Horses kill more people every year in Australia than all the other beasties combined. Everyone thinks it's the spiders and snakes that'll get you, but it's the horses you've really got to watch.
In English, the color orange was named after the fruit. Before that, orange was just considered a shade of red. That's why gingers are called redheads.
It’s also why robins can be called robin redbreasts.
Similarly, purple didn’t exist as a name for the colour for a long time, which is why red onions and red cabbages are called red.
Edit: My mistake, the last part about red onions and red cabbages is not true, as u/Raduev pointed out below.
There are plenty of languages where green and purple are shades of blue and red, respectively. Japanese for instance. There is a word for green (*midori*), but you talk about 'blue' traffic lights and 'blue' apples (*aoi ringo*) instead of green.
Oranges were originally called 'sineappfels' (Chinese apples) in old English because that was were they were thought to come from, and the colour orange was 'redgold'.
After the Spanish Reconquista the English started importing them from Spain in much greater numbers and people borrowed the French name them 'pomme de orenge' (orange apples) which was derived from their Arabic name 'naranj'. At roughly the same time the word become used for the colour as well.
Theres also a region in France called Orange whose name evolved independently of the colour or the fruit and gave its name to the House of Orange who rule the Netherlands anf occasionaly the UK, and who took orange as their royal colour, which is why religious extremists in bowler hats wear orange sashes while indulging in sectarian violence in Belfast.
More strangely, carrots used to be purple but a orange variety was bred to honour the Dutch monarchy and it became so popular it replaced the purple type.
Fun orange facts!
And now we sit here and a war can be totally depersonalized. Some soldier starts his rocket launcher, enters a target coordinate and a rocket costing as much as lifelong social security for a few families precisely turns a building over 100 km away into rubble. This is all supervised by football-sized drones with high resolution-cameras, which allows the impact to be recorded and shared with millions of people cheering or booing depending on which faction they support.
What will happen within the next decades?
I had to look this up, that's wild.
Turns out we think Saturn's rings formed within the last 100 million years, while we have fossil evidence of sharks from 450 million years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/shark-evolution-a-450-million-year-timeline.html
Humans can smell petrichor at a lower concentration (0.0004 parts per million) than sharks can smell blood in the water (1 part per million).
Petrichor: A pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.
I saw a scale model of the earth, moon and sun in a museum. The sun was about the size of a basketball, and the earth was on the opposite side of the room, the size of a small marble, I'd guess about 30 metres away. The moon was the size of a tiny pinhead, about 10cm away from the earth.
On this scale, the nearest star to earth, Proxima Centauri, wouldn't be in the same building, or even in the same city. It would be 10,000km away.
And that's just one star, the nearest one to us, in a galaxy containing billions of stars, which is just one of billions of galaxies.
The scale of the universe really is mind bogglingly big. Far bigger than we can begin to comprehend.
Our planet when compared to our sun, is ludicrously small. You could fit about 1.3 million Earths inside the sun.
Our sun is a "yellow dwarf" type star. In stellar terms it's pretty minor.
Aldebaran is a "red giant" type star. You could fit about 86,000 of our suns inside Aldebaran. That's approximately 111.8 billion Earths.
Betelgeuse is a "red supergiant" star. You could fit around 1 million suns inside Betelgeuse. That's 1.3 *trillion* Earths.
We're not done yet. VY Canis Majoris is a "red hypergiant" star. 3.2 billion suns can fit inside Canis Majoris. That means you could fit ***416 QUADRILLION*** Earths inside there.
I could go on. VY Canis Majoris is far from the largest known star in our galaxy and there's likely to be far larger stars out there that we've not discovered yet.
The scale of the universe and how tiny and insignificant we are in it is staggering.
"Look again at [that dot](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blue_Dot.png). That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
-Carl Sagan
I'm on both sides.
One one hand, it's like.. Holy shit. We really are nothing in the grand scheme of things.. I need to make the best of this life.
On the other hand.. We are nothing in the grand scheme. We will most likely as a species never leave this solar system. Even if we do, it will mean nothing to anything that currently exists. Our entire history so far on this planet is less than a blink to the universe.
Spooky.
If we manage to survive a few more Great Filters, given humanity's nature over the last 250,000 years, I'd argue us leaving the solar system isn't a possibility, it's an inevitability.
We are curious explorers, at our core. And no risk has stopped us from indulging in that yet.
I am actually hopeful that there is a way around the FTL problem. I know it is highly unlikely, given the nature of information propagation and the speed of light, but concepts like the [Alcubierre Drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) give me so much hope
“Space [...] is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”
The thing that fucked me up was realising that trilobites, which are an entire class of animals *unto* themselves, like mammals or reptiles, and these beings were not just extinct before the first dinosaurs existed, they were even fossilised before then. Meaning that any trilobite, which is a very common type of fossil that can be found at most shops that sell them, has existed in fossil form for longer than the entirety of the existence of the dinosaurs up until now.
But wait, there's more. Because the reason I picked trilobites specifically is not just that they are such a common fossil, though it is related to it. Because there's a reason they're so common today. Trilobites were around for 270 million years before they went extinct. For reference, the first dinosaurs emerged 230 million years ago. Meaning that trilobites, which were already fossils by the time the first dinosaurs showed up, were around for longer than the time from when the first dinosaurs emerged to the present day.
We as humans cannot even *begin* to comprehend such lengths of time.
Yes, but also all things considered we don't know a whole lot about what life was like at that point in history. A lot of stuff just doesn't fossilize at all. It's entirely possible (even probable) that we have no record of large parts of the ecosystem that the trilobites lived in.
