How many plants did they have to smoke before they found Marijuana?
How many plants did they have to smoke before they found Marijuana?
In reply to Appleseed:
They probably burned it as a campfire fuel, then some of the more astute people noticed that when they burned a particular kind of plant, they felt... different.
People started in on coffee beans after noticing that goats seemed to have more energy after eating them, after all.
I assume that tobacco came after marijuana.
That leads me in to a question that I've had for a long time.
How did people figure out, say, that a given bean is inedible unless you soak it for 8 hours, or that you can boil a certain kind of leaf and make a refreshing drink?
I had a scrambled egg and cheese sandwich. Cheese, fried eggs, and bread, three things that have an astounding amount of science behind them and how in the world did we get from milk, grains, and eggs, to those finished products? Especially bread, as that is something that requires a few intentional processes to do. You don't accidentally burn a wheat stalk or get bacteria on some grain and oops, I got a loaf of bread. Yet bread is one of the, if not THE, oldest manufactured foodstuffs. Apocryphally it is the baking of bread that caused people to settle into cities in the first place.
My head is full of berkeley!
In reply to Knurled:
In reply to fasted58:
A sci-fi book series I read a long time ago postulated just that... Aliens gave Man the recipe for beer. Then, after they started intentionally growing grain for beer, they showed Man how to make bread. "beer before bread" was repeated many times throughout the story.
There was also some weird E36 M3 in there regarding a second-phase human who could photosynthesize, the Moon was actually a recon vessel for the aliens to keep tabs on us, and humans were slated to be destroyed as a failed experiment until the main character challenged the alien leader to a tennis match, during which he accidentally learned the secret to flying.
I said it was weird. Wish I could remember the name.
In reply to Knurled:
Actually, I think a lot of it IS by accident, but combined with observation and thought.
Somebody probably used an unweaned calfs stomach to store milk once, and the basis of cheese was there. Eggs, always eaten, and somebody left one too close to the fire...and so on.
In reply to Streetwiseguy:
I get all that. But bread? I'm fascinated by how that chain of events had to happen.
Well. Seeds could be eaten , but probably not easily. Mash with rock, you can now digest, but hard to pick up to eat, so mix with water. Now, leave by fire, unleavened bread. And so on. You have to remember many thousands of homo sapiens have been eating for many thousands of years. Potential accidents can create a lot of knowledge.
I've said, to people who feel a need to explain life by including a supernatural component, that I bet I could create life from mud given four billion years.
In reply to Streetwiseguy:
And people have had the same size brains for something like 200,000 years. People were just as intelligent millenia ago as today, it just wasn't until written language was invented that knowledge could be easily passed down and therefore built upon.
The one I don't get is rhubarb.
"Johny ate those leaves and got really sick. I'm gonna try the stem. Bleh! Bitter! How about we put this junk in a pie with some strawberries and loads of sugar? I bet it'll be good then."
An American author has been known to read a story that is allegedly responsible for 73 fainting events by members of the audience. Who is the author, what is the story's name, and why does it cause audience members to faint?
G_Body_Man wrote: An American author has been known to read a story that is allegedly responsible for 73 fainting events by members of the audience. Who is the author, what is the story's name, and why does it cause audience members to faint?
I forgot the name of the author, but the title of the story is something like "5 minutes", and the audience is encouraged to hold one's breath for the duration of the story, as the story involves getting stuck underwater after sitting on a pool water-return and getting their intestines sucked out.
Yeah, gross.
Knurled wrote:G_Body_Man wrote: An American author has been known to read a story that is allegedly responsible for 73 fainting events by members of the audience. Who is the author, what is the story's name, and why does it cause audience members to faint?I forgot the name of the author, but the title of the story is something like "5 minutes", and the audience is encouraged to hold one's breath for the duration of the story, as the story involves getting stuck underwater after sitting on a pool water-return and getting their intestines sucked out. Yeah, gross.
That's more or less the plot and reason why people pass out. The story is Guts by Chuck Palahnuik.
RevRico wrote: So then how did we decide/come up with a transistor and the resulting logic gates? I'm not trying to be a hootus, I've even taken classes in electrical engineering, including assembly language, and the teacher could never give me a good answer. It was asking how the hardware knew how to interpret the assembly language that stalled out the class one day.
Transistors were originally invented as solid state amplifiers, a replacement for the vacuum tubes used in radios. As for how someone figured out the semiconductor effect that allows them to work, I don't know for certain but it seems likely it was "basic research". That is, someone was just playing with stuff to see what happens and noticed something odd.
AND, OR, etc are the basics of boolean algebra, which existed as a mathematical discipline long before the first electronics came around.
