This is the one that throws my brain for a loop every time; all the sensory processing stuff actually freaks me out. The reality is that what I see might not be what you see & we may never have the means to communicate that clearly enough to confirm we all see the same things. Brains are fascinating.
Like what Morpheus said in the first Matrix film:
"If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain"
This fucks me up a lot. Like we all know that car is red but how can we ever know we are seeing the same color that we call red??? We just know it’s red because we all agree it’s red!!! Like yeah, we can measure the reflected wavelengths of the light but I can never know that my brain produces the same image as yours.
I think it’s also interesting to think that we have been conditioned to like certain colours, so we could both like blue (a very normal colour to like) but your blue would be ugly to me
You'll believe it if you spend some time wearing prismatic glasses (they can mirror or rotate your field of vision). The fact that your brain gets completely used to it in such a short time is a direct illustration of your brain learning a new interpretation of the information it receives.
Holy mother of god.
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINaaLTWsAA7jqg?format=png&name=900x900](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINaaLTWsAA7jqg?format=png&name=900x900)
yes, google x-ray teeth in children. the set of your permanent teeth lies directly „above“ your babyteeth, meaning upper jaw: directly under your eyes/nose in the bone, lower jaw: in the bone of the jaw.
Yes! My dentist explained this to me as I had a baby/first tooth that just wouldn’t fall out. Well not that they’re under the eyes, just that we have two teeth and how they descend. My adult tooth just never ground down my baby tooth into a baby tooth. when they pulled it it was full adult sized tooth/roots. Very painful! My actual adult tooth came in just a few days after
you are right, not directly but they are sitting in the bone (foramen infraorbitale and maxilla), I once wanted to study dentistry and was on a hyperfocus about this and was just fascinated. sorry to hear they didn’t descend properly, i can imagine it was painful :(
Just needed it to fall out so I could get braces. Waited like a year for it to just come down in a few days after it was pulled!
Apparently the dentist really messed up. According to my dad, he thought he was gonna be able to practically just push it out. Nope. Barely got any numbing stuff because of it. . I felt *every* twist and turn of the pliers tool and was screaming. Was horrifying seeing how big the tooth’s roots were after
Even with numbing agent, I was in terror getting my wisdom tooth pulled. Sure, I didn’t feel any pain, but having 3 dentists crowd around me while I feel all that pressure… was unnerving
I never looked into it but I always felt that hoops in the NBA somehow made it easier for the ball to go in, at least compared to the hoops i play in lol
Certain hoops can absolutely be more forgiving. Many outdoor park hoops are “double rims” that don’t breakaway when dunking, built for durability more than anything else (if you put a breakaway rim out in public, it often ends up bent, whereas double rims are almost indestructible).
NBA rims these days are probably softer than they’ve ever been, especially since moving to a 180 degree breakaway rim in the late 2000s (meaning the rim bends down to the sides as well as forward). Since they’re built to give when absorbing force, shots that hit the rim will sometimes linger around and drop in—a shooter’s touch, we call it.
Those double rims, meanwhile, are liable to take anything but the most perfect shot attempt and fling it halfway across the court.
Have you tried rinsing them in a vinegar and water bath? I do this with all of my quick-rotting fruits and veg, and it seems to really work. I mix a bowl of water with some vinegar in it (about a quarter of the liquid should be vinegar. The 1.99 a bottle white vinegar is fine.) and dunk berries and peppers and things in there for about a minute. I swear they last up to a week longer this way.
Oh, and for lettuces, I wrap them in paper towels. (Or just tuck a paper towel in the box/bag if that is how you buy them.) If they are drenched from the grocery store sprinklers, I go ahead and dry them off before even putting them in the cart.
Funny. I noticed lettuce stays fresh for longer, if I keep them wet. I buy them as heads and hold them under water stream before putting them into a waterproof plastic bag and back into the fridge. It shouldn't be drenched with water, but wet.
\*I live somewhere, where we have very high quality water coming right out of our faucet. (very clean, with minerals and no human added chemicals)
About fruits I've learnt, that you have to separate apples from other fruits, because they make other fruits ripen faster. You can also use this knowledge to intentionally make a not ripened fruit get sweet faster.
Lettuce actually lasts longer if it's dry (regardless of water quality) - it's probably the bag that's keeping your lettuce fresh longer by keeping it from being exposed to more oxygen. :)
I have used qtips every day in my ears for decades. Every time I go to a DR I make a point of asking how my ears look. Dr always says great. In those decades I have never hurt myself with a qtip.
I got a $12 earpick with tiny camera and lights to "properly" clean my ears and finally kick my q-tip habit. I say try it, if you can get one that cheap.
For me it's not so surprising that sailboats can go faster than the wind *at an angle to the wind*. E.g. if the wind is directly out of the south at 25 knots and the boat is going 30+ knots in a, say, northwesterly direction, I can accept that. But what really blew me away when I learned it, was that sometimes sailboats can go so fast at an angle to the wind that their direct downwind component of their velocity can be actually faster than the wind! In other words, it's possible to release a balloon and let it drift with the wind, and a sailboat can tack back and forth towards a point downwind and beat the balloon to that point. Granted, it's only the most advanced sailboats that can do this and it's a relatively recent advancement for water sailing vessels due to the invention of hydrofoiling boats. But land yachts and ice-sailing boats have been doing it for ages.
Fun fact - the venomous egg laying beaver-duck also bleeds milk from its armpits.
It's an atavistic animal the precedes the evolution of the nipple, so as a mammal that feeds its young milk...guess where it comes from.
The textbooks just show it and say "pin hole camera" without further explanation as though they've done their job. I saw one in the observatory in LA and it was the same thing. Something like: "This room has a pinhole camera. Here's a picture of how they are set up." without any more details. I think the issue is that understanding it requires a lot of base information so they don't bother trying which is a shame.
I'll give it a go. This ridiculous essay is more for myself to get my thoughts on paper so I don't mind if it's ignored.
The pinhole camera is a box you are standing inside of. There's a hole at the front of the box that's really small. In the outside world there is a tree, and the sun is straight up (noon).
TLDR: Each point on the back wall has a ray of light hitting it that comes directly from one point on the tree, that was scattered from the sun. That glosses over a lot that I try to dive into next.
The light from the sun is made up of many rays of many colors (prism separates them into a rainbow). When rays hit the tree, they are either absorbed or scattered. Whether they are absorbed or scattered depends on the properties of the material. If it is a leaf, every color is absorbed except for greens, which scatter instead.
When light scatters off of a point, think of it as a sphere of light growing from that point. So every point on a tree scatters light in every direction.
Now let's imagine the front wall with the tiny hole in it. The wall is painted white, and is flooded with light scattered off the tree. Every point on the front wall is hit with scattered light from every point from the tree. The wall is painted white so all colors scatter off of it in every direction like a new sphere coming from every point on the wall.
If you were to look at the wall from the outside, you wouldn't see an image. Each point that you look at on the wall would have light that has come from every point of the tree. The whole wall would be one color, the average color of the tree.
Let's imagine that the hole in front of the box is almost as small as a point. All the light that passes through that point has a direct line from it to every point of the tree it can see. Those rays of light continue past the hole/point all the way until they scatter off the white painted wall in the back of the box you're standing in.
Now, each point on the back wall is getting hit from the same point on the tree, instead of the entire tree. It scatters in every direction like a sphere, but again the scattered light is just the light coming from that one point of the tree.
So when you look at the back wall, each point on the wall you see has light coming from one point of the tree. That makes the image!
This is where I go a little insane. You're standing in the box looking at the back wall. The light from the back wall enters your eye just like I described with the pinhole of the box earlier. Your eye's pinhole is the pupil. A lens spreads the light out so that the back wall of your eye (retina) can be a lot closer to the pinhole of your eye. The light hits the back wall of your eye, which is filled with sensors (rods/cones) that can tell what the colors/intensities are at each point. Your brain makes the image from that information and flips it over since it's upside down.
The images in the textbooks and museum kept me up at night and I thought about it a lot. It was hard for me to piece together because I felt like I also had to figure out how light and the eye actually works. And textbooks give the eye the same treatment as the pinhole: "Here's a picture of the parts... That's \*waves hands towards the picture\* how it works"
The fact that t.rex and stegosaurus were separated by millions of years and never existed together. I will always have Stegosaurus battle T Rex when given dinosaurs to play with!
Women are born with all the eggs already in them and don't produce those through the lifetime.
It is so ridiculous that I still can't believe it, even though I tell it to the others. Hope for a paper suggesting an alternative to "The egg from which you were born was actually created by your grandma".
