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Off Topic The "That's interesting"/geek thread

Discussion in 'Queens Park Rangers' started by UTRs, May 25, 2018.

  1. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    #521
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  2. UTRs

    UTRs Senile Member

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    #522
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  3. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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  4. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    #524
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  5. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    Fancy a pint of the black stuff? I've stayed in this village on my way to Everest base camp many years ago - very remote but beautiful....

    World's remotest Irish bar: 'We will survive Covid'


    By Owen AmosBBC News
    • 7 hou
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    The Irish Pub in Namche Bazar is 3,450m above sea level

    It has been closed since April, you can’t reach it by car, and the nearest airport is a two-day hike away – but the world's remotest Irish bar is optimistic business will pick up soon.

    The Irish Pub in Namche Bazar, Nepal, is 3,450m above sea level, en route to Mount Everest.

    It has been shut since 10 April, after the pandemic forced Nepal's government to close the mountains to climbers.

    Yet owner Dawa Sherpa inisists that his bar will thrive beyond coronavirus.

    The government recently announced it would issue hiking permits for the Himalayas’ autumn season, which begins in September. International flights – which were suspended in March – are due to resume in August.

    And a new road, which could open next year, should make it easier to bring in beer, food, and even pool tables. Until now, it all had to be flown to “the world’s scariest airport” – and then carried for two days along mountain paths.

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    The pub interior - featuring the heavy Indian pool table

    Dawa, 35, grew up in the “small, colourful, market town” of Namche Bazar, where his parents worked in agriculture and livestock.

    After studying at Khumjung – the “school in the clouds” built by Sir Edmund Hillary's Himalayan Trust in 1961 – he moved to the capital Kathmandu to study business management. Upon returning home, he briefly worked as a trekking guide, before his older brother, who ran a bakery in Namche, spotted a gap in the market.

    The town was beginning to change – an increase in tourism had a “dramatic effect”, says Dawa – but it only had one pub. His brother, Phurba Tenzing, used to visit an Irish bar in Kathmandu, owned by Irish people. It gave the brothers an idea – could they open the highest Irish bar in the world? They Googled it, and discovered Paddy's bar in Cusco, Peru.

    “We worked out the elevation,” says Dawa. “They were 50 metres below us.” So, in 2011, they proudly opened The Irish Pub – the highest, and surely remotest, Irish bar in the world.

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    The town of Namche Bazar, with Mount Kongde Ri in the background

    It is not easy opening a pub in a town with no roads. Supplies are flown in, off season, from Kathmandu to Lukla – a small airport with a short, steep runway.

    From there, porters carry the goods to Namche. The pub's pool table was brought in this way. “And ours is an old, classic Indian table, with huge marble slates,” says Dawa.

    “Three or four slates, each one weighs maybe 120kg. We can’t hire mules or yaks because the paths are too fragile. It’s all carried by porters - humans - with great carefulness.”

    They even import Guinness, expensively, via Singapore.

    “We don’t have a big [profit] margin on it,” says Dawa, who charges 800 rupees ($6.70; £5.10) for a pint of the black stuff. “But we’re an Irish bar - we have to sell Guinness.”

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    Dawa remains optimistic that business will return
    The bar had a slow start.

    “At the beginning, it wasn’t that happening,” admits Dawa. “But we tried really hard to improve the service, ambience, interior. Gradually, we were getting there.”

    Then, in April 2015, a major earthquake hit Nepal, killing almost 9,000 people and ending the climbing season. A landslide on Everest killed 21 people alone.

    “We had to completely shut the bar down,” says Dawa. “We reopened in autumn, but that wasn’t good either.”

    After the earthquake, an economic blockade - which began in September 2015 and affected the whole country - increased the price of goods by “four, five, even six times”. Yet despite the earthquake, and the blockade, the remotest Irish bar in the world survived.

    “We recovered slowly,” says Dawa. “It took us three or four years to get there, but The Irish Pub became the most happening pub in Namche.”

    On an average day, customers - usually Australian, American, or European - might include “people who just summited Everest, or people who’ve been to base camp for the first time”.

    “And a guy who’s just climbed Everest doesn’t mind spending money,” says Dawa. “He’s buying drinks for sherpas, porters, friends. People are happy.”
     
    #525
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  6. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    #526
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  7. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    I had a few Guinness in the oldest Irish bar in the world
    Would be cool to go here
     
    #527
  8. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    Holy **** - you wouldn't mess with this bitch!

