
If you put chalk under a powerful microscope - DanBC
https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1022534132415356928
======
nikanj
Contrast this with the Hubble Deep Field image, which is an extremely tiny
patch of the night sky. It’s sizeis equivalent to a tennis ball at a distance
of 100 metres, or ~110 yards.

And my god, it’s full of stars. There’s endless detail in the universe,
whether you zoom in, or zoom out.

See: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/NASA-
HS2...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/NASA-
HS201427a-HubbleUltraDeepField2014-20140603.jpg)

~~~
noipv4
here is a perspective video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1mkjkTqg0Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1mkjkTqg0Y)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
The star UY Scuti is 2,500,000,000 kilometres in diameter.

It would take light nearly 2.5hrs to travel that far.

------
acconrad
That thread has some beautiful photos. This one is my favorite[1], it's
amazing to me how intricate the math of an object can be at a microscopic
level.

I mean look at the black and white 2x4, top one 2nd from the left, my mind
instantly just wanted to plot that in Matlab and gaze at how complex the
equation is!

[1]
[https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1022890070531960837?s=...](https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1022890070531960837?s=09)

~~~
userbinator
To be honest, I found that and the coccolith pictures quite
unpleasant/uncomfortable to look at --- it could be because I'm somewhat
trypophobic, since they caused me to feel the same "brain-melting" sensation
and have the similar characteristic of many almost-regular-but-irregular
edges. The "neural network dream" generated images did the same thing to me; I
feel my brain heat up and sweat a little.

In contrast, something like a box of gears or related machinery parts, which
theoretically is also full of edges, doesn't provoke the same feeling...

~~~
rangibaby
That’s interesting because my first reaction seeing the photos was to think
that “they look like a bunch of gears, huh that’s neat”.

Deep dream also made me feel calm, like I was watching a natural process, like
a plant growing, or the rain falling. I hadn't had that kind of reaction to
"computer" art before.

~~~
yashevde
you will love the movie 'Annihilation' then, in case you haven't already
watched it

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madmax108
It's easier to read this as an single unrolled post than as a set of tweets:

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1022534132415356928.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1022534132415356928.html)

~~~
tormeh
This looks like a very obvious cowpath that Twitter could pave. I just don't
get why they haven't done it yet.

~~~
matte_black
It’s a slippery slope. If they do this, what’s next? Where do they stop?
What’s it going to take for users to finally be satisfied?

(Edit: Don’t understand the downvotes. Don’t understand a lot of downvotes
lately. Do I have a target on my back?)

~~~
mynameisvlad
It's entirely reasonable to want to be able to read a series of tweets that
are meant to be read as one long tweet/block of text the way it was intended
to be read. I don't understand how you think this is an unreasonable request,
especially when tools exist to correct this issue with the max-character
limitation Twitter has, or what "slippery slope" this could have.

You're getting downvotes because you're advocating something that makes
entirely 0 sense from a usability perspective. And commenting on why you're
being voted in a particular way is wholly against the guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
> and it makes boring reading.

~~~
matte_black
If a series of tweets can easily be put into a defined order for consumption
then why not just lift the max character limitation and let people make tweets
as long as they want? Seems like it’d be an easy slide down that slope once
you’re on it.

~~~
mynameisvlad
There is no slope. Either the limitation is there, or it isn't. What comes
after to call this a "slippery slope"?

And clearly the existing limitation is a pain in the ass, or else services
that "unroll" multi-tweet text wouldn't exist. The limitation is completely
arbitrary and clearly not entirely helpful, so a request to lift it is
entirely reasonable.

~~~
matte_black
I can easily imagine a series of changes that ultimately turns Twitter into
something like Medium.

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allthenews
Those coccoliths also make for fantastic oil bearing reservoir rock, provided
certain conditions are met, otherwise chalk tends to make a good seal. Some of
the most prolific oil fields in the world, in the north sea, come from
fractured chalk beds.

For example, massive salt diapirs (think of them as giant, mountain sized
fingers) 5-15 miles beneath the earth's surface are gradually squeezed, like a
fluid, moving upwards and fracturing rock (and chalk) above, creating porosity
and permeability necessary for oil production.

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firasd
Reminds me of a quick, classic read from GK Chesterton: "A Piece of Chalk"
[https://www.chesterton.org/a-piece-of-
chalk/](https://www.chesterton.org/a-piece-of-chalk/)

------
retrogradeorbit
Also the composition of diatomaceous earth
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth)
which is used in certain types of water filters, like pool filters.

~~~
twic
In a discussion of the economics of a far future spacefaring human
civilization, someone once suggested diatomaceous earth as one of the few raw
materials that might be exported from Earth, since it might well not occur
anywhere else!

~~~
jpindar
Especially since diatomaceous earth is good for preventing infestations of
insect-sized organisms without depending on the biochemistry of those
organisms.

