askchapo

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.

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.

Ciabatta bread was created in 1982 by an Italian baker concerned that Baguettes for sandwiches were becoming too popular

Your foot and forearm (from wrist to elbow) are about the same length

You remember the quadratic formula that you used in high school to solve 2nd degree polynomial equations? The reason it exists is because 2 is the only number whose factorial is prime (2! = 2).

Most people don't learn it in high school but there is also a cubic formula for 3rd degree equations. The reason it exists is because if you have an equilateral triangle with labeled vertices and you decide to randomly shuffle the vertices, the resulting triangle will be a rotation or reflection of the original triangle, and no other polygon does that.

A 4th degree formula exists, but it's too large to be convenient to use. The reason it exists is because the non regular polygon with the smallest sides that has more than one reflection symmetry is the rectangle, which has 4 sides.

Galois theory is full of weird coincidences like that. Also there is no formula for degrees 5 and above and there never will be because there is no coincidences like these with the numbers 5 and above, and I personally think that is really interesting.

Only one country in history has ever developed orbital spaceflight, and then abandoned that capability: Britain.

And they did it because they trusted a handshake agreement with the United States that the US would always launch British payloads on favourable terms.

You'll never guess what happened with that handshake agreement!

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.

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)

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

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: