What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true?
2y 9mon ago by lemm.ee/u/zirzedolta in asklemmy@lemmy.ml
For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. One day takes 243 Earth days, while a year takes 225.
Maybe it's not "well known", but still interesting in my opinion.
I mentioned this one to my friends the other day and it took so much convincing before they actually believed me! Definitely an interesting one. Venus also spins the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
I get people telling me "no, that's impossible" every time I mention this fact.
"Search your feelings, you know it to be true"
Wouldn't spinning in the opposite direction indicate that it's axial tilt is flipped or something?
The leading theory is a moon sized object hit it with enough force to spin it backwards.
The energy used to reverse the existing motion might explain why it's so slow
Ok hold up so the way I'm understanding this is that its tilt (day) is slower than it's rotation around the sun (year). Is that right or am I way off?
Yep, and as a result, the 'movement' of the sun across the Venusian sky during a day seems to change direction (I think?)
Yeah the Venus makes a lap around the sun in less time than it does a rotation around itself relative to said sun's position in its sky.
I've seen this fact somewhere before, but I still am unable to grasp it in my mind
Short: It completes a full 360° of the sun before the planet itself does a full 360° spin.
A few sentences longer:
In planet Earth human terms, we have defined one day as "how long it takes the planet to do a full 360 degree rotation". Example: You spin a basketball on your finger and it does one full rotation.
A year to us is "how long it takes the planet to go around the sun". Example: You hold a basketball out in front of you and you do one full rotation.
Now, to confuse people further, read about the difference between a solar day and a sidereal day.
How does this affect its gravity?
It doesn't. Gravity is caused by mass not spin. The planet's rotation about it's own axis will create a centrifugal effect that offsets gravity, but the effect is negligible for anything rotating as slow as planets.
Interesting.
It doesn't. Gravity is related to its mass, not it's orbit or rotational velocity.
The others already said the core aspect, but to get specific: the difference between your weight on the pole and your weight on the equator differs only by like .5% or something like that. This is the difference between spinning and not spinning (centrifugal force and no centrifugal force). (And also the difference in radius, since the Earth's rotation makes it a tiny bit flatter than a perfect sphere would be)
Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they're right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think "wow that's pretty," but every once in a while I let it hit me that I'm looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it's, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.
The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they're right there. I can point at one and say "look at that pretty star" and right now, a long distance away, it's just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there's life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.
And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It's over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?
Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month
If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there's more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined
What's even more fascinating is that most of the stars we see in the sky are afterimages of primitive stars that died out long ago yet they shine as bright as the stars alive today
That doesn't seem right. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across (give or take) and the life span of stars is measured in billions of years.
Most of the stars we see are in our galaxy, so at most, we are seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago, which means that the vast majority of them will still be around, and looking much the same as they did 100,000 years ago.
I seem to have made a mistake then. Thank you for correcting it.
Thinking about it further, if we're talking about stars that we can see with telescopes, Hubble, James Webb etc, then you're on the money. Stars in remote galaxies far outnumber the ones in our galaxy and show us glimpses of the early stages of the universe. And many of those stars are long gone
Not too sure where you got that number from. From what I can find, the radius of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years.
Edit: I see now that you are talking Galaxy. That's different.
The original comment was about stars we can see in the sky, so I was assuming naked eye
I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
You should try Space Engine. It's a program to explore the universe, based on real telescope data. It also has the ability to procedurally generate galaxies, planets, and stars in unobserved parts of the universe.
I can really relate to this. I remember a weird night in my teens where I must've spent at least an hour staring out of my bedroom window at the moon, because really for the first time I'd had the exact same thought. It's right there. It's so easy to get desensitised to that and to just think of it all as an image projected on the sky. The thought has never really left me and even now I still linger on the moon every time I see it and try to acknowledge that it is a 3 dimensional object lol.
The fact that the moon is tidally locked probably doesn't help, if it rotated it would be easier to see it as a sphere instead of an image
In the same vein, I like to remind myself that every field in physics is literally happening all around me, right now, and it always has been, in fact, I've never seen anything without these invisible fields in it and for some reason, that really makes me super aware of our place in the order of magnitudes.
It's wild we can see so much further down than up.
First time I saw Jupiter through a telescope I got hit hard by the feeling: "Oh shit, that giant monster is real".
Samesies. You aren't alone. We have a support group.
"Just a bit farther" is quite the understatement!
"I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
A moon isn't that strange, our moon is.
First, it is massive compared to Earth. The mass of the Moon is so large that it messed with definitions of planets and plutinos.
Second, the Moon's size and distance from Earth is a near match for the Sun's, which is really rare.
And for a strange fact, the Moon is about as reflective as worn asphalt. The Moon looks white in photos of just itself, but it is a dark grey when in photos with Earth.
There's a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren't supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!
I often used to look at it as a child, however the adults wouldn't let me. I knew there was some ulterior motive behind it.
“You look unhealthy! You should go stand in that really large room and absorb the radiation from that gigantic space-based fusion reactor more!”
You’re right, that sounds like a great idea.
I've seen some of its secrets during the eclipse. It's an angry, writhing tentacled thing. Be thankful it's so far away.