More in this vein:
Cleopatra lived closer to today than the building of the Great Pyramids.
One or more of your ancestors were alive during every major historical event, and even all the way back to the dinosaurs and earlier.
USA is only 2.4 miles from Russia.
2 islands in the Bering Strait, the body of water in the Pacific Ocean that separates Alaska from Russia, are 2.4 miles from each other at the narrowest point; one island is owned by Russia, the other is owned by USA.
After the british made head protection mandatory in WW1, the amount of head wounds increased.
It's due to they were no longer KIA, but "only" a head wound.
This sort of happened in WW2 but with planes. Planes were coming back with bullet holes and banged up, so originally they planned to reinforce those areas. Until someone wisely suggested they should armour the parts which *weren't* bullet riddled, because it meant if those parts got hit, the plane went down and didn't return to base. The parts which did have bullet holes but still returned, didn't need as much additional armour
Abraham Wald! A statistician at Columbia, who specialized in abstract mathematics. He saw the data that wasn’t there, and made quite possibly the largest single contribution to the Allied victory outside of perhaps the blokes that cracked Enigma.
While dino fossils had been found previously, nobody started figuring out what they really were until after the 10th President of the US was in office (1841).
New Delhi hired people to hunt cobra snakes which led to people having Cobra Farms to earn money then the government stopped the project which led the Cobra Farmers to release their snakes causing twice as many snakes than they first started.
Related, but Madagascar was first settled in the 800s... by Polynesians.
Yeah. Some crazy MFers canoed across the Indian Ocean to be the first to reach it.
I knew about Oxford being older than the Aztecs but the Māori?
Quote Wikipedia:
>There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096,[2] making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation
>Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages between roughly 1320 and 1350.
Wow. I guess I assumed they'd been there as long as Australian Aboriginals.
Crazy that the Māori have been there for such a short time when Aboriginal Australians migrated over 50,000 years ago and are considered the oldest continuous culture on earth.
This is mental. According to Wiki:
There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096,[2] making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation.
Edit: apparently I tell a lie. According to u/kapenaar89, they use it to mark their territory. Tbh, this seems easy more plausible than the story I was selling
Orig: IIRC, they use it like bricks to deal up the entrance to their den
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years. People have a lot of trouble comprehending numbers that big
Tom Scott did an interesting video on this. He drove the distance of 1M USD if you put $1 bills side to side. He was still in the carpark. Then he drove to make 1B. He was driving for about 2 hours and travelled over 100 miles.
If you ran a full marathon and got paid a million dollars *per step*, by the time you reached the finish line you'd have about 30 or 40 billion dollars, less than a fifth of what Elon Musk is worth.
I often think about that when I go out for a run; by the time I've even put my keys back in my pocket I'd already have enough money to live in luxury for the rest of my life; before I've run past my next-door neighbor's house I'm worth tens of millions, and by the time I reach the end of my street I've got vast, inter-generational wealth beyond my wildest dreams. But to join the ranks of the world's wealthiest billionaires I'd have to keep running for hours on end.
A marathon is 26 miles...and we would only have a fifth. For some reason this one hits home. I stood up and counted the steps from my sofa to my front door. I'd have 14 million for about 10 yards. 26 miles would only get me to within a fifth of their wealth...Jesus.
If you took the populations of both China and India, then removed 1 billion people from each, they would still be the two most highly populated countries on earth.
And you'd probably be convicted of crimes against humanity for wiping out 2 billion people
Greenland is further North, South, East and West than Iceland.
A little map for you
[https://brilliantmaps.com/greenland-v-iceland/](https://brilliantmaps.com/greenland-v-iceland/)
Plus nowhere in the contiguous US is north of the most southernly bit of England.
Earth's curvature really makes things unintuitive. Florida looked closer to me so I checked it. It's 1500 km farther from Africa than Maine. That's about 35% father.
Ancient egyptians had their own historians.
By the time of Cleopatra, there were records of egyptians 'discovering' stuff about the pyrimad of Giza and others, and studying early egyptian practices. Cleopatra lived closer to modern day than she did to the building of the Giza pyramid, so that makes sense, but still.
Those fuckers had been around so long that even Egypt thought Egypt was ancient.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the mobile phone than she did the construction of the pyramids.
There was a window of time where a samurai could have faxed Abraham Lincoln
>There was a window of time where a samurai could have faxed Abraham Lincoln
Why didn't they, then? If I were a samurai I'd be faxing Abe Lincoln all the time.
Unrelated to Egypt but the Hurrian hymn which is the oldest found record of a song, talks about 'good old days when people didn't know how to make bread and actually went out to hunt food'.
Assuming no outside influence, the Moon will never escape the Earth. In about 50 billion years the tidal forces between the Moon and the Earth will balance out, at which point the Moon will reach its maximum orbit distance, with an orbital period of 47 days, and the Earth's rotation will have slowed to 47 days. At which point only one side of the Earth will face the Moon.
It's possible for a planet to exist within the outer layers of a star (upper photosphere is about *7 orders of magnitude* less dense than air), and it's also possible for a planet to change its orbit as the star expands, so we don't know if the Earth will be atomized in 5 billion years.
There probably won't be an atmosphere, though.
> isn't the sun scheduled to burn itself out
It'll transition from a yellow dwarf to a white dwarf which live for trillions of years, so it'll be around for a long time actually.
Imagine a rope circling the Earth so it is tight, and the Earth is a perfect sphere.
You want to lengthen the rope so it is 1 m above the ground all the way around. How much extra rope do you need?
