• @[email protected]
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    58 months ago

    It’s even funnier when you remember that like 99% of all matter is empty space, and electrostatic force is what keeps everything from sliding past everything else.

  • @[email protected]
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    478 months ago

    When I was a kid there was a Norwegian children movie called “The hunt for the kidney stone” where a kid travels into the body of his sick grandpa to find out what’s wrong with him (kidney stone). After the movie I asked my mom what kidney stones are, and where they come from. “You can get them if you eat too much salt, for example” she says, and after that I was TERRIFIED every time my parents would put salt on anything.

    • @[email protected]
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      238 months ago

      I read a story somewhere of someone getting them from the oxalates in peanut butter.

      They were eating like 1 kg a week for a month or two though.

    • @[email protected]
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      188 months ago

      gas station sushi

      I didn’t know those 3 words existed in that combination and I’m frankly appalled that they do

      • @[email protected]
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        118 months ago

        For every time someone eats gas station sushi, someone has to eat a PB&J from a 5-Star restaurant to maintain the balance of the universe; otherwise you get weird things happening like The Fruit of the Loom logo losing the cornucopia, or Donald Trump becoming president.

  • @[email protected]
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    208 months ago

    I was always worried about perfectly round holes in the ground and falling into them. Looney Tunes really over-represented how common they were.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      Happened to me once. I was super drunk walking home and didn’t see an open manhole in front of me. I got super lucky, though.

      From my drunk perspective, I’m just walking along when suddenly the ground is nearly at my eye level. Then I realised I’m dangling there, with only my head and elbows outside. I dragged myself out and continued on home.

      I have no idea how I managed to fall inside with both my legs at the same time and why my arms didn’t hurt like hell, not even in the morning.

      • @[email protected]
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        98 months ago

        The part of the brain that goes “we’re doing reflexes now and you don’t get a say” is wild.

        • @[email protected]
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          48 months ago

          I don’t think reflexes were involved here, more likely it was lucky arm positioning at the right time. But what do I know? I wasn’t quite there to witness it.

  • @[email protected]
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    98 months ago

    Every time i was somewhere where i could see a big fall, i would get scared, thinking i would intentionally go there and fall to my death without noticing

    • @[email protected]
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      98 months ago

      I’m mildly scared of railings overlooking lower floors and such, thinking “I would get seriously injured if I somehow accidentally lean over this railing so much that I flip over to the other side and fall down.”

    • @[email protected]
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      38 months ago

      I had the exact same fear when I was a kid, and crossing bridges was always very stressful for me. Even today, as an adult, it still bothers me a little, and when I’m driving I keep having these intrusive thoughts like: “What if I accidentally drive off this bridge?”

    • Flying SquidM
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      258 months ago

      My mom once actually stepped in quicksand (thankfully only up to the top of her boot). It was in Canada. Yes, Canada has quicksand! She was visiting my uncle in Saskatchewan.

      Unlike the movies, it fits its name. One minute she was walking, then suddenly it was like she fell into a pit, but couldn’t get her boot out. I can’t remember how the story ended. This was like 35 years ago that she told me about it.

      • @[email protected]
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        28 months ago

        You know, seeing you in the wild I think is kinda like seeing quicksand. Very rare, usually fatal, but if you live - probably a great story.

        Let’s see if I get out alive.

      • madjo
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        38 months ago

        Couple of years ago, I walked through a forest somewhere in the middle of The Netherlands, called the Waterloopbos, and I came across a blocked off area with quicksand warnings.

        I kinda wish I had lost my shoes there, because the shoes I was wearing weren’t good for forest walking.

        That was the first and so far only time I had seen quicksand in my 44 years of existing on this blue marble.

  • volvoxvsmarla
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    258 months ago

    I remember freaking out when the last season of Friends aired - what, there are people vacationing in Bermuda? Are they insane? I was in my late teens

    • ivanafterall ☑️
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      38 months ago

      By now, satellites and GPS can just navigate us around the triangle, kind of like with hurricanes.

      • @[email protected]
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        38 months ago

        The triangle is HUGE, and due to where it covers, a lot of shipping went through it, and still does iirc… Saying its dangerous because ships wrecked there often isn’t that far off from calling Earth dangerous since every human has died there. It’s a true statement, I suppose, but the context helps understand it’s not a very reasonable one.

