Hidden VMU

The DreamCast was so advanced that even the memory cards were games consoles in their own right. Certain games on the Sega would send an 8 bit game to the memory card and you could play a dot matrix side scrolling game similar to that of game boy game. 

~image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT) 

When the Memory card was plugged into the game controller the screen would be used to display game stats. The memory card was refered to as a VMU. It would keep record of your game progress and allow you to play games retro style. 

Heavy Ice Cube

If you froze water that contains the heavy isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium, the ice cube would sink in normal water. This is because it is 10% more dense than normal water. 

~image generated by artificial intelligence(chatGPT) 

Water that is formed of Deuterium hydrogen is often called Heavy water.  Heavy water is also known is Deuterium Oxide. 

We Don't Go Around the Sun

The Planets including Mercury, Venus Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune don't go around the sun. They go around the solar system's center of gravity known as the Barry Centre. Because of Jupiter's mass the Barry center of our solar system is a point beyond the sun's surface. 

~ image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT).  

It's natural to think we're going around the sun but where not. 

Longest Line

The Longest tube line in London is the Central line. It goes from West Ruislip to Epping for about 76 kilometres or 46 miles, a distance that is considerably longer than London itself. The reason it is able to cover that distance is because it doesn't go in a straight line but sort of zig zags across it. 

The Longest Journey time wise would be on the district line because it goes to 80 stops and takes about one and a half hours. 

~ image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT) 

The Elizabeth line goes from Reading("reding") to Shienfield in Essex, 100 kilometres or 62 miles. (You would need to change trains at one of the tube stations to get to Shienfield.) It acts like a tube line for part of the journey but is more like a commuter train. It covers the whole journey in less than 1 and a half hours 

British Radio

Here in Britain DAB+ is the latest version of digital Radio and only works on radios that support DAB+. 

According to the DAB+ website, the sound quality of DAB+ is better despite requiring a lower data transmission rate, less than 64kb per second. At the time of writing this post, Britain intends to keep both technologies running. 

According to official documentation DAB+ uses the codec He aac V2, part of the MP4 framework. It has a much higher compression compared to the MP2 codec used by plain DAB. 

The drawback of this technology is the radio itself has to do more work. After extracting a data stream, microprocessor in the radio has to decompress the sound data and turn it back into sound waves. 

~ image generated by artificial intelligence (Gemini) 

Digital Radio

Digital Radio is different around the world, In most of Europe they use DAB+. MP4 the whole signal turns of and on in pulses to encode the characters in the data stream. This allows for more stations to be crammed into smaller bandwidths. The problem with this is you need to buy new radios to pick up the signal and the micro chip in the radio is working hard to decompress the signal. 

In the United States they use FM HD. In FM HD, the digital signal is hidden on either side of the FM frequency. So every FM station can have additional digital stations. It works a bit like Teletext. The signal can't be perceived in the FM but it is there and contains the digital sound codec. This system allows more FM stations to persist and still provide digital stations.  Ordinary FM transistor radios will still pick up the FM signal but you need new radios to pickup the additional digital stations. 

Tennis Balls and the Sun

Tennis Balls were originally white but sir David Attenborough, who was the head of the BBC at the time decided they should be yellow so they could be seen clearly on colour (colour) TV screens. White balls were very easy to see on black and white screens but not so clear on colour ones. 

~ image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT)

In space the sun is white but the blue portion of the light separates from the ray when it passes through the atmosphere and makes the remaining colours appear yellow. The Blue portion of the sun light eventually becomes scattered and causes the sky to appear blue. 

So the sun and tennis balls both originally appear white. 

Sources

~2024 QI facts by John Lloyd 

~BBC

~ NASA.gov website