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.
Let’s stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn’t believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen… the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
To piggy back on your “bizarre fact”, the same type of iron can be found added to cereal.
I remember several times in school we’d do a science demonstration where we’d smash up Cheerio (or a knock off) brand ceral, mix the powder with water and slowly drag a magnet through the slurry. Every time the magnet would be pulled out of the mix, there’d be more and more tiny iron bits.
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
First time I saw Jupiter through a telescope I got hit hard by the feeling: “Oh shit, that giant monster is real”.
Samesies. You aren’t alone. We have a support group.
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.
The fact that the moon is tidally locked probably doesn’t help, if it rotated it would be easier to see it as a sphere instead of an image
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.
People don’t realize how crazy it is to have a moon orbiting earth
A moon isn’t that strange, our moon is.
First, it is massive compared to Earth. The mass of the Moon is so large that it messed with definitions of planets and plutinos.
Second, the Moon’s size and distance from Earth is a near match for the Sun’s, which is really rare.
And for a strange fact, the Moon is about as reflective as worn asphalt. The Moon looks white in photos of just itself, but it is a dark grey when in photos with Earth.
“Just a bit farther” is quite the understatement!
“I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
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
That doesn’t seem right. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across (give or take) and the life span of stars is measured in billions of years.
Most of the stars we see are in our galaxy, so at most, we are seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago, which means that the vast majority of them will still be around, and looking much the same as they did 100,000 years ago.
Not too sure where you got that number from. From what I can find, the radius of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years.
Edit: I see now that you are talking Galaxy. That’s different.
The original comment was about stars we can see in the sky, so I was assuming naked eye
I seem to have made a mistake then. Thank you for correcting it.
Thinking about it further, if we’re talking about stars that we can see with telescopes, Hubble, James Webb etc, then you’re on the money. Stars in remote galaxies far outnumber the ones in our galaxy and show us glimpses of the early stages of the universe. And many of those stars are long gone
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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.
Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You’ve got a metal frame inside your body.
Using engine brakes can cause your car to not use fuel in some cases.
I’ve read and heard this from different sources (even driving instructors) and I don’t get how it’s possible. Your engine is still running, doesn’t it use at least as much as it does while it’s idling?
Edit: thank you all for your answers. I knew how the engine brake effect worked, my confusion was about exactly why the engine didn’t consume fuel in the process. I now understand so thanks all.
there’s people that don’t like music.
How disappointing… Music can make you feel any which way you want, it’s like the perfect drug. once you find that one banger, you can’t stop. I spend a huge amount of my time on Music Discovery. It’s the same thrill you’d get from say, eating those jelly beans in harry potter; a lot of them are bad tasting but oooh boy when you find that magical flavor that hits you right in the feels? magnifico!
I know people that don’t have necessarily poor taste in music, but certainly underdeveloped. there is a reason most talented musicians will at one point make a ‘parody’ piece that will skyrocket to the charts. a lot of classical music pieces were made to be cheeky and ‘dumb’ but, people liked those songs so much it was a case of ‘the customer is always right’.
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.
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.
I love music so much that i can admit that Silence speaks Volumes…i find the worst culprit to be advertisements. they play ‘classic hits’ when they really mean the top5 songs without consideration for any other of the artists 2nd or third tier bangers.
Honestly so much music is lost to the aether because soliciting has used it so much that a lot of people generally attach that relationship to music
As a person who was born liking music, I indeed find it too bizarre to believe to be true.
I used to be like this, but with movies. When I first met my wife, she was utterly baffled at the concept of somebody not enjoying movies, and she made it her mission to make me enjoy them.
Come to think of it, she actually doesn’t like music much. I’ve failed to change her opinion on that though because my taste in music is shit (and I’m proud of it.)
I am still like this with movies and TV.
It just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve seen a handful of movies/shows that I’d call “not boring as shit” ever, and even then, its not something I’d choose to do myself, but is fine if I’m, like, chillin and chatting with people or whatever.
Might be my neurodivergence, might also just be how much of a reader I am. Movies are just so slow compared to reading.
Good movies demand attention.
Good audio books I can listen to while I play my favorite video game.
I’m the opposite. I can’t ever ‘zone out’ while listening/watching/reading/playing stuff; I can’t even listen to music while playing games, and usually turn background music on low or off.
