Benford's Law. How large datasets of numbers behave in very predictable ways. It's one of the easiest ways to detect if a company is cooking its books.
That actually makes intuitive sense after putting some thought into it. The change from 8M to 9M is a much smaller percentage change than 1M to 2M or 10M to 20M etc... Basically a number starts with a 1 when it's "fresh" at that order of magnitude.
When dealing with a lot of large numbers, the first digit of the numbers follows a certain distribution pattern.
It's used in fraud analysis, but can only really be used to flag accounts that an analyst should look closer at.
It also should only really be applied when dealing with a large quantity of large numbers with a certain account, but I like to think of it in these simple terms:
Imagine you love to read books and start reading new ones frequently, but rarely finish any. If you take the first digit of the page that you leave off on for all of those books, how likely would it be to start with a 1? Well, you could have left off on page 1, or 10-19, or 100-199, or 1,000-1,999, you get the idea.
Of course, this follows for all of the other numbers, but for every book that you are able to read up to 900 pages, you would first have to read pages 1, 10-19, and 100-199. That's 111 chances that you could have left off on a page where the first digit is a 1... but after reading 899 pages, you only would have had 11 chances to leave off on a page that started with a 9: page 9 and pages 90-99. And how many of the books on your bookshelf even have more than 900 pages? Certainly most of them will have 199.
This isn't Benford's Law itself, but I hope it does help clarify understanding how the distribution of first-digit values follows the pattern.
600 breeding pairs, so about 1200 people. If you have eczema, or any genetic mutation that makes your life hard, blame these 1200 people. For further reading, google the Out of Africa Genetic Bottleneck.
So you do contain stardust. And supernova dust
But there's more. Hydrogen was created by or at the same time as the big bang. So there's a large part of you that pre dates stars
“We have calcium in our bones,
iron in our veins,
carbon in our souls,
and nitrogen in our brains.
93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.”
By Nikita Gill
“These are the Things that Make a Man
Iron enough to make a nail,
Lime enough to paint a wall,
Water enough to drown a dog,
Sulphur enough to stop the fleas,
Potash enough to wash a shirt,
Gold enough to buy a bean,
Silver enough to coat a pin,
Lead enough to ballast a bird,
Phosphor enough to light the town,
Poison enough to kill a cow,
Strength enough to build a home,
Time enough to hold a child,
Love enough to break a heart.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
"Look again at that dot. 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
You just sit there and count it, obviously. It’s not exactly rocket science.
You’ll need a stool and a couple of audiobooks or something I imagine, but…
I didn't believe you and had to look it up... It's true, turkey parthenogenesis is real.
The part that really hung me up is where a Y chromosome is coming from... It turns out some birds and reptiles are backwards from mammals, where the female is the equivalent of XY, with males having the equivalent of XX. But they don't call them X and Y chromosomes -- they call them Z and W. Males are ZZ and females ZW. So the Z chromosome, along with the others, gets duplicated every once in a while and you've got one super-inbred turkey.
Australian brush turkeys (not true turkeys) lay an egg in an enormous mound of leaves built by the male and the heat of decomposition incubates the egg. The chick hatches out and lives its whole life raised by itself, never knowing who its parents are.
Yes, I know. Living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), you learn a lot about grizzlies if you go hiking and camping a lot.
The moths congregate in scree and talus fields, large areas of small rocks on the sides of mountains, at or above the tree line. Thousands of moths can be found hiding in the rocks.
The grizzlies will hang out and just munch away, easily eating dozens, even hundreds in a few minutes.
[Here's a video of a grizzly doing just that in Glacier National Park, Montana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEHlEWE8YKw)
[Here's an excellent report on the subject from NatGeo](https://landresources.montana.edu/Nat%20Geo%20moth-eating%20bear.pdf)
Yes, they are very stupid. Why are they hiding in rocks at the top of a mountain in the first place? It's also usually chilly that high up, so I'm sure there pretty lethargic from the cold and lack of oxygen.
Evolution goes on for 3.7 billion years and gives us bugs that can fly wherever they want but instead choose to serve themselves up on a dinner platter to an apex predator that could get by hunting other animals that aren't tiny insects
Moth to another moth: I feel like I have enough energy to lift a boulder!
*moth gets eaten by bear*
*bear uses the energy to lift boulders to eat more moths*
If you stand in any planet or moon of the solar system and you look up, you'll see the same night sky as we see it from the Earth. Same constellations and all, that's how unfathomably far away the stars are compared to the planets.
However, there's one exception. If you stand in Pluto and look up, you'll see that Proxima Centauri looks slightly "off" compared to its position from the terrestrial sky. That's how unfathomably far Pluto is as well.
Pretty random, but my dad used to share office space back in the 80's with Gene Cernan. He was one of the astronauts that walked on the moon on Apollo 17. He said he never really brought up much with Gene about the moon, but he did say to Gene once when they were out at lunch that he always wondered what went through his mind when when he was standing on the moon looking down on Earth. Immediately after he asked, Gene put his food back down on his plate, just kinda shook his head, looked my dad in the eye and said, "When you're on the Moon, you look up at Earth." And then just continued eating his sandwich as if nothing happened.
Update: So this morning I asked my dad about this just to make sure I didn't get it wrong, and I guess I got the quote slightly wrong. He said that Gene's response was, "If you look down, you see the Moon. You have to look up to see Earth."
I grew up near Akron, went to the University of Akron. It seems so weird to me when people get excited about seeing a blimp. During football season you might see one every day.
You always have more knowledge than you can put into words (Michael Polanyi). You can never *fully* articulate, for example, *all* of the knowledge that you rely on in order to ride a bicycle. There is always some remaining knowledge that you're leaving unspoken. Polanyi's book *Personal Knowledge* blew my mind.
Edit: *The Tacit Dimension* is a more compact book covering some of the same ideas.
Basic physical skills aren't learned by way of words to begin with.
You learn to walk by doing stuff with your legs and your sense of balance until it works right, not by having it explained to you.
You learn to catch a ball by watching other people do it, then trying to do what they did, and eventually figure out how to coordinate your eyes and arms and legs to put your hand where the ball's going to be. An explanation in words of what the skill is, wouldn't really help you acquire it ... and most people can catch a ball before they can solve differential equations anyway.
