Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Volt wasn't discovered but AA batteries were.
AA batteries were invented, not discovered.
Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
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Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#72[flagged]
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Square meters yet surely you mean American football here. Further confusion ensues.
I don’t know what readers are aware of this. American football fields are all the same size, but soccer fields can vary. That little bit of trivia makes this extra funny. For me anyway.
> American football fields are all the same size
American American football fields are all the same size. But American Canadian football fields are all the same, different, size. And American Arena football fields are also all the same, different, size.
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#74Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
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Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#75I wonder if this is in any way responsible for the increased biodiversity there - maybe a slightly higher mutation rate?
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#76Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
Why use AA batteries? It's so hard to zap yourself with them. At least with a 9V battery you can lick it to get a sense of how much power is in them. Not that you could extrapolate that other than to get the sense that the electric field of the storm could vaporize you!
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc. Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a sm…
Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites would still be accessible.
I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider high quality enough to use as the basis for the future governors of mankind!)
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#78Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
Nobody outside of the industry knows how much a megavolt is. Megavolts are actually the obscure unit, for normal people.
Most people don't even really understand "million" and "billion" other than as "a lot".
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#79the phenomenon of "red sprites", massive discharges of electricity upwards into the ionosphere that counter every single lightning strike, are only now being observed and photographed. these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to see photos of it.
Here's an article with some pictures in case anyone else was curious about red sprites like I was. https://earthsky.org/earth/definition-what-are-lightning-spr...
that shot with them aligned with Milky Way is spectacular
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#80Does this help to explain the genetic diversity of the tropical latitudes; is the genetic mutation rate higher in the presence of gamma radiation?
So many of our plants and flowers (here in North America) originate from rainforests and tropical latitudes, but survive at current temps for northern latitudes.