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.
Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they’re right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think “wow that’s pretty,” but every once in a while I let it hit me that I’m looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it’s, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.
The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they’re right there. I can point at one and say “look at that pretty star” and right now, a long distance away, it’s just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there’s life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.
And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It’s over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?
Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month
If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there’s more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined
What’s even more fascinating is that most of the stars we see in the sky are afterimages of primitive stars that died out long ago yet they shine as bright as the stars alive today
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You should try Space Engine. It’s a program to explore the universe, based on real telescope data. It also has the ability to procedurally generate galaxies, planets, and stars in unobserved parts of the universe.
In the same vein, I like to remind myself that every field in physics is literally happening all around me, right now, and it always has been, in fact, I’ve never seen anything without these invisible fields in it and for some reason, that really makes me super aware of our place in the order of magnitudes.
It’s wild we can see so much further down than up.
I can really relate to this. I remember a weird night in my teens where I must’ve spent at least an hour staring out of my bedroom window at the moon, because really for the first time I’d had the exact same thought. It’s right there. It’s so easy to get desensitised to that and to just think of it all as an image projected on the sky. The thought has never really left me and even now I still linger on the moon every time I see it and try to acknowledge that it is a 3 dimensional object lol.
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There’s a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren’t supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!
I often used to look at it as a child, however the adults wouldn’t let me. I knew there was some ulterior motive behind it.
I had the same thought so I looked directly at it everyday during an hour at sunset for a year, it was intense and an interesting feeling, it is called sungazing.
Scientists look at it. That’s where they get all their sciencing from. The forbidden knowledges comes from the sun.
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.
I saw 1tb microsd cards for sale at the shops the other day and had a bit of a ‘what the fuck…’ moment
I remember my parents talking about some thing or other in star trek that would be impossible because you’d need “terabytes of storage, and that’s probably not possible”. And now you can go buy 1 tb of storage and lose it in your couch cushions.
Poor Keanu Reaves gave up his childhood memories in Johnny Mnemonic to store something like 100GB of data in his brain. I don’t remember the Star Trek storage callout cause they were generally pretty good about just fabricating their own units for stuff (future sci-fi writers should take note, it’s always easier to make up units then deal with pedantic people on the internet).
I lost a 1tb flash drive with ventoy and a bunch of files and I’m still mad, but I had a backup lol
The latest SDUC standard allows for up to 128 TB.
It gets better. The size of the SD card isn’t the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit ‘thicker’ than the rest; that’s the actual chip, that tiny bump!
SD cards make sense to me. Hard Drives… Now there is some spooky technology.
The reader head on a hard drive changes direction so fast, that it experiences accelerations like that of a bullet being fired, hundreds of times a second.
The “Fly height” or distance a reader floats above the platter is so tiny, that it would crash into a thumbprint.
The actual magnetic media that stores your data is a layer of iron a few atoms thick deposited on to a ceramic or glass platter, with a single atom layer of a protective metal coating (typically rhodium) in top of it.
Despite these incredible tolerances, they damn things are dirt cheap, and surprisingly reliable.
Also fun, they rely on quantum mechanics.
Individual “bits” on a SD card are electron buckets that are either “full” (they have an electron) or not. 8 bits to a byte ~1 trillion bytes to a terabyte.
The mitochondria in all but your blood cells are a different species than us with their own separate DNA.
i love my powerful little friends
They have their own separate genetic code, yes, but that doesn’t make them a separate species, because they aren’t a distinct organism at all. They don’t exist in the absence of our cells.
Maybe it is semantics as you are correct but others do consider them a separate species that just happen to live in our cells. https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-anatomy/mitochondria-what-are-they-and-why-do-we-have-them#:~:text=Two separate species became one,in every other human alive.
Wait what?
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.
Can you elaborate on the math here? (I believe you, I just want to understand the simulation parameters better).
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Also, in this simulation are the customers arriving in equally spaced intervals or is random arrival time within the bounds assumed?
Not OP, but this website should explain everything.
Thanks! This article really clears up a lot of the details that help the simulation make sense.
Assume the bank opens up to a long line and it makes sense.
Intuitive way to see why is that 6.1 customers per hour would mean infinite waiting time (when it reaches a steady state)
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.
Don’t know if it’s bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I’d been lied to my whole life… a leap year isn’t every 4 years.
So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.
So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on…
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It’s amazing that they calculated it down to that detail in the 1700s. Before that they were just a hares breath off for 1000 years (Julian calender -> Gregorian calender). It became a real issue for the church that the start of spring didn’t align with the calendar anymore, and they needed to know exactly when Easter was to be held.
