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January 11 - February 3, 2022
We keep trying to make our units of measurement make sense. But the truth is that the world is an absurd place; why not embrace it? It’s true, unit conversion errors have caused us to lose space probes once in a while. But isn’t that a small price to pay for silliness?
They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.
Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch,” and would be eligible to advance to first base.
Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.
After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth’s atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas’s volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers.
Your love is one in a million; You couldn’t buy it at any price. But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves, Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.
With the threat of dying alone looming so prominently, society could restructure to try to enable as much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts to move lines of people past each other
Technically, the Moon wouldn’t become a new planet, under the IAU definition of a planet. Since its new orbit would cross Earth’s, it would be considered a dwarf planet like Pluto. This Earth-crossing orbit would lead to periodic unpredictable orbital perturbation. Eventually it would either be slingshotted into the Sun, ejected toward the outer solar system, or slammed into one of the planets—quite possibly ours. I think we can all agree that in this case, we’d deserve it.
Fluorine is the most reactive, corrosive element in the periodic table. Almost any substance exposed to pure fluorine will spontaneously catch fire.
We don’t know what astatine looks like, because, as Lowe put it, “that stuff just doesn’t want to exist.” It’s so radioactive (with a half-life measured in hours) that any large piece of it would be quickly vaporized by its own heat. Chemists suspect that it has a black surface, but no one really knows. There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.
The fallout wouldn’t be normal, everyday radioactive fallout9—it would be like a nuclear bomb that kept exploding. The debris would spread around the world, releasing thousands of times more radioactivity than the Chernobyl disaster. Entire regions would be devastated; the cleanup would stretch on for centuries. While collecting things is certainly fun, when it comes to chemical elements, you do not want to collect them all.
In 1914, H. G. Wells imagined devices like this in his book The World Set Free. He wrote of a type of bomb that, instead of exploding once, exploded continuously, a slow-burn inferno that started inextinguishable fires in the hearts of cities. The story eerily foreshadowed the development, 30 years later, of nuclear weapons.
The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found.
In the Clarendon Library at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.
Many spacecraft are powered by solar panels, and others by radioactive decay. The Mars rover Curiosity, for example, is powered by the heat from a chunk of plutonium it carries in a container on the end of a stick.
Cesium-137 has a half-life of thirty years, which means that two centuries later, they’ll still be glowing with 1 percent of their original radioactivity. Since the color of the light depends only on the decay energy, and not the amount of radiation, it will fade in brightness over time but keep the same blue color. And thus, we arrive at our answer: Centuries from now, deep in concrete vaults, the light from our most toxic waste will still be shining.
She died as she lived—rising at a foot per second. I mean, as she lived for the last few hours.
REENTERING SPACECRAFT HEAT UP because they’re compressing the air in front of them (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction).
AERODYNAMICS ASIDE, I’M CURIOUS what tactical advantage you’re expecting to gain by having the high explosive fly back at you if it misses the target.
Before we go any further, I want to emphasize something: I am not an authority on lightning safety. I am a guy who draws pictures on the Internet. I like it when things catch fire and explode, which means I do not have your best interests in mind.
We’ve actually seen this viral extinction in action in isolated populations. The remote islands of St. Kilda, far to the northwest of Scotland, for centuries hosted a population of about 100 people. The islands were visited by only a few boats a year, and suffered from an unusual syndrome called the cnatan-na-gall, or “stranger’s cough.” For several centuries, the cough swept the island like clockwork every time a new boat arrived.
In addition to probably causing the collapse of civilization, Sarah’s plan wouldn’t eradicate rhinoviruses.9 However, this might be for the best!
While colds are no fun, their absence might be worse. In his book A Planet of Viruses, author Carl Zimmer says that children who aren’t exposed to rhinoviruses have more immune disorders as adults. It’s possible that these mild infections serve to train and calibrate our immune systems.
Cisco estimates Internet traffic is growing at about 29 percent annually. At that rate, we’ll hit the FedEx point in 2040. Of course, the amount of data we can fit on a drive will have gone up by then, too. The only way to actually reach the FedEx point is if transfer rates grow much faster than storage rates. In an intuitive sense, this seems unlikely, since storage and transfer are fundamentally linked—all that data is coming from somewhere and going somewhere—but there’s no way to predict usage patterns for sure.
