What is something that sounds 100% false but is actually 100% true?
2y 11mon ago by lemmy.ca/u/lemonadebunny in asklemmy@lemmy.ml
The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it's a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm... Nah, those dots don't connect at all.
And many plantations converted to prisons that are still in operation to this day.
And many states can't reduce their prison populations because then they'd lose free labor.
And some states use prison labor to staff the governor's mansion with butlers.
Here in California, prisoners are employed to fight wildfires.
Until very recently, former prisoners were not allowed to be employed as firefighters when they got out. That was corrected by Newsom in 2020.
Man, I fucking love that guy and what he's been doing. Him and my governor, as well as the governor of Michigan have been having a pissing contest to see who can be the best governor, and we're all winning.
Go read about the nightmare this Angola prison in Louisiana.
It's even worse. The original US Constitution does not prohibit slavery. It wasn't until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed seventy years later - after a Civil War tore apart the country - that slavery was abolished. With the express exception of punishment for a crime. No qualifications for the severity of the crime. And that exception gets frequent use to this day in the penal system
The original US Constitution is explicitly pro-slavery. Not only does it explicitly require non-slaveholding states to return fugitive slaves to their oppressors, but it has multiple mechanisms intended to ensure the dominance of slave states in the federal government.
The Constitution was never a unified idealist vision of liberty. It was a grungy political compromise between factions that did not agree on what the country should be. These included New England Puritans (religious cultists; but abolitionist), New York Dutch bankers (who wanted the money back they'd loaned to the states), Southern planters (patriarchal rapist tyrants), and Mid-Atlantic Quakers (pacifists willing to hold their noses and make peace with the Puritans and planters).
As a natural US citizen it took me a while to understand what I was taught about US history in grade school was not entirely accurate. US independence was about corporate interest. The land barons and industrialists did not want to pay taxes to the crown. That was the offense that led to a declaration of independence, everything else was cursory.
At most half the American population was in favor of independence. Those that spoke against independence were labeled as Tories and terrorized into submission (sometimes horribly). The people with money and influence led a campaign of terror against them. If they had actually held a vote and went with majority rule, it's likely we'd still be a British territory.
As far as the constitution, the authors did not consider other races as equals with human rights. When they said, "Liberty and justice for all." they were talking strictly about men of European descent. Even white women were not considered in the term "all". This is how the genocide of native people and slavery was justified. The people suffering these horrors were considered animals same as livestock. This ideology originated in the major Christian churches of the time which were all run by, you guessed it, men of European descent.
Of course in modern times we know that human genetics are one of the least variant of any species on the planet, but back then they relied on the Church instead of science. You can thank those guys for over a millennia of dark ages and unjust human rights.
In order to explain the injustices of the early US, one has to comprehend English common law, the economics of empires bound together by wind-powered sailing ships, Protestant and Catholic Christian doctrine, and the legacies of the Spanish Reconquista that became ideological white-supremacism.
It is really easy to come up with caricatures that say "Jefferson was just a rapist" or "the Articles of Confederation were okay, but the Constitution sucked" or "the colonies would have been fine under British rule forever" or "everyone shoulda just joined the Iroquois".
In fact, everything was worse and more fucked up and lots of people died in misery and horror.
Not only does it explicitly require non-slaveholding states to return fugitive slaves to their oppressors
The Fugitive Slave Law wasn't part of the Constitution.
but it has multiple mechanisms intended to ensure the dominance of slave states in the federal government.
Again, not part of the Constitution. Those were the various compromises that the South kept getting pissy about foreseeing the end of Slavery, so they kept threatening rebellion.
If anyone tries to tell you the civil war was about states rights, not slavery... These are pretty obviously about slavery. But if they don't believe that, just let them read the Southern States Declarations of Secession. They say what the civil war's about in their own words.
The Fugitive Slave Law wasn’t part of the Constitution.
The Fugitive Slave Clause, which authorized it, certainly is though!
Fair enough! The clause begot the law.
There’s a great documentary called 13th about this and racial inequality in America
Not even just the highest rate. The highest number of incarcerated people! Countries with over 1b people still have fewer prisoners, total.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country
The Star-spangled Banner (where the phrase “Land of the Free” comes from) was written in 1814, 51 years before slavery was abolished. The idea that America is or ever was the land of the free is a total joke.
The third verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is not typically sung today. It refers to "the hireling and slave" among the foes of the Republic. "The hireling" refers to the mercenaries employed by the British crown in fighting the American revolutionaries. It is unclear whether "slave" is intended to derogate all British subjects as "slaves" of the crown, or if it specifically refers to enslaved Africans who were offered their freedom by the British if they fought against the revolution.
