A dozen completely random things I learned this week: \ stacker news ~mostly

A dozen completely random things I learned this week:

2059 sats \ 16 comments \ @mallardshead 3 Mar mostly_harmless

At the height of Spartan society there were only 8000-10,000 Spartan soldiers.
A bitcoin conjunction is when the difficulty adjustment and halving occur on the same block; Early next decade (2032) we'll experience our first.
Only two pictures of the US Supreme Court in session exist. Both were illegally taken in the 1930s.
The influence of Zoroastrianism on Western religion and culture is a mindfuck.
Alexei (RIP) Navalny's bitcoin wallet has been active since 2012. O...G? It's still active today. 733 BTC i/o in that timeframe. Here.
The asteroid ending the great lizards would've been visible with the naked eye 3 months before impact. A few days before it hit, its visual order of magnitude would've made it as large and bright as the moon. Imagine the anxiety. Also, some vernacular gets funny here. It's not actually called the Chicxulub Asteroid, because Chicxulub is both the name and location of the crater it caused. The asteroid's actual name is Chicxulub Impactor. 🤷‍♂️
Pretty much every major sci-fi writer was woke AF.
Nuke development during WW2 gets all the attention, but napalm was also developed at the same time. Napalm claimed more lives than nukes during the war after the US Air Force firebombed Tokyo to ash and much of the Japanese island. Interestingly, the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction (not bomb) was tested on University of Chicago's athletic field in 1942, and the first napalm test was on Harvard's athletic field in 1942.
The movie Children of Men is still awesome.
Cali's water troubles are gone for the next couple years, and we should see historic crop production through 2025 that might help us eclipse Germany's economy briefly for the #4 spot. But...Germany is poised to flip Japan for the #3 spot. So maybe #3? These numbers always changing though.
The NCAA is an organization urged into creation by the Teddy Roosevelt Administration in 1905 after too many deaths and horrible injuries in football. The public had risen up demanding the sport be banned from colleges. One such non-player death nearly happened at the Army/Navy game when an Admiral challenged a General to a pistol duel on the field.
Moscow's population (13M) is close to the size of NYC(8.4M), LA(3.8M), and Chicago(2.76M) combined. That big really?

Anything you can add?⤵

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210 sats \ 2 replies \ @OneOneSeven 3 Mar

One of the most infamous UFO sightings in the US were The Phoenix Lights in 1997.

One witness was a pilot that reported seeing the lights above Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

That pilot was Kurt Russell.

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 3 Mar

Escape from New York

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @mallardshead OP 4 Mar

nice one

210 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies 3 Mar

The influence of Zoroastrianism on Western religion and culture is a mindfuck.

The influence from Zoroastrianism on abrahamic religions? Or the other way round? Or influence from a 3r common cultural influence? Or just generally influencing each other and eastern religion due to being on the geographical crossroads in a big melting pot?

200 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 3 Mar

Pretty much every major sci-fi writer was woke AF.

This is an interesting one. Sci-fi is, more than anything, imagining other possibilities for how the world could be, how people could be together, what it means to be a person. On a lot of these vectors woke makes sense -- thinking of Samuel R. Delaney here, for example. On other vectors, you can see woke + anti-woke living together -- Heinlein comes to mind.

Mostly, I think it's the baggage we're carrying around. In another fifty years, some of the currently canceled may be redeemed, and vice-versa.

228 sats \ 2 replies \ @doofus 3 Mar

Right, if you think of the word progressive, that means moving forward. Sci-fi writers are always thinking ahead, not necessarily a conservative behavior.

200 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 3 Mar

I think that's mostly right -- more thinking around than thinking ahead, though, at least the good ones. Sticking to Heinlein, he's at once more "progressive" than most writing today, but also more "regressive". Which is which is in the eye of the beholder.

64 sats \ 0 replies \ @mallardshead OP 4 Mar

I agree with this on Heinlein. I was kind of going through the sci-fi canon after pirating Dune 2 (a visual masterpiece my god), starting back with Lovecraft working through Asimov to about Gibson. Like damn, I didn't even know the wild controversy StarTrek caused in the 60s when it showcased the world's first interracial kiss on film. Or how Asimov got put on the FBI watchlist for his socialist and anti-religious views. Kind of an endless list of stuff. It's not all of them course, but the sci-fi canon much like you and @doofus were saying.

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 3 Mar

Utopian vision

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 3 Mar

Love the smell of napalm , the smell of victory

27 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 3 Mar

Moscow's population (13M) is close to the size of NYC(8.4M), LA(3.8M), and Chicago(2.76M) combined. That big really?

This depends on what you're interested in. The difference in size between administrative area population and metropolitan area population tends to be very large in the US. Each of those US metro areas has more than double the administrative area population.

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 3 Mar

Yeah, how you carve up the geography matters a lot. I always wondered if there was some underlying order to it. Certainly what you decide counts as NYC is not intuitive, as the whole Eastern seaboard feels like one giant city.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 3 Mar

They use statistical clustering based on commute patterns. Once there's enough overlap, two metro areas get merged into one. That's the case for Baltimore and DC, for instance.

27 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 4 Mar

Los Angeles county is about 10 million people

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 4 Mar

and the metro area includes a few other counties

145 sats \ 0 replies \ @mallardshead OP 4 Mar

Moscow and its oblast are about 22M people. Metro areas weren't included, just the city limits of each one. The city of Moscow has a geographical footprint of 2562km2. Chicago is 607km2, LA is 1210 km2, and NYC is 783 km2, which all add up to be almost exactly Moscow's, and what's interesting is the population density of Moscow is about equal to other 3 US cities added and averaged.

for @bitcoin_citizen as well