That’s basically how I was. Honestly, the reason I enjoy movies nowadays isn’t really because it’s my thing, but because my wife is always so excited to show me the movies she likes, and I can’t help but enjoy myself when it’s making her happy.
I rarely watch movies on my own, or with other people besides her, but when I do, it’s usually because I think it’d be fun to tell her all about it, and maybe watch it with her too.
I’m also bigger on reading, but I have really severe, unmedicated ADHD, so I can’t sit down with an actual book for longer than a few minutes. Gotta have pretty pictures, like a manga or graphic novel or something (and even then it’s hard.)
I told people I didn’t like music, and pretended not to like, when I was young. My sister was really into music, and my dad always had the radio off in the car (I think so conversation could happen), so I thought it was a girl thing and rejected it.
I have since changed my tune.
I have since changed my tune.
Ba-dum tsh
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Can you tolerate it at least, or you get annoyed if it’s playing at an event/Uber/supermarket etc?
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I see. I totally get what you mean, it’s taken me years to learn how to tolerate a lot of music I don’t like. Thanks for sharing
Wait, what? Are you saying you actively don’t like music? I mean i can (kind of) understand if a person doesn’t really get a pleasure response from listening to music, but you’re saying listening to music actually gives you a displeasure response?? ALL music? It’s ok if that’s the case, you didn’t choose to have that response, but i just want to be clear that this is what you’re saying?
A lot of music generates unpleasant sensations for me too, though I can tolerate it a bit. Unlike the other commenter though, I can enjoy a lot of other music. What’s unusual in my opinion is that it’s all music, not the negative response. Lucky you if the worst that music can get from you is indifference!
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Man that sucks. But it seems like you’re doing better these days, so that’s good.
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If you get 23 people in a room the odds of two of them sharing a birthday are 50%
The birthday paradox is a veridical paradox: it seems wrong at first glance but is, in fact, true. While it may seem surprising that only 23 individuals are required to reach a 50% probability of a shared birthday, this result is made more intuitive by considering that the birthday comparisons will be made between every possible pair of individuals. With 23 individuals, there are (23 × 22)/2 = 253 pairs to consider, far more than half the number of days in a year.
Blows my mind how this by its bare bones is just simple statistics and combinations but is a totally different story when described in English. I’m sure there are similar facts like this that are mathematically logical but to a layman is confusing and inconceivable.
I’m sure there are similar facts like this that are
mathematically logicalmaterially sound but to anlaymanamerican it’s confusing and inconceivablecommunism
it’s not part of the paradox, but there are also days when people tend to have more sex
like new years, valentines, christmas etc. (in the west at least)
so you tend to get more people born 9 months after those daysI listen to This American Life also.
i don’t know what that is
! I just assumed, lol
They have an episode where they talk about the birthday paradox and then follow it up with talking about how the math isn’t 100% correct as applied to humans bc birthdays aren’t normally distributed.
ah, fair enough lol
Yeah that’s why so many people have birthdays in September
This seems like a logistical nightmare for all systems related to pregnancy and childcare if it were to actually become a popular thing, like damn, just pay people for having kids its not that hard
In high school my graduating class was 38. The one before us was 21, the one after 18.
Coincidently there was a massive blizzard that snowed everybody into their house for a week about 9 months before my birthday.
I’d test this, but I don’t have 22 friends.
The concept of a room is malleable. Go to a 22 person tf2 server and ask birthdays.
But you need 23 people.
Swab is a person, are they not?
So not really then. I’ve always heard this but not seen it explained. But what you’re saying is that with every interaction the likely hood of finding a match goes up. But realistically, probabilities like that are just fun quirks of math, not representations of reality. Probabilities are doing the math on events, but these are events discussing concrete and unchanging dates. Every person paired up isn’t given a random date in every interaction. They have a set date from the outset, you just don’t know it. There’s not a random number generator picking a number from a set every time. Unless you’re in a simulation and none of this is real and birthdays don’t exist and the computer you’re plugged into has to make up a random birthday every time you interact.
That’s completely wrong lol. Nowhere is there an assumption that birthdays are randomized each time, you just don’t understand the math.
Sorry, but I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say. If you have questions you can click on the Wikipedia link!