Scientists look at it. That’s where they get all their sciencing from. The forbidden knowledges comes from the sun.
Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he'll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy
Also the idea that light is both a particle and a wave always messed with my head because I wanted to know why does it decide to change and when? And the answer is that light is always a particle and always a wave at the exact same time.
It is a wave particle.
And it is possible from light alone to build both an electron and a positron as demonstrated in a 1999 laser science experiment in New York.
I usually interpret this as behaviour: photons are not "particles" or "waves", photons are photons. They just behave as waves and as particles, depending on how you're looking at them.
Note that even things with a resting mass (like you or me) are like this, too. It's just that, as the mass increases, the wave behaviour becomes negligible.
This doesn't make it any less crazy
The crazy thing is there are actually two double slit experiments, and that light can tell whether or not you are actively observing it or not, and decides whether or not to actually exist as a wave or particle.
I heard from someone I respect irl that these experiments were debatable, but I can't personally hold an argument about it.
It's even crazier because you don't need to reach the speed of light. It'll happen in a smaller degree for any speed. Even in mundane conditions.
For example, if your twin spent four days in a 300km/h bullet train, for you it would be four days plus a second.
Usually this difference is negligible, but for satellites (that run at rather high speeds, for a lot of time, and require precision), if you don't take time dilation into account they misbehave.
(For anyone wanting to mess with the maths, the formula is Δt' = Δt / √[1 - v²/c²]. Δt = variation of time for the observer (you), Δt' = variation of time for the moving entity (your twin), v = the moving entity's speed, c = speed of light. Just make sure that "v" and "c" use the same units.)
I wonder how long it would have taken for us to figure out time dilation in Einstein hadn't predicted it. I wonder if it would have taken until we observed it with satellites.
Without Einstein, I think that the discovery of time dilation would be delayed by only a few years. There were a lot of people working in theoretical physics already back then; someone else would inevitably dig through Lorentz' and Poincaré's papers, connect the dots, and say "waitaminute time might be relative". From that, time dilation is a consequence.
In special I wouldn't doubt that Max Planck would discover it.
I'm saying that because, in both science and engineering, often you see almost concurrent discoveries or developments of the same thing, because the "spirit of a time" makes people look at that aspect of reality or that challenge and work with it. The discovery of helium and the development of aeroplanes are examples of that.
IIRC the orbit of Mercure doesn't work with Newton Model, and astronomers were predicted the discovery of Vulcain a small planet between Mercure and the Sun. So a new model had to be invented since Vulcain couldn't be found.
We would have definitely figured it out once we built GPS, since you need to account for relativistic effects there.
Yes I knew about that and I'm glad that doesn't make it crazier for me, instead it makes it easier to accept. If it were something that happened only after hitting some arbitrary speed value I'd be a lot more mentally damaged
To be fair the only ones that don't get mentally damaged at all with this stuff are theoretical physicists. After all being crazy makes you immune to further madness.
The part that I understand in the intellectual sense, because I know or at least used to know how it follows from the math, but which just doesn't feel like it should be the case, is the whole "relativity of simultaneity" aspect of it. That there isn't an objectively true order in which events happen in, if the events in question aren't linked by cause and effect. That is to say, it is possible for one person to see an event A happen before another event B, a second person to see the two happen at exactly the same time, and a third to see event B happen first and then event A, and for all three of them to be equally right. It just feels like, on some level, there ought to be one objectively true order to time, a single valid timeline that all events can be placed in relative to eachother, and for time not to work that way feels so absurd as to not even be able to articulate why the idea feels wrong.
I see another veritassium fan here maybe?
Here's something I just ran into looking stuff up for my comment: GN-z11 is one of the farthest galaxies we've ever seen. Thanks to the expansion of the universe, at a distance of over 30 billion light-years, it has to be moving away from us at over twice the speed of light.
What the fuck does that mean, temporally? Like, forget the speed of light, time dilation has to do with space and relative speeds. If I'm moving at near the speed of light relative to you, then my clock will physically tick more slowly. What happens if I'm moving over twice the speed of light? Is the real life GN-z11 in our reference frame moving backwards in time at over twice the rate we're moving forward?
From my understanding, this is caused by the universe itself expanding between the 2 objects, not that the object itself is moving that speed relative to us. It's still completely insane to think about, either way.
I can't find any reference that says it's moving away from us at twice the speed of light, which would violate Relativity. The fact that it is further away from us in light years than the age of the universe in years, is due to the fact that the space itself is expanding.
The thing is, it's moving that fast because of the expansion of space. ≈30 billion light-years over ≈14 billion years equates to over twice the speed of light. Does that mean there's no crazy relativistic time dilation, and time is moving normally for them in our frame of reference, since they aren't physically moving, it's space that's expanding? That's just as wild to my brain
Relativity only applies to local reference frames and not to the recession rates of cosmologically distant objects.
