UKC

I quite like a bit of pondering. Please share your obvious facts or ideas. I'll start with -

Every living thing on earth including us comes only of the earth and sunlight

In the long term, economic growth doesn’t really make any sense.

Mostly water, air and sunlight really.

The people who are the hardest to know, can tend to have the fewest friends, when they're often the ones in the most need of them. 

This is probably the wine talking but without a specific goal (religion?), in the long term no progress makes any sense other than for progress sake. Infact continuation of what we call life through reproduction makes no sense in the long term.

Yep all of which are part of our planet earth, plus sunlight

If you're (genuinely) busy when somebody invites you to something, they're less likely to invite you again.

Promises and offers of favours seem to have expiry dates.  

Thank you for letting me air these, UKC, my mind can be clear again.  

Promises and favours have expiry dates

It's true, perhaps not in a numeric sense but they are generally forgotten eventually, sometimes death is the terminus.

Yes, because people fear rejection. Even if you have a good reason for turning down an invite, the inviter still feels rejected.

And they can forget the reason why before they forget how they felt i guess. That's a really good point. 

'Would you like to come camping?' 'I'm on the train to see a friend' 'I'll invite you next time' 

Pictures of 'Next time' appear on facebook.  Oh well.    

Well by all means communicate, it's good to talk!

Most things surpass death, hatred, sorrow, love, ideology, war, written knowledge, .... But favours tend to pass

Are you sure you aren't projecting here? I think it's a reasonable assumption, but I can assure you not everyone responds to rejection in the same way 

The price of crumpets, and of butter, is increasing year by year

(OMG that is mega-poignant and mega-groundbreaking I can't believe I wrote something so mega-profound and earth-shattering................................)

I think the youth would say, lolz douche

Read previous post about economic growth.

I'm curious - why profitofdoom?

Apart from all that stuff found around volcanic vents deep in the ocean. They laugh at photons . . .

T.

Do you meanwhy am I called 'profitofdoom'? -- Named after the E4 at Curbar which looks great and I'd love to do but is sadly way out of my league especially nowadays

Nice to hear from you, glad I've got some big posters replying. Hmm yes this is true there are some bacteria that truly stick it where the sun don't shine! Thank you for the correction! I should have said the earth and the sun, I'm sure it's mere existence as a gravitational center is a requirement for life on earth. Not to say we won't discover life on transitory bodies such as asteroids in interstellar space. 

Actually quite a bit of stuff falls to earth each year in the form of meteorites and micro meteorites, and some of that will end up in life.

Some of the energy for deep sea life comes not from the sun, but from the heat in earth’s core (via geothermal vents).  That heat comes from the gravitational collapse of the dust cloud that formed Earth and from the radioactive decay of various elements, themselves forged in the deathly explosion of a long gone star.

Indeed (read previous response regarding thermal vents). 

Hmm some do indeed attribute all life on earth to interplanetary bodies but thats debatable and a cyclical argument. As to what extent extraterrestrial mineral attributes to life, I am uncertain

It has done more for the economy than for life I suspect.  Gold and platinum all sank into the core in the molten earth days, so that which we have now comes from asteroid bombardment after the crust hardened.

Related fact - about half the gold in circulation today had already been mined by the Roman era, and it would all fill less than an Olympic swimming pool.

some BBC science programme on telly (think it was horizon) came out with the statement that if you subtract all the space between the sub atomic particles that make up matter, the amount of solid stuff needed to replicate every human on earth would take up no more than a sugar cube in volume. Had to go for a lie down after that.

They should teach that one in primary school.

Matter is predominantly empty spsce, we are all basically organised nothingness with emotions. 

Well, possibly!

If you really need a shit, don't drink eight espressos and smoke four cigarettes before joining the queue for the loo.

A wise old climber always said to me, don’t eat yellow snow. 

Will that help?

Swindon exists.

People not knowing what poignant means...

Every single one of your ancestors (all the way back to proto-humans, apes, strange squirrel things, walking fish, swimming fish, tadpole-looking thingies, ...), walked away either victorious or escaped from every single dangerous encounter with another being and every dangerous situation and event. You are just the latest in a series of a completely unbroken chain of evolutionary winners stretching back 541 million years - you have the genes of a survivor in you.

