking, and skin twitching. The same cows were also observed for three days with painted-on black stripes (to see if it was the paint chemicals, not the coloring, that repelled flies) and and with no stripes at all.
The apparent effects of the stripes were remarkable. The number of biting flies observed on zebra-striped cows was less than half the number seen on unpainted cows and far less than cows painted with black stripes. Moreover, zebra-striping reduced fly-repelling behaviors by about 20%, indicating that the cows were less bothered by the insects
Oh, and for those who will say "TTIWWOP", here you go:
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@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
It’s such an amazing result - that close but not equal.
If you were to guess the number of atoms in the universe and missed it by just one, that would an incomparably larger miss than this expression gets to pi
I wonder if that has something to do with Euler's identity.
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@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
It’s such an amazing result - that close but not equal.
If you were to guess the number of atoms in the universe and missed it by just one, that would an incomparably larger miss than this expression gets to pi
Apparently not so amazing according to the comments. It’s a “discretization” of an infinite sun identity which is exactly equal to pi. The constants in the discretization can be chosen such that the sum is arbitrarily close to pi.
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Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
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@mark said in Mildly interesting:
Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
Now you can have a date with Jesus!
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Mildly interesting:
@mark said in Mildly interesting:
Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
Now you can have a date with Jesus!