This reminds me of the difficulties Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette had in conceiving an heir:
> In a letter to his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph II described them as "a couple of complete blunderers."[50] He disclosed to Leopold that the inexperienced—then still only 22-year-old—Louis XVI had confided in him the course of action he had been undertaking in their marital bed; saying Louis XVI "introduces the member," but then "stays there without moving for about two minutes," withdraws without having completed the act and "bids goodnight."
This is such a bizarre thing to do from a young man/evolutionary instinct standpoint. I wonder if his hormones were awry. I see speculation that he had hypogonadism or phimosis.
The crown prince of France spent his entire life surrounded by courtiers who would fulfill his every whim. He barely needed to lift a fork to his mouth himself.
Maybe he had depression from this kind of passive lifestyle.
"Important" people get trained into helplessness very quickly. They are the symbol that validates power, but any real action they take is a risk to the movers and shakers surrounding them.
Oh, Wikipedia is in the constant change of what do need an illustration and what does not or what type it should be. Back in 2009 the most pics in the sex and genital articles had a self-made pics, which even prompted this:
Internet access - $25
A digital camera - $250
Making the whole world see your vagina - priceless
For everything else there is MasterCard
And somewhere in 2018 I discovered what almost all photos in these articles (on the English Wikipedia, other languages didn't changed much) were replaced by the most basic pictures or the illustrations from 19th century anatomical atlases.
They are used also to characterize the statistical properties of fields over the sphere. A notable example is the pattern of hot/cold spots in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR, [1]). They are distributed stochastically, and the best way to fit cosmological models against the measurements is to decompose the temperature/polarization fields into spherical harmonics and compute the power spectrum associated with each ℓ (which plays the role of a “spatial frequency” over the sky sphere).
Well… If you are in Purgatory, you will eventually enter Paradiso (=Heaven), and for t→+∞ the ratio between the time spent in Paradiso and Purgatorio will diverge in favor of the former!
“Super expensive” for who builds them, or "super expensive" for the end user paying their electricity bill?
Also, there are safe solutions to store nuclear waste. They are not 1.0e31% secure, but many other kinds of power plants carry significant risks [1] [2] [3]
It's either expensive to the person paying the bill or to the person paying tax to subsidize it.
That's what "super expensive" means.
And yeah, most of it comes from the cost of building them. But they are barely competitive with solar + batteries if you count only the costs of operating them.
julia> using Unitful: m, s
julia> using Measurements
julia> Δx = (3.0 ± 0.1)m
3.0 ± 0.1 m
julia> t = (1.0 ± 0.2)s
1.0 ± 0.2 s
julia> v = Δx / t
3.0 ± 0.61 m s^-1
I am using Unitful.jl for some complex electromagnetics code I am developing. Although it makes the definition of types and constructors more complicated, it has helped me find several subtle bugs in the equations. Forcing the type system to keep track of measurement units has pros and cons, but so far, the advantages are more significant than the cons.
I welcome well-founded scientific articles about the Shroud of Turin like this, as I have read many unsubstantiated claims, both on one side and another: believers see traces of Roman coins laid on the eyes, and skeptical conjecture phantasies about weird ways a super-intelligent forger could have laid the paint on the Shroud.
However, the article fails to mention some details that make the matter not settled, at least in my opinion.
First, the position of the holes in the hands differs from the common belief at the time. Virtually all Western Art depicts the nails entering the palm, yet the man of the Shroud has holes in his wrists. Experiments on dead bodies done in the XIX century demonstrated that only when the nail is put in the wrist the weight of the body can be sustained, but this was unknown in the XIV century. Moreover, there is a nerve in the wrist that, when injured, causes the thumb to retract; this, too, is consistent with the Shroud but differs from the common imagery used in the Middle Ages. (See, for instance, Grünewald’s Crucifixion [1].)
Second, the article fails to mention a paper by Rogers (2005) [2] that applied a non-invasive form of dating to the Shroud. According to these results, the borders of the Shroud are younger than the part in the center (where the image was impressed) and were probably patches added to repair the damage of a burning. This seems to be confirmed by microscopic analysis of the fibers of the samples used in the C14 tests, which do not match the images of the parts of the Shroud that contain the image. Unfortunately, the author states that his dating technique is powerful for relative dating but not absolute dating because of the large error bars. Thus, Rogers could not provide reliable dating.
The most significant difficulty in believing the Shroud’s authenticity is the lack of documentary sources in the first Millennium. However, unlike the author seems to believe, the question might not have been settled definitively by the C14 measurement.
> In a letter to his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph II described them as "a couple of complete blunderers."[50] He disclosed to Leopold that the inexperienced—then still only 22-year-old—Louis XVI had confided in him the course of action he had been undertaking in their marital bed; saying Louis XVI "introduces the member," but then "stays there without moving for about two minutes," withdraws without having completed the act and "bids goodnight."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#Motherhood,_c...
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