That's what Lincoln said! America's enemies point to slavery and use it to call the ideals of liberty lies.
The founders didn’t build the free society. They built the society capable of altering itself, and that grew into the free society.
And the fight continues. The founders were so far down, because basic freedoms for everyone is 0, and we have to fight to get up to that point. The founders negotiated a freeer society, like you said able to modify itself, and the general arc of soiety seems to be the expansion of freedom for the average person.
One day, we may even be able to eat without justifying our food through labor!
Other countries have also altered themselves to become free societies.
Sorry, but freedom wasn't invented by slave masters.
Good for them.
Sheesh. Step it up, America
El Guardador
Unfortunately this bonkers truth is so mundane at this point, I didn’t need to read passed “freedom”
… and built its initial wealth on slavery revenue.
It’s a shame because there are a lot of other great things to be proud about when it comes to the US. I guess when people boast about US freedom, what they mean is democracy, and starting the end of the colonial era, inspiring a tidal wave of democratic uprisings around the world, which is accurate. I wish they didn’t use the word “freedom” for that.
That's not all that exciting. All of Europe (and basically every other are of the world) was built on slave labor as well, that's literally what the colonial period was about. Also vikings were primarily about capturing slaves, Rome and Greece were mostly slaves, serfdom wasn't significantly different than slavery.
Sure; but it still bothers me that the US is part of it and yet is often associated with freedom by American nationalists. The same way I’m annoyed that France (my native country, I’m a naturalized American) boasts itself the “pays des droits de l’homme” (“the country of human rights”), despite freedom of speech and of religion having gigantic asterisks, even though they feel like such basic human rights to me. It’s just like, if your national identity happens to not be the greatest at something, maybe don’t boast about being the best at it!
But anyway, this leads me to wonder… I feel like US slavery is discussed and depicted in arts a lot more often, and I genuinely wonder why that is. What do you think? Is it just that American culture chooses to address it head on when a lot of others don’t, or do you think there’s more to it?
So the US was born in a world where slavery was the norm, practiced slavery, and soon became (one of?) the first countries to formally abolish slavery, and fought a civil war with hundreds of thousands of casualties to back up that abolishment.
Let’s look at this question another way: do you think if the USA had never been founded, that there would be more or less slavery in the world today?
I don’t know enough to know the answer to this question, honestly. I know some stuff about the cultural state of slavery at the time of the founding of the US, and how much it already was on thin ice at the time; and that it’s actually very likely that it would have been ended or at least severely restricted by the King of England earlier if the US hadn’t actually won independence (or at least so thought the Southern states). But I don’t realize what was going on elsewhere in the world too, in a way that it would have been abolished there, or not.
What I know: the reason for slavery in the South specifically is that those colonies were funded with much more of a “get rich quick” mentality. Sustainability wasn’t initially the goal, the goal was finding tons of gold and bringing it back to Europe. When the tons of gold didn’t materialize, people had to drastically cut costs to keep those colonies going on other resources; and that’s how, before slavery, indentured servitude was introduced. It initially was a temporary and voluntary state: you’d sign yourself into indentured servitude for a plantation for X years, as a way to pay for your trip to the new world, at the end of which you were free to build the life you want there. Eventually, the plantation owners wondered what it would be like if they didn’t have to set all those people free at the end of the agreement, and obviously it was quite financially successful for them. Eventually, the slave trade and abductions, and all the related horrors, got set up to feed that system.
Anyway, fast forward to the Revolutionary War, and the English crown is showing signs of wanting to regulate that madness. Maybe not abolishing right away, but at least putting serious limits to what people can do. The war starts in the North, with most Southern states not being very interested to join, but what sets the keg on fire was, after the war started, when the King proclaimed that any slave who would escape to join the war effort on the redcoat side would thereby be free. That sent Southerners the message that slavery was on its last leg if the colonies remained English, and is what convinced a number of Southern states to join the rebellion after all.
Eventually, independence is won, but in the 1780s, the King violates the peace treaty of Paris by placing an embargo on America, in order to squeeze them out of money and force them all to join the English empire back (which obviously didn’t quite work!). At the time, the South has most of the remaining funds after a very difficult decade, and little debt (I wonder why!), but if the North goes back to being English, they see the writing on the wall that the South would also eventually be conquered into the English empire again, and therefore slavery would probably end. As a result, the Southern states demand a clause in the US Constitution that forbids the future new US Congress to abolish the Atlantic slave trade (and therefore slavery) at all for 20 years (until 1808). So with that, they have a choice between being sure to keep slavery for at least 20 years, or going back to being English and having it abolished or severely restricted basically any time. That was a key motivator for the Southern states, which tended to be against centralization of government, to still agree to ratify the Constitution.
So to hit it on the nail again: they knew so well that slavery was on its last leg regardless of what they’d do, that they agreed to a very temporary 20-year break to still be sure to stretch it for that time, even if it meant agreeing for the very long-term to something they massively didn’t like the idea of: a federal government. The rest is history.
Anyway, that’s just the US, and even with that knowledge, I don’t know when emancipation here would have occurred if different events had happened; and even less so the rest of the world, of course.
Wow, very informative.
Sounds like maybe the US extended slavery by twenty years, instead of shortening it.
I do know that American slavery was especially bad compared to other societies’ manifestations of it.
Maybe it extended it, maybe not, my understanding is it’s hard to say.
One thing for sure: slavery lived on quite a lot more than 20 years. The abolition of the Atlantic trade was later voted to be in effect on Jan 1st 1808, the very day that it was constitutionally possible to abolish it; but that didn’t free the existing slaves quite yet. 50+ years went by to attempt to resolve the issue diplomatically, which eventually failed and gave way to 4 years of Civil War. So, that’s almost 80 years total.
But on the other hand, my understanding is no one really knew clearly what the King had in mind to do about slavery, and it was not in his interest to be too clear about it and risk to alienate either side, before actually taking action. Maybe he was planning to quickly abolish slavery indeed; or maybe just to limit it, or maybe to tax it. The Southern states were very worried they he may abolish, but I’m not sure it’s well known what his actual plan was. So, maybe he would have stopped slavery earlier; or maybe he would have regulated it the way he wanted to and then let it happen, and slavery could very well still be active to this day. No idea.
Freedom™
Democracy is a prerequisite for freedom, disenfranchisement, in any form, is a policy failure and should be mitigated.
That's sounds 100% right and is 100% right
This doesn't sound false though.
Yeah, of all the words that can follow the legaly declared prohibition of slavery, except might be one of the dumbest you can pick…
Freedom means guns, and more freedom means more guns. Ur just jealous, commie
sips budlight
They hate Bud Light too now
They never stopped drinking it they just pretended to
You see, the trick is to limit “freedom” to certain people. Then, it can easily be the most “free” country in the world (for those people).
Many companies are making profits off of this. So many states have for profit prison systems and will get fined of they don't have enough people in those prisons. That is above the free labor most people have talked about.
Freedom to consume is right there. They don't specify what freedom right?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not subject guarantees in any United States territories. Misuse of free will may result in the loss of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Symptoms may include mental disease, tissue damage, cancer, and loss of all bodily and livelyvhood functions. Consultation with appropriate legal counsel is recommended before using free will, as complications may occur.
For more information ask your dumbass neighbor what's right for you.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
Don’t mean to pick, but Oxford was founded in 1096 and Cambridge in 1209.
I worked for cambridge in 2009 and got a nice little 800 year badge
That edit is the saddest part about this
I felt like I was transported back to mid-2000s internet when I read that. Le epic troll.
Why are you so rude?
2009-1209=800 Big oof there
You really need to be nicer to people here or you will probably get banned by someone sooner or later. People are trying to get away from the reddit atmosphere here. Don't act all superior because you spotted a mistake. That's really childish.
Dude, delete it and try to forget, nobody is buying your excuse. You called someone dumb for making a mistake, despite it being you who made the error while OP was bang right.
It's very embarrassing mate, you can try to style it out all you want and a couple 10 yr olds might buy it but not much more than that.
Personally I think you'd do best deleting the comment and trying to forget that you were just that stupid once upon a time :) x
delete it and try to forget
Doesn’t that strike you as a sort of self-gaslighting?
Yeah but self gaslighting isn't so bad. Learn from your mistakes sure, but try to forget the things that make you cringe as you fall asleep.
You got epic trolled my dude!
Much delirium, such humourz.
I'm guessing that about fits with your level :) x
u mad?
Apoplectic mate.
That, or just amused at your steadfast position that you actually intended the primary school level mistake :) x
Y u mad though?
I probably shouldn't have given you 2 options and expected you to understand the sarcasm in the first. I blame myself...
Good luck though mate, I have a sneaking suspicion you'll need some :) x
But y u mad?
You're really embodying the saying "Never play chess with a pigeon."
Fucking idiot. Can't do math but quick to jump on the chance to try to correct someone.
Who's dumbass now?
You
I got it man. Some people just don’t get how the making of a super obvious mistake is a satire of the kind of confidence you’re putting forward.
It’s weird because it’s like they can’t recognize when an error is so egregious it couldn’t be a genuine error.
unfunny sthu
And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
Wait, you're saying that the Aztec empire was just 64 years old when Columbus discovered America and ships with conquistadors followed to butcher and enslave everyone?