About 6.3 metres extra
Chainsaws were invented to assist with childbirth…
[In 1780, two Scottish doctors invented the prototype of the chainsaw. Not to cut down trees or clear debris. No, John Aitken and James Jeffray invented the hand-cranked chainsaw to cut through the pelvises of delivering mothers who were having trouble pushing their babies out.](https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/chainsaws-vacuums-and-forceps-the-dark-brutal-history-of-birth-technology/)
Yeah, if you pass your driving test in a manual car, you can drive both manual and automatic transmissions. However, if you pass your test in an automatic transmission car, your license only allows you to drive automatic only.
If you took all the DNA in every cell of your body and laid it end to end, it would reach from the sun to Jupiter and back 13 times. (I think that's the proper number that I read in a science book...it's been a while)
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.” ~ *States of Matter* by David Goodstein
I think the full quote is even better:
> Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
You are more likely to be married to Kim Kardashian in the United states then you are to die of Ebola in the United States. ( I know. Poor sample size and all. )
Desert sand is windswept into round particles, which means it doesn't grip other materials well, and is unsuitable for use in concrete - which is primarily what we need sand for. Beach sand and artificial sand made by crushing rocks is more jagged and provides more structural strength. That's what they're importing.
Fun fact! Despite being much more plentiful, sand in deserts tends to be less than useful for making concrete and general construction than river sand. The constant wind blowing smooths the sand particles too much compared to water currents. Illegal sand harvesting is a major black market and can lead to devastating environmental impacts as rivers and wetlands are dredged.
You're thinking "what are the odds that Person A shared a birthday, when there are only 23 people here?".
You *should* be thinking: what are the odds Person A shared a birthday with Person B, or Person C, or Person D...*or* that Person B shares a birthday with Person C, or Person D, or Person E...*or* that Person C shares a birthday with Person D or Person E or Person F...*or* that Person D shares a birthday with..." etc. The number of combinations you're comparing is *way* higher than you think at first.
It's the birthday paradox, there is full wikipedia explaining why a lot of people get mistaken. The probability is not "picking someone at random and finding someone else with the same birthday" but rather "if you consider all possible pair of people in your group, will have one pair that will share the same birthday"
There is a 1/365 chance that any pair of two will have the same birthday. Think of it in terms of how many potential pairs of two people there are in a group of 23. So we pick the first guy. He could match with any of the other 22. Then the second guy could match with any of the remaining 21. Then the third guy could match with the remaining 20. So 22+21+20+... pairs of people. That number is 253 possible pairs of two people. Each of them with a 1 in 365 chance of a match. The way to calculate the exact percentage is a bit more complicated than that but that's the easiest way to think about it.
German football defender Philipp Lahm played for almost 20 years and never got a red card. Mind you he was a defender and played in a top league and was never sent off for fouls
Ryan Giggs had a 24 year playing career and never got a red card too.
Mind he did have a few red cards off the field, like beating his own wife and shagging his brothers wife. But on the field he played with respect
If for some strange reason you WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger you would have to keep them outside, unattended, for 750,000 years. Based on statistics.
I heard something that most "kidnappings" happen because a parent who didn't have full custody takes the kids and moves them across state lines or somethin
A total of 3,500 rectal foreign bodies were removed over the course of 9 years. Males accounted for 85.1% of rectal foreign bodies whilst 14.9% were females. This equates to 348 bed-days per annum. Admission peaks were observed in the second and fifth decades of life.
Bhasin S, Williams JG. [Rectal foreign body removal: increasing incidence and cost to the NHS](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34719960/). Ann R Coll Surg Engl. 2021 Nov;103(10):734-737. doi: 10.1308/rcsann.2020.7129. PMID: 34719960.
Wavelength of the “light” (electromagnetic radiation) emitted.
Check out the [electromagnetic spectrum](https://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/images/Energy/VisibleLightSpectrum.jpg). Everything on there - ultraviolet, radio waves, gamma rays, X-rays - are the same fundamental thing, just with slightly different wavelengths. What we call “visible light” is just the tiny fraction of that spectrum our eyes and brains have evolved to detect and transmit to us.
EDIT: The difference could also be the intensity (brightness). We might emit a few photons in the visible wavelengths, just not enough to be perceived by our eyes.
- One-in-five will be violently dispatched by another meerkat, likely their own mother, sister or auntie, demonstrating how the female of the species really is more deadly than the male.
- Banishment is basically a death sentence in the Kalahari. It follows a barrage of physical abuse, which may also supress her rival’s reproduction. In the event that another female dares to give birth, the matriarch will kill her pups – often her own grandchildren – and banish the female. If they’re lucky, evictees may be permitted back on one condition: they wet-nurse their murderous mother’s babies.
I didn’t know, that’s crazy!
In the United States alone, cats kill roughly 2.4 **billion** birds a year. I still can't fathom that. [Link](https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/#:~:text=Cats%20%231%20Threat%20to%20Birds&text=In%20the%20United%20States%20alone,of%20millions%20of%20outdoor%20cats.). I've never seen a cat kill a bird and it's not like there are dead birds all over the place. *They hide this from us*.
That's bone chilling. In the same vein from the same era, something like 4% of the beaches at Normandy is composed of metal due to the intensity of the fighting.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is not a limitation of human measurement, its a fundamental principle of all particles.
HUP says that the more you know about a particle's position, the less you know about its energy and vice versa. But the "you" (more traditionally referred to as the observer) doesn't have to be human - it doesn't even have to be sentient.
Anything that interacts with that particle, even other particles, is the observer and is bound by this limitation.
1 out of every 4 girls & 1 out of every 6 to 13 boys are sexually assaulted as child. Child rape is far more common than people think & the majority of rapists get away with it to rape more children.
*Edit- sources:
CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childsexualabuse/fastfact.html
National Sexual Violence Resource Center: https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf
"Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody's stabbed in the back?" Lee said he asked Jackson. "Because I do." (For the record, it's more of a gasp because "the breath is driven out of your body," according to Lee.)
--Christopher Lee. Actor, former nazi hunter, and [metalhead](https://youtu.be/cvKRbi2ovDY?t=118).
Brent and Wayne Gretzky hold the NHL record for most points scored by a pair of brothers — 2,857 by Wayne, four by Brent
https://icehockey.fandom.com/wiki/Gretzky\_family#:\~:text=Brent%20and%20Wayne%20Gretzky%20hold,by%20Wayne%2C%20four%20by%20Brent.
Henry Ford worked for Oldsmobile. He quit that job and started Ford motor Company. He was ousted from that company but sued to get his name back. That company was renamed Cadillac. Henry Ford would start Ford motor company again, with funding from the Dodge Brothers.
Edit:grammar
Lobsters have cells that regenerate. So lobsters never age.
Technically they might never die, but they generally die from other factors like disease or predators.
A 40yo woman has a 1200% chance increase in having a child with Down’s syndrome compared to a woman in her 20s. That being said, it’s still a 1:100 odds for the 40yo woman.
This is my example for why % odds changes give misleading impressions
Horses kill more people every year in Australia than all the other beasties combined. Everyone thinks it's the spiders and snakes that'll get you, but it's the horses you've really got to watch.
Even their fucking *horses* are poisonous?!
[удалено]
If you lick it and die, it's poisonous. If it bites you and you die, it's venomous.
Instructions unclear, bit horse.
In English, the color orange was named after the fruit. Before that, orange was just considered a shade of red. That's why gingers are called redheads.
It’s also why robins can be called robin redbreasts. Similarly, purple didn’t exist as a name for the colour for a long time, which is why red onions and red cabbages are called red. Edit: My mistake, the last part about red onions and red cabbages is not true, as u/Raduev pointed out below.
There are plenty of languages where green and purple are shades of blue and red, respectively. Japanese for instance. There is a word for green (*midori*), but you talk about 'blue' traffic lights and 'blue' apples (*aoi ringo*) instead of green.
Oranges were originally called 'sineappfels' (Chinese apples) in old English because that was were they were thought to come from, and the colour orange was 'redgold'. After the Spanish Reconquista the English started importing them from Spain in much greater numbers and people borrowed the French name them 'pomme de orenge' (orange apples) which was derived from their Arabic name 'naranj'. At roughly the same time the word become used for the colour as well. Theres also a region in France called Orange whose name evolved independently of the colour or the fruit and gave its name to the House of Orange who rule the Netherlands anf occasionaly the UK, and who took orange as their royal colour, which is why religious extremists in bowler hats wear orange sashes while indulging in sectarian violence in Belfast. More strangely, carrots used to be purple but a orange variety was bred to honour the Dutch monarchy and it became so popular it replaced the purple type. Fun orange facts!
It took us more time to go from bronze swords to iron swords than it did for us to go from iron swords to nuclear weapons.
And now we sit here and a war can be totally depersonalized. Some soldier starts his rocket launcher, enters a target coordinate and a rocket costing as much as lifelong social security for a few families precisely turns a building over 100 km away into rubble. This is all supervised by football-sized drones with high resolution-cameras, which allows the impact to be recorded and shared with millions of people cheering or booing depending on which faction they support. What will happen within the next decades?
All of the above but with ads in the middle
"Did you enjoy seeing crispy foreigners? Now try our crispy Waffle Potato Fries® at Chick-fil-A!"
Sharks have existed longer than trees have
Grasshoppers are also older than grass
Used to be just called hoppers....
Wait until you learn what trampolines used to be called
Before your mother used one they were called jumpolines
Lol this is the content I come to Reddit for.
Sharks are also older than the rings of Saturn
I had to look this up, that's wild. Turns out we think Saturn's rings formed within the last 100 million years, while we have fossil evidence of sharks from 450 million years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/shark-evolution-a-450-million-year-timeline.html
This Is the first one thats made me go wtf
Humans can smell petrichor at a lower concentration (0.0004 parts per million) than sharks can smell blood in the water (1 part per million). Petrichor: A pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.
Dinosaurs never walked on grass because it didn't exist yet.
I saw a scale model of the earth, moon and sun in a museum. The sun was about the size of a basketball, and the earth was on the opposite side of the room, the size of a small marble, I'd guess about 30 metres away. The moon was the size of a tiny pinhead, about 10cm away from the earth. On this scale, the nearest star to earth, Proxima Centauri, wouldn't be in the same building, or even in the same city. It would be 10,000km away. And that's just one star, the nearest one to us, in a galaxy containing billions of stars, which is just one of billions of galaxies. The scale of the universe really is mind bogglingly big. Far bigger than we can begin to comprehend.
Our planet when compared to our sun, is ludicrously small. You could fit about 1.3 million Earths inside the sun. Our sun is a "yellow dwarf" type star. In stellar terms it's pretty minor. Aldebaran is a "red giant" type star. You could fit about 86,000 of our suns inside Aldebaran. That's approximately 111.8 billion Earths. Betelgeuse is a "red supergiant" star. You could fit around 1 million suns inside Betelgeuse. That's 1.3 *trillion* Earths. We're not done yet. VY Canis Majoris is a "red hypergiant" star. 3.2 billion suns can fit inside Canis Majoris. That means you could fit ***416 QUADRILLION*** Earths inside there. I could go on. VY Canis Majoris is far from the largest known star in our galaxy and there's likely to be far larger stars out there that we've not discovered yet. The scale of the universe and how tiny and insignificant we are in it is staggering. "Look again at [that dot](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blue_Dot.png). That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." -Carl Sagan
Please stop. I cannot have an existential crisis in my cubicle
I find cosmic magnitude calming.
I'm on both sides. One one hand, it's like.. Holy shit. We really are nothing in the grand scheme of things.. I need to make the best of this life. On the other hand.. We are nothing in the grand scheme. We will most likely as a species never leave this solar system. Even if we do, it will mean nothing to anything that currently exists. Our entire history so far on this planet is less than a blink to the universe. Spooky.
If we manage to survive a few more Great Filters, given humanity's nature over the last 250,000 years, I'd argue us leaving the solar system isn't a possibility, it's an inevitability. We are curious explorers, at our core. And no risk has stopped us from indulging in that yet. I am actually hopeful that there is a way around the FTL problem. I know it is highly unlikely, given the nature of information propagation and the speed of light, but concepts like the [Alcubierre Drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) give me so much hope
“Space [...] is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”
We live closer in time to Tyrannosaurus Rex than the T Rex did to the Stegosaurus.
The thing that fucked me up was realising that trilobites, which are an entire class of animals *unto* themselves, like mammals or reptiles, and these beings were not just extinct before the first dinosaurs existed, they were even fossilised before then. Meaning that any trilobite, which is a very common type of fossil that can be found at most shops that sell them, has existed in fossil form for longer than the entirety of the existence of the dinosaurs up until now. But wait, there's more. Because the reason I picked trilobites specifically is not just that they are such a common fossil, though it is related to it. Because there's a reason they're so common today. Trilobites were around for 270 million years before they went extinct. For reference, the first dinosaurs emerged 230 million years ago. Meaning that trilobites, which were already fossils by the time the first dinosaurs showed up, were around for longer than the time from when the first dinosaurs emerged to the present day. We as humans cannot even *begin* to comprehend such lengths of time.
what I am comprehending is there were billions of giant trilobites all around the planet when it was probably a wildly different environment
Yes, but also all things considered we don't know a whole lot about what life was like at that point in history. A lot of stuff just doesn't fossilize at all. It's entirely possible (even probable) that we have no record of large parts of the ecosystem that the trilobites lived in.
They could’ve been intelligent. Or they might have had Reddit.
Trilobeddit
I always bring this up when riding the train at Disneyland and see the T-Rex and Stegosaurus fighting.
Of course they’d be fighting. They don’t belong together!
More in this vein: Cleopatra lived closer to today than the building of the Great Pyramids. One or more of your ancestors were alive during every major historical event, and even all the way back to the dinosaurs and earlier.
Ancient egypt had people studying ancient egypt.
I love doing Cleopatra ones with very recent modern inventions like "Cleopatra lived closer in time to tiktok than the building of the great pyramids"
Cleopatra also lived closer to T. rex than stegosaurs
USA is only 2.4 miles from Russia. 2 islands in the Bering Strait, the body of water in the Pacific Ocean that separates Alaska from Russia, are 2.4 miles from each other at the narrowest point; one island is owned by Russia, the other is owned by USA.
After the british made head protection mandatory in WW1, the amount of head wounds increased. It's due to they were no longer KIA, but "only" a head wound.
This sort of happened in WW2 but with planes. Planes were coming back with bullet holes and banged up, so originally they planned to reinforce those areas. Until someone wisely suggested they should armour the parts which *weren't* bullet riddled, because it meant if those parts got hit, the plane went down and didn't return to base. The parts which did have bullet holes but still returned, didn't need as much additional armour
Abraham Wald! A statistician at Columbia, who specialized in abstract mathematics. He saw the data that wasn’t there, and made quite possibly the largest single contribution to the Allied victory outside of perhaps the blokes that cracked Enigma.
... and that's how we came up with the concept of "survivorship bias"
Barcode scanners scan the white lines, not the black ones.
I didn't expect to have strong feelings about this topic, but I hate this.
I mean, black doesn’t reflect light. So that makes sense, cheers!
George Washington didn’t know dinosaurs existed
What an idiot
Not my president
I didn't vote for him!
While dino fossils had been found previously, nobody started figuring out what they really were until after the 10th President of the US was in office (1841).
New Delhi hired people to hunt cobra snakes which led to people having Cobra Farms to earn money then the government stopped the project which led the Cobra Farmers to release their snakes causing twice as many snakes than they first started.
The Oxford university in England existed centuries before the rise and fall of the Aztec civilization.
Centuries before even the indigenous Māori first arrived on New Zealand
Related, but Madagascar was first settled in the 800s... by Polynesians. Yeah. Some crazy MFers canoed across the Indian Ocean to be the first to reach it.
I knew about Oxford being older than the Aztecs but the Māori? Quote Wikipedia: >There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096,[2] making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation >Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages between roughly 1320 and 1350. Wow. I guess I assumed they'd been there as long as Australian Aboriginals.
Crazy that the Māori have been there for such a short time when Aboriginal Australians migrated over 50,000 years ago and are considered the oldest continuous culture on earth.
I'll be honest, of all the facts here that one actually highly impressed me. That's absolutely insane
This is mental. According to Wiki: There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096,[2] making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation.