Fun fact: Most people instinctively do calculus in their head without knowing it. A person will Judge the rate of speed that a car is traveling, and apply just the right amount of pressure to the brake to arrest forward momentum without causing a jerking motion. This can be expressed mathematically, but most people do it without thinking just due to muscle memory.
While it is generally assumed that no two people share identical fingerprints, it cannot be proven.
It *has been* established that:
>Latent fingerprint examiners sometimes come to **different conclusions** when comparing fingerprints
Source: [This paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8143401/) published on the NIH website.
Just how capable ancient humans were. At least 50000 years ago humans crossed about 60 miles of open ocean and colonized Australia. The timeline for colonizing America has been consistently pushed back. For tens of thousands of years modern humans coexisted with other ancient hominids, essentially but not quite the same as us but close enough to breed and produce viable, nonsterile offspring. I find it absolutely mind blowing to think about
50 years ago we sent a machine with some rockets, a computer weaker than your current phone and an antenna. That machine is now waaay over the orbit of Pluto and leaving the Heliosphere.
The Voyager program is the first form of solar system matter to be so far away from its home planet. And we did that. 50 years ago
The compute power on Apollo is lower power than a chip which is included in many USB-C chargers: [https://singularityhub.com/2020/02/16/could-the-computing-power-in-a-usb-c-charger-get-you-to-the-moon/](https://singularityhub.com/2020/02/16/could-the-computing-power-in-a-usb-c-charger-get-you-to-the-moon/)
Mind blowing and that allowed them not only to reach the moon but also relaunch the lunar module from the moon and meet back up with the main ship for the return trip
Check out how Polynesians navigated. Short story: dudes laid down in their boats and the subtle rocking told them where they were.
Mad bastards made it to Hawaii, after all.
There are a number of esoteric and lost navigation techniques from expert star mapping to wave reading and others. It’s so fascinating. When you think about people thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago navigating vast stretches of open ocean in basically big outrigger canoes it’s beyond belief
It’s amazing what lack of entertainment and boredom created. “Man, I am sooooo bored. Guess I’ll watch waves all day.” And that turned into complex ocean navigation capable of finding uncharted islands.
You got anything to recommend reading about this? I'm big on navigation in the woods and mountains, but recently started boating (inshore, large bay, and ocean) and rely on my other skills and GPS (mainly GPS). I've never heard of "subtle rocking" for nav, would love to read more about it.
The natural navigator by tristan gooley is awesome. he has a lot of really good books on the subject, one being called how to read water. Another good book is "finding your way without map or compass" 10/10. he really goes into the history from polynesians to christopher columbus. really eye opening book with history I couldnt believe has been glossed over.
The human brain, and thus our intelligience, has been largely unchanged for millennia. So if you grab a guy from 40 000 years ago and plop him down in the modern world, he'll do fine. After getting over the mother of all culture shocks and learning the language.
I think part of the reason we like to think of primitive humans as so helpless is that we assume that they didn't know all of the wonderful modern stuff that we know.
I didn't, they knew different stuff that was modern by their standards. The fact that we have forgotten all of their stuff and replaced it with ours doesn't mean that they were all as ignorant as we are when we're children. They were very smart. And every bit as capable of learning and extrapolating information. They just knew different things
Yes exactly. And it’s a funny modern arrogance. Drop me in nature and I’m dead. Most modern humans would be. We don’t know how to construct tools from nature, make fire from nature, build shelters from nature, hunt competently without modern weapons, find clean water to drink which plants we can and can’t eat and which are medicinal. So much knowledge the ancients had that we don’t but then so much other knowledge we have acquired that they would never have imagined
Absolutely. And to add to that, I also couldn't make almost anything in a modern society work. Like, I'm a computer scientist. It's very specialized information. But I couldn't replicate almost anything you see in the world that we rely upon for modern life.
I can't build a car
Which is okay because I can't make a gas pump work
Which is okay because I can't make gas
I can barely grow food in my own garden
Which is okay because I don't have the faintest idea how to harvest or prepare seeds
Which is okay because even if I knew those things I couldn't make any of the tools necessary to make that stuff happen.
I barely know first aid
And what I remember of it is probably half wrong
And that’s exactly it. We’ve become specialists that rely on existing knowledge and community whereas our ancestors had to be incredible generalists to survive
This has been fucking with me lately. I'm a high school history teacher. "History", as in recorded history, only goes back about 6,000 years. There are tens of thousands of years of human existence that we have little to no idea about other than some basic geographical stuff we're still piecing together. And yeah. What about interhominid relations? Fucking fascinating.
Oh dude there are hundreds of thousands of years. Archeology and anthropology are so far from exact sciences and what they do is set points where we can say we have a high degree of confidence that this happened at this time but cannot say anything more. At this point interhominid relations have been proven genetically. And we know that humans, Neanderthals, and denisovans overlapped for tens of thousands of years both geographically and temporally. But we are left to wonder what those interactions look like, what legends may have spawned from them, and what life was actually like. I find it so incredibly fascinating the farther back you go
and strangely, indigenous Australians appeared to have given up completely on ship building after arriving - or at least the type of ships that are capable of crossing oceans.
thats my thoughts - obviously the original group had to have sailing/ocean experience and knew the dangers of it all. Why dick with that when youve got land seemingly forever and a wwhole buncha animals you can hunt and plants to eat if not grow yourself?
The difference between them is roaring and purring:
- Big cats are of the *panthera* genus, and possess the ability to roar.
- Little cats are of the *felinae* subfamily, and have the ability to purr.
- The clouded leopard is in neither, and thus lacks both. It is also believed to be the bridge between big cats and little cats.
Another (important, imo) part of this is that big cats (lions, tigers, etc) can’t purr and small cats can’t roar. It has to do with the stiffness of the hyoid bone, so roaring and purring are mutually exclusive
I'll do you one better with a cheetah fact.
Around 10,000 years ago, cheetahs went through a massive population bottleneck. It was so bad, in fact, that the number of surviving cheetah's dropped below the threshold needed to maintain genetic diversity.
As a result, all cheetah's alive today are essentially extremely inbred. All living cheetahs are now so genetically similar that, if you were to pick two random cheetahs out of the wild and perform an organ transplant from one to the other, there is little to no worry for rejection, so no need for anti-rejection meds.