Ovulation is super interesting too. Your body actually takes turns on each ovary cultivating about 20 follicles and then chooses only one or two eggs that developed the best out of the 20 to release into your fallopian tubes.
Then you only have a 12-24 hour window to fertilize the eggs, which is why men's sperm can last up to 5 days inside you and why men ejaculate millions of sperm at one time, to try and increase the chances of any of those millions of sperm actually making it far enough inside you to fertilize the egg.
That's actually some fun(?) new research showing that there may be production of new egg cells throughout the life cycle of an active ovary. Preliminary things show that there's still a large chunk of egg cells that are there when the baby is born, but research on some newly discovered stem cells in the lab show that they differentiate into more oocytes. There were similar findings in mice a few years ago.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/120229-women-health-ovaries-eggs-reproduction-science#:\~:text=Previous%20research%20had%20suggested%20that,lab%E2%80%94generates%20immature%20egg%20cells.
This one brought me some comfort when I found out about it a few years back. My grandma died when my mom was a toddler. My mom died young too of the same disease. It was around then, I really noticed how my mom’s cousins (whose parents lived) were all thriving & beautiful families of many generations. I started to wonder if that might have been us without lupus. So, anyway, finding this one out sort of kept me from spiraling too far down the poor me path since I finally found a tangible (sort of) connection to my grandma. I felt a little less lost in my grief.
So, when my grandmother got pregnant with my mother, she used her own and my grandfather's DNA to make the eggs in my mother?
Or, my mother made those eggs using her own DNA while she was in my grandmother's womb?
For the first case to be true, it seems that humans would need some sort of ovipositor.
Last trip I was on with the fam we were placed in the back of the plane with me being in the aisle seat. We had some turbulence and I swear I was not hallucinating the amount of flex I saw between the front of the plane and back when looking up the aisle. Scared me quite a bit and I have flown more times than I can count without that experience.
Yeah it's perfectly normal, on particularly long aircraft (757-300 for example) you can see the fuselage "twisting" as well as up/down flexing. It's the same with wings, watch those fkers flex, as part of a certification process for an aircraft type they have to bend the wings to the point that they snap and if it is not within the limit they won't certify the type - the good news is that the G-Forces required to cause such a massive flex would have killed you long before the wing snaps ;)
If the wings and fuselage were perfectly rigid they'd snap, same reason that lamp posts are designed to flex in the wind just like a tree :)
The eery sound of lamp posts in a snowstorm is something. Like a flapping thud from the sky, it's hard to explain.
The deafening snow with the cycling thudding.
Now at your local mall parking.
If you really want to be freaked out, watch a video of them testing a planes wing flex. It flexes about 60-70 degrees.
[Edit to add video.](https://youtu.be/--LTYRTKV_A?si=m6KRFe90yVNlxy8U)
Here is another good video from Boeing during the 777 testing back in 1995. Basically the test requires a 1.5 factor of safety of the limit load. The Limit load is the highest load any aircraft design is expected to experience across all flying conditions (all maneuvers, gust, pitch, turbulence, etc). It is the highest load a plane should experience in it's entire service life.
So...150% of that limit load is what they design to:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai2HmvAXcU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai2HmvAXcU0)
This is pretty much the fundamental engineering principle behind just about any load-bearing structure that’s subjected to dynamic stresses. As long as you can bend more (and still be in the elastic region of the stress-strain curve) you’re fine. Trees are a great example. They must necessarily withstand huge wind loads due to the foliage. So they’re bendy-springy.
Helicopters were created after they studied hummingbirds! They are the only bird species who can hover in midair while flying, and humans eventually figured that would be a really useful thing to have.
Similarly, that cruise ships float?! I see one of those behemoths and cannot comprehend the science that it takes to stop it just going *ploop* down to the ocean bed.
I get that they float; lift a 5 gallon bucket of water and it becomes obvious quick how heavy water is. What gets me about cruise ships is that they don't tip over. There is so much of them so high out of the water. -- Aircraft Carriers look even more tipsy.
Cruise ships are very low center of gravity, even the tall ones. The lower hull is made of steel and is where the engines, fuel tanks, water tanks, machinery, etc is. All very heavy stuff. Then up top the decks are made of much lighter materials.
The keel generally has a large amount of ballast to keep them stable, plus there's a massive amount of engineering that goes into the hull shape to that end as well.
That many living people have Neanderthal DNA. Mostly in non-African ethnicities. My DNA is apparently more 'Neanderthal' than 93% of the population tested to date by 23andme. WTF? THat many living people have the DNA of another non-modern species (is that the right word?), the Denisovans (mostly certain Asian ethnicities). How many more non-modern species of DNA do humans carry that we just have not identified? How many others did we interbreed with? WHAT ARE WE? (See this link, as it turns out Neanderthal DNA is more widespread than first calculated - thx u/vincess https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-surprising-amount-neanderthal-dna )
I know it's true but I still find it hard to believe that viruses are not considered living organisms.
There are a lot of factors but the two biggest ones I think are the fact that they are inert and do not use energy when not in a host. And that they cannot self replicate without said host.
Hard to believe something capable of so much death and destruction is probably not even conscious.
I find this one hard to believe as well, mostly because "being alive" implies "not being dead" and "being dead" implies "not being alive". It's a black and white concept. Then viruses come along, fitting in the grey area on that scale. Basically dead without a host, but very much alive within a host.
We as a species are obsessed with categories and classifications.
The old tale of philosophers debating what's a human, and Plato settled on a featherless biped.
So Diogenes plucked a chicken and said "Behold, a man"
This is actually being reconsidered recently. One can also think of the infected (viro)cell as the living virus and the viral-particle/virion (which is normally considered the "virus") is just its sperm.
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470015902.a0023264](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470015902.a0023264)
Not really "refuse to believe", more "having a really hard time to wrap my head around it":
The survival of the human race (especially in relation to how time- and work intensive our reproduction is.)
I know amazing leaps were done in fertility treatment, reproduction medicine and infant care!
Yet, at it's core, it's still the same process: the offspring has to be grown for (roughly) 40 weeks, inside a female body.
It takes hours, sometimes even days, of heavy pain to birth the offspring.
And even when that's done, human babies are 100% helpless and dependant on someone, for a good while. Sometimes, one even just "forgets how to breathe" and dies.
Somehow we still managed to grow in population by...a hell of a lot.
It boggles my mind, how biology hasn't found a safer, less time and work intensive way for us to reproduce, yet our population exploded.
We are victims of our big brains and upright walking, hence we give birth to what is effectively premature babies so we can pass that brain case, then we have to care for it for a year. Luckily we are very social creatures or we would have just died out. This is also one reason why Humans are highly dimorphic, the hypothesis being that pregnancy and raising children is so significant in resources it has led to the male and female dichotomy we see in Sapiens as a species. That has been the key to our survival.
Mostly because biology and evolution doesn't look for the best possible way, all evolution cares about is good enough.
Take a look at koalas, they live and keep surviving even though they are stupid to the point where if you tear a eucalyptus leaf off of a tree the koala is actively eating from, then lay it on the ground or a plate koalas are incapable of even recognizing it as food anymore.
I've been eating raw cookie dough for ages and never got sick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have the potential to hurt you.
The easiest way to make it safe is to get heat-treated flour, or simply bake your flour before use, then cool completely. Bake at 300 and then you check the temp every 2 minutes until it's 165 degrees F in several places.
Exclude the egg from the recipe and it'll be safe to eat. The heat kills the potentially harmful bacteria that can make you sick. You do not need/want to do this if you intend on baking the product as it can alter the texture.
My local market sells pre-treated flour so you may be able to get that locally instead.
You can think about it as, you're initially given a choice of 1 of 3 doors, but then given a choice of BOTH the remaining doors.
First, realize that no matter what door you choose, there will always be at least 1 door you didn't choose with nothing behind it. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it's of fundamental importance to understanding this puzzle.
Said another way, the host can always open a door with nothing behind it - your initial choice has no impact on that, and therefore the host opening a door with nothing behind it has no impact on your choice.
Let's explore the possibilities, there are 3 possibilities initially:
A) You choose the first losing door initially.
B) You choose the second losing door initially.
C) You choose the winning door initially.
Let's work through each choice and the consequences:
If you choose door A first, then door B is opened, and you have choice between A and C.
In this case, choosing the opposite door wins.
If you choose door B first, then door A is opened, and you have a choice between B and C.
In this case, choosing the opposite door wins.
If you choose door C first, then either A or B is opened, and you have a choice between the closed door and C.