Probably one of the most memorable and pivotal moments in my life was when my college professor showed us the origins of relativity and how Einstein came to the conclusion that E = mc^2
It's a proof that only took about 10 minutes to explain, and the mathematics really aren't that difficult to understand by most people. The geniuses in the fact that Einstein started by explaining how calculating relative motion meant that time had to be a variable that could be different depending on who the observer was. This in itself is an incredible observation, but you can take this to the extent to literally prove that mass and energy are directly related to each other. It's absolutely wild and one of the most sublime equations ever made.
From what I understand, you are always travelling at the speed of light through space/time, but when you move at high speeds through space that shifts the proportion of your speed out of the time dimension. And a photon travels only through space, experiencing no time between the time it was emitted and the time it was absorbed. What I just can't wrap my head around is the concept of travelling at some speed without involving the time dimension at all.
I wish we could test this out with only simple apparatus. Unfortunately the common people do not have access to satellites or nonstop bullet trains.
Please dont do that
Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.
And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.
EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!
Chitin is not produced by mammals.
Fingernails are composed primarily out of keratin (same as hair and skin).
Oops! I stand corrected.
Wow I didn't know this and I've never felt a similarity between seafood and mushrooms either in flavour or smell. But, still a cool fact.
It's one of those things that feels really obvious if you cook a lot of east/south Asian dishes - shrimp sauce and mushroom soy sauce have a pretty similar aftersmell to them because they're so concentrated
I'll be honest, I'm not much into cooking Asian. I'm also not a frequent crustacean eater, but I eat mushrooms regularlish. I'll pay more attention from now on, but I would have never otherwise thought of making a link between the two
Huh. Oddly I am allergic to shrimp and lobster, but love mushrooms. To me they don't smell the same though. Though this fact probably explains why veg oyster sauce is mushrooms.
Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...
Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.
How about the new 2Tb m.2 drives? Not only vastly larger yet still, transfer speeds are also insane. I once had a computer with a 20Mb hard drive, current drives transfer 600-1200mb per second.
Not so impressive, of course its faster when its smaller. The data have to travel shorter.
Jk, it is damn impressive!
Actually, that's true! It's not significant enough to affect the throughput directly, but when you transmit data on parallel leads, they have to be roughly the same length in order to keep the signals synchronised with the time frames when they are received. Otherwise part of the data might not arrive in time. The higher the throughput (and shorter the frames), the greater the leads' lengths affect the timing. This is why you often see long squiggly leads on circuit boards - they extend the shorter leads to roughly the same lengths.
Eh, parallel hasn't been used for a while already. SATA literally means "Serial ATA" and no longer uses parallel connections. I haven't seen parlallel connectors since like a decade or so
I saw 1tb microsd cards for sale at the shops the other day and had a bit of a 'what the fuck...' moment
I remember my parents talking about some thing or other in star trek that would be impossible because you'd need "terabytes of storage, and that's probably not possible". And now you can go buy 1 tb of storage and lose it in your couch cushions.
Poor Keanu Reaves gave up his childhood memories in Johnny Mnemonic to store something like 100GB of data in his brain. I don't remember the Star Trek storage callout cause they were generally pretty good about just fabricating their own units for stuff (future sci-fi writers should take note, it's always easier to make up units then deal with pedantic people on the internet).
I lost a 1tb flash drive with ventoy and a bunch of files and I'm still mad, but I had a backup lol
The latest SDUC standard allows for up to 128 TB.
And the price of that 128 gb sd card? €10-15, 512 gb cards are even crazier right now at like €35 a piece, that's €0,068 per gigabyte
It gets better. The size of the SD card isn't the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit 'thicker' than the rest; that's the actual chip, that tiny bump!
Also fun, they rely on quantum mechanics.
Individual "bits" on a SD card are electron buckets that are either "full" (they have an electron) or not. 8 bits to a byte ~1 trillion bytes to a terabyte.
What’s a floppy disk?
I've got a 1tb microsd and it's crazy to see the difference between a 60MB harddisk and it
That "I" am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.
That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.
That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China Japan from the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.
That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain
Walking through the Sea of Japan is a bit of a challenge, though.
Haha okay there is some water thats true.
Duh! Just wait for low tide!
Between Japan and the EU, there is an ocean. You also need to swim, not only walk.
Swimming is walking in water /s
Maybe he plans to wear a weight belt.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That's not true though. You need REM sleep. Sleeping doesn't mean you're K.O. You're processing things and regenerating. That's like the exact opposite of being K.O.
But you're out. That processing is so intense you have to de-link nearly all environmental inputs.
It's necessary to clean out all the lactic acid buildup from thinking.
Ive suffered insomnia. It's wild how after long enough you stop developing short term memory. Which; when experienced, translates to; it's 10am. You just got done cleaning the garage cuz...cuz. You're drinking coffee watching clips from the today show on yr phone. You look up. It's 9pm and dark outside. You're sitting on the couch. You felt no time pass in between. You ask yr wife about dinner with her grandparents that you were supposed to go to. Oh. You did go. And you drove (wait....WHAT). Apparently you were as charming as ever. No memories of it.
It's like someone else is living your life.
That's when I went to the Dr. for sleep meds. I trust myself to be myself... but naw fam, life's too short. I never blanked out work so fuck that
Omg that sounds crazy.... like in Memento.
