All posts tagged: exist

4 ridiculously useful Excel tools Microsoft barely tells you exist

4 ridiculously useful Excel tools Microsoft barely tells you exist

Published by skeptic

Excel has been around for decades; somewhere along the way, Microsoft buried a handful of genuinely brilliant features so deep in menus that most people never stumble onto them. These aren’t obscure formulas or power-user shortcuts either. They’re built-in tools that could save you hours if you just knew where to look. Related I typed three semicolons into Excel and found its strangest formatting trick Excel keeps a display layer and a data layer. Not on the ribbon, but three clicks from your toolbar Of everything Excel hides, the Camera tool is probably the most underused. It lets you take a live snapshot of any range of cells, formatting and all, and paste that snapshot anywhere else in your workbook, in another workbook, or even into Word or PowerPoint. The catch, however, is that unlike a regular screenshot, this image stays dynamically linked to the source data. Change a number in the original cells, and the snapshot updates automatically. This makes it perfect for building dashboards, since you can pull together snapshots of tables and …

Why Does the Blackhawk Movie Serial Exist?

Why Does the Blackhawk Movie Serial Exist?

Published by Jenni Sidey

If you’re one of the multitudes who know little to nothing about Blackhawk, all you need to know is that the Blackhawk Squadron originated as a group of World War II fighter pilots from the various Allied countries. Their leader is also named Blackhawk. They’re like Bon Jovi that way. While pretty obscure now, they were apparently popular enough to warrant a movie serial in 1952. You might already have noticed several problems with this. First, movie serials are short, sequential films shown before a main feature. They tended to be made on the cheap, so how did they expect to capture all of the exciting aerial battles seen in Blackhawk comics? They didn’t. Aside from a few brief scenes involving stock footage and unconvincing special effects, the team spends most of their time driving around in disappointingly bland cars. They might have at least painted the Blackhawk logo on the side. Second, 1952 is well after World War II ended. Seems a little odd that a comic so indelibly linked with World War II …

The Prolific Hollywood Filmmaker That Doesn't Actually Exist

The Prolific Hollywood Filmmaker That Doesn't Actually Exist

Published by Sam Flores

!function(n){if(!window.cnx){window.cnx={},window.cnx.cmd=[];var t=n.createElement(‘iframe’);t.display=’none’,t.onload=function(){var n=t.contentWindow.document,c=n.createElement(‘script’);c.src=”//cd.connatix.com/connatix.player.js”,c.setAttribute(‘async’,’1′),c.setAttribute(‘type’,’text/javascript’),n.body.appendChild(c)},n.head.appendChild(t)}}(document);(new Image()).src=”https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=8b034f64-513c-4987-b16f-42d6008f7feb”;cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({“playerId”:”8b034f64-513c-4987-b16f-42d6008f7feb”,”mediaId”:”99490c2d-13c1-487f-a4a2-eccb588295ec”}).render(“6a7b34fbe4b0b34a9822e716”);}); Actors, writers, and directors often face creative changes completely out of their control – think of all the storylines actors flat-out refused to film, or that one time a powerful play about the Cuban revolution turned into Dirty Dancing 2. Often, that means cast and crew are left with their names attached to a project they might not have felt in full control over. For instance, Peter Sagal, the Cuban revolution playwright, is credited as a writer on the Dirty Dancing sequel, despite saying there’s “not a single line of dialogue in that movie” that he wrote. In this case, he seems OK with the credit. But what do directors do when they no longer want their names associated with a film?  Apparently, some turned to an alias: Allen Smithee, often “misspelled” as Alan Smithee. Allen became a way of distancing directors from films they lost control over.  Don Siegel, the first person to use the name, said in his autobiography: “When I refused to take directing credit for the film [Death of …

Scientist says if aliens exist there’s a reason we haven’t found them | Science | News

Scientist says if aliens exist there’s a reason we haven’t found them | Science | News

Published by Sam Flores

Astronomers have spent decades scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life — but they may have been looking in the wrong place all along. A study presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham suggests that alien civilisations could be transmitting signals at higher radio frequencies that have been almost completely ignored by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Most previous efforts have focused on a narrow band of the radio spectrum between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz, known as the “water hole”. This region sits between the natural emissions of hydrogen and hydroxyl — the building blocks of water — and has long been viewed as a logical place for interstellar communication. Louisa Mason, a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester, decided to look elsewhere. Using archived data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, she carried out the telescope’s first dedicated SETI survey. Instead of requesting fresh observing time, she examined 38 existing observations originally collected for other scientific purposes. She searched 12 narrow frequency ranges in …

The Far-Right ‘Terror Plot’ That Didn’t Exist… Until The UK Government And Media Just Said It Did