Ah. Sorry, I assumed you knew what you were talking about about and not just copy/pasting a thing you found. My bad.
It helps if you can compose a coherent sentence! :)
Your inability to understand is not my problem. I suggest a reading comprehension class. I understand that some of those big words like “Probabilities” and “math” might be too much for you. It’s okay. We all have things we’re good at. You’ll find yours one day.
The hell that giving birth can be.
A lot of women endure having a baby…and holy. shit. No.
Their bodies produce chemicals that cause them to forget how bad childbirth was.
I suppose it is for the best, but nonetheless I find it uncomfortable how our bodies have the ability to manipulate our brains’ memories and our consciousness residing in the same place cannot do anything about it
These chemicals are our memories. They aren’t manipulating it. It’s just how it works.
On another note: the body produces opioids when you’re in great pain
Oh, it’s worse than that, the consciousness is in on it.
Exactly. I was there and saw my wife having the worst pain of her life. Really without exaggeration. It was incredibly hard and painful.
Then, 10 minutes after it’s all over, she looks at me and says “Well, that wasn’t so bad”.
Evolution is a hell of a drug.
I always thought it interesting that every time we talk about when our kids were born, I remember all these details and my wife’s like huh, weird, can’t remember a thing.
The hormones really carry you through. Lol. And at least it’s relatively short with a positive end goal.
Every time that comes up, I think to myself “Something I’ve gone through must be more painful, right? I’ve gone through some pretty hellish things, and you’re trying to tell me something MORE painful exists? Not just a little more, but dramatically more? For my own sanity, I’m gonna have to live in denial of that.”
Passing kidney stones is agonizing, and giving birth is a prolonged kidney stone experience.
Huh. I’m guessing the pain of kidney stones comes in varying levels, because the one time I had them I wouldn’t have called it the most painful thing in the world.
Then again, I could also have inherited my mom’s pain tolerance, who gave birth multiple times without any kind of pain relief and without flinching.
I’ve read that passing a kidney stone through the urethra has a brief level of pain matching childbirth… but it’s usually much briefer than childbirth.
Interesting. I suppose they’re both objects with pointy bits much larger than the holes they’re trying to pass through. On that note, I’ve been through very severe anal stenosis and THAT I would say was closing in on the most horrific pain I’ve ever been through. Before I could go to the doctor about it my wife basically had to spend all day and sometimes night keeping me occupied so I had something to do other than cry.
Serious spinal issues are probably one of the only things that could be worse.
Alaska is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost US state.
Likewise, the closest US state to Africa is Maine.
What would happen if you were to put both of yours legs in these westernmost and the easternmost parts?
Your legs would glitch around the whole circumference of the Earth.
You’d probably drown.
You would have both legs in Alaska.
How is Alaska easternmost?
Its Western most point crosses the international date line and is therefore technically “really far east” instead of “really far west”.
It’s arbitrary, though. And I’ve never heard of the dateline being the border where east and west start. It makes no sense.
Albeit arbitrary… if it’s globally recognized that each new day begins as the sun crests the international date line, and the sun indisputably rises from the East, why would it not make sense?
Because time and direction are different metrics? West is a metric that only means anything in relation to something else in a straight line. It’s a direction. West doesn’t stop being west if you go too far. It’s always west.
Wait until you find out that some places breach that line (in addition to it being wobbly to begin with) which is we have timezones greater than +12 or -12. I hate timezones. With a passion. Signed: a programmer.
The world would be better if we just used UTC everywhere.
I need to go to bed, I misread that as “Ahsoka is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, *and” easternmost US 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.
it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment
Sounds like a terrible sorting algorithm /jk
Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you, and through the sharing of experiences and affection, if nothing goes excessively wrong, they become unique for you.
Well said!
Definitely agree and beautifully put :)
Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you
That catch is, you need to find that someone in the first place, and that takes a bit of looking around. So in effect, soul mates are found.
You find a partner, who then MAY become a soul mate
It gets much easier once you factor in that you, yourself, aren’t static and constant. The task isn’t to find someone capable of becoming perfect for you, it’s finding someone whose compatibility and willingness when taken into account with your own offers a fair chance to grow into a symbiotic relationship.
I mean, you should be extra kind to most people most of the time. Comunism begins at home.
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
Well I don’t need to meet everybody. There’s no need to meet anyone who doesn’t match my sexual preferences, so that’s half right there. Then we can also cut everyone who’s sexual preferences I don’t meet, as well as anyone outside of a given age range (most of the people on earth are much younger than me and would be inappropriate for me to date). We can probably get that down to about 50-60 years. (At one second per person).
The thought experiment was just an attempt to show how hard it is to wrap our minds around big numbers. Even a tangible number such as the amount of people in the world.
That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.
Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.
In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.
That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.
That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China
Japanfrom the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
It’s even weirder than that. “You” are a story that your brain tells itself so that you can explain your needs to other people. Without other people, or at least the pretend image of other people, there’s nothing like what we think of as a human personality.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That’s not true though. You need REM sleep. Sleeping doesn’t mean you’re K.O. You’re processing things and regenerating. That’s like the exact opposite of being K.O.
Okay true, but you also need deep sleep a lot otherwise you dont regenerate. Also the body is fully K.O. which may make more sense
But you’re out. That processing is so intense you have to de-link nearly all environmental inputs.
Between Japan and the EU, there is an ocean. You also need to swim, not only walk.
Swimming is walking in water /s
Maybe he plans to wear a weight belt.
Walking through the Sea of Japan is a bit of a challenge, though.
Haha okay there is some water thats true.
Duh! Just wait for low tide!
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
If you get into mindfulness meditation a little bit, the concept of self in general shifts in really weird ways. Like I know that I am an individual entity in the world, but the sense of an individual actor or driver within my consciousness has faded somewhat. When you recognize that the thoughts or feelings that manifest in consciousness are about as much under your control as whether the wind is blowing or what the people across the room are talking about, it gives you a new perspective on life.
that cis people exist. I’m trans and nonbinary, it’s genuinely bizarre to me that not everyone questions the gender assigned to them at birth by the government lol
It wouldn’t surprise me one bit, if it turned out that the most common gender ID is actually non-binary.
Like, my spouse and I pretty much consider ourselves “cis” but … but not for any particular reason other than, “well, its good enough to get the point across.” We don’t really “feel” any particularly strong emotions about it.
A lot of people question it and just go “this is well enough for me”. I’ve wondered about it plenty butI think for my (completely personal) purposes it would be hair-splitting at best to object to being called a guy because my body is my body and society is organized in a gender binary. I despise the social construction of gender, but I also dislike the English language and yet here I am using it to participate in society in a relatively frictionless way, and for me personally it’s kind of the same thing.
I can totally see finding it weird as a nonbinary person how people can feel fine as a binary gender, cis or trans.
yes frankly everyone should at least question it
I understand your perspective on questioning the gender assigned at birth, and it’s a valid point of view. However, it’s important to remember that the concept of gender is multifaceted, involving biological, social, and cultural elements that have existed long before modern governments. For a significant number of people, their gender identity aligns naturally with their biological sex and the societal roles they’ve been assigned. For these individuals, there may not be a pressing need to question their gender, as they feel a sense of congruence. The experience of gender is complex and varies from person to person, but it’s not surprising that some people don’t find it necessary to question their assigned roles.
As a cis by default person it is weird to me when I talk to people and they have strong feelings about their gender. But if we were normal we wouldn’t be posting on this part of the internet
Downvoting because of “by the government”. Your biological sex is assigned by luck, depending on what chromosomes you get. Your gender on your birth certificate defaults to the way the “majority” of people are. But you’re not the majority. No single person is the majority. In fact, the only trait we are certainly sharing with a majority of people is the fact that we’re all unique (and the fact we’re all human).
Questioning doesn’t mean you have to come to a different conclusion. I’m cis-het(ish) and don’t just take that for granted. I’ve thought about my gender identity and sexuality and done the introspection. I’m definitely more of a gender abolitionist, so I don’t necessarily follow the loosely ascribed gender traits consistently, but I’m not trans. Questioning and defying social norms does not make one not cis. And that government comment is weird. Society assigns them to us. The government just writes it down.
Sorry you have two dinguses explaining gender to you lmao
Edit: ❤️Mods
Wow the mods are amazing, they removed the comments before I even saw them.
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There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates
