For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
There are only 24 episodes of the initial run of The Jetsons and only 25 of Scooby Doo. They got aired as reruns for decades before more episodes were made. There are only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean.
Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he'll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy
It's even crazier because you don't need to reach the speed of light. It'll happen in a smaller degree for any speed. Even in mundane conditions.
For example, if your twin spent four days in a 300km/h bullet train, for you it would be four days plus a second.
Usually this difference is negligible, but for satellites (that run at rather high speeds, for a lot of time, and require precision), if you don't take time dilation into account they misbehave.
(For anyone wanting to mess with the maths, the formula is Δt' = Δt / √[1 - v²/c²]. Δt = variation of time for the observer (you), Δt' = variation of time for the moving entity (your twin), v = the moving entity's speed, c = speed of light. Just make sure that "v" and "c" use the same units.)
Yes I knew about that and I'm glad that doesn't make it crazier for me, instead it makes it easier to accept. If it were something that happened only after hitting some arbitrary speed value I'd be a lot more mentally damaged
To be fair the only ones that don't get mentally damaged at all with this stuff are theoretical physicists. After all being crazy makes you immune to further madness.
From what I understand, you are always travelling at the speed of light through space/time, but when you move at high speeds through space that shifts the proportion of your speed out of the time dimension. And a photon travels only through space, experiencing no time between the time it was emitted and the time it was absorbed. What I just can't wrap my head around is the concept of travelling at some speed without involving the time dimension at all.
I wish we could test this out with only simple apparatus. Unfortunately the common people do not have access to satellites or nonstop bullet trains.
We can and do. GPS satellites need to be regularly calibrated to Earth clock signals or they'll start to drift their calibration by meters per day.
If you get 23 people in a room the odds of two of them sharing a birthday are 50%
The birthday paradox is a veridical paradox: it seems wrong at first glance but is, in fact, true. While it may seem surprising that only 23 individuals are required to reach a 50% probability of a shared birthday, this result is made more intuitive by considering that the birthday comparisons will be made between every possible pair of individuals. With 23 individuals, there are (23 × 22)/2 = 253 pairs to consider, far more than half the number of days in a year.
it's not part of the paradox, but there are also days when people tend to have more sex
like new years, valentines, christmas etc. (in the west at least)
so you tend to get more people born 9 months after those daysThis seems like a logistical nightmare for all systems related to pregnancy and childcare if it were to actually become a popular thing, like damn, just pay people for having kids its not that hard
In high school my graduating class was 38. The one before us was 21, the one after 18.
Coincidently there was a massive blizzard that snowed everybody into their house for a week about 9 months before my birthday.
Yeah that's why so many people have birthdays in September
! I just assumed, lol
They have an episode where they talk about the birthday paradox and then follow it up with talking about how the math isn’t 100% correct as applied to humans bc birthdays aren’t normally distributed.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/630/transcript#:~:text=A%20simple%20way%20to%20think,those%20two%20share%20a%20birthday.
Blows my mind how this by its bare bones is just simple statistics and combinations but is a totally different story when described in English. I'm sure there are similar facts like this that are mathematically logical but to a layman is confusing and inconceivable.
I'm sure there are similar facts like this that are
mathematically logicalmaterially sound but to anlaymanamerican it's confusing and inconceivablecommunism
The concept of a room is malleable. Go to a 22 person tf2 server and ask birthdays.
Sorry, but I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say. If you have questions you can click on the Wikipedia link!
That's completely wrong lol. Nowhere is there an assumption that birthdays are randomized each time, you just don't understand the math.
There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.
Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you, and through the sharing of experiences and affection, if nothing goes excessively wrong, they become unique for you.
I mean, you should be extra kind to most people most of the time. Comunism begins at home.
The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.
Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
There's about 25 blimps in the world, and only 40-50 pilots.
doesn't really fit the thread, but i was surprised when i learned that the empire state building has a blimp docking station
Show
The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.
The relatively short time humanity has been around
The universe is finite but expanding
The Monty Hall problem
The absolute scale of devastation created by humanity
I may be wrong but I thought it was generally believed that the Universe is infinite (or at least that that was the most common belief among those that are qualified in the field)
Edit: I mean infinite in Space, of course it hasn't existed forever
Edit2: I quickly read this article https://www.swinburne.edu.au/news/2021/08/Is-space-infinite-we-asked-5-experts/ where the 3 astronomers answered maybe, yes, and yes. Whereas the two non-astronomers answered no. Since this seems to agree with me I will believe that this is correct and not investigate further
We humans are roughly as big compared to atoms and subatomic particles as we are small compared to the largest structures of the observable universe
The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.
The telescoping nature of progress
The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.
This one makes Fermi's Paradox far more confusing and terrifying to me. The time it took to go from agriculture to the steam engine is nothing compared to the age of the universe, absolutely nothing, and from the steam engine to modern technology is fuck ton nothing.
An intelligent species could go from stone age technology to nuclear weapons in the blink of an eye.
And that's just life as we understand it. We have no idea if we're the equivalent of Flatland in a higher spatial dimension or something. There could be stars with entire civilizations of plasma-based intelligent life churning inside of them. There could be intelligent civilizations lurking in each and every single subatomic particle.
It's possible no matter how far out or far in we look, we just keep finding more universe, more space for something to inhabit, forever...
As they said on
, if we look everywhere and we're the only intelligent species anywhere in this universe ... well that would be weirder than if life is hiding all over the universe.
Quantum superpositioning. Schrödinger was right, it's absolutely ridiculous and the cat can't be alive and dead at the same time, box or not.
The problem is it provably does work that way, or at least in a way that is indistinguishable from it, ridiculous or not, and we don't really know why. We've learnt many of the rules, managed to trap particles in superimposed states, even discovered that plants take advantage of it to transport energy more efficiently, and it's just a thing that happens, an apparently fundamental rule of existence. And it doesn't make any fucking sense.
I’ve kind of always assumed it was a problem of observation, which is what a lot of folks talk about re Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat knows if it’s alive (obv won’t know if it’s dead), but from the outside it’s unobservable.
A lot of quantum mechanics (to my understanding) is impossible for us to understand because we can’t observe it without impacting its behavior. But if it had consciousness, it would know what state it’s in.
This is super armchair headcannon shit, but it’s what I’ve taken from everything I’ve read on the subject.
Observation in quantum physics isn't about a consciousness being able to see it happen, but about it interacting with the universe in a way that could potentially be measured. There doesn't need to be a physical observer, just a theoretically measurable result of it interacting with something.
Copied from my other reply because I’m curious what you might think too:
Yea I didn’t convey myself well.
Our ability to observe the effect, at this point in time, results in us disturbing the thing.
Like with Schödinger’s cat, in order to observe the outcome we have to open the box which may result in the poison being released and killing the cat. So if we open the box and the cat is dead, it may be due to our interference rather than the gas being released by the radioactive decay. In order to know the position of the cat, we’d have to be able to see through the box in a way that doesn’t impact the outcome of the experiment. Yet, the cat is either dead or alive, it’s just unknowable to us due to our inability to observe the cat without disturbing the scenario. Only the cat really knows if it’s alive.
Similarly, we largely don’t have great ways to observe quantum happenings because our technology to measure the outcomes disturbs whatever we’re observing. Yet, the thing a we’re looking at either are or are not happening the way we posit, our ability to know doesn’t change that.
Ah, I see what you mean - that the superposition is a model of our uncertainty of unobserved actions, rather than the actual state of the particle. While that was my understanding initially too (because it makes sense) our testing, things like the double slit experiment, has shown behaviours that only make sense if they do occupy both states simultaneously. Quantum computing is actually reliant on qubits being in a 0/1 superposition for it to work. It's what makes the entire thing so maddening, because experimental evidence has disproven every attempt to make it make sense.
First thing my quantum mechanics professor told us was that if you think you understand quantum mechanics you definitely do not understand quantum mechanics. He was at the time one of the world's leading experts on quantum applications, and had just proven the existence of an additional state of matter that quantum theory predicted, and straight up told us to our faces that he didn't understand it, he just knew that it works.
Consciousness has nothing to do with it, observe in this case means "affected something we can measure".
Yea I didn’t convey myself well.
Our ability to observe the effect, at this point in time, results in us disturbing the thing.
Like with Schödinger’s cat, in order to observe the outcome we have to open the box which may result in the poison being released and killing the cat. So if we open the box and the cat is dead, it may be due to our interference rather than the gas being released by the radioactive decay. In order to know the position of the cat, we’d have to be able to see through the box in a way that doesn’t impact the outcome of the experiment. Yet, the cat is either dead or alive, it’s just unknowable to us due to our inability to observe the cat without disturbing the scenario. Only the cat really knows if it’s alive.
Similarly, we largely don’t have great ways to observe quantum happenings because our technology to measure the outcomes disturbs whatever we’re observing. Yet, the thing a we’re looking at either are or are not happening the way we posit, our ability to know doesn’t change that.
It makes a lot more sense if you stop believing in the fiction of objects. There are no objects. Particles are a fiction, waves are a fiction. There is a single process, that we call the universe, and every single thing we refer to is a portion of that process from a subjective perspective. Once you give up on objects the idea that a process can be observed to produce subjective experiences that appear to violate expectations of object-oriented conceptual frameworks becomes less difficult to grasp.
Something that's important to note though, is that the Cat example isn't a great way to envision this phenomenon in general. Schrodinger's Cat was actually made as an argument against this interpretation, by blowing the behavior up to a macro scale, where it seemed absurd. While you can draw analogues and all that, I'd recommend against really thinking that macro scale objects are in a multitude of obviously different states at once, all the time. It's a path to some of the really kooky fake-science "quantum" stuff that get's repeated.
