What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second?

—Dylan

If this is going to happen, I hope it doesn't happen late in the afternoon next Friday.

The Earth rotates,^{[citation needed]} which means its midsection is being flung outward by centrifugal force.[1]Which is still a real thing. This centrifugal force isn't strong enough to overcome gravity and tear the Earth apart, but it's enough to flatten the Earth slightly and make it so you weigh almost a pound less at the Equator than you do at the poles.[2]This is due to several effects, including centrifugal force, the flattened shape of the Earth, and the fact that if you go far enough toward the pole in North America people start offering you poutine.

If the Earth (and everything on it) were suddenly sped up so that a day only lasted one second, the Earth wouldn't even last a single day.[3]Either kind. The Equator would be moving at over 10% of the speed of light. Centrifugal force would become much stronger than gravity, and the material that makes up the Earth would be flung outward.

You wouldn't die instantly—you might survive for a few milliseconds or even seconds. That might not seem like much, but compared to the speed at which you'd die in other What If articles involving relativistic speeds, it's pretty long.

The Earth's crust and mantle would break apart into building-sized chunks. By the time a second[4]I mean, a day. had passed, the atmosphere would have spread out too thin to breathe—although even at the relatively stationary poles, you probably wouldn't survive long enough to asphyxiate.

In the first few seconds, the expansion would shatter the crust into spinning fragments and kill just about everyone on the planet, but that's relatively peaceful compared to what would happen next.

Everything would be moving at relativistic speeds, but each piece of the crust would be moving at close to the same speed at its neighbors. This means things would be relatively calm ... until the disk hit something.

The first obstacle would be the belt of satellites around the Earth. After 40 milliseconds, the ISS would be struck by the edge of the expanding atmosphere and would be vaporized instantly. More satellites would follow. After a second and a half, the disc would reach the belt of geostationary satellites orbiting above the Equator. Each one would release a violent burst of gamma rays as the Earth consumed it.

The debris from the Earth would slice outward like an expanding buzzsaw. The disk would take about ten seconds to pass the Moon, another hour to spread past the Sun, and would span the Solar System within a day or two. Each time the disc engulfed an asteroid, it would spray a flood of energy in all directions, eventually sterilizing every surface in the Solar System.

Since the Earth is tilted, the Sun and the planets aren't usually lined up with the plane of the Earth's equator. They'd have a good chance of avoiding the buzzsaw[5]I keep reading this as "Buzzfeed". directly.

However, Next Friday, April 25th, the Moon will cross the plane of the Earth's equator (as it does every two weeks). If Dylan sped up the Earth at this moment, the Moon would be right in the path of the resulting planetary buzzsaw.

The impact would turn the moon into a comet, sending it rocketing from the Solar System in a spray of debris. The flash of light and heat would be so bright that if you were standing at the surface of the Sun, it would be brighter above you than below. Every surface in the Solar System—Europa's ice, Saturn's rings, and Mercury's rocky crust—would be scoured clean ...

... by moonlight.

Torta de amendoim com filtrado gourmet por Mexido de Ideias

Quem diria que o prosaico amendoim, que acompanha nossas bebidas ou é vendido em praias e estádios de futebol, já era cultivado há 4 mil anos pelos índios peruanos? Existem também vestígios de seu plantio domesticado no sudoeste do Brasil e na divisa com o Paraguai na era pré-colombiana. Apesar de parecer uma fruta seca como a noz, ele é uma leguminosa que cresce debaixo da terra. Em certas línguas recebe o nome de “noz do chão”.

O amendoim já havia sido bastante difundido na época das viagens de Colombo, sendo cultivado em Santo Domingo, na República Dominicana, quando o explorador por lá desembarcou. Depois, espanhóis e portugueses introduziram a preciosidade mundo afora.

É curioso como as culinárias chinesa, japonesa e tailandesa utilizam mais a leguminosa em suas receitas salgadas e, no Brasil, ela aparece em sua maioria em preparações doces. Claro, com exceções: ela surge salgada principalmente na culinária baiana, que deve muito de suas origens aos costumes africanos.

No entanto, como nossas receitas foram muito influenciadas pela doçaria conventual portuguesa, facilitada pela farta produção de açúcar no Brasil, muito dele foi combinado ao amendoim.

Aí vai minha receita para uma Páscoa brasileiríssima. Essa torta é feita para quem adora o danado do amendoim e, claro, o abençoado café.

Receita de torta de amendoim com filtrado gourmet

Tempo de preparo: 40 minutos (Mais 1h de geladeira)
Rendimento: 8 porções

Torta de amendoim com filtrado gourmet por Mexido de Ideias

ROK Espresso Maker e o preparo manual do café por Mexido de Ideias

O visual metálico e robusto da ROK Espresso Maker nos dá uma pista da filosofia de trabalho de seus criadores: o método incentiva o preparo manual do café! Lançada em 2002, a máquina faz espressos usando a própria força do corpo para gerar a pressão necessária para uma boa extração.

