this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

47759 readers
568 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] D61@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

To piggy back on your "bizarre fact", the same type of iron can be found added to cereal.

I remember several times in school we'd do a science demonstration where we'd smash up Cheerio (or a knock off) brand ceral, mix the powder with water and slowly drag a magnet through the slurry. Every time the magnet would be pulled out of the mix, there'd be more and more tiny iron bits.

[–] Bucket_of_Truth@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

We did the same but with Special K in a blender, and held a magnet to the side of the blender's cup.

[–] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Everything is illegal in the DPRK except if you are the current Supreme Leader, in which case everything is legal.

[–] LarkinDePark@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is obviously bullshit. You're right to not believe it.

[–] Thordros@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

The train you have to pull on foot because the DPRK hasn't discovered combustion just got ten cars longer.

[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rahmad@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate on the math here? (I believe you, I just want to understand the simulation parameters better).

[–] spicecastle@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Not OP, but this website should explain everything.

[–] beteljuice@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You've got a metal frame inside your body.

[–] axont@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There are only 24 episodes of the initial run of The Jetsons and only 25 of Scooby Doo. They got aired as reruns for decades before more episodes were made. There are only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean.

[–] UlyssesT@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

This one startled me. surprised-pika

[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What’s a floppy disk?

[–] SoGrumpy@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

That's just another name for the save icon.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I saw 1tb microsd cards for sale at the shops the other day and had a bit of a 'what the fuck...' moment

[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] PaulSmackage@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There's about 25 blimps in the world, and only 40-50 pilots.

[–] Sasuke@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

doesn't really fit the thread, but i was surprised when i learned that the empire state building has a blimp docking station

[–] HodgePodge@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

this is super cool.

[–] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

That looks like sea creatures mating

[–] June@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They really thought blimps were gonna be a thing.

[–] UnicodeHamSic@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

They should have been

[–] Rocky60@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates

[–] boatswain@infosec.pub 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm confused: you say there's no such thing as tides, and then explain what tides are?

[–] UnicodeHamSic@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Tides are the waters going out and coming back. That is how we experience it. We experience it wrong.

[–] boatswain@infosec.pub 1 points 2 years ago

That's like saying sunrise doesn't exist because the sun is relatively stationary while the earth revolves on its axis. Sunrise and tides are the names we give to how we experience these things.

Subjective experience cannot be wrong or right; it simply is. Interpretation of that experience can be wrong or right. Either way, the experience still happened.

[–] blackbrook@mander.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

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?

[–] TheActualDevil@sffa.community 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But aren't the tides caused by external gravitational forces (the moon?)

[–] AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

the tides stay in the same place relative to the moon and the earth spins below the tidal bulges (earth spins faster than the moon orbits, is the basic thing)

[–] Urist@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Damage@feddit.it 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Urist@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Definitely agree and beautifully put :)

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago
[–] whileloop@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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!

[–] dudinax@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

I've seen some of its secrets during the eclipse. It's an angry, writhing tentacled thing. Be thankful it's so far away.

[–] evatronic@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.

[–] swab148@startrek.website 1 points 2 years ago

Well, we'd know by now

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

[–] zirzedolta@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] zirzedolta@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I seem to have made a mistake then. Thank you for correcting it.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 years ago

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

load more comments