     
    #528
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  9. Uber_Hoop

    Uber_Hoop Well-Known Member

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    Reminds me of the recently-former Mrs Uber.
     
    #529
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  10. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    Black holes: Cosmic signal rattles Earth after 7 billion years
    By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent
    • 3 hours ago

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    Image copyrightLIGO-VIRGO Collaboration
    Image caption An artist's impression of the last moments before the merger of two black holes
    Imagine the energy of eight Suns released in an instant.

    This is the gravitational "shockwave" that spread out from the biggest merger yet observed between two black holes.

    The signal from this event travelled for some seven billion years to reach Earth but was still sufficiently strong to rattle laser detectors in the US and Italy in May last year.

    Researchers say the colliding black holes produced a single entity with a mass 142 times that of our Sun.

    This is noteworthy. Science has long traced the presence of black holes on the sky that are quite a bit smaller or even very much larger. But this new observation inaugurates a novel class of so-called intermediate-sized black holes in the range of 100-1,000 Sun (or solar) masses.


    The analysis is the latest to come out of the international LIGO-VIRGO collaboration, which operates three super-sensitive gravitational wave-detection systems in America and Europe.

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    Simulation: The black hole collision produced a train of gravitational waves
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    Media captionSimulation: The black hole collision produced a train of gravitational waves
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    What is a black hole?
    • A black hole is a region of space where matter has collapsed in on itself
    • The gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not event light, can escape
    • Black holes will emerge from the explosive demise of certain large stars
    • But some are truly gargantuan and are billions of times the mass of our Sun
    • How these monsters - found at galaxy centres - formed is unknown
    • Black holes are detected from the way they influence their surroundings
    • They produce observable gravitational waves as they spiral in to each other
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    The collaboration's laser interferometer instruments "listen" for the vibrations in space-time that are generated by truly cataclysmic cosmic events - and on 21 May, 2019, they were all triggered by a sharp signal lasting just one-tenth of a second.

    Computer algorithms determined the source to be the end-stage moments of two in-spiralling black holes - one with a mass 66 times that of our Sun, and the other with 85 solar masses.

    The distance to the merger was calculated to be the equivalent of 150 billion trillion km.

    "It's astounding, really," said Prof Nelson Christensen from the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France. "This signal propagated for seven billion years. So this event happened 'just before halftime' for the Universe, and now it's mechanically moved our detectors here on Earth," he explained to BBC News.

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    Image copyrightLIGO-VIRGO Collaboration
    Image caption The European VIRGO laser lab is based in Italy's province of Pisa
    Gravitational waves - Ripples in space-time
    • Gravitational waves are a prediction of the General Theory of Relativity
    • It took decades to develop the technology to directly detect them
    • They are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by violent events
    • Accelerating masses will produce waves that propagate at the speed of light
    • Detectable sources include merging black holes and neutron stars
    • LIGO-VIRGO fire lasers into long, L-shaped tunnels; the waves disturb the light
    • Detecting the waves opens up the Universe to completely new investigations
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    The involvement of an 85-solar-mass object in the collision has made collaboration scientists sit up because their understanding of how black holes form from the death of a star can't really account for something on this scale.

    Stars, when they exhaust their nuclear fuel, will experience an explosive core collapse to produce a black hole - if they're sufficiently big. But the physics that's assumed to operate inside stars suggests the production of black holes in the particular mass range between 65 and 120 solar masses is impossible. Dying stars that might yield such entities actually tear themselves apart and leave nothing behind.

    If the science is correct on this point then the most likely explanation for the existence of an 85-solar-mass object is that it was itself the result of an even earlier black hole union.

    And that, believes Prof Martin Hendry, from Glasgow University, UK, has implications for how the Universe evolved.

    "We're talking here about a hierarchy of mergers, a possible pathway to make bigger and bigger black holes," he said. "So, who knows? This 142-solar-mass black hole may have gone on to have merged with other very massive black holes - as part of a build-up process that goes all the way to those supermassive black holes we think are at the heart of galaxies."

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    Image copyrightLIGO-VIRGO
    Image caption The discovery suggests there is a hierarchy of mergers that lead to ever bigger black holes
    The LIGO-VIRGO collaboration is reporting the 21 May, 2019, event (catalogued as GW190521) in two scholarly papers.

    One is in the journal Physical Review Letters and describes the discovery. The second can be found in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and discusses the signal's physical properties and scientific implications.

    GW190521 is one of over 50 gravitational wave triggers presently being investigated at the laser laboratories.

