this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Definitely agree and beautifully put :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean, you should be extra kind to most people most of the time. Comunism begins at home.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

Well I don't need to meet everybody. There's no need to meet anyone who doesn't match my sexual preferences, so that's half right there. Then we can also cut everyone who's sexual preferences I don't meet, as well as anyone outside of a given age range (most of the people on earth are much younger than me and would be inappropriate for me to date). We can probably get that down to about 50-60 years. (At one second per person).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The thought experiment was just an attempt to show how hard it is to wrap our minds around big numbers. Even a tangible number such as the amount of people in the world.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To piggy back on your "bizarre fact", the same type of iron can be found added to cereal.

I remember several times in school we'd do a science demonstration where we'd smash up Cheerio (or a knock off) brand ceral, mix the powder with water and slowly drag a magnet through the slurry. Every time the magnet would be pulled out of the mix, there'd be more and more tiny iron bits.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We did the same but with Special K in a blender, and held a magnet to the side of the blender's cup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This one startled me. surprised-pika

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's about 25 blimps in the world, and only 40-50 pilots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

doesn't really fit the thread, but i was surprised when i learned that the empire state building has a blimp docking station

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They really thought blimps were gonna be a thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They should have been

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

this is super cool.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That looks like sea creatures mating

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You've got a metal frame inside your body.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Please dont do that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The hell that giving birth can be.

A lot of women endure having a baby...and holy. shit. No.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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."

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren't supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've seen some of its secrets during the eclipse. It's an angry, writhing tentacled thing. Be thankful it's so far away.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well, we'd know by now

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's one: Iron doesn't have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can't smell coins after washing them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they're right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think "wow that's pretty," but every once in a while I let it hit me that I'm looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it's, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.

The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they're right there. I can point at one and say "look at that pretty star" and right now, a long distance away, it's just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there's life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.

And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It's over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?

Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month

If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there's more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...

Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What’s a floppy disk?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's just another name for the save icon.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From Wikipedia on bones:

Bone matrix is 90 to 95% composed of elastic collagen fibers, also known as ossein,[5] and the remainder is ground substance.[6] The elasticity of collagen improves fracture resistance.[7] The matrix is hardened by the binding of inorganic mineral salt, calcium phosphate, in a chemical arrangement known as bone mineral, a form of calcium apatite.[9]

So the statement is a bit faulty, not only because of the relative low amount of calcium in our bones, but also because it appears as a mineral. We distinguish between salts and metals because of their chemical properties being quite different (solubility, reflectiveness, electrical conductivity, maleability and so on).

Edit: I do realize the point of the comment was not to be entirely factual, so if I am allowed as well I would say science is pretty metal.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The birthday paradox

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 Γ— 22)/2 = 253 pairs to consider, far more than half the number of days in a year.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 days

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