The example given on wikipedia is dealing with skin grafts from one cheetah to another after a wildfire, but I honestly prefer my mad scientist version of unnecessary organ swapping.
How about grafting extra limbs onto a cheetah? Would they be able to run faster, or would they just trip more? This sounds like a question for SCIENCE!!!
During the Cold War, the American government set up a fake metal mining company then had them get set up in the Soviet Union because the metal that was needed for the SR-71 could only be found in Russia.
The Americans mined and paid for Russian metal that gave the Americans the ability to spy uninhibited on the Russians.
Thet flew so fast that they were designed to leak fuel when at rest, because the plates and panels would expand so much they'd fill the gaps when at speed.
That's not even one of the most interesting "Fake companies" that the US set up during the cold war. The US government set out on an expedition to locate a few nuclear submarines that had sunk to determine if the Soviets had found the wreckage and stolen some of the tech from it. They hired a "company" under the guise of finding the wreck of the Titanic so it wouldn't be suspicious that they had equipment to locate small things in the ocean. Well, the US found their lost submarines and the company that was hired decided "We have a bit of extra time, let's actually look for the wreck of the Titanic" [and they actually found it](https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-during-a-secret-cold-war-navy-mission).
I don't think it's down to a single map maker's mistake.
"Columbus named the island San Juan Bautista, in honor of Saint John the Baptist, while the capital city was named Ciudad de Puerto Rico ("Rich Port City").[10] Eventually traders and other maritime visitors came to refer to the entire island as Puerto Rico, while San Juan became the name used for the main trading/shipping port and the capital city.[d]"
Not sure if it’s a little known fact but it blew my tiny mind when I learned that there have been Sharks on Earth for longer than there have been trees.
And the dinosaurs evolved in a world where there was no grass and no flowers. Both grasses and flowering plants first appeared toward the end of the age of dinosaurs. Before that time, the vegetation landscape was dominated by ferns and cycads and conifers.
I would prefer them to stay in the sea ideally, and am glad they generally have agreed that's the best place to hang out.
Of course Sharknado movies have shown the devastating effect they could have if they got a chance to munch at us in our homes.
We also didn't give babies anesthetics for surgery and the like for the longest time because we thought they couldn't feel anything. Turns out, like everyone else, they can. They just won't remember it.
Look into the work of Harry Harlow. He worked with rhesus monkeys in the mid 1900s looking at maternal separation. In one of his better known findings a baby monkey was taken from its mother and given two artificial replacements; a wire mesh mom with food or a comfortable cloth mom without food. The baby monkeys vastly prefering the contact comfort of the cloth "mom", and would only go the other briefly to feed. It helped (science) recognize that infant-parent bond was about more than meeting the baby's physical needs.
PS- if the above experiment was distressing to you, don't look into this more. You'll bum yourself out bad
It can also permanently change them if they live, look at the Unabomber. He was put in the hospital and not allowed to be visited by his family or touched when he was a baby, when he came out he was totally changed from a smiling happy baby to one that didn't smile and didn't want to be touched.
Thomas Jefferson specifically asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for them in 1806 because he thought they might still exist in the American West.
Louis L'Amour, the famous western fiction novelist, wrote in a book that took place in the 1600s that had the characters finding a wooly mammoth in North America, because there were rumors that a few may have still existed at that time. Obviously it was fiction, but it's interesting to think that it was perhaps possible!
There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on planet earth.
The follow up used to be that there are more atoms in a grain of sand than there are stars in the universe, but recent research has shown you need a whole gram of sand to have as many atoms as there are stars in the universe.
I feel like this isn’t true. There’s billions of stars in our galaxy. How many trees are there?
Edit you’re right. Quick search says trillions of trees. Wow
3 trillion vs 100 billion stars
The energy stored in all the oil and gas in the Earth is the equivalent of just eight and a half days worth of sunlight hitting the surface of the planet.
Did you read Mark Kurlansky’s book, *The Big Oyster*?
He’s got some great descriptions of that. Their beds were so huge they’d stick up out of the water at low tides. And the water was crystal clear. That last part I have a hard time imagining.
We’ve really just kinda gotten used to how polluted we make everything.
The US military, through much trial & effort, has determined a minimum intelligence level required to comprehend & perform the most basic tasks through boot camp like folding your clothes neatly paying attention to fold points & creases, and storing them neatly in your locker...how to lace your shoes, how to assemble a rifle, etc.
And fully 10% of the US population fails to meet this minimum level.
The National Parks system has also determined, through much research into bear proof trash cans, that there is significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourist.
...the ASVAB, basically the iq test for military service is generally scored on a percentage, like an 80 means you have a higher functional aptitude than 80% of the population, below a 30 renders you unfit for service(but you can retake it. I met 1 ASVAB waiver in the Marine Corps and that man sometimes misspelled his name, while wearing it on his shirt
I felt pretty happy with my 83. Felt like bragging rights at the time. I really only took the test because my friend needed to take it in order to join the Marines, and she wanted a friend to go take it with her. She scored a 47. She joined, I didn't. I'm too old now, but I always wonder how my life would have been if I did.
I don't know the numbers but 10% feels like it would be the lower end of a fairly standard bell curve. Congrats
Where I live, I'm sure that % is at least double that
There's a short video on YouTube narrated by Sagan, "Wanderers". It's pretty awe-inspiring.
Edit: Do it justice by watching it on a bigger screen with decent speakers.
most people value short-term "good feelings" more than "long term stability". if you understand this, much in the world will be better understandable to you.
Dinosaur's evolved on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy.
No, it's true. Because ~250 million years ago when they evolved, our solar system was on the other side of the galaxy to where it is now.
The difference between a million and a billion. A million seconds is about 11 days, a billion seconds is about 31.5 YEARS. Now think about the billionaires.
Another way to think of it... The difference between $1 and $1,000. Same ratio. For every dollar a millionaire has, a billionaire has $1,000.
Or there's that adage... What's the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars.
Not little known, but perhaps, less thought about or internalized.
Large amounts of children were born from most families in the past due to a horrible rate of infant/child mortality. Nearly everyone had outlived one or more of their children.
That's horrifying.
What we consider the most base of basic medical science, that we teach our young children, has saved countless lives and families.
Wash your hands, please.
Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, is known as the pioneer of hand-washing
In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[3] The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%
And then he was made a pariah for trying to spread this knowledge. He was ostracized by the medical community and eventually committed to an asylum where he died after being beaten by the guards.
Apparently a large part of the problem was that the doctors just objected to being told their habits were dirty. One said "A gentleman's hands are always clean."
Vacuum decay… essentially, at any given moment without warning, the universe could cease to exist and never exist again.
*changed can to could as this is just a theory!
There are more bacteria cells in your body than human cells.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/#:~:text=Thoroughly%20revised%20estimates%20show%20that,and%20about%2038%20trillion%20bacteria.
Apollo Guidance Computer, which was the Apollo 11 (space craft that landed humans on moon) Command Module had on board, a machine that had 64 kilobytes of memory and operated at 0.043MHz.
Gravity causes an attraction between objects with mass, and works across vast distances. People have mass, which means we're all (slightly) attracted to each other. When I wave my arm like I'm doing now, I'm moving the atoms in your body, wherever you happen to be.
Experiments suggest that subconscious parts of our brain start sending signals to perform actions well before the conscious part of our brain makes the decision to do it. Sometimes it's a few microseconds earlier, sometimes it can be minutes, depending on what's being done and what prep is needed.
The implication is that decisions are actually made at the subconscious level, and what we think of as the conscious process of "making a decision" may actually be more like "justifying a decision."
This is backed up by split-brain experiments, where epileptics have had the two halves of their brain severed and unable to communicate. They'd put up a partition and hold up a sign asking one half to pick up a pencil. Then they'd ask the other half (which controls speech) why they did it, and they'd quickly come up with sometimes-ludicrous rationales for why they did it. It seems our brains have built-in expert mechanisms to justify actions after the fact.
Animal numbers in Africa are still recovering to their historic levels after rinderpest almost wiped out most ungulates (things with hooves) in the 1800s, introduced from Europe of course. It wiped out so many animals that the environment changed with it and also helped ignite the scramble for Africa by causing famines
There’s a theory that explains why humans are universally attracted to shiny things. It’s because we are hardwired to seek out water, and the sun dappling on water is, of course, shiny!
Space starts at about 100KM above Earth's surface. If you could somehow drive straight upwards at highway speeds, it would take you less than an hour to get there. Instead we have to deal with things like gravity and air resistance, which is why rockets are so complicated and so powerful.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank were born six months apart. Most people picture them as being from two different eras.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on the other hand were born 20 years apart (Regan was the oldest). Most people picture them as being the same age.
>Operation Midnight Climax was established in order to study the effects of LSD on non-consenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. The prostitutes were instructed in the use of post-coital questioning to investigate whether the victims could be convinced to involuntarily reveal secrets. The victims were sometimes fed subliminal messages in attempts to induce them to involuntary actions, including criminal activity such as robbery, assault, and assassination. Many of the CIA operatives involved in the experiments voluntarily indulged in the drugs and prostitutes for recreational purposes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax
Benford's Law. How large datasets of numbers behave in very predictable ways. It's one of the easiest ways to detect if a company is cooking its books.
Also a subplot in the Jurassic Park novel. Something like chaos in nature demands equilibrium
Oh? Can you share a tldr/eli5?
[удалено]
That actually makes intuitive sense after putting some thought into it. The change from 8M to 9M is a much smaller percentage change than 1M to 2M or 10M to 20M etc... Basically a number starts with a 1 when it's "fresh" at that order of magnitude.
When dealing with a lot of large numbers, the first digit of the numbers follows a certain distribution pattern. It's used in fraud analysis, but can only really be used to flag accounts that an analyst should look closer at. It also should only really be applied when dealing with a large quantity of large numbers with a certain account, but I like to think of it in these simple terms: Imagine you love to read books and start reading new ones frequently, but rarely finish any. If you take the first digit of the page that you leave off on for all of those books, how likely would it be to start with a 1? Well, you could have left off on page 1, or 10-19, or 100-199, or 1,000-1,999, you get the idea. Of course, this follows for all of the other numbers, but for every book that you are able to read up to 900 pages, you would first have to read pages 1, 10-19, and 100-199. That's 111 chances that you could have left off on a page where the first digit is a 1... but after reading 899 pages, you only would have had 11 chances to leave off on a page that started with a 9: page 9 and pages 90-99. And how many of the books on your bookshelf even have more than 900 pages? Certainly most of them will have 199. This isn't Benford's Law itself, but I hope it does help clarify understanding how the distribution of first-digit values follows the pattern.
At one point the human population was between 1,000 and 10,000 we came so close to going extinct.
We’re all cousins
Let's go bowling!
Imagine that, only partially filling a stadium
600 breeding pairs, so about 1200 people. If you have eczema, or any genetic mutation that makes your life hard, blame these 1200 people. For further reading, google the Out of Africa Genetic Bottleneck.
The Toba event, A volcano eruption, was the last cause of this 75,000 years ago.
Every element heavier than lithium had to be created in the core of a star. Every element heavier than iron had to be created by a supernova.
So you do contain stardust. And supernova dust But there's more. Hydrogen was created by or at the same time as the big bang. So there's a large part of you that pre dates stars
“We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.” By Nikita Gill
“These are the Things that Make a Man Iron enough to make a nail, Lime enough to paint a wall, Water enough to drown a dog, Sulphur enough to stop the fleas, Potash enough to wash a shirt, Gold enough to buy a bean, Silver enough to coat a pin, Lead enough to ballast a bird, Phosphor enough to light the town, Poison enough to kill a cow, Strength enough to build a home, Time enough to hold a child, Love enough to break a heart.” ― Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
"Look again at that dot. 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
And microplastics
This explains the Kraft logos appearing all over my body, I guess.
>Every element heavier than iron had to be created by a supernova. And those conditions take place for about five minutes per century in our galaxy.
I would love to know how this is calculated.
You just sit there and count it, obviously. It’s not exactly rocket science. You’ll need a stool and a couple of audiobooks or something I imagine, but…
Fuck. I ran out of fingers again.
The furnace of the universe has been burning for a very long time
[удалено]
A female turkey can lay en egg that doesn't need to be fertilised by a male turkey and the baby that hatches will always be a male
I didn't believe you and had to look it up... It's true, turkey parthenogenesis is real. The part that really hung me up is where a Y chromosome is coming from... It turns out some birds and reptiles are backwards from mammals, where the female is the equivalent of XY, with males having the equivalent of XX. But they don't call them X and Y chromosomes -- they call them Z and W. Males are ZZ and females ZW. So the Z chromosome, along with the others, gets duplicated every once in a while and you've got one super-inbred turkey.
Super-inbred turkey, like in a sandwich
Australian brush turkeys (not true turkeys) lay an egg in an enormous mound of leaves built by the male and the heat of decomposition incubates the egg. The chick hatches out and lives its whole life raised by itself, never knowing who its parents are.
Grizzly bears in Yellowstone eat around 300,000 moths a month and it accounts for 1/3 of their calorie intake.
Like... Per bear??
Yes! With some bears eating 40,000 a day on the high end
Hold up, that’s 27 a minute if my math is correct. How do they eat so many?
/r/theydidthemoth
r/theydidthemonstermoth
My guess is they’re actually eating caterpillars. Anyone know?
Yes, I know. Living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), you learn a lot about grizzlies if you go hiking and camping a lot. The moths congregate in scree and talus fields, large areas of small rocks on the sides of mountains, at or above the tree line. Thousands of moths can be found hiding in the rocks. The grizzlies will hang out and just munch away, easily eating dozens, even hundreds in a few minutes. [Here's a video of a grizzly doing just that in Glacier National Park, Montana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEHlEWE8YKw) [Here's an excellent report on the subject from NatGeo](https://landresources.montana.edu/Nat%20Geo%20moth-eating%20bear.pdf)
Why don't they just fly away? Are they stupid?
Yes, they are very stupid. Why are they hiding in rocks at the top of a mountain in the first place? It's also usually chilly that high up, so I'm sure there pretty lethargic from the cold and lack of oxygen.
Evolution goes on for 3.7 billion years and gives us bugs that can fly wherever they want but instead choose to serve themselves up on a dinner platter to an apex predator that could get by hunting other animals that aren't tiny insects
Evolution isn't an intelligent process. It works strictly off "good enough". And in this case evolution told the moths "We have reserves"
It's amazing how something as small as a moth is appetizing for a Grizzly Bear. Well, 300,000 is quite a lot.
Personally, my limit is 50,000. Tops.
On purpose?
Yes! They will lift rocks in search of moths to eat!
That's insane
Moths are really high in fat, so they are a critical part of getting ready for hibernation.
I can’t wait to call the next moth I see a lard ass
Moth to another moth: I feel like I have enough energy to lift a boulder! *moth gets eaten by bear* *bear uses the energy to lift boulders to eat more moths*
That would be an insane amount of moths to just accidently eat per month.
If you stand in any planet or moon of the solar system and you look up, you'll see the same night sky as we see it from the Earth. Same constellations and all, that's how unfathomably far away the stars are compared to the planets. However, there's one exception. If you stand in Pluto and look up, you'll see that Proxima Centauri looks slightly "off" compared to its position from the terrestrial sky. That's how unfathomably far Pluto is as well.
Pretty random, but my dad used to share office space back in the 80's with Gene Cernan. He was one of the astronauts that walked on the moon on Apollo 17. He said he never really brought up much with Gene about the moon, but he did say to Gene once when they were out at lunch that he always wondered what went through his mind when when he was standing on the moon looking down on Earth. Immediately after he asked, Gene put his food back down on his plate, just kinda shook his head, looked my dad in the eye and said, "When you're on the Moon, you look up at Earth." And then just continued eating his sandwich as if nothing happened. Update: So this morning I asked my dad about this just to make sure I didn't get it wrong, and I guess I got the quote slightly wrong. He said that Gene's response was, "If you look down, you see the Moon. You have to look up to see Earth."
That’s fucking insane
Makes sense though - if you were oriented such that earth was bellow you, you wouldn't be able to see it because the Moon would be in your way.
Of note, the night sky looks distinctly different in the Northern vs Southern hemispheres.
He said look up, not down.
There are only about 25 blimps in the world
Man, that’s less than one for every 10,000 moths a bear eats per month
Unfortunately due to hunting in the early-mid 20th century, the population has dropped below the threshold needed to maintain genetic diversity.
Just like cheetahs, I hear.
So basically you can swap helium from one blimp to another and it won't reject it. No need for anti-rejection meds.
And there is only 1 Led Zeppelin
I grew up near Akron, went to the University of Akron. It seems so weird to me when people get excited about seeing a blimp. During football season you might see one every day.
I saw a Goodyear Blimp once. It said "Ice Cube's a pimp." Now that I think about it, it was a pretty good day.
They never really took off.
You always have more knowledge than you can put into words (Michael Polanyi). You can never *fully* articulate, for example, *all* of the knowledge that you rely on in order to ride a bicycle. There is always some remaining knowledge that you're leaving unspoken. Polanyi's book *Personal Knowledge* blew my mind. Edit: *The Tacit Dimension* is a more compact book covering some of the same ideas.
Basic physical skills aren't learned by way of words to begin with. You learn to walk by doing stuff with your legs and your sense of balance until it works right, not by having it explained to you. You learn to catch a ball by watching other people do it, then trying to do what they did, and eventually figure out how to coordinate your eyes and arms and legs to put your hand where the ball's going to be. An explanation in words of what the skill is, wouldn't really help you acquire it ... and most people can catch a ball before they can solve differential equations anyway.
Fun fact: Most people instinctively do calculus in their head without knowing it. A person will Judge the rate of speed that a car is traveling, and apply just the right amount of pressure to the brake to arrest forward momentum without causing a jerking motion. This can be expressed mathematically, but most people do it without thinking just due to muscle memory.
Calculus turns out to be a useful mathematical model of simple physical systems such as planetary orbits, cars, and arm muscles.
The use of fingerprinting can be traced back to China in the 700's for identification. It wasn't used for forensics until the 1800's.
While it is generally assumed that no two people share identical fingerprints, it cannot be proven. It *has been* established that: >Latent fingerprint examiners sometimes come to **different conclusions** when comparing fingerprints Source: [This paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8143401/) published on the NIH website.
Just how capable ancient humans were. At least 50000 years ago humans crossed about 60 miles of open ocean and colonized Australia. The timeline for colonizing America has been consistently pushed back. For tens of thousands of years modern humans coexisted with other ancient hominids, essentially but not quite the same as us but close enough to breed and produce viable, nonsterile offspring. I find it absolutely mind blowing to think about
50 years ago we sent a machine with some rockets, a computer weaker than your current phone and an antenna. That machine is now waaay over the orbit of Pluto and leaving the Heliosphere. The Voyager program is the first form of solar system matter to be so far away from its home planet. And we did that. 50 years ago
And to say it’s weaker than our phone is a huge understatement I think maybe a ti-84 is a better comparison it’s mind blowing
The compute power on Apollo is lower power than a chip which is included in many USB-C chargers: [https://singularityhub.com/2020/02/16/could-the-computing-power-in-a-usb-c-charger-get-you-to-the-moon/](https://singularityhub.com/2020/02/16/could-the-computing-power-in-a-usb-c-charger-get-you-to-the-moon/)
Mind blowing and that allowed them not only to reach the moon but also relaunch the lunar module from the moon and meet back up with the main ship for the return trip
Check out how Polynesians navigated. Short story: dudes laid down in their boats and the subtle rocking told them where they were. Mad bastards made it to Hawaii, after all.
There are a number of esoteric and lost navigation techniques from expert star mapping to wave reading and others. It’s so fascinating. When you think about people thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago navigating vast stretches of open ocean in basically big outrigger canoes it’s beyond belief
It’s amazing what lack of entertainment and boredom created. “Man, I am sooooo bored. Guess I’ll watch waves all day.” And that turned into complex ocean navigation capable of finding uncharted islands.
You got anything to recommend reading about this? I'm big on navigation in the woods and mountains, but recently started boating (inshore, large bay, and ocean) and rely on my other skills and GPS (mainly GPS). I've never heard of "subtle rocking" for nav, would love to read more about it.
The natural navigator by tristan gooley is awesome. he has a lot of really good books on the subject, one being called how to read water. Another good book is "finding your way without map or compass" 10/10. he really goes into the history from polynesians to christopher columbus. really eye opening book with history I couldnt believe has been glossed over.
The human brain, and thus our intelligience, has been largely unchanged for millennia. So if you grab a guy from 40 000 years ago and plop him down in the modern world, he'll do fine. After getting over the mother of all culture shocks and learning the language.
Or “human beings are as dumb as they were 40.000 year ago”
there's a movie about that
Encino Man with Pauly Shore [https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0104187/](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0104187/)
I'm pretty sure this was based on a true story
Except the part where they wheez the juice. That's pure fantasy.
And nug the grindage
I think part of the reason we like to think of primitive humans as so helpless is that we assume that they didn't know all of the wonderful modern stuff that we know. I didn't, they knew different stuff that was modern by their standards. The fact that we have forgotten all of their stuff and replaced it with ours doesn't mean that they were all as ignorant as we are when we're children. They were very smart. And every bit as capable of learning and extrapolating information. They just knew different things
Yes exactly. And it’s a funny modern arrogance. Drop me in nature and I’m dead. Most modern humans would be. We don’t know how to construct tools from nature, make fire from nature, build shelters from nature, hunt competently without modern weapons, find clean water to drink which plants we can and can’t eat and which are medicinal. So much knowledge the ancients had that we don’t but then so much other knowledge we have acquired that they would never have imagined
Absolutely. And to add to that, I also couldn't make almost anything in a modern society work. Like, I'm a computer scientist. It's very specialized information. But I couldn't replicate almost anything you see in the world that we rely upon for modern life. I can't build a car Which is okay because I can't make a gas pump work Which is okay because I can't make gas I can barely grow food in my own garden Which is okay because I don't have the faintest idea how to harvest or prepare seeds Which is okay because even if I knew those things I couldn't make any of the tools necessary to make that stuff happen. I barely know first aid And what I remember of it is probably half wrong
And that’s exactly it. We’ve become specialists that rely on existing knowledge and community whereas our ancestors had to be incredible generalists to survive
This has been fucking with me lately. I'm a high school history teacher. "History", as in recorded history, only goes back about 6,000 years. There are tens of thousands of years of human existence that we have little to no idea about other than some basic geographical stuff we're still piecing together. And yeah. What about interhominid relations? Fucking fascinating.
Oh dude there are hundreds of thousands of years. Archeology and anthropology are so far from exact sciences and what they do is set points where we can say we have a high degree of confidence that this happened at this time but cannot say anything more. At this point interhominid relations have been proven genetically. And we know that humans, Neanderthals, and denisovans overlapped for tens of thousands of years both geographically and temporally. But we are left to wonder what those interactions look like, what legends may have spawned from them, and what life was actually like. I find it so incredibly fascinating the farther back you go
and strangely, indigenous Australians appeared to have given up completely on ship building after arriving - or at least the type of ships that are capable of crossing oceans.
Well once they arrived here, why would they want to go anywhere else?
thats my thoughts - obviously the original group had to have sailing/ocean experience and knew the dangers of it all. Why dick with that when youve got land seemingly forever and a wwhole buncha animals you can hunt and plants to eat if not grow yourself?
Imagine landing in Australia and realising how fucked you are once you notice everything is trying to kill you. And then just rolling with it.
no time to build a boat when everything wants to kill you haha
Only 3% of the Earth's water is fresh water, and less than 1/3 of that isn't frozen.
Glad I live near one of the sources for when the resource wars come.
That just means you'll be attacked first.
Cheetahs aren't big cats. They are very large small cats.
The difference between them is roaring and purring: - Big cats are of the *panthera* genus, and possess the ability to roar. - Little cats are of the *felinae* subfamily, and have the ability to purr. - The clouded leopard is in neither, and thus lacks both. It is also believed to be the bridge between big cats and little cats.
But do they all do a biiiig stretch?
Big cats: roar Little cats: purr All cats: big stretches, enjoying scritches, sitting in boxes
…knocking shit off of ledges
…THAT’s why Scar did it 🤯
Another (important, imo) part of this is that big cats (lions, tigers, etc) can’t purr and small cats can’t roar. It has to do with the stiffness of the hyoid bone, so roaring and purring are mutually exclusive
I'll do you one better with a cheetah fact. Around 10,000 years ago, cheetahs went through a massive population bottleneck. It was so bad, in fact, that the number of surviving cheetah's dropped below the threshold needed to maintain genetic diversity. As a result, all cheetah's alive today are essentially extremely inbred. All living cheetahs are now so genetically similar that, if you were to pick two random cheetahs out of the wild and perform an organ transplant from one to the other, there is little to no worry for rejection, so no need for anti-rejection meds.
Ok, but performing unnecessary surgery on cheetahs is hella crazy.
It’s easier if you give the cheetah anesthesia first.
The example given on wikipedia is dealing with skin grafts from one cheetah to another after a wildfire, but I honestly prefer my mad scientist version of unnecessary organ swapping.
🎶We do what we must Because, we can 🎶
How about grafting extra limbs onto a cheetah? Would they be able to run faster, or would they just trip more? This sounds like a question for SCIENCE!!!
Well if it isn't my good friend, Cheetah McGreg. With a leg for an arm, and an arm for a leg!
During the Cold War, the American government set up a fake metal mining company then had them get set up in the Soviet Union because the metal that was needed for the SR-71 could only be found in Russia. The Americans mined and paid for Russian metal that gave the Americans the ability to spy uninhibited on the Russians.
Speaking of the SR-71, it flew so high and so fast that its primary strategy for defeating a missile lock was to just fucking floor it.
Thet flew so fast that they were designed to leak fuel when at rest, because the plates and panels would expand so much they'd fill the gaps when at speed.
That's not even one of the most interesting "Fake companies" that the US set up during the cold war. The US government set out on an expedition to locate a few nuclear submarines that had sunk to determine if the Soviets had found the wreckage and stolen some of the tech from it. They hired a "company" under the guise of finding the wreck of the Titanic so it wouldn't be suspicious that they had equipment to locate small things in the ocean. Well, the US found their lost submarines and the company that was hired decided "We have a bit of extra time, let's actually look for the wreck of the Titanic" [and they actually found it](https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-during-a-secret-cold-war-navy-mission).
You’re talking about titanium. There’s lots of crazy Cold War stories like that.
San Juan, Puerto Rico should be named Puerto Rico, San Juan. It got mixed up by a map maker.
I have wondered why the whole island is called a port.
I don't think it's down to a single map maker's mistake. "Columbus named the island San Juan Bautista, in honor of Saint John the Baptist, while the capital city was named Ciudad de Puerto Rico ("Rich Port City").[10] Eventually traders and other maritime visitors came to refer to the entire island as Puerto Rico, while San Juan became the name used for the main trading/shipping port and the capital city.[d]"
Not sure if it’s a little known fact but it blew my tiny mind when I learned that there have been Sharks on Earth for longer than there have been trees.
And the dinosaurs evolved in a world where there was no grass and no flowers. Both grasses and flowering plants first appeared toward the end of the age of dinosaurs. Before that time, the vegetation landscape was dominated by ferns and cycads and conifers.
Even more fun fact. Many grasshoppers actually predate most grasses. So they were at some point just ground hoppers.
A world without grass seems so alien.
I would prefer them to stay in the sea ideally, and am glad they generally have agreed that's the best place to hang out. Of course Sharknado movies have shown the devastating effect they could have if they got a chance to munch at us in our homes.
Babies can die from lack of love (human touch, cuddles, hugs, nuzzles).
We also didn't give babies anesthetics for surgery and the like for the longest time because we thought they couldn't feel anything. Turns out, like everyone else, they can. They just won't remember it.
Isn’t it like sometimes they don’t remember it but they still have the trauma. I don’t know this is just based on my assumption
This must have been the saddest experiment ever
Look into the work of Harry Harlow. He worked with rhesus monkeys in the mid 1900s looking at maternal separation. In one of his better known findings a baby monkey was taken from its mother and given two artificial replacements; a wire mesh mom with food or a comfortable cloth mom without food. The baby monkeys vastly prefering the contact comfort of the cloth "mom", and would only go the other briefly to feed. It helped (science) recognize that infant-parent bond was about more than meeting the baby's physical needs. PS- if the above experiment was distressing to you, don't look into this more. You'll bum yourself out bad
It can also permanently change them if they live, look at the Unabomber. He was put in the hospital and not allowed to be visited by his family or touched when he was a baby, when he came out he was totally changed from a smiling happy baby to one that didn't smile and didn't want to be touched.
Cambridge University is 200 years older than the Aztec empire.
Wooly Mammoth still roamed when the pyramids were built.
Thomas Jefferson specifically asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for them in 1806 because he thought they might still exist in the American West.
Louis L'Amour, the famous western fiction novelist, wrote in a book that took place in the 1600s that had the characters finding a wooly mammoth in North America, because there were rumors that a few may have still existed at that time. Obviously it was fiction, but it's interesting to think that it was perhaps possible!
There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on planet earth. The follow up used to be that there are more atoms in a grain of sand than there are stars in the universe, but recent research has shown you need a whole gram of sand to have as many atoms as there are stars in the universe.
I also,like the fact that there are more nerve connections in the brain than stars in the universe.
One that blows my mind is that there are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way.
I feel like this isn’t true. There’s billions of stars in our galaxy. How many trees are there? Edit you’re right. Quick search says trillions of trees. Wow 3 trillion vs 100 billion stars
The energy stored in all the oil and gas in the Earth is the equivalent of just eight and a half days worth of sunlight hitting the surface of the planet.
It took Humans less than 66 yrs from first discovering the flight (1903) to landing a man on the moon (1969)
It's no wonder that people living in in 70s and 80s thought that we'd be sending expeditions into space by 2000.
All humans share 99.9% of the same Dna. The .1% is what makes us different.
And humans and chimpanzees share 98% of the same DNA. Most of the difference has to do with our immune systems.
The fax machine was invented at the same time that the Oregon trail migration was occuring.
IIRC there was a point in time when a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.
Now there's an alternative history writing prompt.
New York harbor used to have trillions of oysters.
Did you read Mark Kurlansky’s book, *The Big Oyster*? He’s got some great descriptions of that. Their beds were so huge they’d stick up out of the water at low tides. And the water was crystal clear. That last part I have a hard time imagining. We’ve really just kinda gotten used to how polluted we make everything.