Okay true, but you also need deep sleep a lot otherwise you dont regenerate. Also the body is fully K.O. which may make more sense
I get very little deep sleep. Is that part of why my injuries take so long to heal and feel like shit all the time
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
It's even weirder than that. "You" are a story that your brain tells itself so that you can explain your needs to other people. Without other people, or at least the pretend image of other people, there's nothing like what we think of as a human personality.
Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.
Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.
Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.
From Wikipedia on bones:
Bone matrix is 90 to 95% composed of elastic collagen fibers, also known as ossein,[5] and the remainder is ground substance.[6] The elasticity of collagen improves fracture resistance.[7] The matrix is hardened by the binding of inorganic mineral salt, calcium phosphate, in a chemical arrangement known as bone mineral, a form of calcium apatite.[9]
So the statement is a bit faulty, not only because of the relative low amount of calcium in our bones, but also because it appears as a mineral. We distinguish between salts and metals because of their chemical properties being quite different (solubility, reflectiveness, electrical conductivity, maleability and so on).
Edit: I do realize the point of the comment was not to be entirely factual, so if I am allowed as well I would say science is pretty metal.
We also distinguish between metals and non-metals by field of study. Ask an astronomer which elements are metals sometime.
How so? I thought they were mostly determined by their positions in the table of periodic elements.
Lol, they are. In astronomy anything heavier than Helium. is considered a metal.
Well TIL. It makes sense that from an astronomical perspective the use of metal as a qualitative distinction of material properties makes less sense than as a distinction of mass.
Thanks for the reality injection!
The statement was glib but even the partial truth of it made me wonder when I first learned it.
Oh my... I refuse to accept this as reality
We're all organically powered metal meat machines? 😭
In the same sense that we contain a massive volume of gas, because there is a lot of hydrogen in our bodies. Yes, hydrogen is a gas, and yes, there is a lot of it on our body. But it's bound, so it doesn't count.
It would be more accurate to call it stone than metal, because the calcium in our bones is also bound to other elements, which means it does not exhibit its usual metal characteristics.
The meat is suffused with more metal throughout it
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By the sound mine make I would have thought free jazz.
Nigel?
They sure don't feel metal.
The mitochondria in all but your blood cells are a different species than us with their own separate DNA.
You mean the power house of the cell?
i love my powerful little friends
They have their own separate genetic code, yes, but that doesn't make them a separate species, because they aren't a distinct organism at all. They don't exist in the absence of our cells.
Maybe it is semantics as you are correct but others do consider them a separate species that just happen to live in our cells. https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-anatomy/mitochondria-what-are-they-and-why-do-we-have-them#:~:text=Two%20separate%20species%20became%20one,in%20every%20other%20human%20alive.
Wait what?
A book that I love that covers this in an accessible manner is "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochrondria and the Meaning of Life" by Nick Lane
Basically, it looks like a single cell, predatory amoeba of some sort engulfed a parasitic bacterium that was the ancestor to mitochondria, and instead of being digested, it ended up living inside the amoeba, helping to produce energy.
This is a big deal because the way that cells harness energy is by doing some cool biochemistry across a membrane. When a cell has to rely on its main, cell membrane to do this, then the energy production is proportional to the cell's surface area, which means that it's proportional to the cell's radius squared (E ∝ r2 ) . However, the energy requirements of the cell are determined by its volume, which means that energy requirements are proportional to cell radius cubed ( E ∝ r3 ). For small numbers the difference between r3 and r2 isn't much, but as radius increases, the cell volume far outstrips its surface area, which means that there was an upper ceiling on how big a cell could get while still fulfilling its energy requirements.
Mitochrondria allow cells to break this size limit by decoupling energy production from cell size, because scaling up energy production is as simple as having more Mitochrondria. Mitochrondria have their own independent genome - in the years since the endosymbiotic event, the mitochrondrial genome has shrunk a lot, because it's sort of like moving in with a friend who already has a house full of furniture - no sense in having duplicates.
That’s so rad. Thanks!
It still weirds me out how ancient organisms could pick up biochemical mechanisms like Kiryu learns fighting styles. "That's rad!" and now we have mitochondria.
Yeah mitochondrial RNA is separately inherited and only from the mother, because the egg cell has mitochondria whereas the sperm does not.
Don't know if it's bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I'd been lied to my whole life... a leap year isn't every 4 years.
So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.
So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on..
It's amazing that they calculated it down to that detail in the 1700s. Before that they were just a hares breath off for 1000 years (Julian calender -> Gregorian calender). It became a real issue for the church that the start of spring didn't align with the calendar anymore, and they needed to know exactly when Easter was to be held.
It why George Washington is credited with 2 birthdays, depends on which calender you're going by. I think Russia was the last major country to adopt it.
But the earth is flat and pyramids=aliens. Uh huh. Yup.
FYI it's "hair's breadth"
Y'know, I stopped on it when I was typing and thought to double check, but I figured if I wrote it out intentionally wrong I'd get corrected.
I do appreciate it, tho, no joke. Thank you
No one (!) alive today experienced a year divisible by 4 that was not a leap year. The oldest living person was born in 1907.
quite a few people alive today might be around to experience 2100, though
Also when the leap years were introduced, the priests (who were to take care of the calendar) didn't understand what dis "every four years" mean, and used to put a leap year every three years.
It's interesting that the following centuries all calculate correctly, maybe fixed along with y2k
But basic math means that those are the exact same thing. Divisible by 4 means multiples of 4 means every 4 years, right? It seems more likely that they "happen when the year is divisible by 4" came about after they said "let's do it every four years, but we have to phrase it more officially when we write it down."
Not really. 1896 was a leap year, but 1900 was not.
The leap year after 2096 will be 2104.
Edit: an interesting way to put this is, 2000 was the only year in 4 centuries where the year starting the century was a leap year. Next such occurrence will be in 2400
You haven't read the other rules
There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.
Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you, and through the sharing of experiences and affection, if nothing goes excessively wrong, they become unique for you.
Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you
That catch is, you need to find that someone in the first place, and that takes a bit of looking around. So in effect, soul mates are found.
You find a partner, who then MAY become a soul mate
It gets much easier once you factor in that you, yourself, aren't static and constant. The task isn't to find someone capable of becoming perfect for you, it's finding someone whose compatibility and willingness when taken into account with your own offers a fair chance to grow into a symbiotic relationship.
Definitely agree and beautifully put :)
Well said!
If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment
Well I don't need to meet everybody. There's no need to meet anyone who doesn't match my sexual preferences, so that's half right there. Then we can also cut everyone who's sexual preferences I don't meet, as well as anyone outside of a given age range (most of the people on earth are much younger than me and would be inappropriate for me to date). We can probably get that down to about 50-60 years. (At one second per person).
The thought experiment was just an attempt to show how hard it is to wrap our minds around big numbers. Even a tangible number such as the amount of people in the world.
The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.
Interesting fact: the sun becomes 1 million tons lighter every second.
Diet specialists hate this trick.
It's simply burning calories.
Lighter or brighter?
The ton is not a unit of brightness
You sure? The wacky system of units has a lot of different meanings for the word ton. Among others, it is a measure of power.
Yes.
Well, we'd know by now
37 minutes later...still here.
Any moment now! Hopefully...
I might be misremembering but I believe our sun can't go nova, it's too small. It will, however, expand and swallow the Earth towards the end of its life.
When exactly would that be? I gotta add it to my calendar.
Don't worry, your calendar doesn't go that far
The Sun is not a big enough star to ever go nova. Neither are any of our close neighbors. We’re pretty safe from that kind of disaster.
Earth is just gonna slowly cook to a cinder and probably get swallowed when the Sun starts expanding in a couple billion years.
Fine! Geez.
Space aliens could teleport in next to sun, fling a bunch of Star Trek red matter at it like Spock did to the Romulan star, destabilize the star, and cause a, I think it was a black hole? where the star was. And we wouldn't know for 8-ish minutes.
there's people that don't like music.
Can you tolerate it at least, or you get annoyed if it's playing at an event/Uber/supermarket etc?
Wait, what? Are you saying you actively don't like music? I mean i can (kind of) understand if a person doesn't really get a pleasure response from listening to music, but you're saying listening to music actually gives you a displeasure response?? ALL music? It's ok if that's the case, you didn't choose to have that response, but i just want to be clear that this is what you're saying?
Man that sucks. But it seems like you're doing better these days, so that's good.
A lot of music generates unpleasant sensations for me too, though I can tolerate it a bit. Unlike the other commenter though, I can enjoy a lot of other music. What's unusual in my opinion is that it's all music, not the negative response. Lucky you if the worst that music can get from you is indifference!
I see. I totally get what you mean, it's taken me years to learn how to tolerate a lot of music I don't like. Thanks for sharing
I used to be like this, but with movies. When I first met my wife, she was utterly baffled at the concept of somebody not enjoying movies, and she made it her mission to make me enjoy them.
Come to think of it, she actually doesn't like music much. I've failed to change her opinion on that though because my taste in music is shit (and I'm proud of it.)
I have since changed my tune.
Ba-dum tsh
As a person who was born liking music, I indeed find it too bizarre to believe to be true.
I thought my significant other was one of these to a certain extent. It does weird things to me as a DJ. Turns out that she just likes the limited music that she likes and cannot stand most everything else.
that just makes it easier to make a playlist with all their favorite songs.
Chipmunks and Avett Brothers, a playlist only rose colored glasses can help with.
For me it's not like I don't like music, but there are large stretches of time, where I do not care so much for it. I would guess that I haven't actively choosen to hear music for weaks, possibly months, now. Obviously excluding the music you can't avoid, like background music in movies and video games etc.
Alaska is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost US state.
How is Alaska easternmost?
Its Western most point crosses the international date line and is therefore technically "really far east" instead of "really far west".
Wait until you find out that some places breach that line (in addition to it being wobbly to begin with) which is we have timezones greater than +12 or -12. I hate timezones. With a passion. Signed: a programmer.
The world would be better if we just used UTC everywhere.
or Decimal Internet Time, which is way easier to do calculations with, easier to distinguish from local times, and is less eurocentric
Albeit arbitrary... if it's globally recognized that each new day begins as the sun crests the international date line, and the sun indisputably rises from the East, why would it not make sense?
