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  • You know how people used to be able to make tones down phone lines and make free long distance calls and such? The basics behind that were discovered by a surprising number of blind people, many of them children at the time.

  • The dwarves in the elder scrolls, the dwemer, were actually elves of average height. They were named dwarves by the native giants of Skyrim (I think? Might have been another part of Tamriel).

    Also if I remember correctly, neither men nor elves are native to Tamriel. The only native playable races are the Khajit and the Argonians. Nords descended from the Atmorans, who came from the northernmost continent of Atmora.

    • Also if I remember correctly, neither men nor elves are native to Tamriel. The only native playable races are the Khajit and the Argonians.

      This is one of those things in Elder Scrolls with conflicting sources and fan speculation. Like, there's a theory that because of how ohmes furstocks look and the fact that they worship Azura that khajit are actually another colony of chimer that got changed somehow.

  • I don't know if my degree counts as a special interest, but electrical engineering is full of wild things.

    My favorite part about electrical engineering history is something I found when I was writing a paper on electromagnetic coils.

    Predicting the inductance (the characteristic we use the coils for) and self capacitance of such coils as it turns is a very complicated topic. The math for calculating the field in the coils is very difficult, so many engineers have come up with formulas for approximately predicting the inductance.

    Now it turns out that one of these formulas (for the self capacitance of coils), which is still used relatively often, was created by a guy called J. Palmero. His formula is simple and elegant. Unfortunately, if you dig through the data he used to provide evidence that his formula worked, it turns out he SEVERELY "massaged" the experimental data he had gotten from a well respected engineer (Feiedrich Grover) at the NIST. He used this to build reputation for his formula. Throughout my entire research,I only saw basically 2 people (Medhurst* and David Knight) who even seemed to know about this.

    The only way I ended up finding about any of this is because I dug through obscure research papers and data published in the early 20th century.

    Now imagine being a 16 year old doing a school project about coils and then uncovering decades old obscure scientific fraud. I felt like Indiana Jones finding abandoned ruins.

    *the autocorrect seems to have beef with this guy, since it keeps changing his name to "Midhurst" for some reason.

  • Idk if this counts, but the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light. So if the sun instantly vanished, it would take us the same amount of time to both see and feel the effect of its absence.

  • One of the guys who invented modern Tonality (the foundation of western music's structure) was the lutenist Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo Galilei. He was not a particularly rich man and only moderately famous in his day, being outshined by the proto-Florentine camerata who (with his blessing) used his work.

    Here is a song of his. Shockingly modern for a 16th century piece.

    https://youtu.be/0IkaGH5STQQ

  • I'm a bit more into music than many of my friends. So i guess it might count as a "special interest".

    I found this really cool type of music called "microtonal" music, which uses different (and more) notes than traditional western tonal systems. A lot of middle Eastern and Indian music is "microtonal" as well, although that term seems kind of eurocentric when you put it that way.

    Either way, microtonal music can get really wierd and cool. I especially like sevish (on youtube) who makes nice and odd melodies. You can even make microtonal music with as many as 313 distinct tones (although I've never seen anyone use all of them in one song)

  • Mine is that some people don't consider viruses alive. These people are fucking stupid because giruses exist as do virophages. Like yes unalive things literally hunting other unalive things totally makes sense.

    Look up Conway’s game of life for some perspective on how incredibly simple inanimate processes can resemble life.

  • Aliveness isn't a fact about reality, it's a question about how big a circle we draw around things that exist and say "these are 'alive'". It's a semantic discussion.

    I have a lot of special interests and lots of facts, but since I'm going through a spaghetti western phase rn I'll just share this quote from Sergio Leone:

    • This also fascinates me. According to our definition of life viruses are not actually alive. But by that same definition, fire is as "alive" as a virus.

      I tend to agree. Fire isn't alive. It does technically slot into a lot of our requirements though. Viruses aren't really alive either. Without a host they just sit dormant until they either decay from the environment or eventually find a host. Without a host body they are incapable of acting. But barring harsh environmental circumstances, they can technically lie dormant for eternity. Something "alive" things cannot do.

      But we can't just define it like porn: "I know it when I see it." That's not an acceptable definition. Without getting into solipsism, and p-zombies, and blah blah blah; I'm alive. You're alive. Cats are alive (and also extremely cool).

      I don't think LLMs are alive. I don't even think they are intelligent in any capacity. But at what point does an AI become "alive?" How do we define that? A Turing test? If it passes a Turing test, it still doesn't meet several of the requirements for "life" as currently defined. What then? Do we redefine "life", or do we relegate a new form of life as "non-life", to be used and abused? That seems horrifying.

      I have no answers. It's just something I find really interesting to think about.

      • I would consider viruses alive because they can replicate and evolve. I think it's unfair for us to put unnecessary standards on them. They are trying their best.

        Also, being able to go dormant for thousands of years and waking up to cause havoc in the right circumstances is literally final boss behaviour. We gotta give em credit for that at least.

23 comments