What have you always wanted to know?

[PurleaseSqueeze]

I was wondering today whether GPs see other GPs if they are ill? Can anyone tell me? I'm assuming yes as they wouldn't be allowed to prescribe medications for themselves?

What other random things have you always wondered/wanted to know?

@lunepremiere79

How does deja vue happen?

Apparently you are remembering a premonition you had once before.

Who do the government borrow money from? Do they nip to HSBC for a loan or do they borrow from other countries?

A few years ago, I remember reading that some countries owed the UK money, why?
The USA is massively in debt, to who?
Do governments have a vault with a load of money in? I get that most monetary transactions are done electronically these days but the money must exist in some physical form somewhere.

Is there one mega rich country who's handing money out to the rest or is every country in debt and the same money is just moving around the world as debt repayments and loans?
Also, when was money invented? Who decided that trading cows or potatoes for bread and cloth was a stupid idea and a better idea was to make small circles of metal and paper rectangles instead to hand over instead?

if space is infinite, why isn't the night sky completely white from the starlight from infinite stars?

My children attended the school (secondary) where I taught. They called me Mum. Sometimes their friends called me “born’s childname’s Mum”, but that was mostly out of school.
There were lots of teachers’ children in both their year groups - it wasn’t that unusual (1990s).

Sorry - it was “Mrs born’s childname’s Mum”. They remembered the title, and it was always Mrs, even though I’m Ms.

@MammaSchwifty

if space is infinite, why isn't the night sky completely white from the starlight from infinite stars?

I'm told the anser is:

Although the universe is of infinite size, and contains an infinite number of starts, it is not yet infinitely old.

therefore, the stars to fill in the dark gaps between the stars we can see, did not exist long ago enough for their light to have reached us yet. Some of the stars we can see may no longer exist, due to the time it takes for their light to reach us.

Because of the speed of light.
We can only see up to 14 billion light years, the observable universe. Anything beyond that distance is invisible to us because the light hasn’t arrived yet.
I'm not very metric, it travels at 186000 miles per second.

You have started me wondering about all that invisible light... perhaps a SF novel will be written about a universe with different physical laws, where this will be the case...😀

thanks @PigletJohn, that makes sense... As an aside, I guess that space will never be infinitely old, since it has a finite start point in time

@WhateverJohnnyMcNofriends The government borrows money from the Bank of England.

What was the best thing before sliced bread?

I'd like to know why we have a limit to the speed of light in a probably infinite universe. Why is it the fastest speed? Why is there a limit at all?
(I know that quantum physics contradict this)

It's to do with the amount of energy required to move anything with mass I think. If you imagine you are standing 8m from a door and every step towards it you take gets you half as close as before but you get twice as heavy as before too, and need twice as much energy to make the next step.

So step 1 would be 1kW to move 1kg 4m
Step 2 would be 2kW to move 2kG 2m and so on. By step 10 you need 1042kW to move 1042kg 0.0078m. You'll run out if energy before you reach the door. And so with speed you'll run out of energy before you can reach light speed, although this only applies to objects with mass.

The other issue is that for speed to exist you need to be able to measure how far you've travelled over a period of time. But beyond light speed space and time warp so much that it becomes impossible to measure distance or time and so the concept of speed, as we know it, is obsolete.

BUT that's not to say the speed of light is the fastest things can go and you can technically travel faster than the speed of light cosmically, so long as you don't exceed it locally. There's two examples of this, one theoretical and one that's been observed.

Theoretical - if there was a wormhole from our moon to pluto and I went through it I could reach Pluto faster than a light beam that left the moon at the same time and so I'd technically have travelled faster than light, while never actually travelling faster than the speed of light myself.

Observed- distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us/each other at speeds faster than the speed of light. The Hubble Constant says that for every megaparsec of distance between two distant galaxies, the speed separating them increases by about 71 kilometers per second and doubles for every megaparsex. Once you get out to 4,200 megaparsecs away, two galaxies will see each other traveling away faster than the speed of light (and there are galaxies separated by this much). This is to do with the way space expands all around us and so while the galaxies themselves aren't moving faster than light the distance between them is growing faster than light.

@blueshoes

If people did not have nit combs or other ways to kill those buggers, how would a head lice infection not get totally out of control. Wouldn't everyone be walking around with a head full of lice? Or does the head lice population reach a point of equilibrium in your hair.

Mum said that when she was at school in the 1930s the nit nurse would check every child regularly and if you were found to have nits, she's shave your head and paint your scalp with gentian of violet. You always knew who'd had nits coz they had a purple head for ages, until it wore off

Who do the government borrow money from? Do they nip to HSBC for a loan or do they borrow from other countries?