    The pace of research has increased rapidly since the collaboration made its first, Nobel-Prize-winning detection of gravitational waves in 2015.

    "We are increasing the sensitivity of the detectors and, yes, we could end up making more than one detection a day. We will have a rain of black holes! But this is beautiful because we will learn so much more about them," Prof Alessandra Buonanno, director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, told BBC News.

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    • A laser is fed into the machine and its beam is split along two paths
    • The separate paths bounce back and forth between damped mirrors
    • Eventually, the two light parts are recombined and sent to a detector
    • Gravitational waves passing through the lab should disturb the set-up
    • Theory holds they should very subtly stretch and squeeze its space
    • This ought to show itself as a change in the lengths of the light arms
    • The photodetector captures this signal in the recombined beam
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    Image copyright
     
    #530
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  11. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    A great read!
    Thanks for posting.
     
    #531
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  12. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    The first Aston Martin DB5 built in more than 55 years. In association with EON, the makers of the James Bond films, the British marque is building 25 'Goldfinger' Continuation cars (gadgets included) at its factory in Newport Pagnell #UKmfg

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    7
     
    #532
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  13. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    #533
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  14. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    #534
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  15. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    Astronomers have spotted an object named 2020 SO, on an incoming trajectory that is likely to be captured by Earth's gravity. Projections have an object arriving next month, in October 2020, and hanging around until May 202. A temporary new mini moon https://buff.ly/307gtIF



    GIF


    3
     
    #535
  16. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    So geeky!

     
    #536
  17. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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  18. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    Dogs are humans' oldest companions, DNA shows
    By Paul Rincon
    Science editor, BBC News website

    Published
    1 hour ago
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    image copyrightGetty Images
    A study of dog DNA has shown that our "best friend" in the animal world may also be our oldest one.

    The analysis reveals that dog domestication can be traced back 11,000 years, to the end of the last Ice Age.

    This confirms that dogs were domesticated before any other known species.

    Our canine companions were widespread across the northern hemisphere at this time, and had already split into five different types.

    Despite the expansion of European dogs during the colonial era, traces of these ancient indigenous breeds survive today in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania.

    The research fills in some of the gaps in the natural history of our close animal companions.

    Dr Pontus Skoglund, co-author of the study and group leader of the Ancient Genomics laboratory at London's Crick Institute, told BBC News: "Dogs are really unique in being this quite strange thing if you think about it, when all people were still hunter gatherers, they domesticate what is really a wild carnivore - wolves are pretty frightening in many parts of the world.

    "The question of why did people do that? How did that come about? That's what we're ultimately interested in."

    To some extent, dog genetic patterns mirror human ones, because people took their animal companions with them when they moved. But there were also important differences.

    For example, early European dogs were initially diverse, appearing to originate from two very distinct populations, one related to Near Eastern dogs and another to Siberian dogs.

    But at some point, perhaps after the onset of the Bronze Age, a single dog lineage spread widely and replaced all other dog populations on the continent. This pattern has no counterpart in the genetic patterns of people from Europe.

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    image captionThe Rhodesian Ridgeback retains ancestry from an ancient African dog lineage
    Anders Bergström, lead author and post-doctoral researcher at the Crick, said: "If we look back more than four or five thousand years ago, we can see that Europe was a very diverse place when it came to dogs. Although the European dogs we see today come in such an extraordinary array of shapes and forms, genetically they derive from only a very narrow subset of the diversity that used to exist."

    An international team analysed the whole genomes (the full complement of DNA in the nuclei of biological cells) of 27 ancient dog remains associated with a variety of archaeological cultures. They compared these to each other and to modern dogs.

    The results reveal that breeds like the Rhodesian Ridgeback in southern Africa and the Chihuahua and Xoloitzcuintli in Mexico retain genetic traces of ancient indigenous dogs from the region.

    The ancestry of dogs in East Asia is complex. Chinese breeds seem to derive some of their ancestry from animals like the Australian dingo and New Guinea singing dog, with the rest coming from Europe and dogs from the Russian steppe.

    Greger Larson, a co-author from the University of Oxford, said: "Dogs are our oldest and closest animal partner. Using DNA from ancient dogs is showing us just how far back our shared history goes and will ultimately help us understand when and where this deep relationship began."

    The results are consistent with a scenario in which all dogs derive from a single ancient wolf population - or perhaps a few very closely related ones. If there were multiple domestication events around the world, these other lineages did not contribute their DNA to later dogs.
     
    #538
  19. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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  20. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    #540
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