It why George Washington is credited with 2 birthdays, depends on which calender you’re going by. I think Russia was the last major country to adopt it.
But the earth is flat and pyramids=aliens. Uh huh. Yup.
FYI it’s “hair’s breadth”
Y’know, I stopped on it when I was typing and thought to double check, but I figured if I wrote it out intentionally wrong I’d get corrected.
I do appreciate it, tho, no joke. Thank you
Also when the leap years were introduced, the priests (who were to take care of the calendar) didn’t understand what dis “every four years” mean, and used to put a leap year every three years.
And the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to four, no more, no less. Four shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be four. Five shalt thou not count, neither count thou three, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Six is right out. Once the number four, being the fourth number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.”
The sun could’ve gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn’t know for another 20 seconds or so.
Interesting fact: the sun becomes 1 million tons lighter every second.
Lighter or brighter?
The ton is not a unit of brightness
Yes.
I might be misremembering but I believe our sun can’t go nova, it’s too small. It will, however, expand and swallow the Earth towards the end of its life.
When exactly would that be? I gotta add it to my calendar.
Don’t worry, your calendar doesn’t go that far
The Sun is not a big enough star to ever go nova. Neither are any of our close neighbors. We’re pretty safe from that kind of disaster.
Earth is just gonna slowly cook to a cinder and probably get swallowed when the Sun starts expanding in a couple billion years.
Fine! Geez.
Space aliens could teleport in next to sun, fling a bunch of Star Trek red matter at it like Spock did to the Romulan star, destabilize the star, and cause a, I think it was a black hole? where the star was. And we wouldn’t know for 8-ish minutes.
Well, we’d know by now
there’s people that don’t like music.
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As a person who was born liking music, I indeed find it too bizarre to believe to be true.
For me it’s not like I don’t like music, but there are large stretches of time, where I do not care so much for it. I would guess that I haven’t actively choosen to hear music for weaks, possibly months, now. Obviously excluding the music you can’t avoid, like background music in movies and video games etc.
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I have since changed my tune.
Ba-dum tsh
I thought my significant other was one of these to a certain extent. It does weird things to me as a DJ. Turns out that she just likes the limited music that she likes and cannot stand most everything else.
that just makes it easier to make a playlist with all their favorite songs.
Chipmunks and Avett Brothers, a playlist only rose colored glasses can help with.
The combustion engine. I know technically it’s not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity’s finer achievements. yes, it’s not without its barbs like emissions, but that’s a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.
We can’t touch objects, ever. Most of the space “occupied” by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I’m not willing to go down), and when we “touch” an object, it’s just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It’s the same reason why we don’t fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.
That’s just semantics. For any real definition of “touch”, we do touch objects.
“to put the hand, finger, etc., on or into contact with (something) to feel it”
The electromagnetic fields of your hand come in contact with those of the object, and you feel it.
So how does cutting an apple in half work? The knife must be touching the apple to cut it, right?
You can kind of visualize it as wire EDM manufacturing. Although not a fully accurate depiction, but it fractures the connection between the two sides.
That analogy relies on the reader having any idea what wire EDM manufacturing is. ;) Not exactly an everyday topic.
The apple was never whole… it was simply tightly grouped and a subgroup has been severed from another
And it was severed by a thin slice of atoms that used their force field as a wedge to force them apart.
“So what I’m trying to say, your honor, is that no, I did not inappropriately touch this child”
Here’s one: Iron doesn’t have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can’t smell coins after washing them
A solid that isn’t undergoing any sort of chemical reaction isn’t going to smell because there isn’t anything to smell. You need a molecule to enter your nose to smell. That’s my basic understanding, someone smarter than I can explain it better.
Also I’m not sure any country still uses iron for coins.
Iron would be a terrible metal for coinage, since it would shed rust all over everything after being handled. Some coins might be cast from iron (if it’s cheaper than alternatives, idk) but plated in other metals to prevent that.
Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You’ve got a metal frame inside your body.
Hate to burst your bubble, but the calcium inside your bones is not in a metallic form but as calciumphosphate. So no metal frame but one made of a salt I guess.
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The thing that started this conversation is hemoglobin, which is also not metallic but a protein. I don’t think anyone was confused and thought that there’s actually shiney silvery elemental metallic calcium in our body.
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Your bones are not dead rocks! They are living organs that happen to have a lot of sturdy calcium structures in them. They do a lot of other stuff besides hold your body up. They store minerals for all the other stuff your body needs minerals for; that’s why osteoporosis is even a possible failure mode. Your bone marrow produces white blood cells for your immune system, too.
There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates
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?
