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[Is it cold in here?]

A crunching sound from cartilage is called "crepitus" and it's the same root as in "decrepit".

[Morituri]

Most of the time in the US, modifications to a car are legal, subject to a DMV safety inspection.  In California (and now a bunch of other places) modifications to the engine or exhaust system are not: they will cause your car to fail its 'smog test' even if they reduce smog.  You're not allowed to change that thing that was approved by some committee with something that wasn't. For a while, this meant that converting cars to electric drive, eliminating all possibility of burning fuel and producing exhaust, would cause them to fail their smog inspections.  But that's gotten better; now there's just a form that someone can fill out.

Wanna know what they still get tetchy about? 

If you have to change anything about the way the seat belt or the seat itself is attached, your registration ceases to exist.  People buy aftermarket bucket seats all the time but they don't change the seat mounting.  People buy and install five-point harnesses occasionally, but when they do they don't remove the stock seat belt.  When you cross that line, that car is no longer legally a product of the company that made it.  Your Ford Fiesta isn't a Ford Fiesta any more. You have to get new registration, new plates, fill out a custom-car-builder's form, name the new make-and-model, get a builder's VIN issued by the state, etc etc etc....  and since there's no baseline data for your newly-built vehicle, you get future smog inspections under a special 'unknown' category that about two-thirds of production cars actually fail.  When your insurance company wants to know what kind of car you have, you are not allowed to call it a Ford Fiesta.  Insurance may be hard to find, and possibly even expensive.

All of which means, yes, that kind of modification is *technically* legal, but the car company, otherwise under strict liability for accidents and incidents, wants nothing more to do with it because if you designed and built your own attachments for the seat belt, or changed the linkage between the seat and the frame, then your safety is no longer subject to the protections they were expected to provide. 

I've done this three times now.  :-/

[Thrillho]

A crunching sound from cartilage is called "crepitus" and it's the same root as in "decrepit".

That means I heard 'crepitus' when I got the top of my ear pierced I guess.

[Blue Kitty]

I learned that gorillas only have one blood type, while horses have over 400,000

[Cornelius]

Most of the time in the US, modifications to a car are legal, subject to a DMV safety inspection.  In California (and now a bunch of other places) modifications to the engine or exhaust system are not: they will cause your car to fail its 'smog test' even if they reduce smog.  You're not allowed to change that thing that was approved by some committee with something that wasn't. For a while, this meant that converting cars to electric drive, eliminating all possibility of burning fuel and producing exhaust, would cause them to fail their smog inspections.  But that's gotten better; now there's just a form that someone can fill out.

Wanna know what they still get tetchy about? 

If you have to change anything about the way the seat belt or the seat itself is attached, your registration ceases to exist.  People buy aftermarket bucket seats all the time but they don't change the seat mounting.  People buy and install five-point harnesses occasionally, but when they do they don't remove the stock seat belt.  When you cross that line, that car is no longer legally a product of the company that made it.  Your Ford Fiesta isn't a Ford Fiesta any more. You have to get new registration, new plates, fill out a custom-car-builder's form, name the new make-and-model, get a builder's VIN issued by the state, etc etc etc....  and since there's no baseline data for your newly-built vehicle, you get future smog inspections under a special 'unknown' category that about two-thirds of production cars actually fail.  When your insurance company wants to know what kind of car you have, you are not allowed to call it a Ford Fiesta.  Insurance may be hard to find, and possibly even expensive.

All of which means, yes, that kind of modification is *technically* legal, but the car company, otherwise under strict liability for accidents and incidents, wants nothing more to do with it because if you designed and built your own attachments for the seat belt, or changed the linkage between the seat and the frame, then your safety is no longer subject to the protections they were expected to provide. 

I've done this three times now.  :-/

My father converted a couple of vans to motor homes, and that's something you can't touch here, either - or, even, if the car is old enough, install them, in the first place. The procedure here, is that you can do it, but you need a licence as a car builder, and you need to have it shipped back to the manufacturer to have it checked, and marked compliant to safety standards.

[sitnspin]

I learned that gorillas only have one blood type, while horses have over 400,000

So can horses get blood transfusions?

[hedgie]

Considering that they’re usually considered more valuable than humans, I’d presume so.

[Cornelius]

Apparently, despite the huge number of blood types, yes, they can. There's no antibodies originally present against other blood types, so any horse can give another horse their first transfusion. A second one can be trickier, as then, there are. Or so a veterinary knowledge base tells me.

[sitnspin]

I have a friend who has AA degree in equine studies, I will have to ask them about this later.

[Tova]

Considering that they’re usually considered more valuable than humans, I’d presume so.