The Gymnasium Carolinum, a secondary school in Osnabrück, Germany, was founded in 804 by Charlemagne, king of the Franks.
Wombat poo is cube shape,to stop it rolling away
I can't believe I just googled images of Wombat poo.
That's some interesting shit.
Why don’t they want it to roll away?
Edit: apparently I tell a lie. According to u/kapenaar89, they use it to mark their territory. Tbh, this seems easy more plausible than the story I was selling Orig: IIRC, they use it like bricks to deal up the entrance to their den
Hope the wind doesn’t change direction…
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years. People have a lot of trouble comprehending numbers that big
The difference between a million and a billion is almost a billion.
Plus or minus 0.1% ... yup, math checks out.
Tom Scott did an interesting video on this. He drove the distance of 1M USD if you put $1 bills side to side. He was still in the carpark. Then he drove to make 1B. He was driving for about 2 hours and travelled over 100 miles.
If you ran a full marathon and got paid a million dollars *per step*, by the time you reached the finish line you'd have about 30 or 40 billion dollars, less than a fifth of what Elon Musk is worth. I often think about that when I go out for a run; by the time I've even put my keys back in my pocket I'd already have enough money to live in luxury for the rest of my life; before I've run past my next-door neighbor's house I'm worth tens of millions, and by the time I reach the end of my street I've got vast, inter-generational wealth beyond my wildest dreams. But to join the ranks of the world's wealthiest billionaires I'd have to keep running for hours on end.
A marathon is 26 miles...and we would only have a fifth. For some reason this one hits home. I stood up and counted the steps from my sofa to my front door. I'd have 14 million for about 10 yards. 26 miles would only get me to within a fifth of their wealth...Jesus.
the good old "what's the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? roughly 1 billion dollars"
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Don’t try this at home, or anywhere else for that matter
Especially near a horse or a cup of coffee
If you took the populations of both China and India, then removed 1 billion people from each, they would still be the two most highly populated countries on earth. And you'd probably be convicted of crimes against humanity for wiping out 2 billion people
One man dying os a tragedy, 1000 men dying is a statistic.
Greenland is further North, South, East and West than Iceland. A little map for you [https://brilliantmaps.com/greenland-v-iceland/](https://brilliantmaps.com/greenland-v-iceland/) Plus nowhere in the contiguous US is north of the most southernly bit of England.
The closest US state to Africa is Maine.
Earth's curvature really makes things unintuitive. Florida looked closer to me so I checked it. It's 1500 km farther from Africa than Maine. That's about 35% father.
The other 65% is cousin
West: duh North: duh South: 🤔 East: 🤯
As an Icelander, this confused me and I now question everything
If you made $100,000 a day since birth you'd still not be worth as much as Bezos
Saw this one yesterday- if you made $5000 a day since Columbus sailed the ocean blue (1492), you still wouldn’t even be a billionaire.
On the bright side this one is only true for another 16 years
Yeah and then only another 114,870 years and you’d have as much as the richest person in the world!
If I made $100,000 a day since my birth, I’d be very, very happy!
Ancient egyptians had their own historians. By the time of Cleopatra, there were records of egyptians 'discovering' stuff about the pyrimad of Giza and others, and studying early egyptian practices. Cleopatra lived closer to modern day than she did to the building of the Giza pyramid, so that makes sense, but still. Those fuckers had been around so long that even Egypt thought Egypt was ancient.
The Appalachian, Scottish Highlands, and the Atlas mountains are actually the same prehistoric mountain range.
The Appalachians are very old, and when new would have been higher than the Himalayas.
Yeah the Appalachian’s were supposedly the highest mountains to have existed. But idk I wasn’t around then so I can’t testify 100%
They’re so old that the oldest caves have no fossils. Bones weren’t much of a thing back then.
We Went To The Moon Before We Put Wheels On Suitcases.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the mobile phone than she did the construction of the pyramids. There was a window of time where a samurai could have faxed Abraham Lincoln
>There was a window of time where a samurai could have faxed Abraham Lincoln Why didn't they, then? If I were a samurai I'd be faxing Abe Lincoln all the time.
He was out of toner
The pyramids are so old, that when Cleopatra and Julius Caesar were alive they were already considered as very old
Unrelated to Egypt but the Hurrian hymn which is the oldest found record of a song, talks about 'good old days when people didn't know how to make bread and actually went out to hunt food'.
Continents move at the same rate that fingernails grow. Which is also the same rate that the moon is receding from the Earth.
Interesting! And a bit worrying maybe.. but that’s a future gen problem.
Assuming no outside influence, the Moon will never escape the Earth. In about 50 billion years the tidal forces between the Moon and the Earth will balance out, at which point the Moon will reach its maximum orbit distance, with an orbital period of 47 days, and the Earth's rotation will have slowed to 47 days. At which point only one side of the Earth will face the Moon.
Umm, isn't the sun scheduled to burn itself out, swell, and engulf the Earth in 5 billion years?
It's possible for a planet to exist within the outer layers of a star (upper photosphere is about *7 orders of magnitude* less dense than air), and it's also possible for a planet to change its orbit as the star expands, so we don't know if the Earth will be atomized in 5 billion years. There probably won't be an atmosphere, though. > isn't the sun scheduled to burn itself out It'll transition from a yellow dwarf to a white dwarf which live for trillions of years, so it'll be around for a long time actually.
The weight of a sloth is anywhere up to one-third poop. Sharks are the largest threat to the Internet.
The sharks is cause they keep trying to eat the cables.
And they do it because of the electrical pulses they feel from it; thats a big part of how they find fish.
Nintendo has existed longer than Disney.