Because time and direction are different metrics? West is a metric that only means anything in relation to something else in a straight line. It's a direction. West doesn't stop being west if you go too far. It's always west.
Likewise, the closest US state to Africa is Maine.
What would happen if you were to put both of yours legs in these westernmost and the easternmost parts?
Your legs would glitch around the whole circumference of the Earth.
You would have both legs in Alaska.
You'd probably drown.
I need to go to bed, I misread that as "Ahsoka is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, *and" easternmost US state."
Their bodies produce chemicals that cause them to forget how bad childbirth was.
Exactly. I was there and saw my wife having the worst pain of her life. Really without exaggeration. It was incredibly hard and painful.
Then, 10 minutes after it's all over, she looks at me and says "Well, that wasn't so bad".
I suppose it is for the best, but nonetheless I find it uncomfortable how our bodies have the ability to manipulate our brains' memories and our consciousness residing in the same place cannot do anything about it
Oh, it's worse than that, the consciousness is in on it.
These chemicals are our memories. They aren't manipulating it. It's just how it works.
On another note: the body produces opioids when you're in great pain
I always thought it interesting that every time we talk about when our kids were born, I remember all these details and my wife's like huh, weird, can't remember a thing.
If it wasn't so, nobody other than twins would have siblings.
The hormones really carry you through. Lol. And at least it's relatively short with a positive end goal.
Every time that comes up, I think to myself "Something I've gone through must be more painful, right? I've gone through some pretty hellish things, and you're trying to tell me something MORE painful exists? Not just a little more, but dramatically more? For my own sanity, I'm gonna have to live in denial of that."
We can't touch objects, ever. Most of the space "occupied" by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I'm not willing to go down), and when we "touch" an object, it's just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It's the same reason why we don't fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.
Your asswhole can stretch up to 8 inches without permanent deformation.
Also an adult raccoon can fit into a 4.5 inch hole.
Do with that info as you wish
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Here's one: Iron doesn't have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can't smell coins after washing them
There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates
You mean in the same way that there is no centrifugal force?
Technically right, but doesn't matter if you are in the rotating frame of reference.
But aren't the tides caused by external gravitational forces (the moon?)
They’re saying the same thing, just backwards.
Tides are a phenomenon where the height of the edge of a body of water shifts relative to the shore. A phenomenon is a thing. Why should explaining its cause in those terms have any effect on that?
I'm confused: you say there's no such thing as tides, and then explain what tides are?
- Moon pulls the earth.
- Earth pulls away from moon due to centrifugal force.
- In the center of the earth it pulls the earth with the exact same force as the centrifugal force.
- On the side closer to the moon the gravity is more than centrifugal force.
- So water get's pulled towards the moon or "upwards" from earth's perspective.
- That's high tide.
- On the other side centrifugal force is more than gravity.
- On the other side it's the same thing except gets pulled away from the moon.
So since it's pulled on both sides of the earth water is essentially "lighter" and on the sides it's "heavier" if that makes sense. The water flows from the heavier places to the lighter places like down a small slope due to gravity.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I understand how tides work; the source of my confusion is the person I replied to both stating that they don't exist and explaining how they work, which is mutually contradictory: if they don't exist, how can they work at all?
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That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.
Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.
In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.
Using engine brakes can cause your car to not use fuel in some cases.
I've read and heard this from different sources (even driving instructors) and I don't get how it's possible. Your engine is still running, doesn't it use at least as much as it does while it's idling?
Edit: thank you all for your answers. I knew how the engine brake effect worked, my confusion was about exactly why the engine didn't consume fuel in the process. I now understand so thanks all.
The combustion engine. I know technically it's not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity's finer achievements. yes, it's not without its barbs like emissions, but that's a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.
Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You've got a metal frame inside your body.
The fact that things are able to float, despite of gravity pulling all objects towards the big mass of Earth. You would think that the push of gravity should be more than enough to overcome the slight fluid displacement that allows balloons and boats to push away from the Earth's surface.
Yo OP. We're carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it's pure carbon. Why wouldn't we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.
I'm just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.
Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don't see the point in quantifying with maths.
I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Beyond that, the idea that's gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.
Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.
I'm mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.
Did something change? Last time I checked we didn't know whether in the grand scale the universe is or isn't deterministic.
That we know that the universe isn't (seemingly) deterministic locally doesn't change anything about that.
I'm pretty sure it is essentially that any propensity the macro-scale universe has for the appearance of determinism is an illusion since the fundamental scales of the universe and everything it is built on are probabilistic. Nothing built on probabilistic foundations can be deterministic. It can appear to be. In large enough samples the law of large numbers smooths all the chaos out, but that is all our world is. Mathematically smoothed chaos. We as a species have known that for a very long time, but it has only begun to permeate the social zeitgeist in recent years and there is still a lot of pushback from certain sections of society.
The best theories are non-deterministic, but of course we don't know if they are the last word about reality. To put it another way, we don't know why the math is non-deterministic in our best equations.
The old equations were deterministic, but they turned out to be wrong. Something similar may happen here.