To the best of my understanding, they issue national bonds. These have a "coupon", which is the interest rate payable to the buyer. The buyers are the like of pension funds and other national banks who use them as a very low risk investment (well, the level of risk depends on the solvency of the country, but generally low risk economies such as Germany can offer lower interest rates than risky bets such as, for example, Argentina).

Awesome, Buccanarab.

how do computers know how to read code? I mean how do they interpret all those lines of text and execute them? How do they know whether they are reading Java or C++ or Python or whatever? Wouldn't they need some code to know how to do that? And so on ad infinitum? What is the most fundamental code that the computer uses to read everything else and HOW DOES IT WORK?!

My Japanese colleagues were aghast I would even imagine a tomato a fruit. They were also disgusted I wasn't taught astronomy or calligraphy at school, or that I didn't know my blood type

I wasn't wondering this before I started reading the thread but I am now, I'm at a total loss to come up with any reason that the Japanese could possibly find disgust in those things not being taught.

Can any Japanese posters explain what appears a very strange view

were cave toddlers picky little buggers when it came to mealtimes?
what did people used to do about their fingernails and toenails before blades?
why, as a species, do we have hair on our heads that gets so incredibly long, but not really anywhere else?

@SchadenfreudePersonified

Ah, no, I have no idea what infinite means. Thanks for your post.

How the internet works.

@Buccanarab

*I'd like to know why we have a limit to the speed of light in a probably infinite universe. Why is it the fastest speed? Why is there a limit at all? (I know that quantum physics contradict this)*

It's to do with the amount of energy required to move anything with mass I think. If you imagine you are standing 8m from a door and every step towards it you take gets you half as close as before but you get twice as heavy as before too, and need twice as much energy to make the next step.

So step 1 would be 1kW to move 1kg 4m
Step 2 would be 2kW to move 2kG 2m and so on. By step 10 you need 1042kW to move 1042kg 0.0078m. You'll run out if energy before you reach the door. And so with speed you'll run out of energy before you can reach light speed, although this only applies to objects with mass.

The other issue is that for speed to exist you need to be able to measure how far you've travelled over a period of time. But beyond light speed space and time warp so much that it becomes impossible to measure distance or time and so the concept of speed, as we know it, is obsolete.

BUT that's not to say the speed of light is the fastest things can go and you can technically travel faster than the speed of light cosmically, so long as you don't exceed it locally. There's two examples of this, one theoretical and one that's been observed.

Theoretical - if there was a wormhole from our moon to pluto and I went through it I could reach Pluto faster than a light beam that left the moon at the same time and so I'd technically have travelled faster than light, while never actually travelling faster than the speed of light myself.

Observed- distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us/each other at speeds faster than the speed of light. The Hubble Constant says that for every megaparsec of distance between two distant galaxies, the speed separating them increases by about 71 kilometers per second and doubles for every megaparsex. Once you get out to 4,200 megaparsecs away, two galaxies will see each other traveling away faster than the speed of light (and there are galaxies separated by this much). This is to do with the way space expands all around us and so while the galaxies themselves aren't moving faster than light the distance between them is growing faster than light.

I am absolutely amazed.

what did people used to do about their fingernails and toenails before blades?

The manual labour we used to do on a day to day basis (foraging, living in caves etc) would keep them to a reasonable length. We've only had to chop them for a short time from an evolutionary perspective.

What actually is yeast?

Its a single celled organism, with a nucleus, and loads of other cell structures called organelles. There are loads of different species, some are harmful, some not. Yeasts are everywhere, in our skin, hair, in soil, but most cause no problems for us. The useful ones can be used in alcohol production and bread making.

Manual labour wouldn't do anything for toenails and we've been wearing some form of shoes for a long time. I assume they would file them using a rough stone.

@katiedidnt

Given people speaking British English can generally understand those speaking US English and vice versa, can people signing BSL and ASL get the gist as well? Or is there no commonality?

If my friend speaks Spanish, I vaguely understand her. If I speak Italian, she vaguely understands me.

Is there the same level of an ability to get by with BSL and ASL or is more akin to comparing, say, English and Russian?

I think there are commonalities but they are designed differently, ASL is meant to be possible with only one hand.

@Notjustanymum

Golf. Why?😆

Golf is how flag poles are made. Each player has an egg, which he pokes with a stick until it goes into a hole. Then a flag pole grows out of the hole. It's fascinating to watch for about 10 seconds.