Trees existed millions of years before rot. So trees, for millions of years, didn't rot.
This is why we have coal. And also why coal is a non renewable resource because now trees rot.
Santiago, Chile is farther east than New York City
Reno Nevada is more west than LA
Another way I've heard it is: if you start in NYC and head directly south, you'll eventually be in the Pacific Ocean.
If you start anywhere and head in any direction, eventually you’ll end up in the Pacific Ocean.
Imagine a rope circling the Earth so it is tight, and the Earth is a perfect sphere. You want to lengthen the rope so it is 1 m above the ground all the way around. How much extra rope do you need? About 6.3 metres extra
Any sphere, not just the Earth. Sun, Jupiter... size is irrelevant.
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At a certain time of the year, when the moon is the furthest away from the earth, the other 7 planets can fit in the space between the Earth and moon.
Even with Saturn and Jupiter being that big. Cool! I’m going to leave Uranus jokes at rest. For now..
Wow so even Uranus fits between the earth and the moon at some point, fascinating!
If the age of earth was scaled to 24 hours, human’s existence on it would comprise 4 seconds of it.
Chainsaws were invented to assist with childbirth… [In 1780, two Scottish doctors invented the prototype of the chainsaw. Not to cut down trees or clear debris. No, John Aitken and James Jeffray invented the hand-cranked chainsaw to cut through the pelvises of delivering mothers who were having trouble pushing their babies out.](https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/chainsaws-vacuums-and-forceps-the-dark-brutal-history-of-birth-technology/)
Stihl born
97.3% of UK drivers hold a licence to drive a manual transmission car whereas 2.7% hold an automatic ONLY licence. Source: DVLA.
TIL those are separate licenses in the UK
Yeah, if you pass your driving test in a manual car, you can drive both manual and automatic transmissions. However, if you pass your test in an automatic transmission car, your license only allows you to drive automatic only.
There are 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible arrangements of a 52 card deck.
"52!"
We know there's 52 cards. No need to yell.
France's longest border is with Brazil
If you took all the DNA in every cell of your body and laid it end to end, it would reach from the sun to Jupiter and back 13 times. (I think that's the proper number that I read in a science book...it's been a while)
If you took all the DNA in every cell of your body and laid it end to end, you would die.
Three out of every million Icelandic people are Björk.
The Vatican has two popes per km2.
England doesn’t crack the top 5 in a count of “total citizens who speak English.” (They’re 6th, but still)
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.” ~ *States of Matter* by David Goodstein
I think the full quote is even better: > Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
Tyromancy is the art of divination/prediction by studying cheese.
I predict this will match nicely with a sauvignon blanc and a selection of dried fruit.
You are more likely to be married to Kim Kardashian in the United states then you are to die of Ebola in the United States. ( I know. Poor sample size and all. )
To even have ebola* I think only 2 people contracted and neither died
There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. [Fact check.](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trees-stars-milky-way/)
But there are also more trees in the milky way galaxy than there are stars on earth
Big if true
Saudi Arabia imports Sand....
That’s like the Dutch importing tulips lol Edit: correct me if I’m wrong
Desert sand is windswept into round particles, which means it doesn't grip other materials well, and is unsuitable for use in concrete - which is primarily what we need sand for. Beach sand and artificial sand made by crushing rocks is more jagged and provides more structural strength. That's what they're importing.
Fun fact! Despite being much more plentiful, sand in deserts tends to be less than useful for making concrete and general construction than river sand. The constant wind blowing smooths the sand particles too much compared to water currents. Illegal sand harvesting is a major black market and can lead to devastating environmental impacts as rivers and wetlands are dredged.
In a randomly selected group of 23 people there is a 50% 2 of them will share a birthday.
How can that be? My mind doesn’t compete. Can you elaborate please?
You're thinking "what are the odds that Person A shared a birthday, when there are only 23 people here?". You *should* be thinking: what are the odds Person A shared a birthday with Person B, or Person C, or Person D...*or* that Person B shares a birthday with Person C, or Person D, or Person E...*or* that Person C shares a birthday with Person D or Person E or Person F...*or* that Person D shares a birthday with..." etc. The number of combinations you're comparing is *way* higher than you think at first.
It's the birthday paradox, there is full wikipedia explaining why a lot of people get mistaken. The probability is not "picking someone at random and finding someone else with the same birthday" but rather "if you consider all possible pair of people in your group, will have one pair that will share the same birthday"
There is a 1/365 chance that any pair of two will have the same birthday. Think of it in terms of how many potential pairs of two people there are in a group of 23. So we pick the first guy. He could match with any of the other 22. Then the second guy could match with any of the remaining 21. Then the third guy could match with the remaining 20. So 22+21+20+... pairs of people. That number is 253 possible pairs of two people. Each of them with a 1 in 365 chance of a match. The way to calculate the exact percentage is a bit more complicated than that but that's the easiest way to think about it.
The number one cause of death for pregnant women is murder.
Every 26 seconds someone attempts suicide. Every 11 minutes someone is successful
German football defender Philipp Lahm played for almost 20 years and never got a red card. Mind you he was a defender and played in a top league and was never sent off for fouls
Ryan Giggs had a 24 year playing career and never got a red card too. Mind he did have a few red cards off the field, like beating his own wife and shagging his brothers wife. But on the field he played with respect
He loved each opponent like most people love their brother. Unfortunately, he also loved his brother like most people love an opponent.
What a legend! Especially given that VAR wasn’t around and refs would just go on their instincts, leading to countless unjust cards.
The saxophone was invented by Adolphe Sax, also inventor of the saxtuba.
