51–60 of 82 posts
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The lengths people will go to to avoid using the metric system!
Funny how we went through the monumental effort to build and adopt a whole new system of units just because a few people were bad at grade-school arithmetic and mental math.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
The sand pile model: if one builds a pile of sand, dropping onto it a small number of grains at a time, individual grains will slide down the slope - but there's a critical angle at which any additional grains can trigger a catastrophic avalanche.
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They go in increments of 50m. If you asked the width people go to, it would be 25m. So your comment about avoiding the metric system is not really accurate. We don't say the Earth is approximately equal to 150 million kilometres from the Sun, we say one AU. We just use numbers that can be comprehended.
93 million miles you mean
Nothing is too big to fail in the business world either. Or at least nothing should be. If a business is that important to the economy but it can't keep itself afloat, something has gone horribly wrong on the business side, the government side, or both. Bailing out the business will probably not fix the underlying issues.
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Funny how we went through the monumental effort to build and adopt a whole new system of units just because a few people were bad at grade-school arithmetic and mental math.
It's especially weird because 12 is so much more useful than 10.
I am always amazed how thin the biosphere is - 3km down in the water , 3 up in the air - so roughly 1/1000 of the radius of the earth. And the vast majority of the biomass could probably be found in couple of hundred meters close to water level.
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My grandfather (a vulcanologist) set up measuring stations in Iceland in the 1930s to prove that Iceland was spreading apart. Unfortunately, the war interrupted that, and he died in the war.
Any more insights into his research and measurements that you know of? Thanks for sharing.
"His greatest contributions to the academic world – proof of Continental Drift through his studies in Iceland and a crystal growing method now lost to mankind – attest to his considerable intellect and dedication."
https://expo.uw.edu/expo/apply/494/proceedings/show?id=68965
"Geschichtete Lava an islaendischen Vulkanen" von Ferdinand Bernauer, Berlin-Charlottenburg
Zietschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellshaft Heft 2 Band 89 Berlin 1937 / Verlag von Ferdinand Enke in Stuttgart
Before anyone gets excited, the landslide occurred in the 12th century or so :( I was all excited to plan a rock hounding trip to the Himalayas. I even sent out the Sherpa bat signal (it’s a silhouette of me shaving a Himalayan yak), only to find out I’m eight hundred years too late.
Smaller mountain landslides do occur in modern times. There was one here in Montana in 1959 that killed 27 people and blocked a major river. The effects are still visible today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Hebgen_Lake_earthquake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Mountain_(Wyoming)
>Between 50 and 48 million years ago a sheet of rock about 500 square miles (1,300 square kilometers) in area detached from the plateau south of the Beartooths and slid tens of kilometers to the southeast and south into the Bighorn and Absaroka Basins
Luckily events like this are geologically rare. A bigger risk would be tsunamis from underwater mountain landslides.
I am always amazed how thin the biosphere is - 3km down in the water , 3 up in the air - so roughly 1/1000 of the radius of the earth. And the vast majority of the biomass could probably be found in couple of hundred meters close to water level.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Deep-and-narrow-gorge-of...
This Nasa blog post has a lot of good pictures of the immediate area that helps with understanding the shapes of the mountains there. I initially didn't realize just how choked down the drainage got. It seems like many cirques are described as having narrow exits but rarely are they this narrow.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/fromthefield/2014/01...
Here's an earlier discussion related to this one: https://www.science.org/cms/asset/b7f5337c-0f34-4fb5-a907-61...