Interesting. By whom!

[hedgie]

Capitalist society.

[sitnspin]

To be fair, a hamburger is considered more valuable than a human in a capitalist society.

[Tova]

ha ha 

[Gyrre]

Considering that they’re usually considered more valuable than humans, I’d presume so.

Interesting. By whom!

Wealthy douche nozzles.

[Gyrre]

There's a TNG manga.

[Dock Braun]

To be fair, a hamburger is considered more valuable than a human in a capitalist society.

To say that it's more valuable, lacks necessary nuance. The hamburger, to the consumer, has a more direct value, than the stranger bringing it to the consumer. Strangers, though, often have a greater value to the consumer, than any one hamburger, less directly. The stranger's presence aids the bringing of the hamburger, and more---of whatever other service---to the consumer. One stranger likely contributes more than one hamburgers' worth.
And then, of course, to whom? To one consumer, perhaps, some stranger is lower valued than a hamburger. To another, maybe too. Maybe to each consumer. To all consumers? A hamburger is valuable to one consumer. The value of the stranger, is to many. In sum, the stranger may be worth more.
Upon a closer inspection of the hamburger, one may find many strangers participating in the added value. In sum, to the consumer, those strangers' value is exactly the value of the burger. Those strangers, though, bring more benefit, to the consumer, than by that one burger. They bring another burger, to another consumer, who thereby better brings value to other consumers, etc.
Perhaps it is a bit shallow, to consider the value of a person, to another, in terms of how much they contribute to the bringing of hamburgers, or whatever other service; nonetheless, to any consumer, that is where the ultimate value is. Rather, the value is exclusively in the consumer; others may only bring the hamburger so far, before it's more efficient for the consumer to complete their own value, ingesting, enjoying.

[Wombat]

There's a TNG manga.

My brain converted the acronym correctly, but also assumed it referred to Degrassi: The Next Generation, and now I want that manga.

[Morituri]

Sometime in the 19th century, pneumatic tubes were constructed under Manhattan for the delivery of mail.  They were sealed tubes that were installed mostly through existing underground infrastructure such as sewers and steam tunnels.  Letters and small packages, pushed along by forced air moving at 35 mph, ran to and from post offices and, where traffic (and expensive fees) justified it, to offices in high-rise buildings in the financial district.  These were used up until 1935, after which a couple of post offices moved, and a couple of new ones had been constructed, and it just wasn't worth anybody's time and money to extend the system.  Mail is now distributed via more conventional methods.

The Urban Legend:
These tubes still exist underground, and various shifts and ruptures have opened connections to them from the sewers, steam tunnels, etc. in which they were originally built. In the course of remodeling, several unscrupulous architects have taken advantage of these abandoned tubes as drains through which rain can be diverted into the infrastructure below where it will be "somebody else's problem" and the upper ends now open in gutters and on slopes many stories high in the buildings that were once served with pneumatic mail.  But, because the buildings are heated, these long stretches of the tube that run up through the building are held at temperatures much warmer than the outside air resulting, on cold winter days, in a powerful draft from those places deep in the earth that comes whistling out of these tubes at high speed.  And every so often, a hapless cat, hunting rats deep in the underground, wanders too close to one of the air intakes and gets sucked up, through a twisting, turning, terrifying maze of tubing that batters the poor beast until finally it is launched, terrified, yowling, and often injured, out into the void thirty stories above ground.  In certain offices these creatures are occasionally heard as they are launched nearby; in certain apartments which happen to be situated downrange, a cat, sometimes badly injured, occasionally lands on the balcony and, as soon as it recovers its consciousness and/or composure, demands to be let in.  In other places cats are not so lucky and there is nowhere to land....

The Truth:
The guy who built this system back in eighteen-seventy-whatever, for reasons unknown, chose to test its suitability for 'fragile' packages by sending a cat, in a box, between stations to see whether it arrived at the destination with injuries.  Why he chose this bizarre method of testing, as opposed to getting a bunch of tableware - plates, cups, glasses, etc - from a thrift store is unknown, and has led to some speculation about whether he just personally hated that particular cat.  But ever since then people have been talking about cats getting into the tubes and 'accidentally' delivered to one of the destination stations. "High rise" buildings, in the context of eighteen-seventy-whatever, were no more than seven stories tall, and anyway the pneumatic delivery systems were all situated on the ground floor.

[hedgie]

A cat in a box can actually be in one of three determinate states: alive, dead, and bloody furious. 

[cesium133]

A cat in a box can actually be in one of three determinate states: alive, dead, and bloody furious.

