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California has the same population as Australia.
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.
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?
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)
Ah yeah, there it is - thanks for that example
Ah, shit, a clock that runs infinitely fast is always right.
And one that loses only 1 second per year is right only once every 43,200 years.
by weight, theres more non-human DNA in you than human.
I have heard that this is more true for some people in Tijuana.
Wait. Please explain. How is DNA inside me, a verifiable human, not human?
There’s a LOT of e. coli up your ass.
Put more delicately, you are a great big multicellular eukaryote, each of your cells has (or had, in the case of red blood cells) an inner chamber called the nucleus, and you’re full of mitochondria and other organelles. Your body is covered and filled with other organisms, many of them simple, tiny little single cell prokaryotes which make a living helping their gigantic, complicated host function. Like all the bacteria in your intestines that help you digest food. Their cells outnumber yours by a wide margin.
It’s DNA from bacteria that live inside you.
Bacteria technically live in the tube of “outside” on your inside. Digestive system is just one hole all the way through the body that your body interacts with just like the air in the lungs.
Your poop is on the outside of your body
Your gut flora
I read that comes don’t actually eat grass. They have the extra stomachs, and the first stomach is basically a bacteria reactor that feeds on chewed up plant matter. As the bacteria reproduce they get sent to the next stomach which is what actually gives nutrients
youre mostly bacterial dna
U got bugs in ur poop.
we all know what you do when you visit the zoo.
were those giraffes looking thirsty, hmmm?
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.
Every eye has a tiny blind spot near the middle. But your brain makes it disappear and you don’t realize it’s there.
You can verify this. Draw a dot on a bit of paper. Close one eye, stare at a fixed point, now move the paper around the center until the dot disappears…magic
What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation… realizing that is a real mind blower
I’m going to qualify this—all vertebrate eyes have a blind spot. Cephalopods also have eyes that are like vertebrates (this type of eye is called ‘camera eyes’), but their eye anatomy is such that no blind spot exists for them.
Piggybacking on your fact about the brain effectively editing what we visually perceive, we don’t see our nose (unless you made a concerted effort to look at it) because the brain ignores it.
What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation…
It’s also a coordinated synthesis from all of your input senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc). It also explains why those who have a certain sense stunted (aka blindness, deaf, etc) report having all their other senses heightened. And it’s up to the individual’s brain to assemble those sensory inputs into a complete picture of the world around them, what we dub “reality.” Which then brings into question the nature of common reality, and what defines it. Trippy shit.
Also we only see the past since our vision has a bit of “latency”.
So I guess we never see reality but just a delayed representation of our environment as interpreted by our brain.
fun fact: the blind spot is because our optical sensors are installed backwards and that hole is so the optic nerve can pass back through the back of the eye to the brain. some other critters with independently evolved vision systems, such as cephalopods, avoided this particular evolutionary pitfall.
Another fun fact: through that hole there’s also vasculature and capillaries coming through and you can actually see them by looking at a well lit white surface and creating a tiny pinhole with your hand right in front of your eye and wiggling it. Better explained here at around 5:30
That’s awesome, I had no idea, thank you for sharing
Oh I thought my eyes were fucked. I look at a star in my periphery and it’s there, I look at it directly and it’s fucking gone.
This isn’t due to the blind spot, but it is still pretty weird to experience! Here’s some more info if you are curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision
So, here’s a lesson from the flight physiology chapter of the private pilot syllabus:
Your vision is a lot worse than you think it is. You probably conceptualize your eye as similar to a digital camera, there’s a lens that focuses light on a sensor made up of an array of light sensitive cells, and that the edge of that array is as densely packed as the center. This is the case for a camera, but not for your eye.
Each of your eyes has over 30 million photoreceptors called rods and cones.
Rod cells come in one variety and are only really good for detecting presence or absence of light. They work well, or can work well, in very dim light, and they form the basis of your night vision. This is why in very dim conditions you might experience your vision in black and white.