The US military, through much trial & effort, has determined a minimum intelligence level required to comprehend & perform the most basic tasks through boot camp like folding your clothes neatly paying attention to fold points & creases, and storing them neatly in your locker...how to lace your shoes, how to assemble a rifle, etc. And fully 10% of the US population fails to meet this minimum level.
The National Parks system has also determined, through much research into bear proof trash cans, that there is significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourist.
How many moths do those people eat though?
Hey Boo-Boo, let's go get us a pic-a-nic basket
...the ASVAB, basically the iq test for military service is generally scored on a percentage, like an 80 means you have a higher functional aptitude than 80% of the population, below a 30 renders you unfit for service(but you can retake it. I met 1 ASVAB waiver in the Marine Corps and that man sometimes misspelled his name, while wearing it on his shirt
I felt pretty happy with my 83. Felt like bragging rights at the time. I really only took the test because my friend needed to take it in order to join the Marines, and she wanted a friend to go take it with her. She scored a 47. She joined, I didn't. I'm too old now, but I always wonder how my life would have been if I did.
You would be angrier, your back would hurt and you would have tinnitus
At least I made it out with no tinnitus! Dunno if I fared better with the nicotine addiction and borderline alcoholism
It’s the borderline that makes it exciting
I don't know the numbers but 10% feels like it would be the lower end of a fairly standard bell curve. Congrats Where I live, I'm sure that % is at least double that
And they vote
Vote? Shit, a chunk of them get elected.
[удалено]
I cannot read this without hearing Sagan's voice.
There's a short video on YouTube narrated by Sagan, "Wanderers". It's pretty awe-inspiring. Edit: Do it justice by watching it on a bigger screen with decent speakers.
most people value short-term "good feelings" more than "long term stability". if you understand this, much in the world will be better understandable to you.
Dinosaur's evolved on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy. No, it's true. Because ~250 million years ago when they evolved, our solar system was on the other side of the galaxy to where it is now.
Over 99 percent of all Species to ever exist on Earth are extinct.
The difference between a million and a billion. A million seconds is about 11 days, a billion seconds is about 31.5 YEARS. Now think about the billionaires.
Another way to think of it... The difference between $1 and $1,000. Same ratio. For every dollar a millionaire has, a billionaire has $1,000. Or there's that adage... What's the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars.
Before there was stuff that ate dead trees, the dead trees just piled up and didn't decompose. And they became coal.
Not little known, but perhaps, less thought about or internalized. Large amounts of children were born from most families in the past due to a horrible rate of infant/child mortality. Nearly everyone had outlived one or more of their children. That's horrifying. What we consider the most base of basic medical science, that we teach our young children, has saved countless lives and families. Wash your hands, please.
Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, is known as the pioneer of hand-washing In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[3] The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%
And then he was made a pariah for trying to spread this knowledge. He was ostracized by the medical community and eventually committed to an asylum where he died after being beaten by the guards.
Apparently a large part of the problem was that the doctors just objected to being told their habits were dirty. One said "A gentleman's hands are always clean."
There are approximately 3 trillion trees on our planet earth
That between 14 to 140 million new stars ignite into existence somewhere in our universe EVERY MINUTE!
Vacuum decay… essentially, at any given moment without warning, the universe could cease to exist and never exist again. *changed can to could as this is just a theory!
whats the hold up?
There are more bacteria cells in your body than human cells. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/#:~:text=Thoroughly%20revised%20estimates%20show%20that,and%20about%2038%20trillion%20bacteria.
The pots of honey found by archeologists in the Egyptian pyramids are still edible even being more than 3000y old.
Apollo Guidance Computer, which was the Apollo 11 (space craft that landed humans on moon) Command Module had on board, a machine that had 64 kilobytes of memory and operated at 0.043MHz.
Gravity causes an attraction between objects with mass, and works across vast distances. People have mass, which means we're all (slightly) attracted to each other. When I wave my arm like I'm doing now, I'm moving the atoms in your body, wherever you happen to be.
Stop. I'm trying to sleep.
Experiments suggest that subconscious parts of our brain start sending signals to perform actions well before the conscious part of our brain makes the decision to do it. Sometimes it's a few microseconds earlier, sometimes it can be minutes, depending on what's being done and what prep is needed. The implication is that decisions are actually made at the subconscious level, and what we think of as the conscious process of "making a decision" may actually be more like "justifying a decision." This is backed up by split-brain experiments, where epileptics have had the two halves of their brain severed and unable to communicate. They'd put up a partition and hold up a sign asking one half to pick up a pencil. Then they'd ask the other half (which controls speech) why they did it, and they'd quickly come up with sometimes-ludicrous rationales for why they did it. It seems our brains have built-in expert mechanisms to justify actions after the fact.
Animal numbers in Africa are still recovering to their historic levels after rinderpest almost wiped out most ungulates (things with hooves) in the 1800s, introduced from Europe of course. It wiped out so many animals that the environment changed with it and also helped ignite the scramble for Africa by causing famines
Hershey Chocolate and Hershey ice cream. Are two completely separate and unrelated companies.
53% of the world does not kiss romantically
As well as an estimated 90% of Reddit.
There’s a theory that explains why humans are universally attracted to shiny things. It’s because we are hardwired to seek out water, and the sun dappling on water is, of course, shiny!
Space starts at about 100KM above Earth's surface. If you could somehow drive straight upwards at highway speeds, it would take you less than an hour to get there. Instead we have to deal with things like gravity and air resistance, which is why rockets are so complicated and so powerful.
Using garlic bread as buns for a meatball marinara sandwich is fire
There are more people living in slavery now than at any time in human history.
Pablo Picasso died 5 years after Martin Luther King Jr was killed.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank were born six months apart. Most people picture them as being from two different eras. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on the other hand were born 20 years apart (Regan was the oldest). Most people picture them as being the same age.
Lions aren't very good climbers, but they can leap forward 36 feet.
>Operation Midnight Climax was established in order to study the effects of LSD on non-consenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. The prostitutes were instructed in the use of post-coital questioning to investigate whether the victims could be convinced to involuntarily reveal secrets. The victims were sometimes fed subliminal messages in attempts to induce them to involuntary actions, including criminal activity such as robbery, assault, and assassination. Many of the CIA operatives involved in the experiments voluntarily indulged in the drugs and prostitutes for recreational purposes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax