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The one I say themost is probably that there are 10 times as many germ cells in your body as human cells, but due to their size it is only around 8 pounds of your weight.
But the one I love the most is that there are more unique ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are grains of sand on Earth.
There are more atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
That’s…pretty believable.
- Catalan children get (some) of their Christmas presents by beating a cute piece of wood that then shits the presents out onto the floor. Seriously.
- There was a British guy who fought in WW2 with a scottish broadsword and bagpipes. However, the best thing is that he wasn’t even a Scotsman.
- On a small enough timescale, the electric field actually bounces around in your wires for a while after you flick a switch, even if it’s DC, just to “figure out” where it “needs to go”.
- More than twice as much time had passed from the invention of the motorcycle until the first motorcycle backflip, then had from the invention of the airplane until the first humans landing on the moon.
That British guy, Jack “That guy who fought World War 2 with a claymore and bagpipes” Churchill, was also an early pioneer of surfing.
There are more trees on earth by far than there are stars in the galaxy.
Consider a dam that is 10m tall
Then consider the height of water behind that dam is 5m tall.
Does the dam need to be built stronger if the water behind it is 1 km long?
How about only 500m?
How about 1m?
The answer is, it doesn’t matter. Water exerts pressure equally regardless of how much water is behind it.
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Incompressible fluids are pretty insane
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Technically only the pressures are equal, and the actual force will be linearly dependent on the area of the dam (or the surface area of the cylinder). That’s why you can make a tall water tank with relatively thin walls, but an actual dam will have to be quite thicc to handle the tensile/compressive stress (depending on the shape of the dam).
Thank you. Your hypothetical question has been a nagging, unresolved background radiation in my mind for decades, but I’d never gotten around to investigating.
That is accounting for static bodies of water, wouldn’t there be force generated in a dynamic situation? Ie the flow of a fast river? Or if the lake is large enough tidal forces? I’m sure it’s negligible levels but still something that must be accounted for?
No, that’s absolutely true. Dynamic loads will need to be accounted for in real world examples.
Another point is that if the dam is 10m tall, it has to be built to withstand 10m of water. just because it sits at 5m most of the time doesn’t mean a heavy rain couldn’t raise the level, and if the dam collapses that’s going to be catastrophic vs just spilling over the top.
I’ve seen a few dynamic loads in my day and in my professional opinion I must agree
Printer ink costs more per milliliter than human blood.
“Wow you signed the document in blood, you must be really hardcore.”
“No I’m just cheap.”
There is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.
Shouldn’t that be 2? Mars and Venus.
Pretty sure the one on Venus is dead.
well yeah, but that’s because the native robots killed it
A somewhat political fact, but one that made some of my friends dumbfounded:
When a bank issues a loan, it generates that money literally out of thin air and credits that money to the loan account rather than using deposits they already had. For example, if you want to borrow $100,000, the banker approves the loan and doesn’t hand over cash or move existing money around - instead, they just go on their system and credit your account with the sum, that’s it.
While I think your point is true that its much more abstract than people realize. When I worked at a bank and we disbursed loans and credited/debited fees it was from “GLs” (General Ledger?) which were basically just separate accounts to help keep track. Like we had a “member service” one which was for basically anything with good reason. One time someone did a very large amount but he just basically got told to do it a different way.
Its all just in a computer. I could’ve accidentally credited someone a million dollars but it would’ve been realized when I tried to close my drawer and balance everything out. And the branch would have to be balanced at the end of the day so I assume the bank did as well.
On a related note banks take out loans from other banks. I think a lot of people don’t realize that banks have savings accounts so they have money to lend.
As of March 2020 the reserve requirement for banks in the US is 0%.
What the fuck, who changed that? Seems like a horrible idea.
The Fed Board, apparently: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
After reading through that page and the FAQ, I think it’s because the banks should now be compelled to held reserves because Fed pays them a reasonable interest (close to what they would get if they give a very low-risk loan) on them, rather than it being a strict requirement. I don’t know enough about economics to have an opinion on whether it’s a good idea, but I feel like it’s not too horrible? Like, maybe it makes some shitty banks even more susceptible to bank runs, but that’s the reality of fractional reserve banking in general.