Yeah, I've heard similar things in the past and I'm always confused by it.
There were people there prior to the Aztec empire conquering them. The Aztec empire is just a specific government that ruled the area at that specific time.
The Napoleonic empire, for comparison, only lasted 1804-1815 (with a hole in the middle).
The 1st donut empire
My local pub is older than the USA.
As an American who lived in England for a couple years, that always just fascinated me. Some places just legit felt like I've stepped back in time.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the construction on the great pyramids.
Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?
If you've ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you'd get it! They're fairly expensive, and aren't airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they'll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting
It just occurred to me that zippos are basically the same type of oil lanterns that we've been using for thousands of years
Although, if you use them a lot (like, a couple packs a day "a lot"), you get good at filling them the right amount, and it's just something you do.
Zippos are pretty fantastic for cigarette smokers. They're horrible for someone who just want to carry fire around in their pocket "just in case."
Back when I was smoking I got a Zippo because it was cool. Refilling fuel and replacing flints got old, but the taste of gas in your mouth was just the worst.
Every weed smoker had a zippo they didn't use because it tasted so bad. They're fidget toys more than anything. And the "windproof" feature doesn't work all that well compared to a bic lighter. Who cares if it keeps a tiny flame alive if it's not going to ignite anything else. You have to shelter it anyway.
you are loved and deserve happiness
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.
At this point you get into a philosophical discussion about what "right" really means
Two wrong don’t make a right, but three left turns do.
Or if the "present" actually exists
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Good bot
Man, that song hits me right in the feels. Every time.
I'm really picky when it comes to clocks. They need to be ±1 minute. If they aren't it really starts to bother me.
A broken clock may occasionally be right but it's regularly useless
time dilation ftw!
If you're lucky, a clock that's slightly too fast or too slow will be right once
My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it
*It must be correct as it's very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past
Depends how fast is going backwards
Also depends how the other clock is broken, if we're this picky about it.
That's why the correct term is 'a stopped clock' not a broken one.
Yeah a broken LED clock isn't often right!
This only works with 1-dimensional time though.
As opposed to what?
2 dimensional time?
I really wanna know how that clock works
Luckily we don't build clocks for n-dimensional time
A clock running backwards turns left and is therefor never right.
It's right the 4 times the hands overlap at 12 and 6.
Oh, I have two good ones:
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Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
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You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn't been there.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it's been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it's productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)
To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.)
Truly no offense, but this is sort of burying the lede on Nuclear Power risks. Mathmatically coal releases more radiation - no question. It's also hard to pin down how many died due to Fukushima for ver good reasons: Correlation might be easy, but determining cause is ultra tough and no right-minded scientist would say it without overwhelming evidence (like they had something "hot" that fell on their roof and didn't know it for a long time). Also? They aren't dead yet. So we look to statistical life span models crossing multiple factors (proximity, time of exposure, contaminated environments and try to pin down cancer clusters attributable, and people can live for decades, etc....
The problem is that people rightly are concerned that in both Fukushima and Chernobyl (and 3 Mile for that matter) unforseen circumstances could have been catastrophically worse. You blow up a coal plant? You expose a region locally to it and it's probably "meh". You blow up a nuclear plant, and you get melt down corium hitting ground water or sea water with direct exposure to fissioning material and all the sudden you have entire nations at risk for subsequent spewing of hot material that will contaminate food supplies, water resevoirs, and linger on surfaces and be pulled into our lungs once it's in the dirt. Radioactive matieral is FAR more dangerous inside the body when you eat plants and animals that are exposed and pull it from the ground. Even cleaning down every surface, eventually you'll get some of it airborn to be breathed into our lungs again with wind storms, flooding and other natural erosion. The consequences are exponentially higher with Nuclear accidents and ignoring that is whitewashing. And that's not even getting into contamination from fuel enrichment, cooling ponds/pools leaking water, or the fact that it will take 30-40 years to clean up Fukushima (and they aren't sure how exactly that will happen and there could be another tsunami). Probably hundreds to try to clean up and contain Chernobyl - and given the current state of affairs we may find out even worse.
BTW, I'm pro-nuclear. Thorium salts seem a good way to go and we probably would already have these if not for the nuclear arms race making nations hungry for plutonium. Please don't short sell everyone's intelligence because you can claim "only" a handful of people died due to Fukushima. Direct death is only one facet. Lives were disrupted (and displaced) and for a while there, the impacts spread to the US across the Pacific and there were discussions of evacuating like 1/3 of Japan's population outside an exclusion zone. You can be pro nuclear while still acknowledging that some fears are real and well founded, and unfortunately the industry has proven gaps in safety that make it harder and harder to argue when we have Solar and Wind and rapidly ramping power storage. Nuclear is likely to simply be outcompeted over time (just like Coal and NG).