Cone cells are less sensitive to light requiring relatively bright light to function, and come in three varieties that respond the strongest to low, middle and high wavelengths of light, what we know as red, green and blue. By comparing the relative intensities of these wavelengths, we can derive color vision. They don’t work well in low light conditions.
The sensor array in the back of your eye that contains these photosensitive cells, called the retina, is sparsely populated toward the edges and doesn’t have very good resolution. Try reading this sentence looking at it through the corner of your eye. It gets denser and denser, and the ratio of cones to rods increases, until you reach a tiny pit in the very center called the fovea.
This is difficult to put into words but unless you’ve been blind since birth you’ll understand what I mean: You use your whole retina to “see.” You use your fovea to “look.” The detailed center of your vision, the spot where you are “looking” is drawn from the fovea through the center of the lens out into the world. When you are looking at something, you are pointing your fovea(s) at it.
There are no rod cells in your fovea, only cones. So you have very high resolution color day vision, but next to no night vision, with your fovea.
This is why things like dim stars in the night sky can be more easily seen with your peripheral vision than your central vision. Your central vision does not have the cells to see well in the dark. It’s not in the anatomy.
We teach this to pilots because distant lights the pilot is using to navigate by, avoiding collisions with obstacles or other aircraft, might be dim enough that the night adjusted eye can’t actually see it with the center vision but can with peripheral vision.
The same chapter teaches about the “hole” through which the optic nerve passes and how that blind spot is capable of hiding something like another airplane from you, which is why you look around and don’t just stare out the windshield. It’s not often a problem because most of the time one eye can see into the other’s blind spot, but it’s useful to know that about your vision.
Each cell will detect some light, undergo a chemical process that fires an adjacent neuron, and then take a very brief moment to reset to be ready to do it again. Each cell is doing this independently, so your eyes don’t have a “frame rate” the way a camera does, but a flickering light begins to look continuous to humans at a rate of about 18 cycles per second and no flicker can be detected somewhere around 40.
Your occipital lobe takes in this choppy inconsistent resolution broken up mess of visual information passed to it via your optic nerves, does some RTX DLSS 4k HDR10 shit to it and outputs the continuous and smooth color 3D picture you consciousness experiences as “vision.”
AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT your brain does optical everything recognition. You can look at millions of different objects - the letters of the alphabet, tools, toys, people, individual people’s faces, leaves, flowers, creatures, stars, planets, moons, your own hands, and recognize what they are with astonishing speed and accuracy.
It’s what scientists call the hellawhack shiznit that happens inside your brizzle.
The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.
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.
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.
For 10 to not be the median it would also have to not be the case for the majority of people (just the plurality at best), and while I don’t have proof handy I’m pretty sure a vast majority have exactly 10, making that the precise median and the mode. Only the mean would be a different number of digits. (Both definitions)
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.
Yes, but we don’t have only those two points.
It’s well known that most people have one specific value, so much so that our entire number system is based on it (literally the base, it’s ten)
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.
Um akchully…
Median is a type of average
Sharks are older than both trees and the north star
Had to look this up- you are indeed correct. The North Star is at most 67 million years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris
Both trees?
Yes, both of them at the double tree inn obviously
Piney and Sticks
Laurelin and Telperion
Yeah Twin Pines Ma— I mean Lone Pine Mall.
If two moving balls hit each other and bounce apart, it’s the exact same thing as if you held the frame steady on one ball and viewed the other ball as moving faster. Just seems like the stationary ball gets heavier…
Perspective is everything.
Yeah, this one took me a while to wrap my head around and intuitively “get it”. I first learned it was true from that mythbusters episode where they correct their past mistakes… and even they had thought that two cars hitting head on would receive the same energy as hitting a stationary wall at the speed of the sum of their speeds. They were corrected in letters written to them, and then they experimentally verified it.
And even seeing the experimental verification, it still took me a while to really get it. The opposite speeds cancel out, making you go from your speed to zero. Same as if you hit a brick wall at that speed.
Let’s say the two cars are going 50 mph (kph, whatever unit you want). 50-50=0. You experience the same as hitting the brick wall. It’s the difference between initial speed and final speed that matters, not the sum of their speeds.
This has a caveat though, you have to assume that both cars are the same mass.
If a truck hits a car head on, it is likely that the car doesn’t go just to 0 but to some -ve number as the much more massive truck plows through the car and reverses its direction.
This link is about the moon but it starts by covering how to view space and orbital objects including simulators which allow one to do what you describe, as well as the ability to move the camera from on ball to the other and many other interesting simulations. https://ciechanow.ski/moon/
A few of my favorite fun facts are geography related.
The pacific side of the Panama canal is further east than the Atlantic side.
If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you’ll hit is Canada.
Lake Tahoe is further west than Los Angeles
70% of Canadians live south of the 49th Parallel, the northern border of the US.
omg la is east of reno what is happening rn
If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you’ll hit is Canada.
There’s also Angle Inlet, Minnesota which is the only place in the contiguous United States north of the 49th parallel. To travel to Angle Inlet by road from other parts of Minnesota, or from anywhere in the United States, requires driving through Manitoba, Canada. It’s a really weird border.
All borders are weird
Due to its high latitude and being in the middle of a continent, it is a contender for the most extreme winters in the contiguous United States.
Two square miles & 54 residents in North Bumblefuck, separated from the rest of the US by 60 miles. It’s an affront to reason.
Having lived somewhere with constant tourists… I get it.
Glenn Close was in Hook
Samuel L Jackson was in Grease. The movie.
Jackie Chan was in Enter The Dragon.
Not the Boo Box!
Ok, now I’m gonna have to go watch that movie again. I just checked IMDb and there’s a bunch that I didn’t remember/recognize/notice.
Gwyneth paltrow was young Wendy (which I’m guessing is probably pretty obvious but I’m just old and don’t remember), David Crosby and Jimmy Buffett are pirates, and George Lucas kissed Carrie Fisher on a bridge.
Not really favourite, but definitely most unbelievable: They elected Donald Trump for president in the US. Twice.
So far!
There are more atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
That’s…pretty believable.
Sharks are older than trees
Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.
Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.
You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn’t ever actually in their field of view.
Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.
This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?
You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.
I think my AI has a TV problem
The first time I took mushrooms it had been after reading about this kind of thing for about a week.
I recall reading about a man who was effectively blind but his eyes worked fine. What didn’t work fine was the part of his brain that interpreted what his eyes saw. So he just saw smeary streaks of light.
It’s kind of like Linux without its V4L2 system for interpreting video capture devices. It can’t actually see video without it.
That sounds like the story in the Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. There was also a story in there about a man who taught himself to see just fine, even though his eyes didn’t work at all. His brain just made educated guesses.
Me and my alters in my system completely agree. They can and have experience reality differently.
Along those same lines, we’re all blind literally around half the time we’re awake. Our optic processing system can’t keep up with the input as our eyes flit from thing to thing, so we don’t see anything while they move. And they’re moving constantly, even if we’re not aware of it, because only the fovea in the center of the retina has a high enough density of receptors to see details, and also because of sensory fatigue from prolonged static stimulus. In short, we have a tiny field of detailed vision that’s not even working much of the time. That field of vision that feels like a 4K video feed into the mind is a complete lie.
Like the way our subjective experience feels like a continuous, integrated mind fully in control of itself, but in reality, consciousness dips out a couple of times every minute while the brain attends to sensory input.
Even weirder, the conscious mind might not even exist, except as an illusory, emergent phenomenon of sensory experience and memory. There isn’t a place in the brain where it ‘lives’, no part that’s only ever active when we’re conscious.
I think the selective attention test:
further illustrates the limits of human vision and mental processing quite well. Defense attorneys probably ought to play this video in any case where witness testimony is a big component of the prosecution’s case.
If you travel due south from Detroit the first foreign country you will hit is Canada.
Takes flight to Detroit Airport, starts heading south: “Canada here I come!”…