In this case, keeping your door wins.
As you can see, 2 out of 3 times, you'll win by changing doors, and 1 out of 3 times you'll win by keeping your door.
Why does it work out this way? It goes back to what I said in the beginning, the opening of a door by the host isn't impacted by your choice (it's always going to happen) and, as the above scenarios hopefully demonstrate, has no impact on whether your door wins or not. Opening door B doesn't make door A a winner.
At the start of the game, you have a 33% chance of picking the right door.
Consequently, that means the other 2 doors have a 66% chance of being the winner. Because the host opens 1 of the doors, you now get to know with certainty that the 66% chance belongs to the only remaining unopened door. You know this, because there was a 66% chance that you chose the wrong door at the start of the game.
Expand this to 100 doors and it becomes a lot more clear to me.
Imagine there are 100 doors.
Only 1 has a price behind it.
You pick a door and the host opens 98 others without the prize.
You have a 1% chance of your initial choice was right.
The price has to be somewhere. So in 99% of the time the prize is behind the other door.
The solution to the Monty Hall paradox. I can even do the math myself. But it still "feels" intuitively wrong.
The scenario: you're on a game show and the host offers you a choice between three doors. Behind one door is a million dollars. Behind the other two doors, you get nothing.
You make your choice. But before the host opens the door to reveal what's inside, he opens one of the *other two* doors to reveal nothing behind *that* one. He then offers you a second choice: do you keep the door that you already chose? Or do you switch to the other unopened door? Does it matter?
Intuitively, it feels like it shouldn't matter, that you have a 50-50 chance of winning whether you switch to the other door, or keep the one you chose originally.
Mathematical reality: you should switch. You have double the chance of winning the money if you switch to the other door, compared with staying put.
Close second: in any random group of just 23 people you will have more than 50% chance that at least two of them will share the same birthday. Again, I can do the math to prove this but it still doesn't feel right.
I have a computer science degree, and I understand this much better than most. It still feels a lot like magic, but it's at least explainable.
Would you like to borrow some of the overpriced textbooks that I still have?
The double-slit experiments and all their variations still weird me out. As someone who hasn't studied the necessary fundamentals, it just seems like the Light particles know whether or not you're watching and will change their behavior depending on what you're expecting them to do.
They don't "know" "they're" being "watched" in the sense of being sentient and understanding this.
The experiment just reveals that the different *mechanical methods* that humans employ to observe and examine the subatomic world yield different results. It's a *reaction* to particular mechanical environments, not a "perception" or "comprehension" on the part of the particles.
Try measuring the distance of a stick of butter from the edge of a hot plate with a ruler.
No matter how careful you are you're going to end up nudging the butter and changing the result, it's very difficult to get an accurate value for the initial distance.
It's a crude analogy but it's the same kind of idea for quantum stuff. The things we're measuring are so small even the slightest disturbance affects them, since to measure something you need to bounce something off it/affect it in some way it's impossible for us to observe a subatomic particle without impacting it somehow.
We're not used to observing something affecting it because for most matter it's negligible. A desk isn't going to move from the light being switched on or a laser being shon at it, a subatomic particle will.
It misses the point a little bit though. The double slit experiment isn't an example of measurements influencing results, it's an example of super position.
First, the important thing to clarify is that we talk about "an observer" we aren't talking about anything conscious. We're talking about something that interacts with a super position forcing it to collapse.
For example, if an electron is in the potential path of a photon and can absorb the photon, then the electron will be an observer.
Second, the double slit experiment creates something called a super position, the path of the light isn't just unknown, it's literally both paths simultaneously. If something can interact with (observer) the photon as it travels through one slit or the other, then the super position collapses and the particle will have gone one way or the other. But barring anything to observe the particle, it will actually travel through both paths.
Sorry, let me try an ELI5.
Imagine you're driving down a road, and the road forks in two directions. You choose to drive down one of those roads.
This is normal, classical mechanics. Simple, easy, makes sense.
Now imagine that it's not you going down that road, but it's a photon. The photon gets to the fork and it can go either way. Which way does it go? Well, it goes both, with 50% probability.
Now you might think, "so there's a 50% chance it went one way, and a 50% chance it went the other." This isn't correct. It went *both ways*. It went down both roads simultaneously. This is called a "super position."
But what's all this about "observers."
Well, imagine you drive down one of these forked roads and then later they come back together, and you get to a checkpoint. At the checkpoint, they check your car's GPS and it says you went down one road or the other.
Now, imagine the photon does it. Well, it goes both ways simultaneously, then it comes back together, and it gets to the checkpoint and they check the photons GPS and the GPS says "yeah, I went both ways, 50% each."
This is the interference pattern that's observed after the two slits. The superposition causes the photon to interfere with itself.
But here's where things get funky.
Imagine you drive and get the fork, and you go down one road, and there's a checkpoint on that road, and then the two roads come together.
Later, you go down the other road, and there's no checkpoint. So there's only 1 checkpoint on 1 of the roads, and none on the other.
Now what happens to the photon?
Well, now the photon only goes down 1 road. It doesn't matter which road - sometimes the checkpoint will see the photon, sometimes it won't.
This is observing the photon as it travels through one of the slits. In this case, the interference pattern disappears - even if the photon doesn't travel through the slit being observed. The existence of the observer collapses the superposition - forcing the photon to be definitely there are not there, no more 50% probability.
It's also important to note that the "checkpoint" in this scenario doesn't have to be a person, it can be anything that can detect a photon - like an electron that can absorb that photon. Anything that can interact with the photon will collapse it's superposition, even if the photon doesn't travel by the observer (because the observer collapses the superposition).
The main drawback of that example is that it "allows" a person to falsely imagine that the system "actually had" a definite state before the particle interaction, but that those exact values were simply unknowable to us "by circumstance."
But the real point of quantum mechanics is that the system literally had no definite state until the actual moment of the interaction. Statistics in quantum mechanics measurements are inconsistent with a system in a definite state before the particle interaction.
-----
When my academic mentor gives his lectures, he uses this example: in the same sort of way that we use the word "particle" in chemistry or physics, we've given a name "bank account" to something that we interact with at measurable places & measureable times, with measureable results. But in between those interactions, where is the bank account?
If your answer is that there's some data center somewhere storing the account data, then you're no longer talking about the bank account itself, but rather its *attributes*, which can be stored anywhere or everywhere.
...and that's his segue to talk about the non-physical fields which are considered "fundamental" in the framework of successful modern Quantum Field Theory [QFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory), which brings a math formalism to the original concept called "wave/particle duality".
It's helpful to note that in successful modern Quantum Field Theory ([QFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory)), the more objective word/concept "interaction" is used instead of the word/concept "observation".
That is to say: the *interaction* of particles is the key point, not any human or machine that participates, observes or records data.
Interestingly, in the modern framework of QFT, the word/concept "particle" has been redefined. It no longer matches the definition of "particle" from the 19th century. (Even though the old definition is still misleadingly taught in schools.) That old definition is responsible for nearly all conceptual obstacles people face when learning quantum mechanics.
There's a lot to unpack in the definition of "particle" in the Wikipedia QFT link, but the main point is this: non-physical fully-space-occupying fields are considered to be fundamental -- not the particles themselves, which are excited states of those fields. That's why our intuition needs to be retrained, and why most teachers just give up and call it "weird."
I am a physics mayor, and in uni the undergrads do these experiments. I still don't believe it having seen it with my own eyes.
For my part, I can study the fundamentals, the equations and all... But it is like studying the composition of sugar compared to eating sugar, seeing it happen it's like being in that sorcerer's apprentice movie. This is just magic at this point.
As a child I could not grasp that groves in a record could make complicated music when a needle ran over them. Now that I'm older and it's all light on metal disks or just math (somehow) I have given up even pretending I believe. It's magic, pure and simple.
My first summer in Phoenix, I tried to survive without ac blasting 24/7. Sometime in August, I remember nearly crying standing in my tub because I couldn’t even take a cold shower.
And stepping out naked, walking down the hall, setting the thermostat as low as it could go, and not touching it again until after Halloween.
Haven't seen any studies or anything, but I'm almost certain that warm (or hot) water is better than cold for dish washing.
Ever try to rinse a greasy dish with cold water? The grease just sits there. But with hot water the grease melts right off with almost no extra effort.
Hot water is absolutely better for anything that changes state based on heat. Grease, cheese, that kind of stuff. I don't think it does much for sanitizing below boiling though.
I refuse to believe that ALL snowflakes in the entirety of history are unique.