That’s not an orthonormal basis set. The cat can be both alive and bloody furious. Given it’s a cat, it is probably capable of being both dead and bloody furious, too.

Edit— I suppose it could be a valid basis if the cat is capable of being dead and bloody furious. Also, if the cat is not normalized, in which case making the cat more furious causes it to become less alive.

I haven’t been sleeping well this week, so I’m sure none of this makes any sense at all.

Edit 2– I may be thinking of this wrong. I’m picturing it as a three dimensional system— aliveness, deadness, and furiousness. But aliveness and deadness are linked— unless we allow the cat to be neither alive nor dead. In which case it’s actually only a two dimensional system, an alive-dead axis and a furiousness axis. I have no idea where I’m going with this.

[Morituri]

Now I have to wonder if Heisenberg had this incident in mind when he constructed his famous thought experiment.

Edit:  Of course I should have typed Schroedinger.  Thanks Hedgie, for the correction.

[Morituri]

And anyway, if it worked as the urban legend claims, it would be a rat launcher far more often than a cat launcher anyway.

[hedgie]

Now I have to wonder if Heisenberg had this incident in mind when he constructed his famous thought experiment.

Schrödinger, please.  I was also stealing from Pratchett here.

[Pilchard123]

A box with a cat in the "bloody furious" state needs a label saying "this side towards enemy" on the lid.

[hedgie]

Especially when that cat is Greebo.

[Morituri]

Bloody furious is the ground state for some cats. We call them "up" cats.
For others, the ground state is asleep.  We call them "down" cats.
Some never enter the injured state; they are known as "charmed" cats.
And more than a few simply vanish the first time some experimentor does something they don't like.  They are called "strange" cats, and exhibit a property known as "feline tunnelling"  whereby they may appear in an adjacent space, seemingly at random.....

[N.N. Marf]

When Erwin Schrödinger tubed his cat home after that infamous experiment, it stayed both dead and alive---superpositional resiliency being a markčd quality of boxed cats. He was damned sure it'd be bloody furious on the other end---even after collapsing it's superposition, irregarding whence---result: negative; leading to the development of the bottom or top cat distinction.

[LeeC]

I recently learned that the Toucan bird has clear skin and you can see through it if you brush the feathers out of the way.

Here are some pictures.
https://imgur.com/gallery/9oqKDJj

[Veritable_Variable]

When Erwin Schrödinger tubed his cat home after that infamous experiment, it stayed both dead and alive---superpositional resiliency being a markčd quality of boxed cats. He was damned sure it'd be bloody furious on the other end---even after collapsing it's superposition, irregarding whence---result: negative; leading to the development of the bottom or top cat distinction.

He would either get a ferocious live cat or a vengeful ghost cat upon opening the box.

[Is it cold in here?]

I halfway knew this already but it was fascinating to learn the rest.

All I have to do is pop the hood on my Prius to see that three-phase AC can be synthesized with power transistors. That's starting from DC, but today I learned that it's A Thing for industrial motors to get plugged into single-phase circuits and use analogous circuity to generate three phases from it and run the motor from that.

[Morituri]

I'm making a new coat for next winter -  I do go a few places where it's actually cold.

I avoided a mistake I made once, a few years ago, and started by visiting a coin laundry (in American, the word is "Laundromat" - but I don't know if that's widely used) with a washer that takes large loads.  Learning, as the thread title puts it, has occurred. 

Because I know now that the first time you wash ten yards of 60-inch wide 24-ounce cotton fabric in hot water, you get nine yards of 52-inch wide 30-ounce fabric.  It's best to do that before you cut your pattern pieces, or you'll be making clothes for someone smaller than yourself.

Yes, I'm using #4 canvas for the shell fabric of a  greatcoat.  Yes, I'm making a slightly-modified copy of an actual regency-era greatcoat, with the capes and everything.  Because when you make your own clothes, you get to make whatever clothes you want.

[Thrudd]

A box with a cat in the "bloody furious" state needs a label saying "this side towards enemy" on the lid.

Maxim 62. Anything labelled "This side towards enemy" is dangerous at both sides

[Gnabberwocky]

Learned from a conversation with a friend today that bats are important pollinators of certain tropical and desert plants.

[Thrillho]

Learned from a conversation with a friend today that bats are important

[Tova]

TIL

[LeeC]

TIL that Jackie Chan did the Chinese Mandarin dub of Beast for Beauty and the Beast.

[pwhodges]

I learnt today that the Arabic form of my first name also means urine or piss.

[Is it cold in here?]

It was obvious in hindsight, but I learned the etymology of "religion".

