this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 6 days ago (7 children)

African Wild Dogs decide on when to go hunting by voting. If there is a supermajority of votes in favor of hunting, they will go out and hunt. If that quorum is not reached, they will stay home.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Dingo Suffrage is my new punk band name

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago

That’s awesome! Maybe they should teach us some of their tricks…

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 days ago (2 children)

If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

And if you have one skeleton in your body, you're below average.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Well now wait, if pregnant people have four (or more) arms, we’ve got to have more than half as many pregnant people as people missing one or more arms, right?

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

In the movie "Catch Me If You Can", the french police officer that arrests Leonardo DiCaprio who is playing a young Frank Abagnale Jr. Is Frank Abagnale Jr.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

Don’t know that. That’s kind of cool.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

π mph is roughly e knots.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Hydrogen, if left on its own long enough, names itself.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

That's a wild way to think about the universe. Gonna steal this

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago

Over billions of years, hydrogen left on its own collapsed under gravity into stars, under went fusion, supernovaed, created all the heavier elements, formed secondary stars and rocky plants, evolved into creatures, which learnt chemistry and gave it a name. We're all stardust + time basically. But we're stardust that names itself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The people who built the stone towns of Gobekli Tepe and Carahan Tepe in Anatolia in Turkey, built and lived their villages so long ago, that the very first historical civilization recognized as such, with cities and writing - the ancient Sumerians - are closer to us in time than to those hunter/gatherer people, who lived near the ~~Atlas~~ Taurus Mountains foothills and the rivers and tributaries that eventually merge into the Eufrates further downstream.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

The time between the last living stegosaurus and the last living tyrannosaurus is greater that the time between the last tyrannosaurus and today.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Emoticon :) has etymology stemming from emotion + icon. Tis from the 80s, early computer stuff

Emoji 😊 is japanese, from 絵文字 which is like, drawing + character, basically. It's a word MUCH older than computing.

False cognates. Sound similar, similar function, nothing to do with each other.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

There's a :) in a typewritten cookbook I have from the 40s. I don't know how widespread smileys were back then, but they existed.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago

There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.

It's more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Almost all web traffic now uses the utf-8 encoding, a clever hack which works because ascii is a seven-bit code but web traffic uses 8-bit bytes.

  • If the first bit is 0, treat the byte as ascii.
  • if the first bit is 1, treat the byte as part of a multi-byte unicode character.

multi-byte characters in utf-8 can officially be up to four bytes long, with 11 of those 32 bits used for tracking the size of the multi-byte block. That leaves 2^21 code points available, about two million in total, easily enough for every alphabet you could need to write on a website, and all without breaking ascii.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Oh, I wondered about why there weren't more characters in the ASCII code set.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 children)

Honestly literally anything about QR codes. Those things are insane. Did you know there's a very obvious 01010101010101 pattern in it if you know where to look?


(look in-between the paper)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

Yeah, timing marks! There's a few of them. So neat

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (7 children)

The number of possible combinations of cards in a standard 52 card pack is so large that there is very little chance that any two packs of shuffled cards that have ever existed have ever been in the same order.

52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Chess positions are like that too, after any "main line" it quickly becomes a never played game...

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

The natural logarithm number e is the most efficient base, Benford's law shows that a collection of numbers where their logarithms are uniformly and randomly distributed, the probability of the first digit being 1 of any of the numbers is around 30%, and most humans can learn echolocation with some training.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Your lips and butthole are the two ends of the same tube. Same glaborous vermillion border type skin or something

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

Two from me:

People took the London tube to the last public hanging - https://londonist.com/london/undergroundtoapublichanging

The University of Oxford (1096) is older than the Aztec empire (1345)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Your ~~mom~~ moon is exactly at the right distance to give full eclipse of the sun

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (3 children)

That giraffes exist. I'm a simple man, and giraffes are awesome.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago

On Titan, you could strap on wings and fly around.

Moreover, the atmosphere is >5% natural gas, but without oxygen you can't burn it. I suppose oxygen would be considered the fuel in that case and you'd pipeline that instead? And being able to breathe would be a nice side-benefit.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Wombats take square shits.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Kevin Spacey’s middle name is Spacey.

And that’s a rock fact.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago (3 children)

For anyone else wanting to look this up: yep. His full name is Kevin Spacey Fowler. Not Kevin Spacey Spacey as I thought OP meant.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago (3 children)

There are more grains of sand in the ocean than there are stars in our solar system.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

if you like big numbers: there are significantly more ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards than there are atoms in the observable universe.

Every shuffle of the deck is almost certainly unique since folks been shuffling cards.

edit: ahh nice someone posted this exact fact at the top level lower down!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

There's more than one grain of sand in the ocean????!?!?!?1one

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Early cycling laws and rights predate the invention of the automobile by decades. So it is actually the car that is the invasive newcomer.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Two pieces of matter cannot exist at the exact same place at the exact same time.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (2 children)

"If left in the sun, mayonnaise grows hair."

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