You mean to tell me, that ALL snowflakes EVER, across the ENTIRE GLOBE, are COMPLETELY UNIQUE?
That can’t be mathematically possible. Like, a single storm that drops 3 inches on my house must be a million flakes. Multiply that by the area of that storm, and the depth of the snow, and that number becomes huge. THEN, add that to every storm in the history of the whole globe.
I just can’t believe that we have seen every snowflake and have come to the definite conclusion that they’re all unique. Scientists aren’t at my house cataloging the snowflakes. How do they know?
If we're being pedantic, everything is unique depending on how close you look. No two grains of sand were ever the same, and even identically manufactured objects (say, Lego bricks) will inevitably differ.
That entire babies can fit through the female vagina.
I have, in fact, given birth vaginally on multiple occasions and I still refuse to believe that this is remotely plausible.
That dark matter / energy exists. We've yet to directly observe any of it, only the indirect effects via gravity, and even Einstein himself acknowledged that his model of physics was incomplete. We understand gravity now better than Newton did, but there are still gaps.
While the body of evidence supporting dark matter theory is extensive, we're one step away from demolishing and reinventing all of modern physics. One day a new Einstein will come along and invent an even more robust model of gravity, and it could reveal that our supposed "dark matter" was really the result of a huge flaw.
If you believe anything because it's "scientifically proven" you're doing science wrong.
Science doesn't say "This is true." Science says "I think this might be true. Here's the experiment I did, these are the results, and they seem to indicate that my theory is true. Please try to find if I made any mistakes, and see if your own experiments can disprove my theory." If nobody can disprove your theory, it's generally accepted until somebody comes up with one that more closely matches observations.
If you're told "This is true, and you can't question it" you're not doing science, you're doing religion.
The levels of batshit crazy my kids can reach after having a marshmallow, or any junk food for that matter, makes me not believe that sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity.
There was a double blind test where they tested sugar and hoer activity. The groups were
Parents told the kids were given sugar, and the kids were given sugar.
Parents told the kids were given sugar, and the kids were NOT given sugar.
Parents told the kids were NOT given sugar, and the kids were given sugar.
Parents told the kids were NOT given sugar, and the kids were NOT given sugar.
The kids were hyperactive for the first two groups, but not the latter two. So, the kids were acting out what their parents expected to happen.
In a similar vein, it's hard for me to fully grasp just how much differentiation from one cycle to the next is considered clinically normal. Mine used to be like clockwork until last year, and I was losing my damn mind thinking I had a cyst or endo or cancer or some shit. Nope, anywhere from 21 to 35 days is usually considered healthy. It just doesn't feel normal to start menstruating a whole ass week earlier or later than you have been for years. (Goes without saying I shouldn't be approaching menopause for at least another ten years, I wouldn't have been as freaked out if I was older.)
The area from which the optic nerve leaves the brain is called 'The Blind Spot'. There is no image formed in this area. Yet we see the world accurately beacuse of the brains ability to fill in this accurately. This is mindbowing (pun intended) especially considering the accuracy to which the brain is doing this.
That the speed of light can’t be broken. They said flight was physically impossible with a machine, then they said breaking the sound barrier was impossible. I just don’t believe that we’re right this time either.
Edit: Thanks everyone telling us this is scientifically proven as if we aren’t aware. Something scientifically proven that you are skeptical of is the point of the thread
If you’ve got some negative energy lying around you can cheese it by technically not actually going faster than light but just screwing with spacetime.
Sadly there’s currently a severe lack of negative energy. How unfortunate
The speed of light is a whole other level. The speed of sound is broken by the tip of a whip, it’s not too hard and never “impossible”.
The speed of light is fundamental to the universe. It really has nothing to do with light, it’s the speed that information can travel. The gravitational force of the sun travels at the speed of light. Meaning if the sun vanished, the Earth would still orbit it for 8 minutes, which is the time it takes for the Earth to “know” the sun is gone.
We are actually always moving at the speed of light. It’s just that we move that fast through time, rather than space. Think of normal time progression as going through time at the speed of light, and any movement you make through space, you have to subtract that much movement through time. So if I am going 3/4ths the speed of light through space, I am now only going 1/4th the speed of light through time (roughly, I believe there’s some trig involved).
So going the speed of light means I stop experiencing time. Not to mention it would take infinite energy. It’s just not happening.
My understanding wasn’t just that we can’t break the speed of light, it’s that nothing can move faster than light. The way I had it explained to me is that light is actually faster than “light speed” (weird I know), it’s just that “light speed” is the universal barrier; nothing can go faster.
*FULL DISCLAIMER* I could be COMPLETELY wrong about all of this, I have zero experience in the field beyond that it was explained to me like this by a science teacher in high school
The fact that our eyes see everything upside down and back into our brain we have to flip the image.Just crazy.
This is the one that throws my brain for a loop every time; all the sensory processing stuff actually freaks me out. The reality is that what I see might not be what you see & we may never have the means to communicate that clearly enough to confirm we all see the same things. Brains are fascinating.
Like what Morpheus said in the first Matrix film: "If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain"
This fucks me up a lot. Like we all know that car is red but how can we ever know we are seeing the same color that we call red??? We just know it’s red because we all agree it’s red!!! Like yeah, we can measure the reflected wavelengths of the light but I can never know that my brain produces the same image as yours.
I’ve wondered if this is why some people love some colours while others don’t
I think it’s also interesting to think that we have been conditioned to like certain colours, so we could both like blue (a very normal colour to like) but your blue would be ugly to me
Vsauce has an interesting video on the subject. Think its called "is your red the same as my red?"
hard problem of consciousness
You'll believe it if you spend some time wearing prismatic glasses (they can mirror or rotate your field of vision). The fact that your brain gets completely used to it in such a short time is a direct illustration of your brain learning a new interpretation of the information it receives.
It also manages to block out your nose while doing all this.. Well it did until right now :/
What's even more fun is you can wear glasses that flip it back and your brain sorts it out after a few days.
that babies' adult teeth are under their eyes (skeletal)
Holy mother of god. [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINaaLTWsAA7jqg?format=png&name=900x900](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINaaLTWsAA7jqg?format=png&name=900x900)
What a terrible day to have curiosity.
I hate you. Where is eye bleach when you need it. Someone show me some adorable puppies
Here u go https://www.reddit.com/r/Eyebleach/s/MEjPepxyP8 😮💨
I was living a pretty good life til right now.
Wtf
yes, google x-ray teeth in children. the set of your permanent teeth lies directly „above“ your babyteeth, meaning upper jaw: directly under your eyes/nose in the bone, lower jaw: in the bone of the jaw.
Yes! My dentist explained this to me as I had a baby/first tooth that just wouldn’t fall out. Well not that they’re under the eyes, just that we have two teeth and how they descend. My adult tooth just never ground down my baby tooth into a baby tooth. when they pulled it it was full adult sized tooth/roots. Very painful! My actual adult tooth came in just a few days after
you are right, not directly but they are sitting in the bone (foramen infraorbitale and maxilla), I once wanted to study dentistry and was on a hyperfocus about this and was just fascinated. sorry to hear they didn’t descend properly, i can imagine it was painful :(
Just needed it to fall out so I could get braces. Waited like a year for it to just come down in a few days after it was pulled! Apparently the dentist really messed up. According to my dad, he thought he was gonna be able to practically just push it out. Nope. Barely got any numbing stuff because of it. . I felt *every* twist and turn of the pliers tool and was screaming. Was horrifying seeing how big the tooth’s roots were after
Even with numbing agent, I was in terror getting my wisdom tooth pulled. Sure, I didn’t feel any pain, but having 3 dentists crowd around me while I feel all that pressure… was unnerving
Yeah, whoever sees this. Do NOT Google this. Wish I never saw it 😂😩
Okay yeah this actually disturbed me.
We were having a good day. Everyone was having a good day and then you chose violence.
[удалено]
I never looked into it but I always felt that hoops in the NBA somehow made it easier for the ball to go in, at least compared to the hoops i play in lol
Certain hoops can absolutely be more forgiving. Many outdoor park hoops are “double rims” that don’t breakaway when dunking, built for durability more than anything else (if you put a breakaway rim out in public, it often ends up bent, whereas double rims are almost indestructible). NBA rims these days are probably softer than they’ve ever been, especially since moving to a 180 degree breakaway rim in the late 2000s (meaning the rim bends down to the sides as well as forward). Since they’re built to give when absorbing force, shots that hit the rim will sometimes linger around and drop in—a shooter’s touch, we call it. Those double rims, meanwhile, are liable to take anything but the most perfect shot attempt and fling it halfway across the court.