Which is why a “run on the Bank” or “Bank run” is unsustainable for Banks these days.
I’d have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.
1 - George W Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.
…in the same vein…
2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the ‘accounting’ of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.
… If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.
And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.
And make flower patterns on cloth
And big titty anime pics
Lots of people know a broken clock is right twice per day, but many are unaware that a clock running backwards is right 4 times per day.
a clock running backwards is moving away from the current time at twice the rate, so isn’t your example the same as saying that a clock that runs twice as fast is right 4 times a day?
Ah, shit, a clock that runs infinitely fast is always right.
No, if you go twice as fast, it would only align with one at 12 and one at 24. It’s not about speed, it’s about the intersections of forward and backward laps.
Can you give me some examples, for some reason I’m finding it hard to picture
You can picture a clock or a track. If you have one going forward and one backwards, they meet at the halfway point (6), and again at the full lap (12). This happens twice in a day.
If you have one going twice as fast, they only meet when the faster one laps the slower one. The two clocks would be at 3&6, 6&12, 9&6(18), 12&12(24)
it is less than 4 times/day correct, if there is a speed difference between backward rotation and time.
Ah yeah, there it is - thanks for that example
California has the same population as Australia.
And over twice the GDP.
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I thought california had much more
Doesn’t it have a much bigger population than Aus? Wikipedia says that California has about 39 million people and Australia only 27 million.
They may have mixed up the British commonwealth. Canada has a similar population to California
That’s even more insane
Australia feels like a small country stretched around the perimeter of a genuinely impressive quantity of absolutely nothing.
As an American, I’ll take the Mojave over the Outback any day.
Like a donut with a very spicy hole
The great sand croissant.
That Mark Zuckerberg holds several records for most fists shoved inside a human body at once
Due to two facts:
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The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think
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The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.
It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.
There’s no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.
For some reason that reminds me of how the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, named Samoset, spoke to them in English. Then he came back later with another tribe member, Squanto, who also spoke English.
Forever establishing American expectations when traveling overseas.
isn’t english just the crab language that spontaneously comes into existence if given enough time?
What’s the details about a fax machine in the 1860s?
1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.
First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.
Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:
If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.
There are a few different ones by that point.
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Nothing insane, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band are older than Guns ‘N’ Roses.
The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.
Um akchully…
Median is a type of average
NERDDDDD!
Ok, I had assumed average was the same as mean, but see that it’s ambiguous. Saying “the mean person does not have 10 fingers” just sounds wrong though.
Most frequent occurence is the mode. Most ppl have 10. The median would be less than ten, while the mean average is skewed down, I would think, by some people losing fingers as the grow. Having extra fingers is pretty rare. So the mean might be 9.95 fingers, just to toss a number out.
I assume the median and mode are the same value, 10 fingers, but have no data to back that up. I guess saying mode would have been a safer statement to make, but think that even if 49% of people have 0-9 fingers, the median number of fingers would still be 10.
The median of a data set is the measure of center that is the middle value when the original data values are arranged in order of increasing (or decreasing) magnitude.
So ppl generally have, say, between 2 and 11 fingers. If those were your only 2 data points, the mean would equal the median, and there is no mode.
I was also assuming a sample size of more than two for it to be statically significant.
Mode assumes categorical data and is unbounded by range, whereas median makes the most sense for decimal numbers, albeit with rounding in this case
“People have
round(median(data))fingers”edit: though, if we’re counting just fingers and not counting half-fingers, then maybe this really is categorical data (¯\(ツ)/¯?)
The median of a data set is the measure of center that is the middle value when the original data values are arranged in order of increasing (or decreasing) magnitude.
So ppl generally have, say, between 2 and 11 fingers. If those were your only 2 data points, the mean would equal the median, and there is no mode.
