this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not OP, but this website should explain everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This one startled me. surprised-pika

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What’s a floppy disk?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's just another name for the save icon.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

this is super cool.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That looks like sea creatures mating

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They really thought blimps were gonna be a thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They should have been

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Definitely agree and beautifully put :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year 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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well, we'd know by now

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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

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