• Thrife@feddit.org
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    1 month ago

    Reading all these adventure books and comics made me really fear quicksand as a child… I was living in East Berlins suburbs. The most comparable thing to quicksand would have been a mud puddle!

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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      1 month ago

      My mom once actually stepped in quicksand (thankfully only up to the top of her boot). It was in Canada. Yes, Canada has quicksand! She was visiting my uncle in Saskatchewan.

      Unlike the movies, it fits its name. One minute she was walking, then suddenly it was like she fell into a pit, but couldn’t get her boot out. I can’t remember how the story ended. This was like 35 years ago that she told me about it.

      • madjo@feddit.nl
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        1 month ago

        Couple of years ago, I walked through a forest somewhere in the middle of The Netherlands, called the Waterloopbos, and I came across a blocked off area with quicksand warnings.

        I kinda wish I had lost my shoes there, because the shoes I was wearing weren’t good for forest walking.

        That was the first and so far only time I had seen quicksand in my 44 years of existing on this blue marble.

      • el_abuelo@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        You know, seeing you in the wild I think is kinda like seeing quicksand. Very rare, usually fatal, but if you live - probably a great story.

        Let’s see if I get out alive.

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
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    1 month ago

    Just as a reminder that even if you turned an entire atom into pure kenitic energy, you wouldn’t even see a flash.

    Math stuff:

    So E = M c^2

    I’ll choose a carbon atom because it’s a round number (don’t think about that statement too hard)

    So carbon has an atomic mass of 12 atomic mass units. In grams (divide by Avagadro’s number) is 1.992 E-23 grams.

    Shove that into E=mc^2 and you get 1.790 nanojoules, which is 4.974 E-16 kilowatt-hours. Or at 12¢ per KWH is 5*E-15 cents of power.

    So to power a 500 watt gaming rig, you’d need to burn about 20 nanograms of carbon at 100% efficiency, per hour.

  • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    My childhood fear was getting the vaccine shot for the swine flu which was a big issue in the mid 70’s. My 5th grade class received new text books and there was a photo of a kid getting the vaccine shot. Instead of a needle it was delivered by a big device that looked like an uzi machine gun and I was terrified of it. Time passed and I never got the shot. That’s when I learned how the news works.

  • RiceMunk@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    Sometimes I look at the wide open sky and think “What if gravity suddenly reverses and I fall up into the sky and then space? That would be really dangerous.”

    • VoilaChihuahua@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I had a clear childhood memory of when gravity temporarily vanished and we all had to duck and cover under our desks. Years later I learned how gravity worked. A few years after that I realized my memory was impossible though it felt very real. This may be the root of my trust issues…

      • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Human memory is wild. We’re extremely good at inventing things that never happened, or adjusting memories over time as we recall them into something completely different than what actually happened. And it can feel so real.

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Stephen King wrote a story of just that happening to a guy. Except gravity didn’t reverse he just kind of lost mass, but the result was the same.

        • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Dude wasn’t even dieting what was crazy is for all intense in purposes no one could tell he was losing weight. He looked the same weight but when he get on a scale it show him losing weight. You really should read it. For some reason its a stand alone novel, but its actually really short for a Stephen King novel.

  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I have nothing to worry about while I’m in bermuda. I mean I’m not exactly triangle-shaped. Didn’t these people ever have toys as kids? Sheesh!

    • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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      1 month ago

      gas station sushi

      I didn’t know those 3 words existed in that combination and I’m frankly appalled that they do

      • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
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        1 month ago

        For every time someone eats gas station sushi, someone has to eat a PB&J from a 5-Star restaurant to maintain the balance of the universe; otherwise you get weird things happening like The Fruit of the Loom logo losing the cornucopia, or Donald Trump becoming president.

  • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    Tbf kost things a child will cut contain atoms so it’s not as far fetched as it sounds

  • combatfrog@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    When I was a kid there was a Norwegian children movie called “The hunt for the kidney stone” where a kid travels into the body of his sick grandpa to find out what’s wrong with him (kidney stone). After the movie I asked my mom what kidney stones are, and where they come from. “You can get them if you eat too much salt, for example” she says, and after that I was TERRIFIED every time my parents would put salt on anything.

    • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I read a story somewhere of someone getting them from the oxalates in peanut butter.

      They were eating like 1 kg a week for a month or two though.

  • fosho@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    I will never not cringe at “on accident” instead of “by accident”

    euchhhh.

    • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Where does this this linguistically phenomenon come from?

      Is it a mistaken use of “an accident” with the preposition to reflect the personal involvement?

      Mistakes like “Could of” make sense to me because in my accent “could of” and “could’ve” are identically voiced.

      I can also completly understand where we get “alot” because alot is just the beginning of an acorn, minus a few hundred years of lazy pronunciation behind it (an oak corn =acorn)

      Google is telling me it’s because younger people will use “on accident” as an antonym for “on purpose”. That sounds feesible as an origin. Now I’m questioning if “by intent” is grammatically correct, I’ve been staring at words too long.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    It’s even funnier when you remember that like 99% of all matter is empty space, and electrostatic force is what keeps everything from sliding past everything else.

  • eezeebee@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    I was always worried about perfectly round holes in the ground and falling into them. Looney Tunes really over-represented how common they were.

    • Klear@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Happened to me once. I was super drunk walking home and didn’t see an open manhole in front of me. I got super lucky, though.

      From my drunk perspective, I’m just walking along when suddenly the ground is nearly at my eye level. Then I realised I’m dangling there, with only my head and elbows outside. I dragged myself out and continued on home.

      I have no idea how I managed to fall inside with both my legs at the same time and why my arms didn’t hurt like hell, not even in the morning.

        • Klear@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I don’t think reflexes were involved here, more likely it was lucky arm positioning at the right time. But what do I know? I wasn’t quite there to witness it.