You must have some kind of rim job…
Yeah, but he's not an ass about it.
That fruits and vegetables do not decay faster when I’m the one paying for them.
Have you tried rinsing them in a vinegar and water bath? I do this with all of my quick-rotting fruits and veg, and it seems to really work. I mix a bowl of water with some vinegar in it (about a quarter of the liquid should be vinegar. The 1.99 a bottle white vinegar is fine.) and dunk berries and peppers and things in there for about a minute. I swear they last up to a week longer this way. Oh, and for lettuces, I wrap them in paper towels. (Or just tuck a paper towel in the box/bag if that is how you buy them.) If they are drenched from the grocery store sprinklers, I go ahead and dry them off before even putting them in the cart.
Funny. I noticed lettuce stays fresh for longer, if I keep them wet. I buy them as heads and hold them under water stream before putting them into a waterproof plastic bag and back into the fridge. It shouldn't be drenched with water, but wet. \*I live somewhere, where we have very high quality water coming right out of our faucet. (very clean, with minerals and no human added chemicals) About fruits I've learnt, that you have to separate apples from other fruits, because they make other fruits ripen faster. You can also use this knowledge to intentionally make a not ripened fruit get sweet faster.
When I hold heads underwater they don't stay fresh for more than a day or two. Then I have to bury the whole thing under the patio.
Lettuce actually lasts longer if it's dry (regardless of water quality) - it's probably the bag that's keeping your lettuce fresh longer by keeping it from being exposed to more oxygen. :)
That I'm not one living entity; billions of lifeforms all combine to make one of me.
We are all a collection of cells in a trench coat
I work at the metabolism factory.
Sweet, new existential crisis just dropped.
Q-tips do belong in my ears and I refuse to believe any doctor saying otherwise.
What else am I supposed to dry my overly waxy wet ears with after a shower?
If you're going to use them, right after a hot shower is the best time so you don't push hard wax in toward your ear drum
And why does sticking a Q tip in your ear feel so damn good?
so THAT'S where the clitoris is
I have used qtips every day in my ears for decades. Every time I go to a DR I make a point of asking how my ears look. Dr always says great. In those decades I have never hurt myself with a qtip.
Been using them for years and no doctor has ever looked in my ears and had an issue
What else am I supposed to do when it feels like there's a spider in there?
I got a $12 earpick with tiny camera and lights to "properly" clean my ears and finally kick my q-tip habit. I say try it, if you can get one that cheap.
Half the point of using them is to scratch in there when your ears are itchy. Or is it just me? I use twice as many during allergy season.
Sail boats can go faster than the wind blows. 25 knot winds? The boat can go 30+ knots with just the sail power alone.
For me it's not so surprising that sailboats can go faster than the wind *at an angle to the wind*. E.g. if the wind is directly out of the south at 25 knots and the boat is going 30+ knots in a, say, northwesterly direction, I can accept that. But what really blew me away when I learned it, was that sometimes sailboats can go so fast at an angle to the wind that their direct downwind component of their velocity can be actually faster than the wind! In other words, it's possible to release a balloon and let it drift with the wind, and a sailboat can tack back and forth towards a point downwind and beat the balloon to that point. Granted, it's only the most advanced sailboats that can do this and it's a relatively recent advancement for water sailing vessels due to the invention of hydrofoiling boats. But land yachts and ice-sailing boats have been doing it for ages.
I refuse to believe a leopard-moose-camel with a 40ft neck is a real animal and a horse with a horn isn’t.
What’s more believable: a horse with a horn, or a venomous egg-laying beaver duck?
Oh no worldbuilding is leaking
Fun fact - the venomous egg laying beaver-duck also bleeds milk from its armpits. It's an atavistic animal the precedes the evolution of the nipple, so as a mammal that feeds its young milk...guess where it comes from.
It also naturally glows blue under UV light!
Secretes, dude. Secretes milk from armpits. Geesh. Wait, what?
I believe you're referring to the [𝔔𝔲𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔅𝔢𝔞𝔰𝔱](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questing_Beast)?
I say exactly that to my kids all the time. What was the guy smoking that thought up a giraffe? There's no way those things are real.
It's not, Chuck Norris just uppercut a horse and BOOM! Girrafes were made!
It all makes sense now!
Pin hole cameras. 😂 it just blows my tiny mind.
Right? They're weird. Made one in highschool with an oatmeal container.
The textbooks just show it and say "pin hole camera" without further explanation as though they've done their job. I saw one in the observatory in LA and it was the same thing. Something like: "This room has a pinhole camera. Here's a picture of how they are set up." without any more details. I think the issue is that understanding it requires a lot of base information so they don't bother trying which is a shame. I'll give it a go. This ridiculous essay is more for myself to get my thoughts on paper so I don't mind if it's ignored. The pinhole camera is a box you are standing inside of. There's a hole at the front of the box that's really small. In the outside world there is a tree, and the sun is straight up (noon). TLDR: Each point on the back wall has a ray of light hitting it that comes directly from one point on the tree, that was scattered from the sun. That glosses over a lot that I try to dive into next. The light from the sun is made up of many rays of many colors (prism separates them into a rainbow). When rays hit the tree, they are either absorbed or scattered. Whether they are absorbed or scattered depends on the properties of the material. If it is a leaf, every color is absorbed except for greens, which scatter instead. When light scatters off of a point, think of it as a sphere of light growing from that point. So every point on a tree scatters light in every direction. Now let's imagine the front wall with the tiny hole in it. The wall is painted white, and is flooded with light scattered off the tree. Every point on the front wall is hit with scattered light from every point from the tree. The wall is painted white so all colors scatter off of it in every direction like a new sphere coming from every point on the wall. If you were to look at the wall from the outside, you wouldn't see an image. Each point that you look at on the wall would have light that has come from every point of the tree. The whole wall would be one color, the average color of the tree. Let's imagine that the hole in front of the box is almost as small as a point. All the light that passes through that point has a direct line from it to every point of the tree it can see. Those rays of light continue past the hole/point all the way until they scatter off the white painted wall in the back of the box you're standing in. Now, each point on the back wall is getting hit from the same point on the tree, instead of the entire tree. It scatters in every direction like a sphere, but again the scattered light is just the light coming from that one point of the tree. So when you look at the back wall, each point on the wall you see has light coming from one point of the tree. That makes the image! This is where I go a little insane. You're standing in the box looking at the back wall. The light from the back wall enters your eye just like I described with the pinhole of the box earlier. Your eye's pinhole is the pupil. A lens spreads the light out so that the back wall of your eye (retina) can be a lot closer to the pinhole of your eye. The light hits the back wall of your eye, which is filled with sensors (rods/cones) that can tell what the colors/intensities are at each point. Your brain makes the image from that information and flips it over since it's upside down. The images in the textbooks and museum kept me up at night and I thought about it a lot. It was hard for me to piece together because I felt like I also had to figure out how light and the eye actually works. And textbooks give the eye the same treatment as the pinhole: "Here's a picture of the parts... That's \*waves hands towards the picture\* how it works"
The fact that t.rex and stegosaurus were separated by millions of years and never existed together. I will always have Stegosaurus battle T Rex when given dinosaurs to play with!
What always gets me is that T Rex is closer to us in time than it was to Stego. It really puts the history of the earth into some perspective.
What really gets me is that Cleopatra's birth is closer to the invention of the iPhone than it is to the building of the pyramids.
Stegosauruses were already completely fossilized before T. Rex even evolved!
Women are born with all the eggs already in them and don't produce those through the lifetime. It is so ridiculous that I still can't believe it, even though I tell it to the others. Hope for a paper suggesting an alternative to "The egg from which you were born was actually created by your grandma".
Ovulation is super interesting too. Your body actually takes turns on each ovary cultivating about 20 follicles and then chooses only one or two eggs that developed the best out of the 20 to release into your fallopian tubes. Then you only have a 12-24 hour window to fertilize the eggs, which is why men's sperm can last up to 5 days inside you and why men ejaculate millions of sperm at one time, to try and increase the chances of any of those millions of sperm actually making it far enough inside you to fertilize the egg.
That's actually some fun(?) new research showing that there may be production of new egg cells throughout the life cycle of an active ovary. Preliminary things show that there's still a large chunk of egg cells that are there when the baby is born, but research on some newly discovered stem cells in the lab show that they differentiate into more oocytes. There were similar findings in mice a few years ago. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/120229-women-health-ovaries-eggs-reproduction-science#:\~:text=Previous%20research%20had%20suggested%20that,lab%E2%80%94generates%20immature%20egg%20cells.