Allowing for quantum randomness does not help the free will argument. Randomness might be "free", but it is certainly not but "will".
But it does. If the universe was deterministic, choice would be impossible because all outcomes would be predetermined.
Quantum randomness may not directly provide free will but it does exclude determinism, which would make free will impossible.
This "choice" is just the manifestation what you are at that moment, the sum of everything that has influenced you up until this point. Whether that complex tangle of cause and effect was "determined" a million years ago or affected by random fluctuations the whole way, including a moment ago, doesn't change anything. "Free will" just doesn't make any sense, regardless of whether one considers predeterminism to be the alternative.
We don't know whether the universe is deterministic, though. That's the only slimmer of hope for free will we can have.
The fun thing is, even if we assume our consciousness isn't entirely deterministic, the most reasonable alternative would be pure randomness.
Which, in the end, makes absolutely no difference in the free will argument.
Except the universe is full of non-determinism that we work hard to keep quiet in our toys.
I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Huh, I always thought of us having free will in response to cause and efect, not in place of it. But maybe I'm understanding free will differently?
If the universe is deterministic, it means that every particle has an infinitely predictable path. And our body and brain are full of particles which could only ever move in the predetermined way. And because our thoughts are only movements of neurone, which in turn, as everything, are made of particles, every action of ours would be predetermined and we could never decide otherwise than we did.
I think Camus might have summed it up best when he said the only real choice (therefore, freedom to exercise will) humanity has is whether or not to commit suicide.
We do have metal in our veins. Blood has metallic taste precisely because of iron, which carries oxygen through our body.
Metal has no taste tho. What yr tasting is you. VSauce or Nilered did a video about it.
You can test it yourself, just degrease and wash a coin. Once clean, no taste.
Of course it is not free metal. Probably oxide. And no, I am not going to taste rust.
The USA has 157 million workers, shuffling 140,000 years of work a day. One in 4 has an idea. One in five of those is a good idea. Two thousand stakeholders can make it an innovative idea. So, they can pump 3.5 years of brute force innovation into the world every single day. That's well over a thousand years of advancement per year.
Critical mass populations that can keep up with their own development are a serious creative force to be reckoned with. And human evolution has been exceeded by innovation, dramatically.
But thousands of years of experience die off every day too.
Concepts coming from quantium mechanics take you into a rabbit hole. 2022 Nobel winning experiment that proved universe is not locally real.
Can you elaborate on what that means? "Universe is not locally real"? How do we know what is real? What precisely does 'local' mean? Real relative to what?
In quantum mechanics, the concept of "locality" and "realism" are often discussed in the context of the EPR paradox and Bell's theorem. In a "locally real" theory, the properties of particles are well-defined independently of measurement (realism), and no influences can propagate faster than the speed of light (locality).
-
Realism: In a "realistic" theory, the properties of a system exist independently of observation. For example, if you have an electron, the idea is that it has a definite spin direction whether or not you measure it.
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Locality: The principle of "locality" holds that physical processes occurring at one place do not depend on the properties of objects at another place that is spacelike separated, which would require information or influence to travel faster than the speed of light.
However, quantum mechanics challenges these intuitive notions. Experiments with entangled particles suggest that the properties of one particle can instantaneously affect the properties of another distant particle, seemingly violating locality. Meanwhile, the superposition principle suggests that particles don't have definite properties until measured, challenging realism.
In my opinion, the breakdown of "local realism" is one of the most unsettling and fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. It forces us to reconsider our intuitive understanding of reality and has implications for fields like quantum computing and quantum cryptography.
— ChatGPT4
As physicists, I can confirm, this is not bad explanation.
Reality is like society: a strong consensus is good enough and as good as you can get.
Ok. I'm gonna give an example that will be slightly wrong if we nitpick, but it will give you an idea.
Lets take the old philosophical idea "if a tree falls in a forrest and theres nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?" and modify it for this example.
"If you are not there to observe will the tree in the forest fall?"
If you are not there to observe the tree will be in all possible states. Two notable states being "it has fallen" and "it is still standing" that exist simultaneously.
If you go in to the forest and observe, one of the states will randomly become your reality according to certain probability amplitude.
You don't necessarily have to go in to the forest to observe the tree. You can send your buddy who will then tell you the state.
As your friend is returning back from his observation, there's actually two friends walking back to you. He is "entangled" with the tree. When he opens his mouth, one of them is randomly selected as your reality.
Entity checking the state of the tree does not have to be a living consciousness. It can be a particle, that interacts with a particle, that interacts with a particle, that interacts with you. You are not conscious of the trees state, but the information is delivered to you and for you there is now only one state for the tree.
So quantium level information is constantly delivered to you and your reality is weaving itself around you through this "decoherence"
now you see how my first two examples were false. Quantium decoherence is so much faster than you or your buddy, that you can only catch this mechanism at work on quantium level.
...and "local" basicly just means that the experiments result is true, as long as nothing can transfer information faster than light. So far nothing has.
Marcus Chown's book is a good primer on quantum theory, but it will make your head spin.
(you'll understand the dad joke after you've read the book)
Heard about it. I initially thought the universe should exist regardless whether someone is there to observe it or not...
...but then I also studied quantum mechanics, so I am not really in a position to say anything...
Well, let’s start with definition what “exists” means…
Women have orgasms
reported for misinfo
Jesus Christ people it's a joke
It would be less funny if there were no downvotes
To be fair, the single iron atoms are surrounded by a lot of carbony goodness. There's a few metals that have minor biological uses in humans like that, and even sodium and potassium are metals in pure form.
It's hella weird to me how we suddenly developed democracy and industrialisation after thousands of years of kind of the same thing. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation; right now I'm playing with Lanchester's laws as a theory.
Similar metal in the human body one, Vitamin B12 has cobalt in it. Absolutely wild. I guess that's not really commonly known but it's still worth mentioning
Sorry, why is that wild? Is it cause it’s a metal? Ty
Cobalt is toxic
Everything is toxic in sufficient amounts. Even water.
Cobalt is very toxic. Far worse than lead. But yet bound up in this one molecule, that looks like this:
it becomes biologically necessary for all animals. How does it get there? Is all the vitamin B12 made already and it stays in circulation, or is there some plant that selectively fetches cobalt from the ground and builds this thing that keeps us all alive?
May I ask what is special about cobalt in B12 specifically? I've come to realize there are numerous inorganic substances inside my body like copper, gold etc. so cobalt by itself doesn't really stand out anymore.
Cobalt by itself is toxic and damages the nervous system.
Interesting
I think your idea of what is organic or inorganic is a little off. Organic things can and do involve metals and gases in various forms. According to wikipedia, "About 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus." These are elements that also appear in minerals and other rocks, but that doesn't mean the same elements can't be in organic compounds. Everything is made of all the same stuff on the periodic table, organic or inorganic.
huh, thank you for leading me to find out about organocobalt compounds, and complicate my understanding of organic/inorganic chemistry. I still that fits the simple definition of "organic" = "contains carbon" that most chemists would use, though.
Although "commonly accepted" may be pushing it, i can't imagine a finite universe(, i.e., 'with a positive curvature'/spherical), with the old question : what happens at the edge if i push it with a stick ?
(I.i.r.c., the answer is that the edge is expanding faster than the speed of light or sthg)
(And, kinda unrelated, fractal universes piling upon each other may make sense)
You're probably picturing the inside 3D sphere, but it would actually be the surface of a 4D sphere. Just like how Earth doesn't have an "edge", if you walk in a straight line you just end up where you started, so there's nothing to "push" at all
So Isaac Brock has been right for like 20 years? "The universe is shaped exactly like the earth. If you go straight long enough you end up where you were."
It's only one of many possibilities, we have no idea about the actual topology of the universe. It could also be infinite
Fuck
That fucks me up.
But also, if we could move through the earth itself we’d come to the ‘edge’ and eventually out onto the surface of the earth… right back where we started. Fuck.
Fuck.
Yep, just read some stuff on Quora about 4D spheres, and still don't get it 🤷♂️
You have an edge on the Earth, both above and below, i can't imagine the material part of the All circling upon itself, how would you visualise from outside ?
I still see an edge with an hypersphere, well, w/e, thanks for the answer anyway :) !
The problem there is you're thinking in 3d space. The surface of a sphere is two dimensional, a two dimensional creature living there would be able to travel in a straight line in any direction and they'd end up back where they started; they have no concept of "up" or "down" so wouldn't be able to move up to leave the surface of the sphere.
A 4d sphere would be similar; the surface of that sphere is three dimensional. A three dimensional creature (like a human) could travel in any direction along the surface of that sphere and end up back where they started, they would have no concept of "into" or "out of" that sphere so wouldn't be able to leave it.
A picture of a hypersphere is trying to represent a 4d object in two dimensions, you lose a lot of data every time you lose a dimension.
Thanks for the explanation, but since you, along with mathematics, agree that there's a surface, there should be a normal/perpendicular, and you can get more or less close to that surface, i guess i just can't wrap my head around it, it'd mean that the hypersphere is on both sides of its surface ?
I've read elsewhere that the universe would be this (hyper)surface, i wonder what the surface of a 5d-sphere would look like then.
There doesn't need to be a normal at all. Mathematically, the properties/content of surface of a sphere can be completely described without having to think about an embedding space. The word "surface"/"hypersurface" is a bit misleading in this context because it implies an embedding space (It just means object of dimension N-1 in an embedding space of N dimensions) (sometimes the word hypersurface is used when N ≠ 3). But when we say "surface of a sphere", the "sphere" and the space around it is only a visualization tool, it doesn't need to be considered as a "physical thing". If we don't want to talk about an embedding we can just say we are talking about "a space with positive curvature" or a "spherical space".
Here's a video of what it's like to live in a spherical world (a very small one with a very high curvature): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9GAyJtuJ0Here it must be noted, they added a ground to their world to help visualize stuff but it would works without it as well. If nothing obstructed your view, you'd end up seeing yourself in all your vision, as if you were inverted like the house of the video. Trippy stuff!
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Humans can smell rain better than a shark can smell blood.
The official 9/11 story.