This will be a thread for things that I learned and wanna share bc I think they're cool, maybe I'll do one everyday, maybe it'll be dispersed idk yet I'm just going w the flow

1. Today seemed like a really good day to start because today LIGO detected an unequal binary merger of two black holes for the first time ever! GW190412 produced two distinct frequencies and LIGO detected it w their (fairly new) ability to detect gravitational waves.

In layman's terms: https://www.sciencealert.com/this-black-hole-collision-is-the-first-with-wildly-mismatched-masses

Numerical simulation of how it would have looked:

2. On covid-19: Comparing country to country doesn't work for a number of reasons, not just because of the difference in testing and skewed results like I previously thought & I thought this article was excellent https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/52311014?__twitter_impression=true

3. Think of the smell of metal. Chances are you know the metallic scent Im talking about but it turns out that the metal smell we associate with coins and such isn't actually the smell of the metal but instead its the smell that your skin produces when it comes in contact w metal

The smell is predominantly from 1-octen-3-one that develops on your skin when you touch metal and oxidation of skin lipids are induced from this contact.
Sources:
https://www.livescience.com/4233-coins-smell.html
https://phys.org/news/2006-11-metal.html
Making Pure 1-octene-3-one:

4. Mythbusters' beautiful demonstration of Newtonian physics. The truck is going 60mph in one direction & the ball is shot out of a cannon on the back of the truck at 60mph in the opposite direction.

Since velocity is a vector they cancel each other out and the ball stay suspended in midair for a split second before gravity takes over and it falls straight down. Even in moderns days, classical physics is still beautiful.

Interestingly enough this demonstration can lead to the theory of special relativity which is another discussion on its own.

5. I'm just gonna drop this tweet here bc I couldnt have said it better myself https://twitter.com/TamasGorbe/status/1256860210393743365?s=19

6. Dark matter & dark energy gets physicists going like nothing else https://twitter.com/InertialObservr/status/1258465253479706624?s=19

7. A beautiful thread https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=19

8. Book recommendation: Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson M.D.
Read time ~ 1hr
Its about adapting to change where cheese is a metaphor for what you want in life. The discussion part of the book made sure it wasnt just black & white, I found it v uplifting.

9. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-enigma-of-spanish-influenza-art-two-other-illuminating-reads-from-around-the-web-1867884 Discussing why no one made significant art during the spanish flu pandemic in 1918 in the context of what it could mean for art made during the covid-19 pandemic. Within this are 5 linked essays/think pieces on the same topic.

10. Recently I've been hooked on various twists on Sudoku, my favorite iteration so far is called miracle Sudoku which this thread talks about in the context of mathematical proofs! https://twitter.com/wtgowers/status/1264672918983802882?s=19