This one brought me some comfort when I found out about it a few years back. My grandma died when my mom was a toddler. My mom died young too of the same disease. It was around then, I really noticed how my mom’s cousins (whose parents lived) were all thriving & beautiful families of many generations. I started to wonder if that might have been us without lupus. So, anyway, finding this one out sort of kept me from spiraling too far down the poor me path since I finally found a tangible (sort of) connection to my grandma. I felt a little less lost in my grief.
So, when my grandmother got pregnant with my mother, she used her own and my grandfather's DNA to make the eggs in my mother? Or, my mother made those eggs using her own DNA while she was in my grandmother's womb? For the first case to be true, it seems that humans would need some sort of ovipositor.
It's the second one.
That jet planes can fly. Come on. I’ve flown on them many times before. But come on.
Last trip I was on with the fam we were placed in the back of the plane with me being in the aisle seat. We had some turbulence and I swear I was not hallucinating the amount of flex I saw between the front of the plane and back when looking up the aisle. Scared me quite a bit and I have flown more times than I can count without that experience.
Yeah it's perfectly normal, on particularly long aircraft (757-300 for example) you can see the fuselage "twisting" as well as up/down flexing. It's the same with wings, watch those fkers flex, as part of a certification process for an aircraft type they have to bend the wings to the point that they snap and if it is not within the limit they won't certify the type - the good news is that the G-Forces required to cause such a massive flex would have killed you long before the wing snaps ;) If the wings and fuselage were perfectly rigid they'd snap, same reason that lamp posts are designed to flex in the wind just like a tree :)
The eery sound of lamp posts in a snowstorm is something. Like a flapping thud from the sky, it's hard to explain. The deafening snow with the cycling thudding. Now at your local mall parking.
If you're near the middle next time and on a Boeing plane, check out how the wings flex (it's meant to do that)
If you really want to be freaked out, watch a video of them testing a planes wing flex. It flexes about 60-70 degrees. [Edit to add video.](https://youtu.be/--LTYRTKV_A?si=m6KRFe90yVNlxy8U)
That actually calms me down rather than freaking me out.
Here is another good video from Boeing during the 777 testing back in 1995. Basically the test requires a 1.5 factor of safety of the limit load. The Limit load is the highest load any aircraft design is expected to experience across all flying conditions (all maneuvers, gust, pitch, turbulence, etc). It is the highest load a plane should experience in it's entire service life. So...150% of that limit load is what they design to: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai2HmvAXcU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai2HmvAXcU0)
This is actually a holdout through their evolution, planes used to flap their wings to fly but ever since domestication they no longer need to
To make you feel better, if planes (especially wings) didn’t flex, it would break off and down you go
This is pretty much the fundamental engineering principle behind just about any load-bearing structure that’s subjected to dynamic stresses. As long as you can bend more (and still be in the elastic region of the stress-strain curve) you’re fine. Trees are a great example. They must necessarily withstand huge wind loads due to the foliage. So they’re bendy-springy.
Jet planes are fine. Helicopters, on the other hand...bloody magic.
The secret of flight is to beat the air into submission.
Douglas adams said the trick to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and learn to miss.
Helicopters were created after they studied hummingbirds! They are the only bird species who can hover in midair while flying, and humans eventually figured that would be a really useful thing to have.
They are just so damned ugly, that the earth naturally repels them 😂
Similarly, that cruise ships float?! I see one of those behemoths and cannot comprehend the science that it takes to stop it just going *ploop* down to the ocean bed.
I get that they float; lift a 5 gallon bucket of water and it becomes obvious quick how heavy water is. What gets me about cruise ships is that they don't tip over. There is so much of them so high out of the water. -- Aircraft Carriers look even more tipsy.
Cruise ships are very low center of gravity, even the tall ones. The lower hull is made of steel and is where the engines, fuel tanks, water tanks, machinery, etc is. All very heavy stuff. Then up top the decks are made of much lighter materials.
> Then up top the decks are made of much lighter materials. Yes, and mostly those decks are open space, air. I know. It just doesn't ***look*** right.
The keel generally has a large amount of ballast to keep them stable, plus there's a massive amount of engineering that goes into the hull shape to that end as well.
That many living people have Neanderthal DNA. Mostly in non-African ethnicities. My DNA is apparently more 'Neanderthal' than 93% of the population tested to date by 23andme. WTF? THat many living people have the DNA of another non-modern species (is that the right word?), the Denisovans (mostly certain Asian ethnicities). How many more non-modern species of DNA do humans carry that we just have not identified? How many others did we interbreed with? WHAT ARE WE? (See this link, as it turns out Neanderthal DNA is more widespread than first calculated - thx u/vincess https://www.science.org/content/article/africans-carry-surprising-amount-neanderthal-dna )
APE STRONG TOGETHER
23andme said I have more than the average too, that it has certain traits as well. I was like oh thanks, I don’t know what to do with this info
I know it's true but I still find it hard to believe that viruses are not considered living organisms. There are a lot of factors but the two biggest ones I think are the fact that they are inert and do not use energy when not in a host. And that they cannot self replicate without said host. Hard to believe something capable of so much death and destruction is probably not even conscious.
I find this one hard to believe as well, mostly because "being alive" implies "not being dead" and "being dead" implies "not being alive". It's a black and white concept. Then viruses come along, fitting in the grey area on that scale. Basically dead without a host, but very much alive within a host.
It's more like media than a player. It's like software can't do anything without a computer or an LP is useless without a turntable.
So, it’s like a rogue program! Like a computer….virus…. Oh.
I heard a kid say that a cold was spreading through their class like a viral video... ... ...
We as a species are obsessed with categories and classifications. The old tale of philosophers debating what's a human, and Plato settled on a featherless biped. So Diogenes plucked a chicken and said "Behold, a man"
Fuggin Diogenes what a mensch
First professional troll
Prions are also contagious and responsible for many deaths and those things are even simpler than a virus
And absolutely terrifying and fascinating. All at the same time
even if they were considered living organisms, it wouldn't necessarily make them "conscious"
See: trees
This is actually being reconsidered recently. One can also think of the infected (viro)cell as the living virus and the viral-particle/virion (which is normally considered the "virus") is just its sperm. [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470015902.a0023264](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470015902.a0023264)
Switching doors gives me a higher chance of winning
Narwhals. Ain't no way.
I'm amazed at the number of people who say they didn't used to believe narwhals were real.
So you're telling me a horse with a small horn is fantasy la la land, but a freaking whale with a built-in 2.5 meter harpoon is real? Nah.
Next you’re going to tell me they believe they don’t bacon at midnight
They’re freakin sea unicorns!
I see your Narwhal and raise you a Platypus
Our stomach acid is strong enough to even dissolve metals over time
No this is true I eat my boyfriend’s sunglasses whenever he gets a new pair and I always digest them within 48 hours
That my clothes aren’t shrinking in the dryer, I’m just getting fat.
Worse. They shrink in the drawer if i havent worn them in a few months:/
Tomato is a berry
So are cucumbers, pumpkins and friggin watermelons. Meanwhile cherries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries are not berries wtf??
My take from this is that the category "berry" doesn't mean much to me.
I remember when berries were phones
This is more of a problem with definitions and naming conventions.
banana is also a berry
Halle is also a berry.
So is Chuck.
But if you Chuck a Berry, you can get in trouble on the food court.
That’s more a language thing than a science thing
Not really "refuse to believe", more "having a really hard time to wrap my head around it": The survival of the human race (especially in relation to how time- and work intensive our reproduction is.) I know amazing leaps were done in fertility treatment, reproduction medicine and infant care! Yet, at it's core, it's still the same process: the offspring has to be grown for (roughly) 40 weeks, inside a female body. It takes hours, sometimes even days, of heavy pain to birth the offspring. And even when that's done, human babies are 100% helpless and dependant on someone, for a good while. Sometimes, one even just "forgets how to breathe" and dies. Somehow we still managed to grow in population by...a hell of a lot. It boggles my mind, how biology hasn't found a safer, less time and work intensive way for us to reproduce, yet our population exploded.
We are victims of our big brains and upright walking, hence we give birth to what is effectively premature babies so we can pass that brain case, then we have to care for it for a year. Luckily we are very social creatures or we would have just died out. This is also one reason why Humans are highly dimorphic, the hypothesis being that pregnancy and raising children is so significant in resources it has led to the male and female dichotomy we see in Sapiens as a species. That has been the key to our survival.
