Born 400 years ago #Today, Blaise Pascal was child prodigy, mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. He was pioneer in the natural and applied sciences and invented one of the first mechanical calculators
Pascal designed and built one of the earliest mechanical calculators, known as Pascal's Calculator or Pascaline. It was a pioneering device that used gears and wheels to perform addition and subtraction. It laid the foundation for mechanical computation
He introduced the namesake Triangle, a triangular arrangement of numbers with various mathematical properties. Each number in the triangle is the sum of the two numbers directly above it.
Pascal's Theorem, also known as the Hexagrammum Mysticum Theorem, is a fundamental result in projective geometry. No matter how you choose to place the red points on the circumference, the three blue points will lie on a straight line.
Pascal's Law, also known as the principle of transmission of fluid pressure states that any pressure applied to an enclosed fluid is transmitted undiminished to all portions of the fluid and the walls of the container. A hydraulic jack is based on it
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54 years ago #Today, one of the most famous images ever taken was snapped from the orbit of the Moon. Now known as "Earthrise", with modern digital technology, the iconic image -- originally in black and white -- has been remastered ow.ly/Hir130n5JpX
“The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis to the big vastness of space.” — Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell buff.ly/2EMnMMG#Apollo8#54YearsAgoToday
54 years ago #Today, Apollo 8 entered the lunar orbit. Humans are in orbit around another world for the first time. This is the third TV live broadcast. A #Christmas gift: human eyes see the Moon up close bit.ly/2ionb8I
The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest, most powerful particle accelerator: in a way it's the world's largest single machine. It consists of a 27-km ring excavated between the lake of Geneva and the Jura mountain range at an average depth of 100 m. Let's see some facts
Each of the 6000-9000 superconducting filaments of niobium-titanium coiled between them to make up the LHC cables is 0.007 mm thick, about 10 times thinner than a normal human hair. If put one after another they would stretch from the Earth to the Sun and back six times
The protons accelerated are obtained from standard hydrogen. Although proton beams are very intense (1.15x10¹¹ protons in a beam size of 3.5 micrometres), only 2 nanograms of hydrogen are accelerated each day. It would take about 1 million years to accelerate 1 gram of hydrogen.
This account has just been blocked for suspicious behavior and unblocked upon providing authentication. The problem is that @TwitterSupport doesn't send an email notification for this and it's not possible to clarify if rules have been violated or it's an hacking attempt
This is not good, an account should have enough transparency to know what are the reason of a block. This happened last year in the same way and no message or notification was ever released. This is quite scary and not helping plan any action.
To work around this, years ago I created a backup account, @Rainmaker1973b, to be used in case of sudden and unexplained suspension, but I really hope this is not the case.