Years ago when my eldest was three, I rang home from an expedition to speak to my other half to be regaled with this conversation:

Guess what first born said today, we were watching Pingu and he said 'mummy, what is Pingu made from?'

'what do you think he's made from?'

'plasticine mummy'

'what are you made  from?'

'recycled stars mummy'  

'who told you that?'

'daddy'?????

I've never been so proud!?? 

I’ve heard this too but according to Wikipedia only 25% of all gold above ground had been extracted by 1910. 

I teach science at high school and I make that exact point  very early on. 

 "Hey kids, atoms are 99% empty space, 99% absolute nothing, you're made of atoms, you are 99% absolutely nothing "

Always goes down well that one.

Is pingu not made from recycled stars too?  

Confucius say: Man who go to bed with itchy butt, wake up with stinky finger 

Dude, he was 3

we see only electrons and their spinoffs, all is ruled by them, but they are organised by the stuff we don't see

plus, there isn't so much different between "empty space" and matter, just behaviour

Humans are a migrant species, if we weren't we'd all still live in Africa.

Atoms are mostly empty space but we still can’t walk through a wall

and obvious..

Everyone dies, baby, that's a fact.

There is very little evidence that intelligence will turn out to be a good long term evolutionary strategy.

Can't being around to embrace the gift of life be enough?

Edit: Allowing for the wine talking I'm guessing it can be.

For "poignant facts" substitute "trite waffle"

A piece of advice I was given on here a few years ago when I was going through a very hard time and reaching out for help. 

'You can never truly know another person.'

It really helped at the time and it's served me well since then.

At every instant of every day the sun is setting and also rising.

Beware of deepities. 

Earth seen from Voyager as a pale blue dot

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/multimedia/pia00452.html

Do you realise the sun don't go down? It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.

I love that photo. Simple complicated deep and profound

Water molecules are very small.

If you were to take a pint of water to the beach in Tenby and pour it into the sea, wait a million years for the water on the planet to mix and dilute, then take the same pint glass to anywhere else in the world and collect a pint from the sea, it would contain on average around 8000 molecules of water from the original glass in Tenby.

If that's true it's amazing and is a good illustration of how small the molecule is.

Apparently there are 8000 more molecules of water in a pint than there are pints of water on the planet!  I struggle to believe it but if the maths are there...

https://futurism.com/facts-about-water

That is a great fact, I was wondering if it was a myth.

Thanks for the link.

Wow, that is one dense cube...500 million tonnes? About what you find in a can of coke.

Woah. That's deep.

If you haven't seen this - set aside at least 30 minutes to slowly go through it: http://htwins.net/scale2/
(the slower the better, absorbing each change in scale).

Which one of my posts do you think is deep?

Half-hearted attempt at sarcasm. Yes, I do realise that that sunsets and sunrises are caused by the Earth's rotation.

That does depend how you value the economy.

jk

Why not?

It's valued/measured in pretty much every state on earth by GDP as you know. So by that definition I don't think it makes any sense.

I don't think it's possible to decouple it from inputs.

It is but it doesn't have to be. We choose to measure GDP (pretty much because it's a relatively easy number to generate despite being pretty meaningless in isolation) but there are many other measures we could choose apply that we could aim to grow continually without destroying our world in the process, public happiness for wild example.

jk

This isn't obvious or poignant but I learnt today that the Moon wobbles. Quite dramatically! It just happens so slowly that I've never noticed it.

youtube.com/watch?v=vC7odtQHoPc&

Can you explain what you mean?

A definition of GDP; "Gross domestic product (GDP) is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period."

Can we agree that GDP is used as a measure of economic health? In that if it constantly increases it's seen as a good thing.

Simplistically if you want to get more out of a system you need to put more in - energy, raw materials, people even. How can this happen when some of those things are finite?

I know there are theorists who say growth can be de-coupled from these inputs perhaps by efficiency or revolutionary technology but i've yet to see a macro scale example and I suspect it's impossible and wishful thinking to propose it.