[Morituri]

Today I confused two French words.  "Embaiser" means to kiss, and "Baiser" means to ... I'm going to say lovemaking but it's the crude word for it.

I had intended to use the first word, and accidentally found the second kicking around my head, and said something considerably more forceful than I intended to say.  I had intended something like "people who want to kiss, but don't because they fear the disapproval of others, are depriving themselves of happiness."  I messed it up because it was too complicated for my horribly rusty half-forgotten French.

When I learned what I had actually said and why people were giving me their best shocked-and-almost-offended looks,  I apologized, saying I had made a mistake, and that smoothed feathers over.  And then someone asked a question which I thoughtlessly answered.  "Oui, je pense que c'est aussi vrai."  or yes I do in fact think the thing I didn't mean to say is also true.  And everybody went back to that shocked-and-almost-offended look again.

I can blame the first one on not speaking French for years and dipping my toes into that conversation anyway against my better judgment. The second, however, is a thing I am all too familiar with because I do it in English as well.  Ask me a straightforward question and my mouth will open with the truth as best I know it whether or not it happens to be a polite thing to say.  I can't seem to come up with anything else once the question is hanging there in the air.  It's a bit of a personality flaw.

I will continue to forget French vocabulary for a long time, but I will never forget, or confuse, those two words again.

[LeeC]

You can still use "un baiser" as a noun for kiss, but using it as a verb is a bit vulgar. Either that or all the children songs I learned means something very different now.

[Morituri]

It was in fact a poem that I learned while a student of French that kicked around in the back of my head and gave me that word at that moment. I knew the line, I knew the translation was about stolen kisses, deduced the wrong word and, well, the rest is "a learning experience." 

It's a bit of a slippery spot, probably an easy mistake to make.  I can't say much because mostly I speak English, which has so many such slippery spots that it doesn't bear examination in comparison to anything. 

I

[cesium133]

I tried to learn French using Rosetta Stone once. All I learned from it is that the correct pronunciation of ‘voiture’ is ‘Fuck you.’

[Is it cold in here?]

I have a personal belief that if you never make a humiliating mistake in a language you are studying then you are not trying hard enough. That idea does smell like a rationalization.

[LeeC]

It wasn't until I moved to Massachusetts did I learn that turkeys have chest beards. Theres a flock of a dozen turkeys in my neighbor hood and it was kind of a shock to discover this.

[hedgie]

I have learnt that it's much better to open port 22 on the firewall *before* heading out and trying to remotely access the server.

[Tova]

[Morituri]

Bob Dole has recently passed away. I was a resident of Kansas while he was serving as a senator (and Senate Majority Leader, and chair of more important congressional committees than I can count) for that state.

People who didn't like his politics all thought he was a crook, but also knew that he was a very effective crook who did a lot for the interests of his constituents.  People who liked his politics also knew him as a very effective senator, and generally looked into things and decided that once you got past the hyperbole he had done a lot of tricky deals but wasn't an actual crook.  Veterans, whether they liked or didn't like his politics, respected the hell out of his military service record and the circumstances under which he got his Purple Heart.  Everybody knew that he was smarter than a bathtub full of professors.  The sheer raw intellect of the man was astonishing. But not very many people liked him personally.  There was just something offputting about him.

A thing I didn't learn until his ill-fated run for the Presidency, however, was that "Dole", if you spell it in the Arabic alphabet, and in such a way that people would pronounce it correctly, is inescapably the  Arabic word for "Penis."  How to spell his name for purposes of news headlines apparently became something of a controversy in the Middle East.

[Morituri]

The Crocodile is more closely related to birds than anything else which is not actually a bird.  (Common ancestor lived 240 mya).

The Coelecanth is more closely related to cats than it is to other fish.

Hyenas are more closely related to elephants, cats, and golden moles than they are to dogs.

Sea squirts (you know, the ones that are famous for finding a nice spot to spend the rest of their lives, digging into it and then devouring their own brains because they're not needed any more after that?) are more closely related to vertebrates than they are related to any other invertebrate.

[hedgie]

So maybe cślecanths should be renamed "catfish".

[Tova]

The Coelecanth is more closely related to cats than it is to other fish.

I take it that this means that the Coelacanth and the cat have a more recent common ancestor than the Coelacanth and other species of fish.

I've come across this kind of factoid quite a few times, and to be honest, I mentally lump it with other TBU* knowledge, like "tomatoes are a fruit" and "I am 37% Scottish." Most people don't put tomatoes into fruit salad. A precise percentage of heritage doesn't translate into just how "Scottish" you look, act, or sound. Coelacanth probably don't purr to self-heal.

* true but useless