Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

lqwertyd OP t1_j8k8f3x wrote

Reply to comment by vacuum_everyday in TIL The Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah is almost 4000 feet deep (that's 3X as tall as the Empire State Building). It's the largest man-made excavation and the deepest open-pit mine in the world. It's also visible to the naked eye from space. by lqwertyd

Yikes. Unsurprising.

The Pebble mine in Alaska looks like an environmental nightmare in the making.

Super interesting Frontline documentary on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NNlVrcthXI

Bingham Canyon makes a cameo.

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vacuum_everyday t1_j8jw7sv wrote

Reply to TIL The Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah is almost 4000 feet deep (that's 3X as tall as the Empire State Building). It's the largest man-made excavation and the deepest open-pit mine in the world. It's also visible to the naked eye from space. by lqwertyd

Utahn here, Rio Tinto is not a good neighbor.

The Salt Lake Valley usually has the worst air pollution nationally/globally during the winter months as it’s set in a bowl and the temperature inversion traps everything until a storm blows it away. This mine contributes to 30% of all pollution, that’s 10x more than the next polluter that is the Chevron refinery.

And this is not mentioning their hazardous spills, or the trendy/high income Daybreak neighborhood that’s built of former polluted mine land. Fun fact: you’re not allowed to any grow food in the ground there.

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kibufox t1_j8jucmz wrote

Reply to TIL The Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah is almost 4000 feet deep (that's 3X as tall as the Empire State Building). It's the largest man-made excavation and the deepest open-pit mine in the world. It's also visible to the naked eye from space. by lqwertyd

It's also so big that it obliterated an entire mountain, and took something like 1/2 to 2/3 of a city out. There are historic photos from a street looking down a road near the mine, which to have the same perspective today, you'd need to be flying a drone some 200 feet in the air.

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ksdkjlf t1_j8jd3t2 wrote

Reply to comment by V6Ga in TIL: The wires helping hold up antenna and poles are not "guide wires" by actually "guy-wires" by HanSolo71

I'm assuming they mean they only learned it was "pike" rather than "pipe" recently,.since it's a commonly cited mondegreen — or as reddit calls it, a r/BoneAppleTea.

Pike meaning "highway" is a shortening of turnpike, a term for a toll road most commonly encountered in the US Northeast, as u/jungl3j1m points out. So it's basically just "coming down the road". But to folks who don't call highways "pikes", it is often interpreted as "pipe".

A turnpike was originally a type of military defense that was used to stop horses or vehicles from going down a road — either like a cheval de fries or a turnstile — a set of pikes, turning around a central axis. Eventually it meant any sort of barrier, and then the road on which such a barrier might exist, i.e. a toll road.

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lqwertyd OP t1_j8jcswb wrote

Reply to comment by Carl_The_Sagan in TIL The Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah is almost 4000 feet deep (that's 3X as tall as the Empire State Building). It's the largest man-made excavation and the deepest open-pit mine in the world. It's also visible to the naked eye from space. by lqwertyd

Agreed. I flew over it the other day. I had no idea what it was, but took a photo I was so impressed by the scale. Stumbled upon the answer last night watching a documentary on the Pebble copper mine they are trying to build in Alaska.

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DumbNBANephew t1_j8j6wys wrote

Reply to comment by RedstripeRhapsodyHP in TIL that Sugar Ray Robinson had won all but one of his previous 132 fights, when he was defeated by unknown British boxer Randolph Turpin in 1951. Turpin became the first Brit to hold the middleweight championship since 1891 by VengefulMight

I think there was a circle of people who were "in" and they did their best to make sure no one else gets ahead of them no matter how good they are. A status pro quo that existed for a long time. They weren't all of British boxing when it all started, but they were de facto British boxing for a while before it all fell apart.

You see this sort of thing everywhere if you look hard enough. Some nobody being good enough to win it all and never get support is a telling sign.

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