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nyc111
So reading Huxley's lecture,
[https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/huxley/thomas_henry/piece-o...](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/huxley/thomas_henry/piece-
of-chalk/chapter5.html) are we supposed to understand that chalky places like
Dover were the bottom of the sea long long time ago? (He is talking about the
mud at the bottom of the ocean having the remains of the same creatures.)

~~~
contras1970
> But if the Radiolaria and Diatoms are thus rained upon the bottom of the
> sea, from the superficial layer of its waters in which they pass their
> lives, it is obviously possible that the Globigerinae may be similarly
> derived; and if they were so, it would be much more easy to understand how
> they obtain their supply of food than it is at present. Nevertheless, the
> positive and negative evidence all points the other way. The skeletons of
> the full-grown, deep-sea Globigerinae are so remarkably solid and heavy in
> proportion to their surface as to seem little fitted for floating; and, as a
> matter of fact, they are not to be found along with the Diatoms and
> Radiolaria, in the uppermost stratum of the open ocean.

> It has been observed, again, that the abundance of Globigerinae, in
> proportion to other organisms, of like kind, increases with the depth of the
> sea; and that deep-water Globigerinae are larger than those which live in
> shallower parts of the sea; and such facts negative the supposition that
> these organisms have been swept by currents from the shallows into the deeps
> of the Atlantic.

> It therefore seems to be hardly doubtful that these wonderful creatures live
> and die at the depths in which they are found.

> However, the important points for us are, that the living Globigerinae are
> exclusively marine animals, the skeletons of which abound at the bottom of
> deep seas; and that there is not a shadow of reason for believing that the
> habits of the Globigerinae of the chalk differed from those of the existing
> species. But if this be true, there is no escaping the conclusion that the
> chalk itself is the dried mud of an ancient deep sea.

------
nine_k
From the comments in the Twitter thread:

> _Only tangentially relevant, but I love the fact that sand from Normandy
> still consists of up to 4% microscopic war materiel from WWII._

------
XorNot
Looking at some of those pictures gave me a slightly light-headed feeling -
the same kind I get when I look at the Hubble ultra deep-field.

------
Fifer82
Newbie here with these types of images. In the image there are spheres and
flat discs. I take it the life forms were spherical and flat discs have broken
off rather than vice versa? Of course I find it hard to imagine discs forming
spheres but at the same time, that sphere doesn't seem single cell to me.
Fascinating none the less.

~~~
twic
> I take it the life forms were spherical and flat discs have broken off

Exactly, yes:

[https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1023256798470463489](https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1023256798470463489)

~~~
Fifer82
Thanks, sorry for the silly question as well, I aggressively block social
media on my laptop and only seen the image. Visiting your link on a PC
answered all my questions.

------
leemailll
For those of you enjoy good quality things under a microscope, take a look at
[https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/](https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/)

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mnoplop
the world is so beautiful

------
bawana
and to think that most of the space in an atom is vacant. Seems to be a
tremendous waste of space. incomprehensible that nature would permit this.
surely something must exist in that nothingness where the electron vibrates
around the nucleus. and we are blind, deaf, insensate to it.

~~~
GW150914
You just said it... the electron is there. At any given moment, the electrons
occupy that “empty” space, which means it isn’t really empty, but full of
electrons. The wave function of the electrons is a “smeared” out geometry
which occupies that space, with various probabilities of localizing the
electron at any given point. When you touch something and experience mutual
electromagnetic repulsion (i.e. what touching actually is) you’re very much
sensing that. No need to invoke magic and mystery to fill a gap that doesn’t
exist.

~~~
NihilumExNil
That does very much sound like magic. The wave function is in principle just
describing the probability of measuring a value, if I recall correctly. What
you make of it is but an attractive theory to interpret that wavefunction
after the fact. And it's not particularly satisfying. It's completely
meaningless that it would have been in all places at once, if in fact, when
you look, it's only ever in one place.

~~~
GW150914
“When you look” is the key phrase there. When you _measure_ you’ve perturbed
the system and a superposition of probabilities collapses to a single
possibility. You can try to ignore the problem, but it keeps cropping up. Take
for example the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser:

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e4af/e51dd7946512eb14674035...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e4af/e51dd7946512eb146740356488f25a423aa8.pdf)

~~~
NihilumExNil
I am not going to even click that. "superposition of probabilities" is not a
real thing, merely a mathematical tool. The definition of probability still
involves something that is going to happen. Hey that's amazing, it's the
probe-ability.

edit: It's very hard for people to admit we really don't know, is what I am
trying to say. I mean that's the real definition of chance, we don't know for
certain. Whereas, if there is more to the field theories, more than ether, I'd
really like to know, but I'm not holding my breath. Between measurement
uncertainty and observer uncertainty, the models will remain just that.

~~~
GW150914
Well you’re allowed to believe whatever you want of course, however divorced
from observation, experiment and theory it happens to be. I would just caution
you against drawing such strong conclusions about a field you seem to know
very little about based on what you think should be, or your intuition.

~~~
posterboy
Well, now I read the paper and, while I do find it interesting but don't
follow the formulas, I wonder what you are trying to show me.

Removing the Beamsplitter (BSA) would only remove the ability to correlate the
measurements, so how do you know that there are actually no instances of
Gaussian distribution happening already at the origin, which would cause the
fork at the splitter (instead of information traveling back in time, for
example)?

> observation, experiment and theory

we agree on the observation and theory parts. The predictive power of the
theory for experiments is duly noted, but here the object under scrutiny is
way bigger than a single atom. Whereas the science around the materials used,
crystallography to begin with, is way above my grade.

The language in the paper caused me a bit of trouble: " _It is easy to see
..._ ", " _at the same time_ ", " _a quantum_ ".

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Bromskloss
Aww, I was gearing up for learning about blackboard chalk.

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superasn
When elon musk says it's possible that we're living in a simulation, it's fun
to think about the computer that can handle this level of detail and
complexity from the very minute to the billions of galaxies

~~~
TeMPOraL
And then it's funny to realize a simulation would not have to compute those
details until someone looks at them.

~~~
superasn
You're definitely right about that! But who is that someone? A human, a
bateria, any sentient being?

~~~
toxicFork
You.

~~~
oliviergg
Me. Who else ?

~~~
qbrass
Not you, you're part of the simulation. It's just superasn, Elon Musk, and a
bunch of goldfish used to generate entropy.

