Realising Obvious Things (that Blow Your Mind)

bloodiedathame said:
On a piano, a C sharp key is the same as a D flat. The same goes for all the black keys, they're sharp of the white key to the left and flat of the white key to the right. That was a real penny drop moment on Grade 1 music theory.
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Reminds me of Bill Bailey... Eb or D#, if you prefer... depending on your outlook on life.

Interesting .... "cuppa" is latin for the word "cup". So when people say they "fancy a cuppa" what they're actually saying is they fancy a cup. Likewise the saying "To be in your cups" is to be drunk... so maybe they actually mean they want to get drunk :D
 
EVH said:
Reminds me of Bill Bailey... Eb or D#, if you prefer... depending on your outlook on life.

Interesting .... "cuppa" is latin for the word "cup". So when people say they "fancy a cuppa" what they're actually saying is they fancy a cup. Likewise the saying "To be in your cups" is to be drunk... so maybe they actually mean they want to get drunk :D
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Indeed, there's an Argonian in Skyrim who goes by the name Deep-In-His-Cups.
 
There are 5 lines on musical notation because we have five fingers. Gregorian chanting was the first music to have recorded notation, and a conductor would point to a finger, or between fingers, to indicate which note to sing.
 
bloodiedathame said:
There are 5 lines on musical notation because we have five fingers. Gregorian chanting was the first music to have recorded notation, and a conductor would point to a finger, or between fingers, to indicate which note to sing.
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Is this true? I can't find any reliable source for this.

Plainchant used four lines initially, so I'm having a hard time believing it. Nice idea though! That's not to say that choirs didn't use the lines and spaces in such ways informally, but I doubt whether this was accountable for the stave we now know.
 
Lysander said:
Is this true? I can't find any reliable source for this.

Plainchant used four lines initially, so I'm having a hard time believing it. Nice idea though! That's not to say that choirs didn't use the lines and spaces in such ways informally, but I doubt whether this was accountable for the stave we now know.
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Hmm, I was told it by a lecturer at Uni. I hope it's true!
 
Cooler running said:
It's debatable, but the main belief is that it's all connected into how ancient hominids started a technique called "persistence hunting". This method involved jogging after an animal until it gives up and lets you kill it. We were good at it as we are one of the sweatiest mammals around, losing hair probably helped us achieve this by further allowing for cooling.
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How ironic is your username...
 
bloodiedathame said:
All objects that we look at are absorbing wavelengths of light and only reflecting the wavelengths that we then see. Things that appear black are absorbing a lot of light, things that are white are reflecting almost all wavelengths of light back at us.
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I'm not sure where grey/gray/silver come in though as they're not really made up of the three primary colours. I could Google this, but not sure it's allowed:cool:. My contribution is we were discussing fruit and veg at work and strawberries aren't a Berry, but bananas are. I think that warrants a head exploding emoji. It's to do with seeds being inside for a Berry and bananas have but strawberries don't.
 
adolf hamster said:
how could it expand if it was already infinite? thought we already knew the size of the "universe"?

in order for there to be expansion, there must be a limit that is increasing in order for it to be expanding.

wether or not that limit is something that could ever viably be reached, and what lies beyond is a question nobody in our lifetime (or possible the entire human species) will ever know.

unless we're being pedantic and including whatever the "universe" is expanding into as also part of the universe.

and now i'm confused :p
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Theres the known or rather the observable universe and then theres whatever is beyond that. The further you look across space the further you're looking back in time as light has taken longer and longer to reach us. We can see back to the early days of galaxies but thats about it we can't see the big bang for example nor would it be possible for the first 300,000 years of its existance the universe was opaque a seething mass of plasma and energy after that point it became transparent when elementary particles coalesced into atoms and matter and energy separated.

The known universe cannot possibly be traversed in a human lifetime at least not without shortcuts i.e. wormholes etc

potatolord said:
I thought it was impossible for anything to move faster than light?
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Its impossible for anything to travel through space faster than the speed of light, but the universe isn't travelling through anything. Its simply expanding. The intitial inflation period of the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light.
 
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mattyg said:
Theres only 1 place on your body where you can put your left hand and your right hand can't touch it
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Initially, I thought that has to be somewhere on your right arm, between wrist and shoulder, but on thinking it through, that doesn’t work, well, maybe your right forearm, so put me out of my misery.
I’ll ask my wife in the morning, and she’ll think for 5 or 6 seconds and come up with an answer, she’s always said, “Jean, you’re undoubtedly intelligent, but you have zero common sense.”
 
Assuming things are working properly, when you shine a light into one eye both of your pupils contract, not just the one being lit up. That was a revelation.
 
mattyg said:
Theres only 1 place on your body where you can put your left hand and your right hand can't touch it
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There's several places...

1) The back of your right hand.
2) The back of your right wrist.
3) Your right forearm.
4) Your right elbow.
 
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