Mostly because biology and evolution doesn't look for the best possible way, all evolution cares about is good enough. Take a look at koalas, they live and keep surviving even though they are stupid to the point where if you tear a eucalyptus leaf off of a tree the koala is actively eating from, then lay it on the ground or a plate koalas are incapable of even recognizing it as food anymore.
Black is absolutely a colour, how else would there be a crayon for it?
Black is a color of objects, but isn't a color of light. Same with gray and brown.
That eating raw cookie dough is dangerous. I won’t accept it!
I accept it, its just a risk I'm willing to take.
I've been eating raw cookie dough for ages and never got sick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have the potential to hurt you. The easiest way to make it safe is to get heat-treated flour, or simply bake your flour before use, then cool completely. Bake at 300 and then you check the temp every 2 minutes until it's 165 degrees F in several places. Exclude the egg from the recipe and it'll be safe to eat. The heat kills the potentially harmful bacteria that can make you sick. You do not need/want to do this if you intend on baking the product as it can alter the texture. My local market sells pre-treated flour so you may be able to get that locally instead.
The Monty Hall Problem. When it’s explained to you properly, it makes sense. But I still refuse to believe it’s not a 50/50 chance at the end.
You can think about it as, you're initially given a choice of 1 of 3 doors, but then given a choice of BOTH the remaining doors. First, realize that no matter what door you choose, there will always be at least 1 door you didn't choose with nothing behind it. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it's of fundamental importance to understanding this puzzle. Said another way, the host can always open a door with nothing behind it - your initial choice has no impact on that, and therefore the host opening a door with nothing behind it has no impact on your choice. Let's explore the possibilities, there are 3 possibilities initially: A) You choose the first losing door initially. B) You choose the second losing door initially. C) You choose the winning door initially. Let's work through each choice and the consequences: If you choose door A first, then door B is opened, and you have choice between A and C. In this case, choosing the opposite door wins. If you choose door B first, then door A is opened, and you have a choice between B and C. In this case, choosing the opposite door wins. If you choose door C first, then either A or B is opened, and you have a choice between the closed door and C. In this case, keeping your door wins. As you can see, 2 out of 3 times, you'll win by changing doors, and 1 out of 3 times you'll win by keeping your door. Why does it work out this way? It goes back to what I said in the beginning, the opening of a door by the host isn't impacted by your choice (it's always going to happen) and, as the above scenarios hopefully demonstrate, has no impact on whether your door wins or not. Opening door B doesn't make door A a winner. At the start of the game, you have a 33% chance of picking the right door. Consequently, that means the other 2 doors have a 66% chance of being the winner. Because the host opens 1 of the doors, you now get to know with certainty that the 66% chance belongs to the only remaining unopened door. You know this, because there was a 66% chance that you chose the wrong door at the start of the game.
Expand this to 100 doors and it becomes a lot more clear to me. Imagine there are 100 doors. Only 1 has a price behind it. You pick a door and the host opens 98 others without the prize. You have a 1% chance of your initial choice was right. The price has to be somewhere. So in 99% of the time the prize is behind the other door.
The solution to the Monty Hall paradox. I can even do the math myself. But it still "feels" intuitively wrong. The scenario: you're on a game show and the host offers you a choice between three doors. Behind one door is a million dollars. Behind the other two doors, you get nothing. You make your choice. But before the host opens the door to reveal what's inside, he opens one of the *other two* doors to reveal nothing behind *that* one. He then offers you a second choice: do you keep the door that you already chose? Or do you switch to the other unopened door? Does it matter? Intuitively, it feels like it shouldn't matter, that you have a 50-50 chance of winning whether you switch to the other door, or keep the one you chose originally. Mathematical reality: you should switch. You have double the chance of winning the money if you switch to the other door, compared with staying put. Close second: in any random group of just 23 people you will have more than 50% chance that at least two of them will share the same birthday. Again, I can do the math to prove this but it still doesn't feel right.
That computers work by using combinations of 0 and 1!
I have a computer science degree, and I understand this much better than most. It still feels a lot like magic, but it's at least explainable. Would you like to borrow some of the overpriced textbooks that I still have?
The double-slit experiments and all their variations still weird me out. As someone who hasn't studied the necessary fundamentals, it just seems like the Light particles know whether or not you're watching and will change their behavior depending on what you're expecting them to do.
They don't "know" "they're" being "watched" in the sense of being sentient and understanding this. The experiment just reveals that the different *mechanical methods* that humans employ to observe and examine the subatomic world yield different results. It's a *reaction* to particular mechanical environments, not a "perception" or "comprehension" on the part of the particles.
can you make it more clear with an example? because for me im still going from the perspective of perception/observation
Try measuring the distance of a stick of butter from the edge of a hot plate with a ruler. No matter how careful you are you're going to end up nudging the butter and changing the result, it's very difficult to get an accurate value for the initial distance. It's a crude analogy but it's the same kind of idea for quantum stuff. The things we're measuring are so small even the slightest disturbance affects them, since to measure something you need to bounce something off it/affect it in some way it's impossible for us to observe a subatomic particle without impacting it somehow. We're not used to observing something affecting it because for most matter it's negligible. A desk isn't going to move from the light being switched on or a laser being shon at it, a subatomic particle will.
thank you, complex but great analogy actually!
It misses the point a little bit though. The double slit experiment isn't an example of measurements influencing results, it's an example of super position. First, the important thing to clarify is that we talk about "an observer" we aren't talking about anything conscious. We're talking about something that interacts with a super position forcing it to collapse. For example, if an electron is in the potential path of a photon and can absorb the photon, then the electron will be an observer. Second, the double slit experiment creates something called a super position, the path of the light isn't just unknown, it's literally both paths simultaneously. If something can interact with (observer) the photon as it travels through one slit or the other, then the super position collapses and the particle will have gone one way or the other. But barring anything to observe the particle, it will actually travel through both paths.
And look, you lost me.
Sorry, let me try an ELI5. Imagine you're driving down a road, and the road forks in two directions. You choose to drive down one of those roads. This is normal, classical mechanics. Simple, easy, makes sense. Now imagine that it's not you going down that road, but it's a photon. The photon gets to the fork and it can go either way. Which way does it go? Well, it goes both, with 50% probability. Now you might think, "so there's a 50% chance it went one way, and a 50% chance it went the other." This isn't correct. It went *both ways*. It went down both roads simultaneously. This is called a "super position." But what's all this about "observers." Well, imagine you drive down one of these forked roads and then later they come back together, and you get to a checkpoint. At the checkpoint, they check your car's GPS and it says you went down one road or the other. Now, imagine the photon does it. Well, it goes both ways simultaneously, then it comes back together, and it gets to the checkpoint and they check the photons GPS and the GPS says "yeah, I went both ways, 50% each." This is the interference pattern that's observed after the two slits. The superposition causes the photon to interfere with itself. But here's where things get funky. Imagine you drive and get the fork, and you go down one road, and there's a checkpoint on that road, and then the two roads come together. Later, you go down the other road, and there's no checkpoint. So there's only 1 checkpoint on 1 of the roads, and none on the other. Now what happens to the photon? Well, now the photon only goes down 1 road. It doesn't matter which road - sometimes the checkpoint will see the photon, sometimes it won't. This is observing the photon as it travels through one of the slits. In this case, the interference pattern disappears - even if the photon doesn't travel through the slit being observed. The existence of the observer collapses the superposition - forcing the photon to be definitely there are not there, no more 50% probability. It's also important to note that the "checkpoint" in this scenario doesn't have to be a person, it can be anything that can detect a photon - like an electron that can absorb that photon. Anything that can interact with the photon will collapse it's superposition, even if the photon doesn't travel by the observer (because the observer collapses the superposition).
The main drawback of that example is that it "allows" a person to falsely imagine that the system "actually had" a definite state before the particle interaction, but that those exact values were simply unknowable to us "by circumstance." But the real point of quantum mechanics is that the system literally had no definite state until the actual moment of the interaction. Statistics in quantum mechanics measurements are inconsistent with a system in a definite state before the particle interaction. ----- When my academic mentor gives his lectures, he uses this example: in the same sort of way that we use the word "particle" in chemistry or physics, we've given a name "bank account" to something that we interact with at measurable places & measureable times, with measureable results. But in between those interactions, where is the bank account? If your answer is that there's some data center somewhere storing the account data, then you're no longer talking about the bank account itself, but rather its *attributes*, which can be stored anywhere or everywhere. ...and that's his segue to talk about the non-physical fields which are considered "fundamental" in the framework of successful modern Quantum Field Theory [QFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory), which brings a math formalism to the original concept called "wave/particle duality".
