Monday Overnight Open Thread - January 28, 2025 [scampydog}

Not tired of winning. Trump, his agenda, and people off to a helluva start.

Border Czar Tom Homan warned that daily deportation numbers are set to rise in the coming weeks as President Trump's administration begins to expand its operations.

Put on your thinking caps and adjust your TV antenna for better reception.

Who recalls when television signed off for the evening?

The most famous television test pattern or test card, the RCA Indian-head.

Those a bit younger will recall the SMPTE version.

The logic behind the layout.

The chart was designed to both check transmitter performance from the studio to the antenna and allow the audience to determine the degree of performance of their individual receivers. In addition to the advantage of being a static signpost, of sorts, the chart revealed geometrical defects, horizontal and vertical degrees of picture resolution, and a range of shading gradations.

Remember When Television Ended at Midnight?

In the early 1960s, stations started to get creative with their playing of the Star Spangled Banner, many choosing to show various images of American life with the music playing in the background. Through the 1970's and 1980's, studios experimented with many different forms and formats, but no matter what, this was the sign that kids used to know it was *really* time to go to bed!

A local station played this Blue Angels video every night - prior to playing the Star Spangled Banner and signing off.

And those trying to get Cinemax (which never went off air) did not get a test card but did get something that resembled this.

Science, ONT Style.

H/T to fellow Moron, Publius for a bigly ONT science assist and Feynman quote.

"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." - Richard P. Feynman

Albert R. Broccoli and United Artists lied! It does not work that way. That rascal 007 and Holly Goodhead.

Read the whole thing. So much comedy material.

More than 675 people have traveled to space, but according to NASA, none of them have had sex in the final frontier.

Beyond the snark - some science, space style.

Newton's third law of physics. Pretty straightforward material.

Some very interesting space related incidental learning sessions, courtesy of Publius.

Principal Axis Theorem. Rotating bodies can do some very non-intuitive things. Here's a video demonstrating this effect: Publius.

The "Principal Axis Theorem" is about the moments of inertia of a general 3D body. This is probably getting into mathematical details too much for a post (the no-math rule), but the result of that is for any 3D body, no matter how odd shaped and lacking symmetry, you can find 3 orthogonal axes for which the moments of inertia tensor/matrix take a simple diagonal form. These are the three principal moments of inertia, the "I's", I1, I2, I3. They can be equal, or different. In the general case, you arrange it where say, I1 > I2 > I3. Publius.

This is sometimes called the Tennis Racket Theorem, or the Dzhanibekov effect, the latter after a Russian cosmonaut who noticed it spinning wing nuts off studs in orbit. It scared him, thinking "could the earth do that?" There was this bit that the Russians were "afraid" to talk about the tumbling wing nut incident because they were worried the earth could do something like that. I don't think they ever were really, as this behavior was known. The earth does wobble a bit, due to external gravitational torques, and internal mass redistributions, but we can be assured it's stable overall and no flipping around. The proper name for this is the Intermediate Axis Theorem. Here is a nice explanatory video: Publius.

For a sphere, they're all equal, and any axis is a principal axis. A sphere has perfect 3D symmetry. On the other hand, an odd shaped object will have perhaps no symmetry at all, and in that case, it will have 3 different moments, about some particular set of axes. The Intermediate Axis Theorem states that rotation about the largest or the smallest axes (I1 and I3) is stable, but rotation about the middle one, I2 is unstable. Things will tumble. That's the Tennis Racket effect. If two moments of inertia are equal, say we have I1 > I2 = I3, or I1 = I2 > I3, we have no intermediate axis. A cylinder or disk has this property. -Publius

Science Jokes (pun away, Horde).

The rotation of the Earth makes my day.

Did you hear about the restaurant on Mercury? The lighting was good but it had zero atmosphere.

The internet delivering the funny.

It all started with a screenshot from TikTok with the text "When his name starts with J and rhymes with one of the 50 states."

"Can't believe Jississippi would do this," one commenter wrote.

"Wait till Jisconsin hears about this!" another commented.

Stellar ONT Finish

Tonight's ONT brought to you by knowing who to sit next to in science class. Regular commenter Some Rat gets it.

269 3rd to last is Reforger (REE!) Posted by: Helena Handbasket

(Moves desk to left and slightly behind Helena's desk)
Posted by: Some Garbage Rat at December 31, 2024

Send crustless tramezzini sammiches to: scampydog at protonmail dot com.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:00 PM

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