O método funciona de forma parecida com as cafeteiras de pistão (para gerar a pressão ideal), e dispensa o uso de eletricidade. Você só precisa de um café fresco – moído para espresso – e água quente.

O passo a passo é básico: Coloque o pó de café no porta-filtro, que é idêntico ao de uma máquina de espressos comum. Ferva a água e encha o recipiente superior. Depois, é só elevar as alavancas para que o líquido desça – e abaixá-las com a força das mãos. A bebida sairá do equipamento diretamente para a sua xícara.

Para entender melhor sobre o funcionamento da ROK Espresso Maker, basta dar play no vídeo abaixo:

A ROK,empresa responsável pela máquina, entrega seus produtos para o mundo todo. Ficou interessado? Basta acessar este link e encomendar uma Espresso Maker para sua casa por cerca de R$ 400 (£ 107,50). O preço é um tanto salgado, mas o sabor do café deve ser delicioso!

Por: Lucas Tavares

ROK Espresso Maker e o preparo manual do café por Mexido de Ideias

In his ongoing series of photos titled Moon Games, French photographer Laurent Lavender has subjects play with a rising moon, effectively tansforming it into a balloon, a painting, and even a scoop of ice cream. The dreamlike photos have been turned into a calendar and a (French-only) book of poetry as well as a few other objects. You can see more of his work over on Facebook. (via IFLScience)

John Scalzi gets it.

by @juan_domenech

by Kain

by secondhype

Yep, been there, done that.

[Source: MercWorks | College Humor | Via CB]

Don’t let her go, Sub-Zero!

[Via GT]

Mas, ainda assim, é só uma terça.

O post Mentirinhas #621 apareceu primeiro em Mentirinhas.

Google has developed an algorithm that can decipher house numbers from Street View images with impressive accuracy. The problem is that the algorithm can match or even outperform humans when confronted with Google’s own use of CAPTCHA tests.

Because so much of the data collection for Google Maps is automated, the first drafts of the maps often lack the ability to match a specific number to a specific building, meaning maps can’t always highlight a particular building (or part of a larger building) in a street.

One way round this is to automatically hunt for building numbers that appear in the images captured for the Street View images. That’s not always easy as the numbers on the side of buildings appear in many different typefaces at different sizes and with differing degrees of contrast to the backgrounds.

In a paper published via Cornell University, Google researchers have rethought the way this recognition works. It says traditionally computer systems work on image recognition in three distinct steps: figuring out what part of the image actually houses the characters, breaking it down into manageable sections, then recognizing it piece by piece.

In this case, the researchers instead developed what they call “a deep convolutional neural network that operates directly on the image pixels.” In simpler terms, they tried to develop a system that looks at the entire image and tried to recognize characters in a single process. That’s the technique humans use and has usually been considered as a task computers can’t perform as quickly.

The researchers say they initially tested their algorithm on the Street View House Numbers (SVHN) dataset, a selection of images Google makes publicly available for testing and refining automated recognition tools. The algorithm successfully recognized 96 percent of complete numbers and 97.84 percent of individual digits.

They then turned to the complete Google database, which contains many images considered too difficult to be worth including in SVHN. Here they still managed 90 percent accuracy.

Realizing the technique might work in other areas, the researchers then tried the algorithm on reCAPTCHA, Google’s own system used to distinguish between humans and bots. Not only does reCAPCTAH use letters as well as numbers, but it also distorts the image. The idea is that humans can quickly piece together and reverse-engineer the effects of the distortion, whereas a computer is forced to try out every possible change to get back to the original image and then recognize the characters.

According to the researchers, the algorithm was able to get 99.8% accuracy on the hardest category in the reCAPTCHA test.

Google now concedes that reCAPTCHA as it stands may no longer be sufficient to distinguish between human and machine:

Thanks to this research, we know that relying on distorted text alone isn’t enough. However, it’s important to note that simply identifying the text in CAPTCHA puzzles correctly doesn’t mean that reCAPTCHA itself is broken or ineffective. On the contrary, these findings have helped us build additional safeguards against bad actors in reCAPTCHA.

Understandably Google isn’t detailing these changes, which have involved cooperation between the researchers and the reCAPTCHA department. However, the paper suggests the simplest option is to make the CAPTCHA text longer, something that not only requires more computer resources to automatically crack, but also increases the significance of whatever error rate does exist.

It also suggests a more effective change would be to have the CAPTCHA text sliding around over a static image background, effectively creating a moving target for automated recognition.

by imaginarythomas

If all the seas were one sea,
What a great sea that would be!
If all the trees were one tree,
What a great tree that would be!
If all the men were one man,
What a great man that would be!
If all the axes were one axe,
What a great axe that would be!
And if the great man took the great axe,
And cut down the great tree,
And let if fall into the great sea,
What a great splish-splash that would be!

... How great would all of these things be?

—John Eifert (quoting a Mother Goose rhyme)

If all the seas were combined into one sea, it would look pretty much like the Pacific Ocean, only a little bigger.

The poem's tree, axe, and human are more interesting.

The tree

Real trees can't grow taller than around 130 meters, thanks to physical limits on their ability to transport water. If they found a way around those limits, they'd face issues of fundamental physical strength; a kilometers-tall tree would crush itself.

Let's set aside these limits, and imagine that we built a single standard tree out of all the material in all the world's trees.

For our "standard tree," we'll use the oak tree from the Sylva Foundation's OneOak project. The project extensively documents every detail of a single oak tree. As part of the project, the tree was cut down in 2010. Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of the whole thing, but it's as good a candidate as any for our model "standard tree".

The OneOak tree was 23.9 meters tall and weighed 14.385 tons.[1]Slightly more of the mass was in the branches than the trunk. By comparison, one paper estimates that the world's forests have an aboveground plant mass of about 470 billion tons.

If—ignoring the physical constraints—we combined this mass into a single tree, modeled on the OneOak, the trunk would be two kilometers in diameter. The upper branches would stretch about 75 kilometers above the surface—most of the way to space.

The human

If we used the same approach to combine every living human into a single body—again, ignoring the obvious physical constraints—that person would be close to 3 kilometers tall.

Proportionally, the person would have grown slightly less than the tree.

The axe

How many axes are there in the world?

Thanks to multiple meanings of the word "axes", this is a hard problem to Google.[2]That, and the fact that it's a weird statistic that no one has any real reason to try to gather data on even if they could find a way to do so. Instead, let's try to get a reasonable guess through Fermi estimation.

Since there's no central clearinghouse of axe-related information, I thought I'd try asking friends how many axes they had.

But this might miss a lot of axes; for example, some axes—like fire axes—are owned by organizations. To get a slightly fairer sample, I asked a bunch of friends around the country to estimate the number of axes and number of humans in their general vicinity.

Some people were in houses with sheds, and had a 2:1 human-to-axe ratio. Other people were in large offices with hundreds of people and at best one or two fire axes. The average seemed to be around 50:1—much lower than I expected.[3]I grew up in a house with a wood shop, and we always had a roughly 1:1 axe-to-human ratio.

Of course, surveying random Internet-connected people who I know is hardly representative; rural people probably have more axes, while the very poor might not have any. But it also wouldn't make sense for there to be substantially more axes than people, if for no other reason than that humans can only really use one axe at a time.

But absent any other data, I'm guessing the ratio of humans to axes is probably somewhere between 50:1 and 5:1.

This means that our combined axe would be a little small for our combined person. It would be only a little over half a kilometer long—barely more than a flimsy hatchet.

If an experienced axe user can chop down an eight-inch tree in 15 minutes, then chopping down our giant tree—if the rate is proportional to the axe size and square of the tree's diameter—would most likely take a few weeks of chopping.

The fall

The tree would weigh between 1% and 10% as much as the Chicxulub asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

It would strike the ocean with much less speed than the Chicxulub asteroid, and the energy release would be much less substantial. However, it would still be moving at kilometers per second, and would be able to displace a gigantic amount of water.

The Chicxulub impact created a giant tsunami; the buried layer of jumbled sand mixed with a fossilized forest it left along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico was a crucial clue in discovering the location of the crater.[4]For more on this discovery, I can't recommend the book T. Rex and the Crater of Doom highly enough. It's written by Walter Alvarez—one of the researchers who found the first evidence for the impact—and is one of the best pieces of popular science writing I've ever read.

There have been some beautiful simulations of the Chicxulub tsunami. The exact details of the tsunami depend on a lot of factors, but it seems safe to say that waves at least tens or hundreds of meters high would inundate every coastline and destroy virtually every coastal city and many farther inland.

In other words, the Mother Goose poem in John's question probably wouldn't wipe out the human race, but it would probably be the deadliest single disaster in our species's history. Even by the ghastly standards of old childrens' fairy tales, that's pretty bad.

Axe law

In closing, I offer my favorite piece of axe-related legal trivia:[5]That's not a long list, but the things on it are all pretty memorable.

Lawyer Kevin Underhill, of the legal blog Lowering the Bar, highlighted the wonderful 1998 case People v. Foranyic. In this case, he writes, appeals court ruled "that there was probable cause for police to detain someone they see riding a bike at 3 a.m., carrying an axe."

So if you're two miles tall and heading toward the coast to cut down the world's only tree ...

... watch out for cops.

[Via GeekXGirls | The Meta Picture]

[Via B&P]

by john

[Source: Success Burger]

Hugh Jackman (31 Years Old) in X-Men (2000) vs. Hugh Jackman (44 Years Old) in The Wolverine (2013).

[Reddit | Dorkly]

Wil Wheaton said it best with his tweet to Mica Bethea (Pictured): “You win all the cosplay awards forever.”

[Source: Wil Wheaton | Mica Bethea]

There are Zelda fans, and then there are Zelda fans. Chrisaixa is a Zelda fan.

Read more...

Texto de Mariana Raquel.

Cláudia Silva Ferreira era casada, mãe de quatro filhos e trabalhadora, mas não foram essas qualidades que tornaram Claudia vítima da violência, na manhã do último domingo.

A trabalhadora que saiu de casa para ir à panificadora, comprar três reais de pão e três reais de mortadela, foi baleada por policiais que subiam o morro da Congonha, onde a vítima morava.

O motivo? Que motivo!? Cláudia era negra e moradora da periferia, isso já é mais do que justificativa para a polícia militar brasileira, que mata mais do que os países que tem a pena de morte instituída.

Moradores do Morro da Congonha fazem manifestação pela morte de Claudia Silva Ferreira. Foto de Paolla Serra/jornal Extra.

Segundo relatos vinculados pela mídia, à vítima a contragosto dos moradores e familiares que se encontravam no local, foi “socorrida” pelos policiais militares, se é que podemos chamar de socorro a forma como ela foi jogada em um camburão, como se coisa fosse.

Mas o que marcou o crime cometido contra Cláudia não foi ela ser baleada, apenas por sair de casa para comprar pão, afinal, pessoas negras, moradores de periferia são mortos todos os dias, apenas por ser quem são.

O fato que deu notoriedade ao caso de Cláudia e que chamou a atenção da mídia e da população, foi o vídeo gravado por um cidadão onde o corpo da trabalhadora aparece dependurado na viatura policial, sendo arrastado por cerca de 250 metros. Sem que nenhum dos policiais que transportavam aquela mulher notasse que alguma coisa estranha estivesse acontecendo!

Cláudia entrou para a estatística de mortos pela polícia no Brasil, e sobre isto vimos pouco mais do que a menção do crime na televisão.

Por parte do governo, a presidenta enviou condolências a família por rede social. Já o governador do Rio, em entrevista, afirmou que medidas serão tomadas contra os policiais.

Condolência enche barriga? A promessa de justiça do governador muda a forma como os moradores serão tratados, daqui pra frente, nas comunidades pobres do Rio de Janeiro? Onde está a indignação da população brasileira? Já sei! Guardada para um crime cometido contra um alguém sujeito de plenos e efetivos direitos. Pois Cláudia, nascida negra e moradora de periferia, não serve como parâmetro de justiça no Brasil.

Seu destino, não é mais do que a manifestação do kit opressão destinado pelo Estado brasileiro a pessoas como ela. A face mais perversa do racismo institucional, que tem feito do Brasil o país do genocídio contra a juventude negra. País onde o bandido é identificado pela cor e pela origem humilde, e não pela pratica de ato criminoso.

Li em uma reportagem que Cláudia temia que seus filhos fossem confundidos com bandidos, e quis o destino que fosse ela a “bandida” da vez.

Claudia está morta, sobre isso, não há mais nada que se possa fazer a respeito. Contudo, cabe a nós transformar toda a indignação, por essa morte sem sentido, todo o choro derramado por seus filhos, no combustível da transformação social que esse país precisa.

Nós, como movimento negro, movimentos sociais, ou apenas cidadãos conscientes, devemos nos levantar contra a contínua violação de direitos a que são sujeitos os moradores negros e pobres das periferias espalhadas pelo Brasil.

Autora

Minha professora da 6ª série me batizou de: a menina do contra. E sou mesmo! Nasci Mariana Raquel, mas a vida me fez Diva. Do nome de protagonista mexicana herdei a certeza de um futuro brilhante (um dia serei poderosa e sambarei na cara da alta sociedade) e a contradição que só quem tem significados de nomes antagônicos pode conhecer! Como é possível ser soberana/cheia de graça, sendo mansa como um cordeiro?

Esse texto foi originalmente publicado na página ‘da CAMA ao PÓ’ no Facebook.

+ Sobre o assunto

[+] Até quando vai durar esse extermínio ao povo preto, favelado e pobre? Por Sheila Dias.

[+] Claudia Silva Ferreira: baleada, arrastada e morta pela PM. Até quando? Por Amanda Vieira.

[+] 100 vezes Claudia no Think Olga.