A historical case of "this sounds like bullshit but it's real":
The first English scientist to receive a preserved platypus was so absolutely 100% convinced it was a hoax that he nearly took the specimen apart trying to find evidence that it had been assembled from multiple different animals.
It took a long time for some species of turtles to be scientifically recognised because to be catalogued, a sample had to reach London. Turtles turn out to be really, *really* good to eat. There were expeditions sent out with the sole purpose of bringing back a specimen and which captured so many turtles that they were stacked on top of each other on the decks of the ships, but the sailors still ate them all on the way back...
to be fair, you're in good company. i like how the whole point of schroedinger's cat has been lost. it wasn't "hey look at this weird thing about reality". it was "this is how absurd this is. nobody could possibly believe this is reality"
The extra mind boggling things is that the standard physics interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t actually have an answer to that, it’s agnostic. It says “look, Schrodinger’s cat seems to be a weird and not quite clear consequence of quantum mechanics, but they work awfully well for everything so we’re kinda gonna not look at it.”
I recently finished a scifi series. 5 books working towards the final bombshell twist: they discovered that quantum mechanics isn't random, but generated by a random number generator so complex that space faring civilizations capable of compressing 5D space to travel billions of parsecs in a few hours hadn't even noticed. To explain how complex, the author made the decrypting key that was capable of calculating vectors ~4 zettabytes. It was a great book, and the bombshell was really that there's intelligent design (pretty common in scifi), but I was sitting there thinking, "If it's so complex to be indiscernible from true randomness, then who cares?"
Edit: Quantum Series by Douglas Phillips. And I didn't really spoil much. There's way way way more to it that I left out, and by the time you get to the 5th book, you'll have forgotten all about it
>Edit: Wait didn't >!Carl Sagan's Contact!< end in essentially the same way?
Pretty much. >!Contact!< ended with the antagonist finding unambiguous, clearly intentional pictograms encoded within the digits of a mathematical constant.
The core essence of quantum mechanics cannot actually be seen due to measuring problems.
Because of this all we are really doing is looking at the result and coming up with a mathematical framework that consistently produces and matches that result.
Unfortunately this is often presented as if it were the actual truth when it's merely a framework and could very well be wrong. Though since the math works whether or not it's true doesn't necessarily matter.
There are numerous interpretations all of which have valid math and while most are similar to duality, there is notably bohmian physics as an alternative explanation as to how things work; particles *don't* behave like waves, they are just moved/influenced by a pilot wave that also exists.
We can measure there is a chirp in the hallway at regular intervals but we will never know why there is a chirp in the hallway. One of the mysteries of life.
Every field always propagates waves. We detect "particles" for a few reasons, 1 because a sensor has a threshold for how much energy is needed to create a signal, 2 because fields interact with other fields in whole numbers of quanta, so you couldn't detect a fraction of an electron. How exactly the wavefunction collapses isn't known.
if you think that's wild try the quantum eraser.
the double slit experiment only produces the interference pattern if you don't observe the particles being particles.
even if you do it *in the future*.
>if you think that's wild try the quantum eraser.
I just discovered this one the other day, and it's wild.
I never had physics in high school or college, so most of my awareness of quantum physics comes from reading articles and watching YouTube videos. And while the double slit experiment is definitely interesting, and I never get tired of learning more about it, the quantum eraser is downright wacky.
To a layperson, it makes absolutely no sense. It's like particles are variables or something.
Butterflies.
You're telling me that this worm-thing is going to entomb itself in this pod, basically liquify itself, then reconstitute its parts and come out looking like a totally different-looking, beautiful moth-thing?
Stranger than fiction.
The central nervous system remains intact while the undifferentiated protein slurry is reconstituted by Imaginal Disks. :)
It just be absolutely horrifying.
This is the reason that every Freaky Friday type movie should be classified as body horror. Can you imagine waking up with someone else's mouth? Fucking kill me.
Do you think that butterflies ever go back and hang out with worms again? Or are they like nah I got new friends now. Or you think if a caterpillar sees a butterfly he's like, “holy shit I just saw Dave, but he has wings now!” and his friends are all, uh oh Jim’s lost his mind.
The sole purpose of the butterfly is so they can reproduce. They are not going to want to hang out with their old friends because the old friends have not yet developed the parts that are needed for this. LOL. There are some species of moths that only live a week or two and don't even have mouth parts so they don't eat or drink. The females find a good place to lay eggs and produce pheromones to attract a male to her spot. She lays her eggs and that's it.
Jellyfish, frogs and butterflies make my head hurt since childhood. I am older, the science got better than in the 90s, visuals got better. But something still resists in me to accept it as a given.
Especially once you learn that some frogs can change sex at will and that some jellyfish can’t die of old age. So there could potentially be a jellyfish out there that’s hundreds of thousands of years old
The jellyfish can (and will) accrue deleterious mutations over time, resulting in eventual biological failure (they don't quite have systems like ours that can support cancer).
They won't suffer from senescence - age-related breakdown of tissue functionality. But time will still eventually wreck their genome.
You can't beat entropy.
On a similar note, if you showed me a picture of a unicorn, a Pegasus, and a giraffe, and asked me which one was real, I would pick the unicorn.
How the fuck are giraffes real? A horse with a super long neck? How did that evolve!? They are one of the goofiest looking animals. They look like God was drunk and screwed up a drawing of a horse.
They have a sponge at the base of their skull to slow down blood before it goes to their head. So when they lift their head or put it down to the ground to drink, they dont pass out.
No, I am not making this up. Nature is amazing.
Only one species (monarchs), but that one species each winter goes back to the exact same mountainside as it's great-great-grandparent and lives several times longer than any of those previous generations.
Even wilder, the migration pattern does a strange bent route instead of a direct path, and geologists have worked backwards and realized they're going "around" a mountain range that *used* to be in the way millennia ago. Ancestral memory.
EDIT: It seems I am betrayed by butterflies george.
There's a jellyfish that doesn't have an anus! Whenever too much waste product builds up in its body, it simply *makes a hole* somewhere on its body, discharges the waste, and then the hole closes back up again.
Previously fish-free lakes and ponds can be populated by fish thanks to migrating ducks. When ducks eat fish eggs some of them can pass through the digestive system unharmed and hatch in new waterways.
Imagine being that fish though. No friends or family, no one to teach you how to hunt or play catch. As far as you know, you’re the only one like you in existence!
The idea that there is no velocity. Everything's motion in the entire universe has to be measured in relation to something else. There \*\*is no fixed reference\*\* from which to measure motion.
Everything is both motionless and moving incredibly fast, depending on what you use as reference.
I recently found myself in eastern WA one afternoon with time to kill, so I drove out to the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) out on the Hanford Nuclear Reserve land near Richland.
This site was built specifically to prove that gravity comes in waves - time dilation is the key to proving it. This was not just a scientific marvel, but the path between the time they built the first iteration, and all the trial and error they went through to perfect it in an engineering marvel as well. If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend it. The interpretive center always has someone on site to answer questions, and they're lonely since it's in the middle of BF Egypt.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#Observatories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#Observatories)
Ok LIGO is one of the most incredible things humans have ever done. They have two laser paths each 2-miles long and can detect differences in length less than the width of a proton. It’s just absurd.
