The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
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Fact: Every year, the temperature rose on average 0.01K or 0.0039 percent.
Fact: Temperature differences of less than 0.01 K require very sensitive equipment to be measured correctly.
...
Let's imagine that out of 73000 temperature readings only 3 values were only 1 degree Celsius off. The person reading the temperature scale made an error and incorrectly reported 21 degrees when the true daily average was 20 degrees.
If we have 3 erroneous readings out of 73000, the error is 50% higher than the assumed increase in global temperature.
Fact: 3 measurements out of 73000 being 1 degree off is an error of 0.00004 degrees. This is 1 day's worth of global warming.
If we thought we were able to predict when a specific global warming event would occur, and we we were actually wrong by an entire day, then obviously global warming is a crock.
On a totally unrelated note, NASA will try launching its new ARES X-1 rocket tomorrow.
But is it wiki'd so that people can make corrections to it?
"The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the coblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd."
Charles Stross
The neutrinos from a core collapse supernova would be lethal to humans at the distance of Jupiter. Any given neutrino has very little chance of hitting interacting with normal density matter it passes through, but there are a LOT of neutrinos: about 0.05 solar masses of them.
Furthermore, they are the first things that escape from the core (apart from gravitational waves) since they move at near-lightspeed and have very little chance of interacting with the envelope of the star. The big flashy special effects are driven by the shockwave from the core reaching the surface, and that takes hours. So if you were at the distance of Jupiter, you would have time to die from neutrino effects before the blast hit you.
Admittedly, Betelgeuse is somewhat further away than Jupiter, and the only neutrino effects are likely to be a lot of very excited astrophysicists. But both Jupiter and Betelgeuse are much closer than 99.9999999999999999999% of the Universe, and much further away than everyone you've ever met, so the distance scales aren't that different.
If you have geographic data, Google Earth is a great output viewer. It is easy to use Python to write a KML file.
Searching on prime numbers and Benford's law, the first page includes a hit on the book
Prime Numbers by David G. Wells which on page 17 talks about Benford's law and the distribution of first digits of primes.
Around 1980, there was a program called SPIKE, which was a virtual keypunch. It put an image of a punch card up on the screen (character graphics on a Z-100). As you typed, it wrote the characters (uppercase) at the top of the card, and blacked out the appropriate squares.
It had a mode to do blind typing (not all keypunches printed the characters at the top of the card--that cost extra). It also had a 'dropdeck' command to shuffle the lines of your file.
Your 4-year-old's account shouldn't have administrator access.
If you gave his account administrator access, neither should you.
Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