The Far-Right ‘Terror Plot’ That Didn’t Exist… Until The UK Government And Media Just Said It Did

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Steven Tucker via dailysceptic.org, Did you see that huge Muslim gathering held in Suffolk recently, which had to be called off early due to a major far-Right terror plot being hatched against it? You may well have done, as the news was all over the media and referenced in alarmist tones by leading politicians, up to and including the Prime Minister (both the ones we’ve had this week). But did you also see that the ‘plot’ didn’t even exist? Quite possibly not, because the subsequent release of everyone concerned (bar one aberrant and misleading exception, who we’ll come to later) didn’t get anything like as much space in the media, and no mention at all from any of the politicians who had so eagerly jumped the imaginary gun to condemn it. Empty threats The disrupted event, called the UK Ijtima, attracted 15,000 members of the Religion of Peace from around the world to gather in the grounds of the country estate of Shrubland Hall in Barham to engage in events of a peacefully …

Does dark energy really exist? Our work identifies cracks in the foundations of today’s cosmological model

Does dark energy really exist? Our work identifies cracks in the foundations of today’s cosmological model

Published by skeptic

According to our best understanding, the universe is expanding – and is doing so at an accelerating rate. This is believed to be caused by something called the “cosmological constant”, which was first proposed by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity. In recent decades, it has become better known as dark energy, which is believed to make up about 70% of the universe. Crucial to this realisation were studies of Type Ia supernovae – exploding white dwarf stars. These are thought to emit a specific amount of light, which allows astronomers to determine their distances very accurately and thereby track the expansion of the universe. This work was awarded the 2011 Nobel prize in physics. The accelerating expansion of the universe is thought to be due to negative pressure, an unusual property of dark energy that allows it to overcome the attractive force of gravity. Yet the exact nature of dark energy remains a puzzle. It cannot be explained by our best theory for the fundamental building blocks of the universe – known …

Wild animals don’t exist for your social media content

Wild animals don’t exist for your social media content

Published by Sam Flores

Plenty of people who saw the video of a 65-year-old grandfather being tossed in the air like a rag doll by a bison in Yellowstone National Park last weekend assumed that the man must have gotten close enough to the animal to piss it off. At Yellowstone, which has the largest population of the majestic animals, bison attacks are rare relative to the number of park visitors overall. But the animals often called fluffy cows have also racked up the most human-involved injuries of any Yellowstone resident — and last weekend’s attack was the second this summer. But Carl McDaniel and his 13-year-old grandson, who visit Yellowstone every year, were abiding by the park’s guidance and giving the animal plenty of space, according to Mike MacLeod, a professional wildlife photographer who witnessed the incident. The same bison had charged through the campground minutes before, sending tourists scrambling, and was resting on a patch of ground when the man and his grandson came into view. “They were walking along the road, quite a ways away from …

Ezra Collective ‘wouldn’t exist’ without festivals like Montreux, band say

Ezra Collective ‘wouldn’t exist’ without festivals like Montreux, band say

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Music festivals have a responsibility to help “tell the stories” of artists who perform on their lineup, the CEO of Montreux Jazz Festival has said, as Ezra Collective declared they “wouldn’t exist” without festivals such as Montreux “giving us a chance”. As the historic festival concludes the first of its two-week programme, while celebrating its landmark 60th edition, CEO Mathieu Jaton told The Independent about their approach to curating an extraordinary lineup of both legends and newcomers each year. “We need to create bridges between the two,” he said. “When we had RAYE at the festival in 2024, the first thing she told the audience was how her heroes had played there decades before – Nina Simone, Etta James – so it becomes about that lineage.” RAYE opened this year’s Montreux Jazz Festival with a special performance the British star curated herself, featuring …

Astronomers discover faint dwarf galaxy that seems to exist without dark matter

Astronomers discover faint dwarf galaxy that seems to exist without dark matter

Published by Jenni Sidey

A faint dwarf galaxy drifting 45 million light-years from Earth may have joined one of astronomy’s strangest clubs. It belongs to a tiny set of galaxies that seem to exist without dark matter. That would be odd enough on its own. However, what makes NGC 1052-DF9 more striking is where it sits, in a narrow, straight trail of small galaxies in the NGC 1052 group. It sits alongside two other unusual systems, DF2 and DF4, that were already reported to lack dark matter. Now DF9 appears to fit the same pattern. In measurements reported in The Astrophysical Journal, a Yale-led team found that DF9’s mass can be explained by its stars alone. In ordinary dwarf galaxies, that should not happen. Normally, these systems are dominated by dark matter, the unseen material thought to provide the gravitational framework that helps galaxies form. This framework also helps galaxies hold together. “A line of galaxies lacking dark matter has never been seen before,” said Michael Keim, a Ph.D. student in astrophysics in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and …