Iv read about Thorium the last 3-4 years and it seems so promising. Im really disapointed that the push is not greater as it would make everything a lot more safe.
Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.
Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can't do it.
Did you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's only mandate is to ensure the safety of nuclear power, not to promote its implementation. Many regulatory bodies have a dual mandate to stop them from just shutting down what they're supposed to regulate.
Can't be unsafe if it doesn't exist lol
Not just that, but you might get less radiation swimming in the pool where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored than outdoors.
Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.
Though they're on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there's a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don't have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They've been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.
There are people still alive who remember a world before "splinter-free" toilet paper.
The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".
Fucking OUCH
Sometimes you need that good, deep clean only a chunk of bark will give you.
Also known as "scooping"
Mostly because they think it will “turn you gay” or some shit
That's my favorite Wikipedia page now. Love that Wikipedia takes itself so seriously that they actually list the uses of toilet paper.
I enjoyed "See also: Anal Hygiene"
History smells awful.
til: nokia sold toilet paper
The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.
On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.
Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
Edit: idk if it's actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that's what I've heard. I looked it up and it seems like it's your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.
It works best if you hold the fob under your chin and open your mouth in the direction you're aiming!
I swear these comments look more and more like a ploy to make me look stupid in public
For maximum effectiveness, open your mouth and make a "BONG" noise. It's literally the same technology as a radar detector.
Also works better if you spread your arms and hold the fob with your chin
Closing your eyes and assuming an earth bending position like Toph helps too. Bonus points if you make your feet stomp the ground.
And then point your left leg towards the sky for extra spread
The best id the look on people's faces when it works.
On one side you have people that think 5g causes cancer. On the other, you have people directly beaming shit into their skulls to open their cars from a couple extra feet away.
Wild
To be fair, radio waves have been everywhere for over a hundred years now. Plus, it's just low-frequency light. It's no different (probably safer even) than shining a flashlight at your head.
Supposing we could somehow bring the light into the body?! Or maybe we could inject them with disinfectant! We better look into that.
i dont believe it causes cancer necessarily, but i think 5g is worrying for the sake of big increase in location tracking precision
That is a very valid concern, to be honest.
Your skull acts as an antenna
How?
The tinfoil hat you're wearing amplifies the signal!
Your skull is a parabolic reflector
I’ve read two takes on this before:
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The cavity of your head helps project the signal to your car
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The water molecules in your head amplify the radio waves to reach your car
I can't imagine how water could amplify a signal. If anything, it's the reflector like shape of your skull.
The way I do it is holding the bottom of the key under the soft part of the lower jaw while holding the mouth open as a resonance chamber.
Alright, I came across some researchers who were keen on validating this. It appears quite credible. You can view the results of their simulation here: Digital Debunking: Using Your Head to Extend Your Car Remote Range
There is absolutely no way this is true. I need to see some evidence to believe this. (I work as a wireless technician)
I've done it. It does work.
Hold your fob a foot to the side of your head. Back away until it stops working. Take 2 more steps back to be sure. Then put the fob to your forehead. It'll work again.
It's true, but not because your skull acts like an antenna. It's because the signal is being reflected by the skull. You can actually just try it out, the range of your car keys will extend when you hold them to your chin.
I doubt enough signal reflect of off your very radio wave observing skull to make much of a difference at all, it's most likely a placebo effect and the real reason it extends the range is because you are holding the key fob higher, so it has a better LOS with less obstructions, and it has a better chance to bounce waves off of the very reflective concrete on the ground up to the sensor of your car.
Organic materials are absolute crap at reflecting wireless signals, they are much better at absorbing and scattering them.
Let us know what you think after you try it!
Science is cool.
Alright well unfortunately I can't really test it because the key fob for my car is hit or miss even when I'm right next to it.
I would love if someone can post some evidence, literally any evidence I will watch and take in. I have a scientific mindset, no problem being proven wrong, I'm very much open to new information but I need to see some evidence.
I found this small experiment, someone recorded on Physics StackExchange.
I also found this computer modelling, but I’m not familiar with the source (Altair.)
I have no leaning either way, and would welcome more data on the topic.
Try it out, for real! The effect is too strong for being a placebo.
Alright, I came across some researchers who were keen on validating this. It appears quite credible. You can view the results of their simulation here: Digital Debunking: Using Your Head to Extend Your Car Remote Range
I use this trick all the time to find my car I'm parking garages.
I would love to see more info on this
The first time I heard about this was in reference to garage door remotes.
If your remote was too far away, you placed the remote under your chin pointing to your skull to amplify the signal using your head.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.
1 day = time to rotate on it's axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun
For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.
However, because Venus' axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.
Hence, a year is shorter than a day
For those interested:
1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days
The world is running out of sand.
It's one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.
Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids
General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Isn't this Judge Doom's plan?
All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon
The northern most part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southern most part of Brazil.
Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.
- Wombat feces are cube shaped.
- Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
- Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
- Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.
The can opener was invented 30 years after the can.
Maine is the closest US state to Africa.
Is that really true haha
Edit: seems like it, so cool!
https://www.sciencealert.com/which-us-state-is-closest-to-africa
weast
Actually, here's my fun fact: Alaska is the farthest North, East, and West state in the U.S.
According to my sloppy google maps guesstimate, this appears to be true. Florida-West Africa seems slightly further than Maine-Northwest Africa
Florida is crazy far west, compared to where I expect. It's due south of Ohio.
I feel like this probably explains some things...
I once read a blog from a sailing group that pointed out that there is possible sea route where you could sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia in a straight line and end up in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Every Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.
I don't think this is true for all of them. My cube takes at least a couple hundred rotations and then you have to take the stickers off and move them around to solve it.
nooooo dont peel the stickers
take it apart
Consider: Hammer.
rotates a corner piece
Air is a fluid.
Most people have more than the average number of legs.
The average person has one fallopian tube
"The average person has... " is very different from "People on average have...".
I suspect you meant the second, but sometimes people truly mean the first.
The difference doesn't matter until it very suddenly matters. 😉
I was actually quoting Bo Burnham, it's a direct quote from his 2010 special Words Words Words
I didn't know the specific reference (I haven't seen that special yet, so thanks for mentioning it), but I recognize the joke structure.
You should definitely watch it! It's a little rough around the edges because he was only 19 when he wrote and performed it, but it's also extremely impressive because he was only 19 when he wrote and performed it.
The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.
99.99% of population have more arms than average value.
Ice is a mineral. Just unstable at room temperature.
This sounds good for birthdays ...
Water is actually a very unusual substance. When it freezes into a solid, instead of becoming heavier and sinking in liquid water, it begins bouyant and floats.
If it didn't have this property, our planet would have turned into an ice ball and never thawed out.
That I cleaned the house (according to my fiance at least)
Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies.
(also a good example of why correlation =/= causation)
Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate.
93%, actually.
https://www.good.is/infographics/the-population-of-the-dead-how-many-people-have-ever-lived
Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/
EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.
An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.
Texas is larger than any country in Europe except Russia.
Wait, is Russia in Europe?
Edit: apparently it's in both. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_the_continents
I always feel weirded out when people are surprised part of Russia is in Europe, when I was surprised to learn part of it is considered Asia.
Geographically only, not in essence
Essence?! We have tacos and bbq!
Turkey has kebab but they can't into Europe either.
Maybe if EU becomes the World State it can welcome honorary members
Nice one, you did a racism 👍️
No, you didn't seem to get the comment.
Russia is an Asian country and there's nothing degrading, less valued or discrimination in that.
As what it comes to russian people, they should be freed of repression as any others
It has a (smaller) european part.
Yeah, it was my first comment about part geographically
So American.
Lol :-)
Moose kill more people than bears every year.
Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.
Tiffany was a really common name in Ancient Rome.
if you scramble a rubiks cube up there is a good chance that it is the first cube to be in that state. there are 43,252,003,247,489,856,000 possible states that a cube(3x3) can be scrambled up in to.
Hand sanitizer is ~120 proof alcohol. (Not a recommendation to drink it, since it's usually spiked with bad-tasting additives to keep people from doing just that. Some commercial hand sanitizers swap out ethanol for isopropyl alcohol, i.e. rubbing alcohol, which is more toxic when ingested.)
Turtles can, in fact, breathe through their butts.
Until recently the word "factoid" didn't mean a small bit of trivia. It meant something that sounded true or was accepted as a fact even though it was incorrect.
I've noticed Americans tend to be surprised that Europe is bigger than the US
We might actually not know why magnets work.
The formula used to prove the functionality of magnets can also be used to prove the existence of a theoretical state called a monopolar magnet - positive or negative on both sides. So either monopolar magnets can exist, even if in some esoteric circumstance, or we don't know why magnets work.
There are four stanzas to the Star Spangled Banner (the US national anthem) and what you typically here at sporting events is only the first.
Bonus fun fact, the fourth stanza contains the line that, in the 1860s became the shorter, "In God We Trust," motto on coinage that eventually became the national motto of the US in the 1950s (which was also when it was added to paper money). That original line from the fourth stanza was, "And this be our motto - 'In God is our trust.'"
If your body healed as fast as your tongue you would starve to death.
Lettuces in landfills take up to 25 years to decompose.
The first can/tin opener wasn’t invented until about 75 years after canned food started being produced. During that time, people used hammers and chisels to open cans.
Another comment presented this same fact, but the years is 30 instead 75. Heck, what's the truth.
I see your 75 years and raise you to 100 years. That's now the truth.
To be fair the other commenter said 30 years after the can was invented, so maybe it goes like this:
Can food starts being processed -> 45 years later can is invented -> 30 years later can opener is invented
So, canbed food or can come first? This is egg and chicken all over again lol
550/2 is not 225 and 77+33 is not 100
Texas is smaller than the state of Western Australia, while the USA is only slightly bigger than Australia.
Moose are prey to Orca Whales.
Today I learned the president of the Screen Actors Guild is The Nanny (Fran Dresher)
There are 100 billion bacterial cells in a single gram of poop.
7% of all homosapien to have ever lived are alive today.
If this percentage trending up or down?
Up as population grows and down as it shrinks.
Apparently I’m wrong.
That's not true. If the population grows only a little, say one more person each year, the relative amount shrinks.
No. Birth rate has to overcome the collective mortality rate of every year since the first human.
I don't know which way is it trending tho.
It's trending down as the overall amount of dead humans continues to grow proportionally with the current population. No matter how many humans are born they will eventually die and add to the total; even with a massive and sustained baby boom the ratio of alive humans to dead humans will still, eventually, reach zero.
Trees are mostly made of air.
Cars run on explosions
In future space travel spaghettification will be a serious concern.
Yummy.
Wait why? I thought that was only a thing if you get close to a black hole. Why would it be a serious concern? Couldn't you just avoid the black holes?
Yea maybe, but would still concern the hell out of me...
It can also matter if you are travelling close to the speed of light.
The word "alone" comes from a compound of "all" + "one".
The world's two largest cities by area are both on Greenland.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/largest-city-in-the-world-by-area
That would be a diameter of about 800 km. Don't they have multiple centers that could be called towns? With churches, administration and schools? They just can't be bothered to split it up.
The towns in this municipality on Greenland used to be split up. The main capital is among them, so it made sense to grasp the 800 km circumference even if it's just a few people. Anyway it's according to the topic, so as stupid as it might be, it is factually the largest cities by area, and goes to show that the question of which is the largest city is ambiguous.
Tokyo is usually considered the largest city, due to the largest population overall, but it doesn't have the largest area (Greenland) nor the largest population of a single municipal (Chongqing, China) nor the largest density (Macau, China) nor the largest area of skyscrapers (Hong Kong), so it's a thing depending on definitions.
It doesn't really matter much. If you're in the middle it, it's all just city until the horizon. Well, except for Greenland. You can probably throw a stone across all the houses in the largest city by area.
Hard sell to consider towns of 20k and 10k people are cities. I grew up in rural Midwest with higher population densities than that.
In Lithuania, the smallest city (i.e. settlement with a city status), Panemunė, has a population of ~300. Source: Wikipedia
Australia is about the same size as the USA in terms of land mass.
I am quite old and responsible when I'm not here?
“This sentence is a lie” sounds false but is actually true. I think?
A description is "autological" if it describes itself. For example:
- "Short" is a short word, so it is autological.
- The phrase "excessively verbose, wordy, redundant, repetitious, repetitious, and prolix" also describes itself, so it too is autological.
- "Written in English" is written in English, so it is autological.
A description is "heterological" if it does not describe itself. For example:
- "Long" is not a long word; so it is heterological.
- "Bisyllabic" is not a bisyllabic word, so it is heterological.
- "Written in Arabic" is not written in Arabic, so it is heterological.
Now, is the word "heterological" itself heterological?
The following phrase is autological: "is currently being read by an idiot"
Liar.
Well, that makes it true then.
It's not easy to say whether it is or not. This is something called the Liar Paradox and it has a surprising amount of potential solutions. That article linked explains it really well but, be warned, it is a bit dry.
The solution one of my professors gave that makes most sense to me is that, as a standalone sentence, "this sentence is a lie" is neither true nor false. At first glance the sentence makes sense and "lie" leads us to think that there is an untruth somewhere but there can't be as there is no 'truth value' within it. That is to say that there is nothing in the sentence that can either be true or false therefore there is nothing that can be lied about.
Only one of many potential solutions so though. So, maybe?
Every possible Rubik's cube permutation can be solved in 20 moves.
Not by me. :(
The first fax machine was invented years before the first telephone.
There was an approximately 20 year period where a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLUD_NGE370
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=cLUD_NGE370
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
My last one was a bit confusing. Here's one
the word Helicopter is not as you'd think. Heli-copter.
The word is Helico, to mean spinning
and pter, as in feather, like pterodactyl
so the pronounciation is helico-ter.
P.S. I'm so sorry.
A fairly large amount of traditional Italian dishes aren't Italian. Many of these, such as carbonara, pizza, and tiramisu, were actually invented in the US, and only became known in Italy sometime in the mid-late 20th century.
Edit: I've been corrected, these dishes do originate from Italy. I should've re-read the article instead of going off of memory.
Many of these, such as carbonara, pizza, and tiramisu, were actually invented in the US
From the article you cited:
Pizza is a prime example. “Discs of dough topped with ingredients,” as Grandi calls them, were pervasive all over the Mediterranean for centuries: piada, pida, pita, pitta, pizza. But in 1943, when Italian-American soldiers were sent to Sicily and travelled up the Italian peninsula, they wrote home in disbelief: there were no pizzerias. Before the war, Grandi tells me, pizza was only found in a few southern Italian cities, where it was made and eaten in the streets by the lower classes. His research suggests that the first fully fledged restaurant exclusively serving pizza opened not in Italy but in New York in 1911. “For my father in the 1970s, pizza was just as exotic as sushi is for us today,” he adds.
It clearly states something different than your claim. Pizza was not invented in the US, it was popular in the US.
From Wikipedia:
Modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples, Italy, in the 18th or early 19th century.[31] Before that time, flatbread was often topped with ingredients such as garlic, salt, lard, and cheese. It is uncertain when tomatoes were first added and there are many conflicting claims,[31] though it certainly could not have been before the 16th century and the Columbian Exchange. Until about 1830, pizza was sold from open-air stands and out of pizza bakeries.
Many sources state pizza wasn't popular in Italy as it was in the US, but your statement on it's origin is 100% wrong.
Tl;dr Italy invented the pizza but the US invented the pizzeria.
It was popularized and took it's current form in the US. Flatbread with toppings was eaten all across the Mediterranean, so isn't Italian as such.
Flatbed with cheese and tomatoes on pizza bread... Yep, that's basically pizza. You can say Italian Americans evolved the dish and created popular varieties, but the basics come from Naples. Flatbed with toppings was eaten even in Achaemenid Persia, so I'm not talking about just that, but about a dish called "pizza" with cheese and tomatoes, and that clearly comes from Italy.
Have you not read the article? Cheese and all types of fruit/meats were used on the flatbread. Trukish Pide is basically the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0%C3%A7li_Pide
The thing with the invention of tradition is that it's orgiginality is only established after the popularity. American GI's find out that pizza is not the thing in Italy it was back in the states: people go looking and find that someone from Napoli wrote something about flatbread with cheese and tomato. Now it is said to be an Italian classic.
Sam thing happened in Scotland with the Kilts and tartan. That wasn't a thing in Scotland untill an English textile salesmen started selling fabrics to scottish nobility in the 19'th century.
We've got paintings of pizza that are older than the US 😂
This is not stated accurately. The American versions of pizza and carbonara we're invented in the US, but there were and are original Italian versions.
Would be great to have sources for the less obvious answers.
Nikola Tesla loved a pigeon so much he spent todays rough equivalent of $34,970 on her happiness.
"I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life." Nikola Tesla (according to this biography)
America bombed the Nord Stream
Regardless which lossless compression algorithm you prefer, it makes most files bigger.
*where "files" includes all bitstrings of a given length, whether or not they've ever existed
That's pretty disingenuous, since most files aren't just random data.
Most real files actually have rather low entropy, even if they look like random junk (e.g., executables), chiefly due to repetition of similar data and sparse values.
Exactly. It's merely our human preference for those types of files that allow them to work at all.
things get weird when we include "all possible states"
It's not a preference; it's simply the state of the system to which we may desire to apply compression.
Is it because it works on patterns and your random garbled string would have too much noise to be compressed well, while a structured file coming from an actual piece of software would probably have enough repeating patterns to the point where it actually can be shrunk?
yes. dictionary based compression is truly awful when fed random data.
the ups and downs are battling hard on the parent comment. gotta admit, I had to think for a few seconds to get the gist of it, but its actualy pretty slick and perfectly snarky.
edit: only thought would be that an infinite selection of random data sets would be somewhat evenly split between compressable and non-compressable, but if you add compression structure, it tips the balance firmly into "file size increases" territory.
very cool little comment.
*except the identity function 🤓