Like, you're never going to see a physicist argue that a person is both alive and dead in another room, because of the technical chance that they tunneled halfway through the wall.
that cis people exist. I’m trans and nonbinary, it’s genuinely bizarre to me that not everyone questions the gender assigned to them at birth by the government lol
Sorry you have two dinguses explaining gender to you lmao
Edit: ❤️Mods
Wow the mods are amazing, they removed the comments before I even saw them.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit, if it turned out that the most common gender ID is actually non-binary.
Like, my spouse and I pretty much consider ourselves "cis" but ... but not for any particular reason other than, "well, its good enough to get the point across." We don't really "feel" any particularly strong emotions about it.
A lot of people question it and just go "this is well enough for me". I've wondered about it plenty butI think for my (completely personal) purposes it would be hair-splitting at best to object to being called a guy because my body is my body and society is organized in a gender binary. I despise the social construction of gender, but I also dislike the English language and yet here I am using it to participate in society in a relatively frictionless way, and for me personally it's kind of the same thing.
I can totally see finding it weird as a nonbinary person how people can feel fine as a binary gender, cis or trans.
As a cis by default person it is weird to me when I talk to people and they have strong feelings about their gender. But if we were normal we wouldn't be posting on this part of the internet
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=U-hiS4YObes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Can you tolerate it at least, or you get annoyed if it's playing at an event/Uber/supermarket etc?
I see. I totally get what you mean, it's taken me years to learn how to tolerate a lot of music I don't like. Thanks for sharing
As a person who was born liking music, I indeed find it too bizarre to believe to be true.
I used to be like this, but with movies. When I first met my wife, she was utterly baffled at the concept of somebody not enjoying movies, and she made it her mission to make me enjoy them.
Come to think of it, she actually doesn't like music much. I've failed to change her opinion on that though because my taste in music is shit (and I'm proud of it.)
I am still like this with movies and TV.
It just doesn't appeal to me. I've seen a handful of movies/shows that I'd call "not boring as shit" ever, and even then, its not something I'd choose to do myself, but is fine if I'm, like, chillin and chatting with people or whatever.
Might be my neurodivergence, might also just be how much of a reader I am. Movies are just so slow compared to reading.
That's basically how I was. Honestly, the reason I enjoy movies nowadays isn't really because it's my thing, but because my wife is always so excited to show me the movies she likes, and I can't help but enjoy myself when it's making her happy.
I rarely watch movies on my own, or with other people besides her, but when I do, it's usually because I think it'd be fun to tell her all about it, and maybe watch it with her too.
I'm also bigger on reading, but I have really severe, unmedicated ADHD, so I can't sit down with an actual book for longer than a few minutes. Gotta have pretty pictures, like a manga or graphic novel or something (and even then it's hard.)
Good movies demand attention.
Good audio books I can listen to while I play my favorite video game.
I'm the opposite. I can't ever 'zone out' while listening/watching/reading/playing stuff; I can't even listen to music while playing games, and usually turn background music on low or off.
Also: mushrooms are genetically closer to animals than plants. If and how that impacts vegetarians and vegans, I'll leave to you, the reader.
Mushrooms are plants made out of meat. They are the opposite of shellfish which are plants made out of meat.
There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates
But aren't the tides caused by external gravitational forces (the moon?)
the tides stay in the same place relative to the moon and the earth spins below the tidal bulges (earth spins faster than the moon orbits, is the basic thing)
Tides are a phenomenon where the height of the edge of a body of water shifts relative to the shore. A phenomenon is a thing. Why should explaining its cause in those terms have any effect on that?
I'm confused: you say there's no such thing as tides, and then explain what tides are?
Tides are the waters going out and coming back. That is how we experience it. We experience it wrong.
That's like saying sunrise doesn't exist because the sun is relatively stationary while the earth revolves on its axis. Sunrise and tides are the names we give to how we experience these things.
Subjective experience cannot be wrong or right; it simply is. Interpretation of that experience can be wrong or right. Either way, the experience still happened.
The hell that giving birth can be.
A lot of women endure having a baby...and holy. shit. No.
Every time that comes up, I think to myself "Something I've gone through must be more painful, right? I've gone through some pretty hellish things, and you're trying to tell me something MORE painful exists? Not just a little more, but dramatically more? For my own sanity, I'm gonna have to live in denial of that."
Serious spinal issues are probably one of the only things that could be worse.
Huh. I'm guessing the pain of kidney stones comes in varying levels, because the one time I had them I wouldn't have called it the most painful thing in the world.
Then again, I could also have inherited my mom's pain tolerance, who gave birth multiple times without any kind of pain relief and without flinching.
Interesting. I suppose they're both objects with pointy bits much larger than the holes they're trying to pass through. On that note, I've been through very severe anal stenosis and THAT I would say was closing in on the most horrific pain I've ever been through. Before I could go to the doctor about it my wife basically had to spend all day and sometimes night keeping me occupied so I had something to do other than cry.
