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Have you learned anything interesting today?

I don't think I've ever seen you be aggressive at all :)
Okay alright. Something I learned today is I guess I’m glad I’m single, most of my online friends that are teens are in romantic relationships with other ppl online (not tinder, like via YouTube and insta) and I feel left out. One of my friends (14male) posted a video implying he and his now partner are in a romantic relationship
 
Okay alright. Something I learned today is I guess I’m glad I’m single, most of my online friends that are teens are in romantic relationships with other ppl online (not tinder, like via YouTube and insta) and I feel left out. One of my friends (14male) posted a video implying he and his now partner are in a romantic relationship
Just out of curiosity: is it common for a lot of people your age to have online relationships now, or is this just common with friends you have online?
 
Just out of curiosity: is it common for a lot of people your age to have online relationships now, or is this just common with friends you have online?
A mix of both, with ppl I’ve witnessed online almost always. Most ppl I know irl are in relationships with ppl they know or single, except one online friend that’s 14F that has a boyfriend from a school she goes to.
 
I learned that professional darts players tend to stand with their front foot sideways against the line when they throw their darts.

1673132590797.png
 
I learned that professional darts players tend to stand with their front foot sideways against the line when they throw their darts.

View attachment 93732
I guess that makes sense. I suppose you are technically closer to the target than you would be "toe first". I'm glad I know this if I ever happen to play darts again in the future. So I learned this today too! This thread is going to help people's knowledge snowball! :-)
 
I noticed looking at the tide tables that tides are highest at the low moon, and just after, and are also nearly as high at the full moon, and just after. I think I may have previously known this and forgotten it though. Gotta factor that idea in at my age...
 
Well, after seeing the Met production of the Hours where the dialogue was sung through, I find that I like Musical theater better, especially by Stephen Sondheim. The brilliance of Sweeney Todd or Assassins, his darker works, is unparraled.
 
What I knew:

US money is issued by 12 different Federal Reserve Banks located across the United States.

5f87591fea23a5001903d6af


Where the letter corresponding to a bank's number (e.g. Boston = 1 / A, New York = 2 / B, etc.) is the first letter of the serial number and on the $1 and $2 also appears as a seal.

s-l500.jpg


What I learned:

The Minneapolis bank is the "smallest" and so their notes are the less commonly seen overall, though of course for those in or near their district, that might not appear so.

(New York is the largest by a landslide, followed by San Francisco)
 
What I knew:

US money is issued by 12 different Federal Reserve Banks located across the United States.

5f87591fea23a5001903d6af


Where the letter corresponding to a bank's number (e.g. Boston = 1 / A, New York = 2 / B, etc.) is the first letter of the serial number and on the $1 and $2 also appears as a seal.

s-l500.jpg


What I learned:

The Minneapolis bank is the "smallest" and so their notes are the less commonly seen overall, though of course for those in or near their district, that might not appear so.

(New York is the largest by a landslide, followed by San Francisco)
I worked as teller, my first job out of high school. The federal reserve dropped off a huge bag of money, in San Francisco, which we had to count. That's a lot of money. We had a guy who signed his withdrawal as George Washington. Years later, l saw the same guy walking down the Ala Wai canal in Waikiki.
 
I didn't learn this today. But if you will indulge me...

Years ago, when I was about 7 or 8, my cousin got a chess set for Christmas. We started to play and I quickly picked up the moves and though I found it complicated I found it interesting.

Now, my cousin was super into sports etc. He was very competitive. But he was a terrible loser. He always had to win.

This put me at a disadvantage since I had to learn chess from my opponent. One day I found myself in check against him. I looked at my admittedly poor position in the game. Ran through all the moves and counter moves I could think of, then realised "oh I can just take the piece with the king, problem solved." So I did.

My cousin obviously irritated that he hadn't predicted the move told me that when you are in check, you can't take the piece that put you in check. So I believed him.

Years and years, and many chess games later, I was playing chess on an app. Using the "knowledge" my cousin gave me, I thought I had the computer cornered. Quite an event for me! Until I saw the computer make it's move and take the piece that put it in check!

I was stunned! My cousin had lied to me and for 30 odd years, I had been playing with one arm tied behind my back. I learned you definitely can perform such a move!

The nasty little cheat! :smilecat:

Been learning a lot about chess myself lately, I think I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm trying to get better at it as it's an activity for my father and I to do together.

I've found that it's pretty common for there to be some rule that someone had wrong without knowing, or if there was something in chess they didnt know existed (such as the "en passant" move that pawns can do, which is very rarely actually used because of how specific it is). After all, if you've never played in any more formal setting, or never read anything on it, or anything like that, you're not in a position to know those things.

When we used to play waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy back when, when I was a kid, somewhere there was this rule that the king couldnt capture the queen. I have no idea where that came from but we used that silly rule for years. Now of course I know better, the king can just eat any other piece, but still.


Okay time for me to do my own mini infodump here, for anyone that doesnt really know chess well (for anyone that DOES play, you probably already know all this):


Like, I'd learned about the idea of forks and pins, which sound like odd words to go in there.

A fork is like this:

sdfsa.jpg


The "fork" is the fact that the pawn there could take either rook, the one and only way for white to prevent losing one would be to capture the pawn with something else, since you cant move both at once. So, that's what a fork is, attacking two pieces at once with a single piece. Though in the image here you cant really stop the pawn without losing something either, it's in a small "pawn chain", AKA it's being supported by another pawn. Take it with something and the one behind it will just knock out whatever did it, and then it's just a fork again. Pawn structure = really important, it turns out.

Also the exact position in the image there is one that happened while I was playing with my father yesterday. Dumbest thing I've managed to do so far (I was playing white). He didnt catch on to it, I waited to see if he would and then later explained it to him.


There's also the idea of a pin, which is kinda like this:

8r5k184q382B55K22R5.png


The white bishop has the queen "pinned" to the king here. Basically the queen cannot just move out of the way of the bishop, because that'd put the king in check, so it's an illegal move. The queen only has one legal move, which is to capture the bishop. Black could of course move the king and THEN the queen, but that aint gonna work. In this particular position black is guaranteed to lose the queen no matter what they do (if the queen captures the bishop, the white rook knocks her out). Pinning is often done not necessarily to capture, but simply to stick a valuable piece like the queen in place and hold it there while other stuff happens.

There's also a "skewer", but I dont quite grasp that one yet, it tends to look kinda like a pin to me.

A lot of tricks I dont know. Learning more and more with each day here.
 
Been learning a lot about chess myself lately, I think I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm trying to get better at it as it's an activity for my father and I to do together.

There's also the idea of a pin, which is kinda like this:

View attachment 93799

The white bishop has the queen "pinned" to the king here. Basically the queen cannot just move out of the way of the bishop, because that'd put the king in check, so it's an illegal move. The queen only has one legal move, which is to capture the bishop. Black could of course move the king and THEN the queen, but that aint gonna work. In this particular position black is guaranteed to lose the queen no matter what they do (if the queen captures the bishop, the white rook knocks her out). Pinning is often done not necessarily to capture, but simply to stick a valuable piece like the queen in place and hold it there while other stuff happens.

There's also a "skewer", but I dont quite grasp that one yet, it tends to look kinda like a pin to me.

A pin, as you've noted, is where a piece is stuck protecting a more valuable piece behind in.

A skewer is where the two pieces being attacked are the other way around (i.e. black king on E5 and black queen on G7)
Chess.png

where a valuable piece is being attacked, and moving it out of the way results in a less valuable piece behind it being left open to attack.

lichess.org has some fun interactive tutorials and an excellent library of puzzles for all levels of players.
 
Last edited:
A couple of days ago, I realized that to polish new aluminium parts, I should do the final sanding using oil instead of water, and then use the polishing compound immediately, to avoid a spotty appearance from hard aluminum oxides forming on the surface.
 
Been learning a lot about chess myself lately, I think I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm trying to get better at it as it's an activity for my father and I to do together.

I've found that it's pretty common for there to be some rule that someone had wrong without knowing, or if there was something in chess they didnt know existed (such as the "en passant" move that pawns can do, which is very rarely actually used because of how specific it is). After all, if you've never played in any more formal setting, or never read anything on it, or anything like that, you're not in a position to know those things.

When we used to play waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy back when, when I was a kid, somewhere there was this rule that the king couldnt capture the queen. I have no idea where that came from but we used that silly rule for years. Now of course I know better, the king can just eat any other piece, but still.


Okay time for me to do my own mini infodump here, for anyone that doesnt really know chess well (for anyone that DOES play, you probably already know all this):


Like, I'd learned about the idea of forks and pins, which sound like odd words to go in there.

A fork is like this:

View attachment 93797

The "fork" is the fact that the pawn there could take either rook, the one and only way for white to prevent losing one would be to capture the pawn with something else, since you cant move both at once. So, that's what a fork is, attacking two pieces at once with a single piece. Though in the image here you cant really stop the pawn without losing something either, it's in a small "pawn chain", AKA it's being supported by another pawn. Take it with something and the one behind it will just knock out whatever did it, and then it's just a fork again. Pawn structure = really important, it turns out.

Also the exact position in the image there is one that happened while I was playing with my father yesterday. Dumbest thing I've managed to do so far (I was playing white). He didnt catch on to it, I waited to see if he would and then later explained it to him.


There's also the idea of a pin, which is kinda like this:

View attachment 93799

The white bishop has the queen "pinned" to the king here. Basically the queen cannot just move out of the way of the bishop, because that'd put the king in check, so it's an illegal move. The queen only has one legal move, which is to capture the bishop. Black could of course move the king and THEN the queen, but that aint gonna work. In this particular position black is guaranteed to lose the queen no matter what they do (if the queen captures the bishop, the white rook knocks her out). Pinning is often done not necessarily to capture, but simply to stick a valuable piece like the queen in place and hold it there while other stuff happens.

There's also a "skewer", but I dont quite grasp that one yet, it tends to look kinda like a pin to me.

A lot of tricks I dont know. Learning more and more with each day here.
I only recently learned about en passant. I just had to go look it up again as I couldn't quite remember how it works. This again was discovered playing in the chess app when I thought I was going crazy when the opponent's pawn landed beyond the piece they took. You can rewind the game in this app so I moved it back and played the same move again and behold! It did it again! I was more than a bit irritated as I thought the app had a bug! It took a while to look it up on Google as I had to try lots of different search terms!

For what looks like a quite simple move, there are quite a few conditions that have to be met to make the move legitimate. One thing I'm sure I didn't know before is that the pawn must have moved exactly 3 squares before performing the move. So I guess I learned that today! :-)
 
@VictorR , metal oxides are also used to make the pigments in inks and paints. Most printers end up with dangerous levels of heavy metals in their bodies from this.

Also note: The Hi-Vis colours in so called safety wear are made from Uranium Salts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inorganic_pigments
Artist's paints, like acrylic and oil, still contained them some time ago.

We as students learned of lead white and cadmiuns (yellow, orange and red), which are very prominent in painting. I don't know if paints still use toxic metals to this day, but we still are cautious around a few colors, since we don't know how they were produced.
 

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