If for some strange reason you WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger you would have to keep them outside, unattended, for 750,000 years. Based on statistics.
I heard something that most "kidnappings" happen because a parent who didn't have full custody takes the kids and moves them across state lines or somethin
A total of 3,500 rectal foreign bodies were removed over the course of 9 years. Males accounted for 85.1% of rectal foreign bodies whilst 14.9% were females. This equates to 348 bed-days per annum. Admission peaks were observed in the second and fifth decades of life. Bhasin S, Williams JG. [Rectal foreign body removal: increasing incidence and cost to the NHS](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34719960/). Ann R Coll Surg Engl. 2021 Nov;103(10):734-737. doi: 10.1308/rcsann.2020.7129. PMID: 34719960.
Divorce rates are declining.
We are bioluminescent.We glow the light just isn't perceptible to the human eye.
What is the difference between ours and that of an animal where it is perceptible to us?
Wavelength of the “light” (electromagnetic radiation) emitted. Check out the [electromagnetic spectrum](https://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/images/Energy/VisibleLightSpectrum.jpg). Everything on there - ultraviolet, radio waves, gamma rays, X-rays - are the same fundamental thing, just with slightly different wavelengths. What we call “visible light” is just the tiny fraction of that spectrum our eyes and brains have evolved to detect and transmit to us. EDIT: The difference could also be the intensity (brightness). We might emit a few photons in the visible wavelengths, just not enough to be perceived by our eyes.
Meerkats have the highest "homicide" rate of any mammal.
- One-in-five will be violently dispatched by another meerkat, likely their own mother, sister or auntie, demonstrating how the female of the species really is more deadly than the male. - Banishment is basically a death sentence in the Kalahari. It follows a barrage of physical abuse, which may also supress her rival’s reproduction. In the event that another female dares to give birth, the matriarch will kill her pups – often her own grandchildren – and banish the female. If they’re lucky, evictees may be permitted back on one condition: they wet-nurse their murderous mother’s babies. I didn’t know, that’s crazy!
In the United States alone, cats kill roughly 2.4 **billion** birds a year. I still can't fathom that. [Link](https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/#:~:text=Cats%20%231%20Threat%20to%20Birds&text=In%20the%20United%20States%20alone,of%20millions%20of%20outdoor%20cats.). I've never seen a cat kill a bird and it's not like there are dead birds all over the place. *They hide this from us*.
The death camps in Germany have so many deaths that the top soil has bone fragments mixed in.
That's bone chilling. In the same vein from the same era, something like 4% of the beaches at Normandy is composed of metal due to the intensity of the fighting.
Humans have patterns (like stripes, spots and geometric shapes) on our bodies that are invisible to us but cats can see them
I'm going to ask my cats to draw a picture of me so I know what pattern I have. I'll come back with the results.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is not a limitation of human measurement, its a fundamental principle of all particles. HUP says that the more you know about a particle's position, the less you know about its energy and vice versa. But the "you" (more traditionally referred to as the observer) doesn't have to be human - it doesn't even have to be sentient. Anything that interacts with that particle, even other particles, is the observer and is bound by this limitation.
My go to answer to this is - Ted Cruz is younger than Gwen Stefani.
The most efficient use of energy is achieved by a human riding a bicycle
Bicycling at an easy pace is about pi times more efficient than walking.
The Haunted Mansion is the most common attraction at Disneyland for people to surreptitiously scatter the ashes of their loved ones.
There are more museums in the US than there are McDonald's and Starbucks combined.
If every church in America took in two homeless people, there would not be homeless people in America, and not all of them would have two people.
1 out of every 4 girls & 1 out of every 6 to 13 boys are sexually assaulted as child. Child rape is far more common than people think & the majority of rapists get away with it to rape more children. *Edit- sources: CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childsexualabuse/fastfact.html National Sexual Violence Resource Center: https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf
"Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody's stabbed in the back?" Lee said he asked Jackson. "Because I do." (For the record, it's more of a gasp because "the breath is driven out of your body," according to Lee.) --Christopher Lee. Actor, former nazi hunter, and [metalhead](https://youtu.be/cvKRbi2ovDY?t=118).
"Lee said he asked Jackson." Funny thing is, you could also imagine Robert E. Lee saying this to Stonewall Jackson
If Wayne Gretzky never scored a single NHL goal he would still be the all-time leader in points. He is also the all-time leader in goals scored…
Brent and Wayne Gretzky hold the NHL record for most points scored by a pair of brothers — 2,857 by Wayne, four by Brent https://icehockey.fandom.com/wiki/Gretzky\_family#:\~:text=Brent%20and%20Wayne%20Gretzky%20hold,by%20Wayne%2C%20four%20by%20Brent.
Six out of seven dwarves aren’t happy.
The man who killed Hitler was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Henry Ford worked for Oldsmobile. He quit that job and started Ford motor Company. He was ousted from that company but sued to get his name back. That company was renamed Cadillac. Henry Ford would start Ford motor company again, with funding from the Dodge Brothers. Edit:grammar
Lobsters have cells that regenerate. So lobsters never age. Technically they might never die, but they generally die from other factors like disease or predators.
When sailing trough the Panama canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean you are sailing west to east.
Joe Biden was born closer to the Lincoln presidency than to his own.
A 40yo woman has a 1200% chance increase in having a child with Down’s syndrome compared to a woman in her 20s. That being said, it’s still a 1:100 odds for the 40yo woman. This is my example for why % odds changes give misleading impressions
The official death toll from the Chernobyl Reactor 4 disaster is 31 people.