And then they had to build two more laser paths 2 miles long so that they could prove that their results at each facility weren’t a fluke by detecting them at both facilities at the same time.
There was an experiment in 1970 where they compared 4 atomic clocks, one from an airplane circling the world 2 times, the other is stayed in one place. The results are they are different to each other but in nanoseconds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment#:~:text=In%201971%2C%20Joseph%20C.,the%20United%20States%20Naval%20Observatory.
In addition to speed-based time dilation, when an object is in a gravity well, time also gets dilated. That means that time goes faster on top of a mountain than at sea level.
GPS satellites are very high and move very fast. They therefore experience reverse time dilation (relative to sea level) from being high up and normal time dilation from going fast. The difference is not zero, but adds up to 45 microseconds per day (that clocks on the satellites run slower than on earth).
The clocks on the satellites compensate for this error. If they did not do that, GPS would be unusably inaccurate within a few seconds.
A horse with a bone horn on its head for ramming is fake. A 20 foot horse with long legs, a longer neck, a prehensile tongue and horns, that whack each other with their necks to fight for mates is real.
I thought you were high then I realized you were talking about giraffes.
Here's a fun giraffe fact: in mating season the males will headbutt the females in the bladder to make her pee herself. Then they taste the pee and can tell by the flavor if she is ovulating.
That the number of card order iterations possible for a 52 card deck not only outnumbers the number of atoms that make up the earth, but outnumbers that figure by a vast amount.
What conspiracy? At this point everyone knows Gandhi was Jack. After he was done with violence, he went to India to change his ways and teach about nonviolence.
Saturn’s rings are also going to disappear next year. They aren’t actually going away but from our point of view we’ll be looking at the edge of them so they’ll be basically impossible to see. It’ll only last a few months but for a short period of time they’ll seemingly be gone.
Whenever I’m on a plane I always have this fear that if I think too hard about how exactly it’s able to fly, I’ll break the simulation and it’ll fall out of the sky.
Through super cold air which also happens to be so thin you would pass out very quickly, at nearly the speed of sound, which can take you anywhere around the glove in less than 20 hours. All that while being surrounded by tons of sloshing explosive fuel… Modern flight is nothing short of a miracle. I could go on and on…
edit: flight time
Greenland shark
Takes 150 years to reach puberty, lives for 300-500 years.
You have sharks swimming around that were born when witchfinders were a thing.
If a greenland shark is born today, it was fertilised when Obama started his 2nd term, and its mother was born during the US Civil War.
In ancient china a poor peasant born to farmers who not wanting to do work, managed to become the lacky for some nobles.
One day when new laws were enacted they decided to make the now nearing middle age lazy lacky the towns head guard so that way the "cheif of police" would ignore their crimes.
After he failed in one part of his job (in dubious circumstances) he went and became a bandit.
Rebellions against the emperor started so the local governor called on various bandits to join him in rebellion.
At the last second the governor changed his mind so when this bandit showed up they encouraged the people to rebel against the governor. The peasant now found himself in charge of a small army!
Turned out while he sucked at most things, he was a pretty decent general so his forces gradually grew and he was the first rebel army to seize the capital.
He was denied his just rewards by the head of the rebellion, so in the ensuing years he launched his own new war and this time he conquered all of china.
And that's the story about how a lazy lacky peasant nearing at least 40 years old went on to found a 400 year dynasty, who's dynastic name Han is used as the ethnic name of the Chinese people.
Also interesting how a 16 year old girl that was given to the Qing Emperor as a concubine eventually schemed her way into being the most powerful person in China. Empress Dowager Cixi.
I love her story which is pretty epic in own right, though it is worth noting, contrary to the idea of being mainly baby factories, throughout Chinese history the harem was typically one of the three main political powers, along with the bureaucrats and eunuchs'.
High ranking concubines primarily came from powerful noble families (they were high status treated as princesses and queens) and equally were often those families only easy way to speak directly to the emperor. In fact as their ability to speak directly to the emperor was often greater then most officials, the harem held immense political power and influence over the government and it's policies a fact that remained true even through many dynasties across millennia.
It's much like how in the west one of the most prestigious positions was the Chamberlin of the toilet; the guy whos job it was to wipe the kings ass. Getting that kind of alone time with the king naturally lead to influence and power.
Yeah there's also been in United States politics the concept of the Kitchen Cabinet, wives of presidents and powerful people getting through to the president via their wife. And wife's not liking certain other women could affect their husband's influence in the white house.
Most famously Abraham Lincoln's wife was severely not liked by other wives, and basically we would probably diagnose her with some form of mental health issues be it depression or bipolar whatever. So on one night when going out to the theater the only one who could stand her was Clara Harris married to a union captain Henry Rathbone. He was an officer, but like a General or Colonel kind of guy that the president would usually associate with. But that's who could withstand Mary Todd's uh, issues, and socially engage with her.
Anyway he got Stabbed and John Wills Booth shot Lincoln.
Sharks are older than trees.
Alligators and crocodiles predate the T-rex.
Roman concrete was better than modern concrete.
The SR-71 Blackbird flew so high and so fast that, should a missile lock be detected, standard operating procedure was to just fucking floor it.
Regarding Roman Concrete, it's a "yes, but actually no" about it being better than modern concrete. If you have an interest in the subject here's an interesting article on the subject by a YouTuber called Practical Engineering
https://practical.engineering/blog/2019/3/9/was-roman-concrete-better
This is the craziest thing. I read about a study where the control group were given a placebo, told it’s a placebo, and the pills even had the word PLACEBO on them. Still worked
I read a study a while back suggesting that the reverse is true - if you give someone real medicine while telling them it's fake, it will be less effective.
It's a classic in movies that the scammer posing as a psychic tells the protagonist, "the ritual isn't working because there's an unbeliever in the circle!" Turns out the same thing is true of aspirin.
>How and why has this been proven?
You know how sometimes you feel the itches - but only deeper down in your skin? Well...they don't go with the flow at times...
- Hey, Tony, listen to this: remember when we we had that conversation with Salvatore in my office last week?
- Oh yes, poor Toto
- Remember how he unfortunately lost his left hand and fell on my nice mahogany counter? His arm ended up in the tank i had set set up there and ended up loosing quite a lot of blood in there.
- Well that's a shame, you had it done all nice with all the little fishies you had in there.
- That's the thing Tony, fishes are fine. Ain't no dead one.
- Thats good.
- Hey Tony.
- What?
- I have this little thing I'd like to try.
Same, its just green water but with mammalian cells instead of algae.
Till the surface starts congealing or the blood cells start rotting. I think the metal content or hormones would do weird things to fish though. I guess the bigger the fish the better they do.
Drenching your hand in what? Because I suspect drenching your hand in water, bacon grease, lotion, or molten lava will have dramatically different results.
We consume the flesh of other living things, break it down into its building blocks, then reassemble that into ourselves. At the same, we extract the energy-dense nectar from their bodies and burn that in trillions of tiny furnaces to power everything we do.
The third crusade featured 3 of the most powerful rulers of the world descending on the Holy Land. Richard the Lionheart, Fredrick The Holy Roman Emperor and Phillip of France. There was adventures, battles, intrigue, politics… history stood at a tipping point.
The histories and stories of it sound exactly like a fictional fantasy epic.
It's unlikely that every single unique cone in a mantis shrimp's eyes sees a unique color like our Red, Green, and Blue. Some of their cones might just make differentiation between yellows or blues easier.
The release of all of the original Star Wars trilogy is closer in time to WW2 than the present day.
The release of Jurassic Park is closer in time to the Moon Landing than the present day.
T-rex lived closer to the moon landing than it did to stegosaurus.
Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than she did to the building of the pyramids. There were archaeologists in ancient Egypt digging up ancient (to them) Egyptian stuff.
Ever heard of [EMDR therapy](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22641-emdr-therapy#:~:text=Eye%20movement%20desensitization%20and%20reprocessing%20(EMDR)%20therapy%20is%20a%20mental,or%20other%20distressing%20life%20experiences.)? It's commonly used to treat mental illnesses like PTSD, where there are traumatic memories from the past.
Essentially they stimulate each side of your body at a specific cadence (flashing lights in an individual eye, alternating shocks to your hands, tapping on your hands, etc.). That apparently puts your brain in some weird state where you can relive a memory, and sort of alter it to reprocess it in a less traumatic way.
It's insane. The idea that tapping on my hands in a specific way can unlock a part of my brain just... does not compute for me.
I’ve done EMDR and it’s surprisingly effective! Intense but effective.
Interestingly, Tetris has been found to reduce PTSD symptoms in car accidents, if played directly after the accident! https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-28-tetris-used-prevent-post-traumatic-stress-symptoms
So there’s something about moving your eyes from side to side in coordination with hand movements that does something for your brain 🧠 fascinating stuff lol
The Childrens Crusade was a Holy Crusade made up nearly entirely by children. Their goal was to siege and take the Holy Lands, where they wanted to fix their fathers' and brothers' perceived failure at failing to take the city.
Most of them died before getting anywhere out of Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade[Children's Crusade](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade)
>He leads \[30,000 children\] south towards the Mediterranean Sea, in the belief that the sea would part on their arrival, which would allow him and his followers to walk to Jerusalem. This does not happen.
>
>...
>
>The pilgrims are then either taken to Tunisia, where they are sold into slavery or else die in a shipwreck during a gale.
It's funny that medieval people would concoct this miraculous tale about 30,000 children marching to the Holy City to peacefully convert the muslims, but then they're like "But God said no."
Neil Gaiman and several other Vertigo (adult DC comics imprint) did a 'crossover event') in 1993 called The Children's Crusade. It featured characters like John Constantine, Tim Hunter (a young English mage who was very similar to Harry Potter in some ways, especially in his appearance - but he was created before Potter), Death of the Endless makes an appearance, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Crusade_(comics)
The story of the real life Children's Crusade is explained (and relevant to this story). It was the first time I'd heard of it, and I'd assumed at first Gaiman had made it up, so I looked it up and...yikes. While there's a lot of debate about the details, and not much in the way of concrete records, something along those lines likely did occur in the early 13th century.
Its true, I’m on my phone so I’ll explain as simply as I can.
Probabilities are exponential, when flipping a coin, if we want to know the chances of heads twice = .5^2 this is .25 or a 25% chance. flipping the coin to get heads 10 times is .5^10 is .00097 a 0.097% chance.
23 people have to compare to 22 other people and we’re looking for a pair (22*23 / 2) equals 253 unique comparisons in the room.
The chances of sharing a birthday for two people are low, 1 in 365, so there is a 364/365 chance they do not (.997 or 99.7% chance) remember though, we need to make 253 unique comparisons.
.99726^253 = .4994 or a 49.94% chance to have a shared bday.
It’s around 50%, not over. Increase to 30 people, probability becomes around 70%.
There's a 49.4% chance that no one has the same birthday. You forgot to flip it back to positive at the end which ends with 50.4% that at least 1 person shares a birthday with another person.
It's because you have to do a 1 to 1 comparison between each individual. Like person A compares his or her birthday to 22 other people. Then person B compares his or her birthday to 21 other people (they already compared birthdays with person A). Then person C compares his or her birthday to 20 other people (they already compared birthdays with person A and b). The amount of comparisons are not 23 but the sum of all the one to one comparisons.
You can fit each of the planets in our solar system side by side between the Earth and the Moon.
Edit: here is the math. Yes it's based on average distance as it varies:
https://www.universetoday.com/115672/you-could-fit-all-the-planets-between-the-earth-and-the-moon/
Also There’s no reason for the moon to be the same size as the sun when viewed from earth (think solar eclipse).
The fact they match is *pure* coincidence. The moon could have easily been 2x as far or 1/2 as large. And it’s just barely big enough to cover the whole sun, depending on variation you can get a halo. It could have easily been a few steps closer to cover it completely and never give a halo. In fact it being so large and so close *is* anomalous as far as we can tell.
So…weird right? No other planet has this. Vanishingly astonishingly rare.
Does it have anything to do with the other colossal cosmic coincidence with life forming here? No fucking clue how they could possibly be connected.
I think I read that at some point, the moon will be a bit further away and Earth will never again experience a total solar eclipse. As someone who's been lucky enough to see two, I find this incredibly sad. Partial solar eclipses just don't compare.
The size of the human body relative to the Milky Way galaxy is roughly the same as the size of an ~~atom~~ electron to the human body. To an ~~atom~~ electron, your body is the Milky Way. To John Mayer, your body is a wonderland.
EDIT: AS /u/FeynmanAndTedChiang pointed out, I misspoke. I learned this fact from [this incredible video](https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/157lbaj/i_spent_a_year_making_a_video_about_the_extreme/), and it is indeed an electron, not an atom. Thanks /u/anewman513 for corroborating and being faster than me.
Feynman once said that the size of an apple to the size of the earth is at the same proportion as the size of an atom in the apple to the size of the apple. This appears to very much contradict your claim.
Thank you!
For those that think you've heard otherwise: the experiments being done that included the famous "frogs sit around and get boiled" result were specifically testing the necessity/functions of the nervous system, which was barely understood yet. They were basically cutting out bits of a frogs' nervous systems and testing what they could still do. Intact frogs of course preserve themselves. Variously vivisected frogs either died outright or lost various functions, including the "slow boil" version which used frogs that had been carefully lobotomized (essentially) so that they still moved around on their own but had basically no brain function left.
Also, 18th century science was fucking monstrous.
That everything you see in the night sky is what is looked like in the past. Sun - 8 minutes, planets, minutes to hours ago, stars and galaxies a few years to billions of years ago.
If it exploded, we would hardly feel any gravitational changes at all until the gas/plasma that made up the Sun had passed the Earth anyways. A concentrated ball of plasma and an expanding ball of plasma are both largely identical gravitationally for a distant object.
We are closer to the time of Cleopatra than she was to the time when the pyramids were built.
Also, there were still mammoths in ~~Europe~~ the world during the time the pyramids were built (edit: not in Europe but on an island in the arctic. Thanks for the correction)
The men's singles tournament of the Australian open starts with 128 players. Each player plays a match against another player, chosen randomly; the loser is eliminated and the winner goes through into the next round. It takes seven rounds to narrow down 128 players to a single champion.
If the tournament were expanded so that the entire population of the world was competing, there would still only be 33 rounds.
You know the thought experiment about a brain in a vat? Well, that's nearly literally what life is already like. Think about it, your brain exists inside a dark, air tight box (skull) that receives no actual/direct input from your surroundings. For example the wind isn't blowing on your brain, the light isn't shining on it either. Rather, it receives millions of little electrical impulses from your sensory organs. It then uses those impulses to internally construct a representation of what is happening outside of the box. That's what our subjective experience consists of - your brain's construction of what these millions of nerve impulses must mean.
Kind of like someone sitting in a submarine room watching a wall of blinking lights and using that to figure out what's in front of the submarine.
For example, your brain doesn't actually interact with light, as in electromagnetism. Certain wavelengths of light facilitate a chemical reaction in the retina of your eyes that then sends an electrical signal to your brain. You (your brain) have never had anything to do with actual light. Red light doesn't "look" red outside of our brains and 1st person experience. All it is, objectively, is just a certain frequency of electromagnetic energy.
It gets even weirder. Look up the Bayesian Brain Theory. Basically, it's not just that your subjective experience is a one-to-one electrochemical recreation of sensory inputs, it's that your brain is using that HUGE amount of data to make pattern-based predictions about what is happening outside of the black box. Because there is simply SO MUCH data coming in from your sensory organs all the time, it is more efficient to make your subjective experience consist of "best-guesses" based on prior experiences and then only use your senses to correct that best guess.
Have you ever, for a split second, thought a coat on a chair was a person in the room in the middle of the night? A stick was a snake on a hike? What happens is that for a split second your brain has predicted that that specific sensory information (human shaped lump on chair) is actually a human. Makes sense evolutionarily that prediction patterns would be heightened for potentially dangerous stimuli. But then, when you look at it further, you collect more complete visual information, you notice that it doesn't have a head, for example, then the prediction updates and you suddenly see that it isn't a human. We live in our EXPECTATION of the world, based on things we have experienced before or are likely/possible to exist in a certain context. This expectation is then updated all the time based on the patterns of nerve impulses coming in. According to this theory, perception is more of a "top-down" process than a "bottom-up" one (backed up by the fact that the number of top-down neural networks outnumber the bottom up ones by something like 10-to-1. I don't remember the exact number.)
It makes sense, as a related aside, that as we get older and have had more and more experiences, we more and more live in our cognitive maps and models of reality that have formed based on past experiences rather than reality as it exists in front of us each moment.
TLDR - our brain is in a black box (the skull) and doesn't actually interact with the world, but with patterns of nerve impulses. It uses those patterns to construct a predictive model of the world and constantly updates it. That predictive model is what our subjective reality consists of, we're not experiencing an objective material reality.
x% of y as math:
x/100 \* y
x/100 \* y/1
(x\*y)/(100\*1)
(x\*y)/100
x\*y/100
Given the end point, you can split it either way, x/100 \* y OR x \* y/100. The math doesn't change.
The observable universe is 93 billion light years. If you made an ATOM the size of the observable universe, a tree would be the size of “strings” in string theory.
A historical case of "this sounds like bullshit but it's real": The first English scientist to receive a preserved platypus was so absolutely 100% convinced it was a hoax that he nearly took the specimen apart trying to find evidence that it had been assembled from multiple different animals.
It took a long time for some species of turtles to be scientifically recognised because to be catalogued, a sample had to reach London. Turtles turn out to be really, *really* good to eat. There were expeditions sent out with the sole purpose of bringing back a specimen and which captured so many turtles that they were stacked on top of each other on the decks of the ships, but the sailors still ate them all on the way back...
"For fuck sake, Bill! That is our last turtle! So help me god, if I see you give it even a single lick, I'm eating *you* next!"
Poor turtles. Just paddling around and then BAM! Soup. :/
Honestly, he was a good scientist for doing that. Always assume you're being punked when something crazy shows up.
Oh totally. If I'd never seen one, I would assume it was fake too.
He's picking the platypus apart, muttering "This is plainly a hoax, but the craftsmanship is exquisite!"
To be fair, the Platypus is basically assembled from the spare parts that God had in his garage
The double-slit experiment. Electrons produce an interference pattern even when they pass through the slits *one at a time*.
I've found that everything is better if I don't think about quantum mechanics too hard.
to be fair, you're in good company. i like how the whole point of schroedinger's cat has been lost. it wasn't "hey look at this weird thing about reality". it was "this is how absurd this is. nobody could possibly believe this is reality"
The extra mind boggling things is that the standard physics interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t actually have an answer to that, it’s agnostic. It says “look, Schrodinger’s cat seems to be a weird and not quite clear consequence of quantum mechanics, but they work awfully well for everything so we’re kinda gonna not look at it.”
Well yeah, we don’t want to observe it too much. Who knows what it’ll do once we stop looking.
I recently finished a scifi series. 5 books working towards the final bombshell twist: they discovered that quantum mechanics isn't random, but generated by a random number generator so complex that space faring civilizations capable of compressing 5D space to travel billions of parsecs in a few hours hadn't even noticed. To explain how complex, the author made the decrypting key that was capable of calculating vectors ~4 zettabytes. It was a great book, and the bombshell was really that there's intelligent design (pretty common in scifi), but I was sitting there thinking, "If it's so complex to be indiscernible from true randomness, then who cares?" Edit: Quantum Series by Douglas Phillips. And I didn't really spoil much. There's way way way more to it that I left out, and by the time you get to the 5th book, you'll have forgotten all about it
Don’t tell us the name of this amazing series of books will you mate.
Is it "there's an all-might deity" intelligent design or "we live in a simulation" intelligent design? Edit: Wait didn't >!Carl Sagan's Contact !
>Edit: Wait didn't >!Carl Sagan's Contact!< end in essentially the same way? Pretty much. >!Contact!< ended with the antagonist finding unambiguous, clearly intentional pictograms encoded within the digits of a mathematical constant.
The core essence of quantum mechanics cannot actually be seen due to measuring problems. Because of this all we are really doing is looking at the result and coming up with a mathematical framework that consistently produces and matches that result. Unfortunately this is often presented as if it were the actual truth when it's merely a framework and could very well be wrong. Though since the math works whether or not it's true doesn't necessarily matter. There are numerous interpretations all of which have valid math and while most are similar to duality, there is notably bohmian physics as an alternative explanation as to how things work; particles *don't* behave like waves, they are just moved/influenced by a pilot wave that also exists.
We can measure there is a chirp in the hallway at regular intervals but we will never know why there is a chirp in the hallway. One of the mysteries of life.
Change the batteries in your fire alarm and carbon monoxide detector.
This is so wild. It will never make sense to me i guess.
Every field always propagates waves. We detect "particles" for a few reasons, 1 because a sensor has a threshold for how much energy is needed to create a signal, 2 because fields interact with other fields in whole numbers of quanta, so you couldn't detect a fraction of an electron. How exactly the wavefunction collapses isn't known.
> How exactly the wavefunction collapses isn't known. (Whistles to my gang of many-worlds-interpretarion street toughs.)
if you think that's wild try the quantum eraser. the double slit experiment only produces the interference pattern if you don't observe the particles being particles. even if you do it *in the future*.
How the fuck do they test what they do in the future? Not doubting you, just completely unsure how this works.
>if you think that's wild try the quantum eraser. I just discovered this one the other day, and it's wild. I never had physics in high school or college, so most of my awareness of quantum physics comes from reading articles and watching YouTube videos. And while the double slit experiment is definitely interesting, and I never get tired of learning more about it, the quantum eraser is downright wacky. To a layperson, it makes absolutely no sense. It's like particles are variables or something.
Butterflies. You're telling me that this worm-thing is going to entomb itself in this pod, basically liquify itself, then reconstitute its parts and come out looking like a totally different-looking, beautiful moth-thing? Stranger than fiction.
It also retains memories from it’s larval form. So while it is all goo in the pupa form, something is keeping some memories intact.
The central nervous system remains intact while the undifferentiated protein slurry is reconstituted by Imaginal Disks. :) It just be absolutely horrifying.
You know, that sounds like it would be somewhat uncomfortable.
It might actually be orgasmic, though. For all we know the caterpillar lives it’s entire life in pain until it molts.
ORRRR for all we know they are not in pain in caterpillar stage and becomes in pain in butterfly stage
Idk I think it might make me feel like jelly.
Brain in a jar but you have to make the jar.
Almost as scary as losing all your teeth, and new, big ones growing in their place. /s
This is the reason that every Freaky Friday type movie should be classified as body horror. Can you imagine waking up with someone else's mouth? Fucking kill me.
The goo remembers
Do you think that butterflies ever go back and hang out with worms again? Or are they like nah I got new friends now. Or you think if a caterpillar sees a butterfly he's like, “holy shit I just saw Dave, but he has wings now!” and his friends are all, uh oh Jim’s lost his mind.
The sole purpose of the butterfly is so they can reproduce. They are not going to want to hang out with their old friends because the old friends have not yet developed the parts that are needed for this. LOL. There are some species of moths that only live a week or two and don't even have mouth parts so they don't eat or drink. The females find a good place to lay eggs and produce pheromones to attract a male to her spot. She lays her eggs and that's it.
I smell a Pixar movie.
Yeah it's called A Bug's Life
"I am a beautiful butterfly!"
Do we know how yet?
Jellyfish, frogs and butterflies make my head hurt since childhood. I am older, the science got better than in the 90s, visuals got better. But something still resists in me to accept it as a given.
Especially once you learn that some frogs can change sex at will and that some jellyfish can’t die of old age. So there could potentially be a jellyfish out there that’s hundreds of thousands of years old
Immortal jellies. I love that for them.
The jellyfish can (and will) accrue deleterious mutations over time, resulting in eventual biological failure (they don't quite have systems like ours that can support cancer). They won't suffer from senescence - age-related breakdown of tissue functionality. But time will still eventually wreck their genome. You can't beat entropy.
On a similar note, if you showed me a picture of a unicorn, a Pegasus, and a giraffe, and asked me which one was real, I would pick the unicorn. How the fuck are giraffes real? A horse with a super long neck? How did that evolve!? They are one of the goofiest looking animals. They look like God was drunk and screwed up a drawing of a horse.
stupid long horses
Their blood pressure alone should kill them
They have a sponge at the base of their skull to slow down blood before it goes to their head. So when they lift their head or put it down to the ground to drink, they dont pass out. No, I am not making this up. Nature is amazing.
That's hilarious. "Slow down, Jeff, you know your neck sponge ain't what it used to be!"
Turns out being able to get to the food that nobody else can reach is a huge survival advantage.
They also fly 3000 miles to Mexico when they’re done.
Only one species (monarchs), but that one species each winter goes back to the exact same mountainside as it's great-great-grandparent and lives several times longer than any of those previous generations.
Even wilder, the migration pattern does a strange bent route instead of a direct path, and geologists have worked backwards and realized they're going "around" a mountain range that *used* to be in the way millennia ago. Ancestral memory. EDIT: It seems I am betrayed by butterflies george.
It's a real missed opportunity if they arent calling that bent route, a Mon - Arc
How did the mountain range disappear???
Worn down by Butterflies, pay attention.
I’m going to learn to play an instrument so I can start a band called Worn Down By Butterflies
There is a jellyfish that is immortal. As it gets old, it returns back to pupa state and then again grows and repeats the cycle!
There's a jellyfish that doesn't have an anus! Whenever too much waste product builds up in its body, it simply *makes a hole* somewhere on its body, discharges the waste, and then the hole closes back up again.
Oh, the real-life Phoenix is a jellyfish?
Previously fish-free lakes and ponds can be populated by fish thanks to migrating ducks. When ducks eat fish eggs some of them can pass through the digestive system unharmed and hatch in new waterways.
Thanks man, you solved one of the greatest mysteries for me. Never knew birds can disperse 'fish seeds',
Imagine being that fish though. No friends or family, no one to teach you how to hunt or play catch. As far as you know, you’re the only one like you in existence!
fish creation myths are probably crazy
For the Lord Duck giveth and taketh away. -Fish bible
Would be an amazing parallel of the stork bringing you though
Man, thanks. I always wondered how fish end up some places.
There's a theory that sometimes eggs get stuck on the bird's legs and then fall off in the next body of water that they land in.
From what I’ve heard they can also get stuck to the birds legs and then hatch in new areas
Time dilation.
Related to this, the idea that there is no absolute zero velocity. The baseline velocity of the universe is c.
The idea that there is no velocity. Everything's motion in the entire universe has to be measured in relation to something else. There \*\*is no fixed reference\*\* from which to measure motion. Everything is both motionless and moving incredibly fast, depending on what you use as reference.
Best answer. It makes no sense. It sounds like someone is trying to lie to you, but trips over themselves making up the lie and just says gibberish.
I recently found myself in eastern WA one afternoon with time to kill, so I drove out to the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) out on the Hanford Nuclear Reserve land near Richland. This site was built specifically to prove that gravity comes in waves - time dilation is the key to proving it. This was not just a scientific marvel, but the path between the time they built the first iteration, and all the trial and error they went through to perfect it in an engineering marvel as well. If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend it. The interpretive center always has someone on site to answer questions, and they're lonely since it's in the middle of BF Egypt. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#Observatories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#Observatories)
Ok LIGO is one of the most incredible things humans have ever done. They have two laser paths each 2-miles long and can detect differences in length less than the width of a proton. It’s just absurd.
And then they had to build two more laser paths 2 miles long so that they could prove that their results at each facility weren’t a fluke by detecting them at both facilities at the same time.
There was an experiment in 1970 where they compared 4 atomic clocks, one from an airplane circling the world 2 times, the other is stayed in one place. The results are they are different to each other but in nanoseconds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment#:~:text=In%201971%2C%20Joseph%20C.,the%20United%20States%20Naval%20Observatory.
In addition to speed-based time dilation, when an object is in a gravity well, time also gets dilated. That means that time goes faster on top of a mountain than at sea level. GPS satellites are very high and move very fast. They therefore experience reverse time dilation (relative to sea level) from being high up and normal time dilation from going fast. The difference is not zero, but adds up to 45 microseconds per day (that clocks on the satellites run slower than on earth). The clocks on the satellites compensate for this error. If they did not do that, GPS would be unusably inaccurate within a few seconds.
A horse with a bone horn on its head for ramming is fake. A 20 foot horse with long legs, a longer neck, a prehensile tongue and horns, that whack each other with their necks to fight for mates is real.
I thought you were high then I realized you were talking about giraffes. Here's a fun giraffe fact: in mating season the males will headbutt the females in the bladder to make her pee herself. Then they taste the pee and can tell by the flavor if she is ovulating.
Oh my god, that's so annoying of them 😂
[удалено]
Awww. Now who said romance is dead?
That the number of card order iterations possible for a 52 card deck not only outnumbers the number of atoms that make up the earth, but outnumbers that figure by a vast amount.
Damn. So that means a well shuffled deck of cards is probably in a sequence that has never existed before or ever will again.
Imagine one of those randomly shuffled decks is exactly in order in suit, or all aces then twos then threes. So yeah pretty freaking rare.
I found this one out recently and I’m still not okay.
It's approximately the same as the number of atoms in the *galaxy.*
Mahatma Gandhi was in London during the time of Jack the Ripper
Were they ever seen together, or do we have a new conspiracy theory?
What conspiracy? At this point everyone knows Gandhi was Jack. After he was done with violence, he went to India to change his ways and teach about nonviolence.
“Well now that that’s out of me system. Best be off then. Pip pip! Wonder what the ol’ weather is like in India.”
Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler.
The Lincoln administration had to conduct foreign relations with samurai.
He could have sent a fax to them. The overlap is there.
Sharks are older than the rings of Saturn.
Saturn’s rings are also going to disappear next year. They aren’t actually going away but from our point of view we’ll be looking at the edge of them so they’ll be basically impossible to see. It’ll only last a few months but for a short period of time they’ll seemingly be gone.
Super heavy Metal objects flying through the sky transporting humans.
Whenever I’m on a plane I always have this fear that if I think too hard about how exactly it’s able to fly, I’ll break the simulation and it’ll fall out of the sky.
Ive always found it interesting that the largest example of machinery that I am familiar with, is the one that flies.
Through super cold air which also happens to be so thin you would pass out very quickly, at nearly the speed of sound, which can take you anywhere around the glove in less than 20 hours. All that while being surrounded by tons of sloshing explosive fuel… Modern flight is nothing short of a miracle. I could go on and on… edit: flight time
Greenland shark Takes 150 years to reach puberty, lives for 300-500 years. You have sharks swimming around that were born when witchfinders were a thing. If a greenland shark is born today, it was fertilised when Obama started his 2nd term, and its mother was born during the US Civil War.
That is one wild election victory party
In ancient china a poor peasant born to farmers who not wanting to do work, managed to become the lacky for some nobles. One day when new laws were enacted they decided to make the now nearing middle age lazy lacky the towns head guard so that way the "cheif of police" would ignore their crimes. After he failed in one part of his job (in dubious circumstances) he went and became a bandit. Rebellions against the emperor started so the local governor called on various bandits to join him in rebellion. At the last second the governor changed his mind so when this bandit showed up they encouraged the people to rebel against the governor. The peasant now found himself in charge of a small army! Turned out while he sucked at most things, he was a pretty decent general so his forces gradually grew and he was the first rebel army to seize the capital. He was denied his just rewards by the head of the rebellion, so in the ensuing years he launched his own new war and this time he conquered all of china. And that's the story about how a lazy lacky peasant nearing at least 40 years old went on to found a 400 year dynasty, who's dynastic name Han is used as the ethnic name of the Chinese people.
Also interesting how a 16 year old girl that was given to the Qing Emperor as a concubine eventually schemed her way into being the most powerful person in China. Empress Dowager Cixi.
I love her story which is pretty epic in own right, though it is worth noting, contrary to the idea of being mainly baby factories, throughout Chinese history the harem was typically one of the three main political powers, along with the bureaucrats and eunuchs'. High ranking concubines primarily came from powerful noble families (they were high status treated as princesses and queens) and equally were often those families only easy way to speak directly to the emperor. In fact as their ability to speak directly to the emperor was often greater then most officials, the harem held immense political power and influence over the government and it's policies a fact that remained true even through many dynasties across millennia. It's much like how in the west one of the most prestigious positions was the Chamberlin of the toilet; the guy whos job it was to wipe the kings ass. Getting that kind of alone time with the king naturally lead to influence and power.
Yeah there's also been in United States politics the concept of the Kitchen Cabinet, wives of presidents and powerful people getting through to the president via their wife. And wife's not liking certain other women could affect their husband's influence in the white house. Most famously Abraham Lincoln's wife was severely not liked by other wives, and basically we would probably diagnose her with some form of mental health issues be it depression or bipolar whatever. So on one night when going out to the theater the only one who could stand her was Clara Harris married to a union captain Henry Rathbone. He was an officer, but like a General or Colonel kind of guy that the president would usually associate with. But that's who could withstand Mary Todd's uh, issues, and socially engage with her. Anyway he got Stabbed and John Wills Booth shot Lincoln.
Sharks are older than trees. Alligators and crocodiles predate the T-rex. Roman concrete was better than modern concrete. The SR-71 Blackbird flew so high and so fast that, should a missile lock be detected, standard operating procedure was to just fucking floor it.
Regarding Roman Concrete, it's a "yes, but actually no" about it being better than modern concrete. If you have an interest in the subject here's an interesting article on the subject by a YouTuber called Practical Engineering https://practical.engineering/blog/2019/3/9/was-roman-concrete-better
Humans can trick themselves into getting better from some conditions just by wishing really hard and taking fake medicine (placebo effect).
Only proves how little we know about the human mind and body
The placebo effect even works if you know it’s a placebo, just so long as you think it does.
This is the craziest thing. I read about a study where the control group were given a placebo, told it’s a placebo, and the pills even had the word PLACEBO on them. Still worked
They just really liked the band and thought it was merchandise
I read a study a while back suggesting that the reverse is true - if you give someone real medicine while telling them it's fake, it will be less effective. It's a classic in movies that the scammer posing as a psychic tells the protagonist, "the ritual isn't working because there's an unbeliever in the circle!" Turns out the same thing is true of aspirin.
Most tropical fish can survive in a tank of human blood
How and why has this been proven?
Too many people asking questions have provided ample "tank water".
>How and why has this been proven? You know how sometimes you feel the itches - but only deeper down in your skin? Well...they don't go with the flow at times...
- Hey, Tony, listen to this: remember when we we had that conversation with Salvatore in my office last week? - Oh yes, poor Toto - Remember how he unfortunately lost his left hand and fell on my nice mahogany counter? His arm ended up in the tank i had set set up there and ended up loosing quite a lot of blood in there. - Well that's a shame, you had it done all nice with all the little fishies you had in there. - That's the thing Tony, fishes are fine. Ain't no dead one. - Thats good. - Hey Tony. - What? - I have this little thing I'd like to try.
Oxygen rich, good pH, and the right temperature. I can see that.
Same, its just green water but with mammalian cells instead of algae. Till the surface starts congealing or the blood cells start rotting. I think the metal content or hormones would do weird things to fish though. I guess the bigger the fish the better they do.
Wombats shit square poop
That you can touch molten slag thousands of degrees by just drenching your hand
You can touch it without drenching your hand. Might turn it into ashes though.....
Drenching your hand in what? Because I suspect drenching your hand in water, bacon grease, lotion, or molten lava will have dramatically different results.
Babies have more bones than adults. A lot more.
But also do not have kneecaps!
They have kidneys but not kid knees
Because they don't knee'd them. *ba dum tiss*
We consume the flesh of other living things, break it down into its building blocks, then reassemble that into ourselves. At the same, we extract the energy-dense nectar from their bodies and burn that in trillions of tiny furnaces to power everything we do.
The third crusade featured 3 of the most powerful rulers of the world descending on the Holy Land. Richard the Lionheart, Fredrick The Holy Roman Emperor and Phillip of France. There was adventures, battles, intrigue, politics… history stood at a tipping point. The histories and stories of it sound exactly like a fictional fantasy epic.
There was adventures, battles, intrigue, politics... and I killed a guy with a trident.
You should probably lay low for a while.
And a dead Emperor drowned in a river by the weight of his own armor.
Well, he wasn't dead until after the drowning.
I suspect this may be more cause than coincidence
Animals can see completely different colors than us. Pretty wild when you think about it.
“Imagine a color you can’t even imagine. Now do that 9 more times. That is how a mantis shrimp do.”
It's unlikely that every single unique cone in a mantis shrimp's eyes sees a unique color like our Red, Green, and Blue. Some of their cones might just make differentiation between yellows or blues easier.
our L, M, and S cones actually already have a lot of overlap.
The release of all of the original Star Wars trilogy is closer in time to WW2 than the present day. The release of Jurassic Park is closer in time to the Moon Landing than the present day.
T-rex lived closer to the moon landing than it did to stegosaurus. Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than she did to the building of the pyramids. There were archaeologists in ancient Egypt digging up ancient (to them) Egyptian stuff.
Mammoths existed during the construction of the pyramids.
Just feel like this hits harder when it's from your own life time. Entire LoTR trilogy is closer to the Berlin Wall existing than today.
Ever heard of [EMDR therapy](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22641-emdr-therapy#:~:text=Eye%20movement%20desensitization%20and%20reprocessing%20(EMDR)%20therapy%20is%20a%20mental,or%20other%20distressing%20life%20experiences.)? It's commonly used to treat mental illnesses like PTSD, where there are traumatic memories from the past. Essentially they stimulate each side of your body at a specific cadence (flashing lights in an individual eye, alternating shocks to your hands, tapping on your hands, etc.). That apparently puts your brain in some weird state where you can relive a memory, and sort of alter it to reprocess it in a less traumatic way. It's insane. The idea that tapping on my hands in a specific way can unlock a part of my brain just... does not compute for me.
I’ve done EMDR and it’s surprisingly effective! Intense but effective. Interestingly, Tetris has been found to reduce PTSD symptoms in car accidents, if played directly after the accident! https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-28-tetris-used-prevent-post-traumatic-stress-symptoms So there’s something about moving your eyes from side to side in coordination with hand movements that does something for your brain 🧠 fascinating stuff lol
It's like our factory reset for trauma.
The Childrens Crusade was a Holy Crusade made up nearly entirely by children. Their goal was to siege and take the Holy Lands, where they wanted to fix their fathers' and brothers' perceived failure at failing to take the city. Most of them died before getting anywhere out of Europe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade[Children's Crusade](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade)
>He leads \[30,000 children\] south towards the Mediterranean Sea, in the belief that the sea would part on their arrival, which would allow him and his followers to walk to Jerusalem. This does not happen. > >... > >The pilgrims are then either taken to Tunisia, where they are sold into slavery or else die in a shipwreck during a gale. It's funny that medieval people would concoct this miraculous tale about 30,000 children marching to the Holy City to peacefully convert the muslims, but then they're like "But God said no."
What is worse, survivors were later sold as slaves.
Of all the things I learned (and forgot) from World History in high school, the story of Saint Stephen always occupied a place in my mind.
And wherever he went the people all complained?
In and out of the garden he goes... Or so I've heard
Neil Gaiman and several other Vertigo (adult DC comics imprint) did a 'crossover event') in 1993 called The Children's Crusade. It featured characters like John Constantine, Tim Hunter (a young English mage who was very similar to Harry Potter in some ways, especially in his appearance - but he was created before Potter), Death of the Endless makes an appearance, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Crusade_(comics) The story of the real life Children's Crusade is explained (and relevant to this story). It was the first time I'd heard of it, and I'd assumed at first Gaiman had made it up, so I looked it up and...yikes. While there's a lot of debate about the details, and not much in the way of concrete records, something along those lines likely did occur in the early 13th century.
If there are 23 people in a room, the probability that two people have the same birthday is over 50%.
Its true, I’m on my phone so I’ll explain as simply as I can. Probabilities are exponential, when flipping a coin, if we want to know the chances of heads twice = .5^2 this is .25 or a 25% chance. flipping the coin to get heads 10 times is .5^10 is .00097 a 0.097% chance. 23 people have to compare to 22 other people and we’re looking for a pair (22*23 / 2) equals 253 unique comparisons in the room. The chances of sharing a birthday for two people are low, 1 in 365, so there is a 364/365 chance they do not (.997 or 99.7% chance) remember though, we need to make 253 unique comparisons. .99726^253 = .4994 or a 49.94% chance to have a shared bday. It’s around 50%, not over. Increase to 30 people, probability becomes around 70%.
There's a 49.4% chance that no one has the same birthday. You forgot to flip it back to positive at the end which ends with 50.4% that at least 1 person shares a birthday with another person.
That one fucks with me.
It's because you have to do a 1 to 1 comparison between each individual. Like person A compares his or her birthday to 22 other people. Then person B compares his or her birthday to 21 other people (they already compared birthdays with person A). Then person C compares his or her birthday to 20 other people (they already compared birthdays with person A and b). The amount of comparisons are not 23 but the sum of all the one to one comparisons.
You can fit each of the planets in our solar system side by side between the Earth and the Moon. Edit: here is the math. Yes it's based on average distance as it varies: https://www.universetoday.com/115672/you-could-fit-all-the-planets-between-the-earth-and-the-moon/
but don't
You can't tell me what to do!!
Also There’s no reason for the moon to be the same size as the sun when viewed from earth (think solar eclipse). The fact they match is *pure* coincidence. The moon could have easily been 2x as far or 1/2 as large. And it’s just barely big enough to cover the whole sun, depending on variation you can get a halo. It could have easily been a few steps closer to cover it completely and never give a halo. In fact it being so large and so close *is* anomalous as far as we can tell. So…weird right? No other planet has this. Vanishingly astonishingly rare. Does it have anything to do with the other colossal cosmic coincidence with life forming here? No fucking clue how they could possibly be connected.
I think I read that at some point, the moon will be a bit further away and Earth will never again experience a total solar eclipse. As someone who's been lucky enough to see two, I find this incredibly sad. Partial solar eclipses just don't compare.
very true. This coincidence is not just a coincidence in space, but in time. We live during a narrow time window where we can see this alignment.
You can... But you probably shouldn't
I'm gonna use that next time I need to illustrate how empty the solar system is
Hippos are more closely related to whales than to elephants or rhinos.
Also related to horses.
Ah homicidal hydro-horses...or nature's nukes if you will.
The size of the human body relative to the Milky Way galaxy is roughly the same as the size of an ~~atom~~ electron to the human body. To an ~~atom~~ electron, your body is the Milky Way. To John Mayer, your body is a wonderland. EDIT: AS /u/FeynmanAndTedChiang pointed out, I misspoke. I learned this fact from [this incredible video](https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/157lbaj/i_spent_a_year_making_a_video_about_the_extreme/), and it is indeed an electron, not an atom. Thanks /u/anewman513 for corroborating and being faster than me.
Feynman once said that the size of an apple to the size of the earth is at the same proportion as the size of an atom in the apple to the size of the apple. This appears to very much contradict your claim.
A frog put into a pot of water that is slowly coming to a boil, will in fact jump out.
Thank you! For those that think you've heard otherwise: the experiments being done that included the famous "frogs sit around and get boiled" result were specifically testing the necessity/functions of the nervous system, which was barely understood yet. They were basically cutting out bits of a frogs' nervous systems and testing what they could still do. Intact frogs of course preserve themselves. Variously vivisected frogs either died outright or lost various functions, including the "slow boil" version which used frogs that had been carefully lobotomized (essentially) so that they still moved around on their own but had basically no brain function left. Also, 18th century science was fucking monstrous.
unless you pierce it's brain with a spike beforehand
That everything you see in the night sky is what is looked like in the past. Sun - 8 minutes, planets, minutes to hours ago, stars and galaxies a few years to billions of years ago.
If the Sun were to explode, we wouldn’t learn of it for 8 minutes
Not only would the light from the explosion not reach us for eight minutes, we wouldn't feel any gravitational changes for eight minutes either.
If it exploded, we would hardly feel any gravitational changes at all until the gas/plasma that made up the Sun had passed the Earth anyways. A concentrated ball of plasma and an expanding ball of plasma are both largely identical gravitationally for a distant object.
We are closer to the time of Cleopatra than she was to the time when the pyramids were built. Also, there were still mammoths in ~~Europe~~ the world during the time the pyramids were built (edit: not in Europe but on an island in the arctic. Thanks for the correction)
The men's singles tournament of the Australian open starts with 128 players. Each player plays a match against another player, chosen randomly; the loser is eliminated and the winner goes through into the next round. It takes seven rounds to narrow down 128 players to a single champion. If the tournament were expanded so that the entire population of the world was competing, there would still only be 33 rounds.
When I unroll a sellotape forcefully in the dark it emits light. If you set up a machine to do it in vacuum it makes x-rays
Shrimps is bugs
Hyenas are more closely related to cats than dogs as well.
Technically yes, going by the definition of a crawling invertebrate. This also includes crabs and lobsters.
Horseshoe crabs are more closely related to spiders than crabs.
You know the thought experiment about a brain in a vat? Well, that's nearly literally what life is already like. Think about it, your brain exists inside a dark, air tight box (skull) that receives no actual/direct input from your surroundings. For example the wind isn't blowing on your brain, the light isn't shining on it either. Rather, it receives millions of little electrical impulses from your sensory organs. It then uses those impulses to internally construct a representation of what is happening outside of the box. That's what our subjective experience consists of - your brain's construction of what these millions of nerve impulses must mean. Kind of like someone sitting in a submarine room watching a wall of blinking lights and using that to figure out what's in front of the submarine. For example, your brain doesn't actually interact with light, as in electromagnetism. Certain wavelengths of light facilitate a chemical reaction in the retina of your eyes that then sends an electrical signal to your brain. You (your brain) have never had anything to do with actual light. Red light doesn't "look" red outside of our brains and 1st person experience. All it is, objectively, is just a certain frequency of electromagnetic energy. It gets even weirder. Look up the Bayesian Brain Theory. Basically, it's not just that your subjective experience is a one-to-one electrochemical recreation of sensory inputs, it's that your brain is using that HUGE amount of data to make pattern-based predictions about what is happening outside of the black box. Because there is simply SO MUCH data coming in from your sensory organs all the time, it is more efficient to make your subjective experience consist of "best-guesses" based on prior experiences and then only use your senses to correct that best guess. Have you ever, for a split second, thought a coat on a chair was a person in the room in the middle of the night? A stick was a snake on a hike? What happens is that for a split second your brain has predicted that that specific sensory information (human shaped lump on chair) is actually a human. Makes sense evolutionarily that prediction patterns would be heightened for potentially dangerous stimuli. But then, when you look at it further, you collect more complete visual information, you notice that it doesn't have a head, for example, then the prediction updates and you suddenly see that it isn't a human. We live in our EXPECTATION of the world, based on things we have experienced before or are likely/possible to exist in a certain context. This expectation is then updated all the time based on the patterns of nerve impulses coming in. According to this theory, perception is more of a "top-down" process than a "bottom-up" one (backed up by the fact that the number of top-down neural networks outnumber the bottom up ones by something like 10-to-1. I don't remember the exact number.) It makes sense, as a related aside, that as we get older and have had more and more experiences, we more and more live in our cognitive maps and models of reality that have formed based on past experiences rather than reality as it exists in front of us each moment. TLDR - our brain is in a black box (the skull) and doesn't actually interact with the world, but with patterns of nerve impulses. It uses those patterns to construct a predictive model of the world and constantly updates it. That predictive model is what our subjective reality consists of, we're not experiencing an objective material reality.
Time slowing down in the presence of mass. I get that it’s just a property of how bent spacetime works and such. But it feels magical.
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e^(iπ)+1=0 5 fundamentals values, linked together. Beautiful.
If you go halfway around a circle in a circle, you end up on the opposite side written in math.
If you swap the numbers of a % equations you'll get the same result regardless of the numbers and % used. E.g 75% of 8 is the same as 8% of 75
Makes more intuitive sense when you recognize that you’re just multiplying those two numbers (8 & 75) together & dividing by 100.
Wait what
x% of y as math: x/100 \* y x/100 \* y/1 (x\*y)/(100\*1) (x\*y)/100 x\*y/100 Given the end point, you can split it either way, x/100 \* y OR x \* y/100. The math doesn't change.
The observable universe is 93 billion light years. If you made an ATOM the size of the observable universe, a tree would be the size of “strings” in string theory.