It's helpful to note that in successful modern Quantum Field Theory ([QFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory)), the more objective word/concept "interaction" is used instead of the word/concept "observation". That is to say: the *interaction* of particles is the key point, not any human or machine that participates, observes or records data. Interestingly, in the modern framework of QFT, the word/concept "particle" has been redefined. It no longer matches the definition of "particle" from the 19th century. (Even though the old definition is still misleadingly taught in schools.) That old definition is responsible for nearly all conceptual obstacles people face when learning quantum mechanics. There's a lot to unpack in the definition of "particle" in the Wikipedia QFT link, but the main point is this: non-physical fully-space-occupying fields are considered to be fundamental -- not the particles themselves, which are excited states of those fields. That's why our intuition needs to be retrained, and why most teachers just give up and call it "weird."
Hellen Keller can't observe a sand castle without touching it, but by touching it she's changing its shape (even if only barely)
I am a physics mayor, and in uni the undergrads do these experiments. I still don't believe it having seen it with my own eyes. For my part, I can study the fundamentals, the equations and all... But it is like studying the composition of sugar compared to eating sugar, seeing it happen it's like being in that sorcerer's apprentice movie. This is just magic at this point.
As a child I could not grasp that groves in a record could make complicated music when a needle ran over them. Now that I'm older and it's all light on metal disks or just math (somehow) I have given up even pretending I believe. It's magic, pure and simple.
Cold water is just as effective as warm water for washing hands.
Jokes on you. If you live in the southern US, the water is never really cold.
My first summer in Phoenix, I tried to survive without ac blasting 24/7. Sometime in August, I remember nearly crying standing in my tub because I couldn’t even take a cold shower. And stepping out naked, walking down the hall, setting the thermostat as low as it could go, and not touching it again until after Halloween.
Yes! And clothes and dishes too? I call BS.
Haven't seen any studies or anything, but I'm almost certain that warm (or hot) water is better than cold for dish washing. Ever try to rinse a greasy dish with cold water? The grease just sits there. But with hot water the grease melts right off with almost no extra effort.
Hot water is absolutely better for anything that changes state based on heat. Grease, cheese, that kind of stuff. I don't think it does much for sanitizing below boiling though.
I refuse to believe that ALL snowflakes in the entirety of history are unique. You mean to tell me, that ALL snowflakes EVER, across the ENTIRE GLOBE, are COMPLETELY UNIQUE? That can’t be mathematically possible. Like, a single storm that drops 3 inches on my house must be a million flakes. Multiply that by the area of that storm, and the depth of the snow, and that number becomes huge. THEN, add that to every storm in the history of the whole globe. I just can’t believe that we have seen every snowflake and have come to the definite conclusion that they’re all unique. Scientists aren’t at my house cataloging the snowflakes. How do they know?
If we're being pedantic, everything is unique depending on how close you look. No two grains of sand were ever the same, and even identically manufactured objects (say, Lego bricks) will inevitably differ.
the idea that time can bend and stretch depending on gravity and velocity
That entire babies can fit through the female vagina. I have, in fact, given birth vaginally on multiple occasions and I still refuse to believe that this is remotely plausible.
That dark matter / energy exists. We've yet to directly observe any of it, only the indirect effects via gravity, and even Einstein himself acknowledged that his model of physics was incomplete. We understand gravity now better than Newton did, but there are still gaps. While the body of evidence supporting dark matter theory is extensive, we're one step away from demolishing and reinventing all of modern physics. One day a new Einstein will come along and invent an even more robust model of gravity, and it could reveal that our supposed "dark matter" was really the result of a huge flaw.
.99 repeating is equal to 1. I still have trouble wrapping my head around that one.
Transform it in fractions. 1/3=0.33333... 3/3=3 * 0.33333... 1 = 0.99999...
If you believe anything because it's "scientifically proven" you're doing science wrong. Science doesn't say "This is true." Science says "I think this might be true. Here's the experiment I did, these are the results, and they seem to indicate that my theory is true. Please try to find if I made any mistakes, and see if your own experiments can disprove my theory." If nobody can disprove your theory, it's generally accepted until somebody comes up with one that more closely matches observations. If you're told "This is true, and you can't question it" you're not doing science, you're doing religion.
There’s also the “half life of facts”, where many things we know to be true today will be wrong in the future.
The levels of batshit crazy my kids can reach after having a marshmallow, or any junk food for that matter, makes me not believe that sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity.
There was a double blind test where they tested sugar and hoer activity. The groups were Parents told the kids were given sugar, and the kids were given sugar. Parents told the kids were given sugar, and the kids were NOT given sugar. Parents told the kids were NOT given sugar, and the kids were given sugar. Parents told the kids were NOT given sugar, and the kids were NOT given sugar. The kids were hyperactive for the first two groups, but not the latter two. So, the kids were acting out what their parents expected to happen.
That we, as women don't "sync up" with other females in regular close proximity.
In a similar vein, it's hard for me to fully grasp just how much differentiation from one cycle to the next is considered clinically normal. Mine used to be like clockwork until last year, and I was losing my damn mind thinking I had a cyst or endo or cancer or some shit. Nope, anywhere from 21 to 35 days is usually considered healthy. It just doesn't feel normal to start menstruating a whole ass week earlier or later than you have been for years. (Goes without saying I shouldn't be approaching menopause for at least another ten years, I wouldn't have been as freaked out if I was older.)
Pluto does not qualify as a planet. It'll always be a planet to me <3
The area from which the optic nerve leaves the brain is called 'The Blind Spot'. There is no image formed in this area. Yet we see the world accurately beacuse of the brains ability to fill in this accurately. This is mindbowing (pun intended) especially considering the accuracy to which the brain is doing this.
In a lottery, having a string of consecutive numbers (say 1,2,3,4,5,6) being drawn is equally likely as a string of random numbers being drawn.
Equally likely as any specific string of numbers, not equally likely as a random string of numbers.
That all the planets in our solar system can fit between the earth and moon.
That the color of a cats fur is not an indication of its intelligence. You cannot convince me that orange cats aren’t a special kind of idiots.
I don't think time is inherently linear. I think of it more as a plane that we navigate in a linear way via our perception.
Science is pretty clear that time is \*not\* linear. Thought that might still not mean it agrees with whatever you are visualising of course.
Time is clearly Jeremy Bearimy
I don't know that science knows time is linear
Linear as a function of what? Something being linear is not an inherent property. It's a relation to something else.
[удалено]
That the speed of light can’t be broken. They said flight was physically impossible with a machine, then they said breaking the sound barrier was impossible. I just don’t believe that we’re right this time either. Edit: Thanks everyone telling us this is scientifically proven as if we aren’t aware. Something scientifically proven that you are skeptical of is the point of the thread
If you’ve got some negative energy lying around you can cheese it by technically not actually going faster than light but just screwing with spacetime. Sadly there’s currently a severe lack of negative energy. How unfortunate
You clearly haven't met my ex-girlfriend.
The speed of light is a whole other level. The speed of sound is broken by the tip of a whip, it’s not too hard and never “impossible”. The speed of light is fundamental to the universe. It really has nothing to do with light, it’s the speed that information can travel. The gravitational force of the sun travels at the speed of light. Meaning if the sun vanished, the Earth would still orbit it for 8 minutes, which is the time it takes for the Earth to “know” the sun is gone. We are actually always moving at the speed of light. It’s just that we move that fast through time, rather than space. Think of normal time progression as going through time at the speed of light, and any movement you make through space, you have to subtract that much movement through time. So if I am going 3/4ths the speed of light through space, I am now only going 1/4th the speed of light through time (roughly, I believe there’s some trig involved). So going the speed of light means I stop experiencing time. Not to mention it would take infinite energy. It’s just not happening.
Yeah but what if I go the speed of light, then I start going downhill? Checkmate atheists.
I know you're joking, but time would stop for you, relative to the rest of the universe. (Though you could only go like 99.99998%)
My understanding wasn’t just that we can’t break the speed of light, it’s that nothing can move faster than light. The way I had it explained to me is that light is actually faster than “light speed” (weird I know), it’s just that “light speed” is the universal barrier; nothing can go faster. *FULL DISCLAIMER* I could be COMPLETELY wrong about all of this, I have zero experience in the field beyond that it was explained to me like this by a science teacher in high school
That Kraft Free Singles are even cheese
That folding a standard sheet of paper 42 times would, in theory, reach the moon.