        • @[email protected]
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          18 months ago

          My understanding is there’s a lot of coral reefs in the Bermuda triangle and, like you say a lot of shipping with through there. So it makes sense a lot of ships went missing in that area.

          Sailors are a superstitious lot so there were stories about it being cursed. Kinda like how it’s bad luck to carry bananas on a sailboat.

        • @[email protected]
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          18 months ago

          Yeah the mystery of the triangle was puffed up by disingenuous authors who lied and fudged details to pretend ships went missing all the time. Things like reporting ships missing but not their eventual returns, claiming there were no storms when records showed otherwise, including sinkings and crashes that happened well outside the triangle, and a bunch more.

          When the the data is analysed; the number of incidents is the same as anywhere else on the planet.

    • @[email protected]
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      98 months ago

      When I was in my late teens, I ended up on a boat from Ft Lauderdale to the Bahamas. Theres no way no to go through just a little bit of the Burmuda Triangle. I remember freaking out / being super excited, wondering what crazy stuff things would happen on our journey. Of course, nothing happened. I was so disillusioned.

  • @[email protected]
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    418 months ago

    Sometimes I look at the wide open sky and think “What if gravity suddenly reverses and I fall up into the sky and then space? That would be really dangerous.”

    • @[email protected]
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      128 months ago

      I had a clear childhood memory of when gravity temporarily vanished and we all had to duck and cover under our desks. Years later I learned how gravity worked. A few years after that I realized my memory was impossible though it felt very real. This may be the root of my trust issues…

      • TheRealKuni
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        78 months ago

        Human memory is wild. We’re extremely good at inventing things that never happened, or adjusting memories over time as we recall them into something completely different than what actually happened. And it can feel so real.

    • @[email protected]
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      128 months ago

      Stephen King wrote a story of just that happening to a guy. Except gravity didn’t reverse he just kind of lost mass, but the result was the same.

        • @[email protected]
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          8 months ago

          Dude wasn’t even dieting what was crazy is for all intents in purposes no one could tell he was losing weight. He looked the same weight but when he get on a scale it show him losing weight. You really should read it. For some reason its a stand alone novel, but its actually really short for a Stephen King novel.

  • nomad
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    98 months ago

    Watched a childrens show that showed a snakebite. Was unable to enter my bed for years without searching it for snakes throughoutly.

  • Kairos
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    8 months ago

    Just as a reminder that even if you turned an entire atom into pure kenitic energy, you wouldn’t even see a flash.

    Math stuff:

    So E = M c^2

    I’ll choose a carbon atom because it’s a round number (don’t think about that statement too hard)

    So carbon has an atomic mass of 12 atomic mass units. In grams (divide by Avagadro’s number) is 1.992 E-23 grams.

    Shove that into E=mc^2 and you get 1.790 nanojoules, which is 4.974 E-16 kilowatt-hours. Or at 12¢ per KWH is 5*E-15 cents of power.

    So to power a 500 watt gaming rig, you’d need to burn about 20 nanograms of carbon at 100% efficiency, per hour.

  • @[email protected]
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    18 months ago

    My childhood fear was getting the vaccine shot for the swine flu which was a big issue in the mid 70’s. My 5th grade class received new text books and there was a photo of a kid getting the vaccine shot. Instead of a needle it was delivered by a big device that looked like an uzi machine gun and I was terrified of it. Time passed and I never got the shot. That’s when I learned how the news works.

    • @[email protected]
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      18 months ago

      Where does this this linguistically phenomenon come from?

      Is it a mistaken use of “an accident” with the preposition to reflect the personal involvement?

      Mistakes like “Could of” make sense to me because in my accent “could of” and “could’ve” are identically voiced.

      I can also completly understand where we get “alot” because alot is just the beginning of an acorn, minus a few hundred years of lazy pronunciation behind it (an oak corn =acorn)

      Google is telling me it’s because younger people will use “on accident” as an antonym for “on purpose”. That sounds feesible as an origin. Now I’m questioning if “by intent” is grammatically correct, I’ve been staring at words too long.