KyAllroad wrote: Yeah, but it's done at such a small scale that you can only SEE the ridiculous things with an electron microscope. They're "printed" more than manufactured. But even knowing how it's done.......it's just magic.
Chips were (and I think still are, although I'm not sure of that) made with a process called "photolithography". It's an optical process, the design is done at a large scale which is then reduced by projecting the image of the design through a lens system onto the target. That target is coated in a chemical that reacts to light, allowing a later acid bath to remove material in some areas but not in others. Back in the 60s they had "small scale integration" (SSI) or around 10 transistors per chip. As time goes on, people work to refine and improve the process, enabling them to squeeze more and more transistors in there, leading to MSI (100), LSI (1000), VLSI (10K), and so forth. Today we've got billions and yes, if you approach it with no history it looks like magic. In reality, though, it's all incremental development, a little bit here, a little bit there, it adds up over the last 50 years.
The same is true of any technology, think about how we went from James Watt's steam engine to a modern car engine with VVT, direct injection, turbocharger, etc.
EvanR wrote: Ever used a BNC connector? (Primarily for composite video, sometimes antennas).
Heh. I'm dating myself here, but to me BNC is mainly tied to ethernet. I was a college student in the early 90s, I rented a house with 3 other nerds, and we had a 10base2 ethernet running around the whole thing to interconnect all the computers with the 9600 baud SLIP line (precursor to PPP) connecting us to campus. 10base2 was a coaxial ethernet standard, and it used BNC connectors.
codrus wrote: Chips were (and I think still are, although I'm not sure of that) made with a process called "photolithography". It's an optical process, the design is done at a large scale which is then reduced by projecting the image of the design through a lens system onto the target. That target is coated in a chemical that reacts to light, allowing a later acid bath to remove material in some areas but not in others.
And that, tangentially, reminds me of one of my favorite "oops" stories, involving an engineer who decided to get a trophy-shot image of a processor that much money and time was spent developing, and he forgot to disable his camera's flash.
codrus wrote:EvanR wrote: Ever used a BNC connector? (Primarily for composite video, sometimes antennas).Heh. I'm dating myself here, but to me BNC is mainly tied to ethernet. I was a college student in the early 90s, I rented a house with 3 other nerds, and we had a 10base2 ethernet running around the whole thing to interconnect all the computers with the 9600 baud SLIP line (precursor to PPP) connecting us to campus. 10base2 was a coaxial ethernet standard, and it used BNC connectors.
I thought any computer networking that involved BNC cables was ArcNet, but I've been wrong before.
BNC is a Bayonet Nut Connector.
Streetwiseguy wrote: I've said, to people who feel a need to explain life by including a supernatural component, that I bet I could create life from mud given four billion years.
I'm sure you are right.
And if I lived 4 billion years, I WOULD BE the supernatural being!
Appleseed wrote: How many plants did they have to smoke before they found Marijuana?
In reply to Slippery
Ignore
How many times is "hope" said in Rogue One?
The first time I saw it, it seemed like "hope" was said a lot. The second time, I paid closer attention, and yes, "hope" was said a lot. I just saw it again, this afternoon, but forgot to count how many times.
How do they know how much weight a bridge can hold to put on the signs?
RevRico wrote: How do you make RAM? Like, how did the concept, and then hardware combination, evolve to become RAM? BUILDING A computer from parts is easy, building parts for a computer is magic.
I'll try to answer this question, having read the other responses.
You're trying to figure out how someone made a modern RAM module seemingly out of nowhere. It didn't happen that way, it was a long progression of technologies that eventually led to modern RAM over many decades. The first forms of RAM were mechanical, then magnetic and electric, and then after the invention of the transistor there was eventually something basically the same as the modern electronic IC RAM we use today (just much slower, smaller in capacity/larger in size and more power-hungry). Here's a history:
http://www.computerhope.com/history/memory.htm
In the future we might have photonic/optical RAM, which could eventually be capable of storing quantum states.
slefain wrote: How do they know how much weight a bridge can hold to put on the signs?
Nowadays? Finite element analysis of individual components strung together into an engineered structure, then back off the theoretical load value with a healthy safety factor.
Before CAD, FEA, and material science programs? 'Yeah, that looks like a 2 ton bridge... sure.'
Robbie wrote: The one I don't get is rhubarb. "Johny ate those leaves and got really sick. I'm gonna try the stem. Bleh! Bitter! How about we put this junk in a pie with some strawberries and loads of sugar? I bet it'll be good then."
I don't really care how many casualties this entailed. I am grateful that somebody figured it out, because Rhubarb Pie is the King of All Pies!
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