The Flaming Lips?

The problem is that the economy IS decoupled from its inputs. The perfect example must be trade in market derivatives or the gratuitous printing of cash and quantitative easing. Calling profit from marginal, unsustainable fluctuations via high-speed, algorithmic trading "wealth creation" is another problem in the same vein.

Continual, indefinite economic growth is a reality because our definitions of money and market allow it.

That does not mean that it makes sense.

It cannot be sustainable, long term. A bunch of rich people are using mirrors to sell the infinite reflections of a cake but the cake, itself, is finite and humanity is hungry.

Vacuum is really a very busy place

there is no one present

Fundamentally, economic growth is based on figuring out better ways of doing things.  Thus, science and engineering drive economic growth.  Once could envisage a sustainable, long-term growth that did not use up any resource.

If we're talking about GDP then that is not anywhere the near the definition of it! Science and tech help but without mines & foundries producing materials, land being put do crops to feed the workers and energy inputs they can't do it on their own.

If we found a different thing to measure to record growth then maybe - but nobody in government is doing that. 

Yip.

I'm not talking about how to *define* GDP, I'm talking about what is the long-term *driver* of growth in GDP, or why we are much richer today than ever before.

The answer is *not* because we're using up resources more rapidly (that might be true, but it's not the main factor in the above question), the answer is that, owing to science and engineering, we've much more technologically capable.  That capability drives GDP growth.

Yes we can build much better computers now using less materials than a 1960s mainframe (though the complexity of modern tech sends tentacles into resource extraction far and wide). But there are now 10,000 pcs for every IBM. Hundreds of 54inch flat screens for every old CRT telly.

I'm convinced that economic growth can't be decoupled from resource use or, even more importantly, from population growth. Though I have never found any attempt to analyse the relationship between population growth and crudely measured economic growth.

female Kangaroos have three vaginas

I guess this could be obvious if you had access to a female kangaroo?

I don't know if this qualifies as either obvious or poignant but here it is anyway.

Every female is born with her lifetime supply of eggs already in her ovaries (they form when she is a foetus at around 16-20 weeks). So the eggs which may one day become my grandchildren grew inside me.

This blows my mind every time!

The Russians understood this many years ago and embodied the knowledge in their Dolls!

Do I? My genes are naff, I've got the NHS to thank for me being here! 

Not strictly true, as like birds they have one hole for everything, a cloaca. Sounds very unsatisfactory to me, but they seem to manage.

I think it's more like 99.99% empty space, (Comparing nuclear to atomic volume).

If you spend time with anything that has tits or wheels, at somepoint it will give you grief.

All that means (presumably) is: that's the amount of space that's necessary for this extremely interesting 0.01% bit to happen. Once you're talking about the dull bit, nothingness, I can't see why its 'size' matters.  Why get in a stew about the fascinating way that nature and physics actually works - which, sub-atomically, seems to be much more about waves and energy than 'solid' particles in any kind of Newtonian sense. .. In which everything seems to be interconnected, at a distance, in some mysterious way that's not yet fully understood.

This is a Bill Bryson fact that was an eye opener for me. To be pedantic, every one of your ancestors lived long enough to procreate, they may have met a violent end thereafter. And that lineage is a lot longer thank 500 million years. Maybe more than 3 billion. Wow.

For sure. I think statistically we can practically guarantee a room full of ancient-grandfathers who died with their willies in use hehehe.

On average, every single person on the planet owns 14 lego bricks.

Every hundredth person has one inside them.

Eggs are probably the most divisive foodstuff.

Seriously. Think of all the debates that eggs precipitate: Is the farming and eating of eggs ethical or not? Should vegetarians eat eggs? Fried, boiled, poached, hard-boiled, or scrambled? How many may a grown adult eat in a day? Are they a respectable pizza topping? Should they be stored in the refrigerator?

Where other foods may be boring and non-controversial (lettuce), and some may be polarising (avocado), debates surrounding eggs are nuanced and multi-dimensional and often involve apparent contradictions: how can one love eggs with toast but loath them in a sandwich?