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.
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. One day takes 243 Earth days, while a year takes 225.
Maybe it’s not “well known”, but still interesting in my opinion.
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
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!
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
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Also the idea that light is both a particle and a wave always messed with my head because I wanted to know why does it decide to change and when? And the answer is that light is always a particle and always a wave at the exact same time.
It is a wave particle.
And it is possible from light alone to build both an electron and a positron as demonstrated in a 1999 laser science experiment in New York.
I usually interpret this as behaviour: photons are not “particles” or “waves”, photons are photons. They just behave as waves and as particles, depending on how you’re looking at them.
Note that even things with a resting mass (like you or me) are like this, too. It’s just that, as the mass increases, the wave behaviour becomes negligible.
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This doesn’t make it any less crazy
The crazy thing is there are actually two double slit experiments, and that light can tell whether or not you are actively observing it or not, and decides whether or not to actually exist as a wave or particle.
I heard from someone I respect irl that these experiments were debatable, but I can’t personally hold an argument about it.
It’s even crazier because you don’t need to reach the speed of light. It’ll happen in a smaller degree for any speed. Even in mundane conditions.
For example, if your twin spent four days in a 300km/h bullet train, for you it would be four days plus a second.
Usually this difference is negligible, but for satellites (that run at rather high speeds, for a lot of time, and require precision), if you don’t take time dilation into account they misbehave.
(For anyone wanting to mess with the maths, the formula is Δt’ = Δt / √[1 - v²/c²]. Δt = variation of time for the observer (you), Δt’ = variation of time for the moving entity (your twin), v = the moving entity’s speed, c = speed of light. Just make sure that “v” and “c” use the same units.)
Yes I knew about that and I’m glad that doesn’t make it crazier for me, instead it makes it easier to accept. If it were something that happened only after hitting some arbitrary speed value I’d be a lot more mentally damaged
To be fair the only ones that don’t get mentally damaged at all with this stuff are theoretical physicists. After all being crazy makes you immune to further madness.
Here’s something I just ran into looking stuff up for my comment: GN-z11 is one of the farthest galaxies we’ve ever seen. Thanks to the expansion of the universe, at a distance of over 30 billion light-years, it has to be moving away from us at over twice the speed of light.
What the fuck does that mean, temporally? Like, forget the speed of light, time dilation has to do with space and relative speeds. If I’m moving at near the speed of light relative to you, then my clock will physically tick more slowly. What happens if I’m moving over twice the speed of light? Is the real life GN-z11 in our reference frame moving backwards in time at over twice the rate we’re moving forward?
From my understanding, this is caused by the universe itself expanding between the 2 objects, not that the object itself is moving that speed relative to us. It’s still completely insane to think about, either way.
I can’t find any reference that says it’s moving away from us at twice the speed of light, which would violate Relativity. The fact that it is further away from us in light years than the age of the universe in years, is due to the fact that the space itself is expanding.
The thing is, it’s moving that fast because of the expansion of space. ≈30 billion light-years over ≈14 billion years equates to over twice the speed of light. Does that mean there’s no crazy relativistic time dilation, and time is moving normally for them in our frame of reference, since they aren’t physically moving, it’s space that’s expanding? That’s just as wild to my brain
Relativity only applies to local reference frames and not to the recession rates of cosmologically distant objects.
From what I understand, you are always travelling at the speed of light through space/time, but when you move at high speeds through space that shifts the proportion of your speed out of the time dimension. And a photon travels only through space, experiencing no time between the time it was emitted and the time it was absorbed. What I just can’t wrap my head around is the concept of travelling at some speed without involving the time dimension at all.
Probably one of the most memorable and pivotal moments in my life was when my college professor showed us the origins of relativity and how Einstein came to the conclusion that E = mc^2
It’s a proof that only took about 10 minutes to explain, and the mathematics really aren’t that difficult to understand by most people. The geniuses in the fact that Einstein started by explaining how calculating relative motion meant that time had to be a variable that could be different depending on who the observer was. This in itself is an incredible observation, but you can take this to the extent to literally prove that mass and energy are directly related to each other. It’s absolutely wild and one of the most sublime equations ever made.
I wish we could test this out with only simple apparatus. Unfortunately the common people do not have access to satellites or nonstop bullet trains.
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We can and do. GPS satellites need to be regularly calibrated to Earth clock signals or they’ll start to drift their calibration by meters per day.
Please dont do that
Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.
And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.
EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!
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.
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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.
How about the new 2Tb m.2 drives? Not only vastly larger yet still, transfer speeds are also insane. I once had a computer with a 20Mb hard drive, current drives transfer 600-1200mb per second.
Not so impressive, of course its faster when its smaller. The data have to travel shorter.
Jk, it is damn impressive!
Actually, that’s true! It’s not significant enough to affect the throughput directly, but when you transmit data on parallel leads, they have to be roughly the same length in order to keep the signals synchronised with the time frames when they are received. Otherwise part of the data might not arrive in time. The higher the throughput (and shorter the frames), the greater the leads’ lengths affect the timing. This is why you often see long squiggly leads on circuit boards - they extend the shorter leads to roughly the same lengths.
Eh, parallel hasn’t been used for a while already. SATA literally means “Serial ATA” and no longer uses parallel connections. I haven’t seen parlallel connectors since like a decade or so
I wasn’t talking about connectors, I was talking about circuits inside the devices. Even if something is as simple as a clock and a data signal travelling in parallel, timing is still an important factor.
I saw 1tb microsd cards for sale at the shops the other day and had a bit of a ‘what the fuck…’ moment
I remember my parents talking about some thing or other in star trek that would be impossible because you’d need “terabytes of storage, and that’s probably not possible”. And now you can go buy 1 tb of storage and lose it in your couch cushions.
Poor Keanu Reaves gave up his childhood memories in Johnny Mnemonic to store something like 100GB of data in his brain. I don’t remember the Star Trek storage callout cause they were generally pretty good about just fabricating their own units for stuff (future sci-fi writers should take note, it’s always easier to make up units then deal with pedantic people on the internet).
I lost a 1tb flash drive with ventoy and a bunch of files and I’m still mad, but I had a backup lol
The latest SDUC standard allows for up to 128 TB.
And the price of that 128 gb sd card? €10-15, 512 gb cards are even crazier right now at like €35 a piece, that’s €0,068 per gigabyte
It gets better. The size of the SD card isn’t the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit ‘thicker’ than the rest; that’s the actual chip, that tiny bump!
SD cards make sense to me. Hard Drives… Now there is some spooky technology.
The reader head on a hard drive changes direction so fast, that it experiences accelerations like that of a bullet being fired, hundreds of times a second.
The “Fly height” or distance a reader floats above the platter is so tiny, that it would crash into a thumbprint.
The actual magnetic media that stores your data is a layer of iron a few atoms thick deposited on to a ceramic or glass platter, with a single atom layer of a protective metal coating (typically rhodium) in top of it.
Despite these incredible tolerances, they damn things are dirt cheap, and surprisingly reliable.
Also fun, they rely on quantum mechanics.
Individual “bits” on a SD card are electron buckets that are either “full” (they have an electron) or not. 8 bits to a byte ~1 trillion bytes to a terabyte.
I’ve got a 1tb microsd and it’s crazy to see the difference between a 60MB harddisk and it
What’s a floppy disk?
That’s just another name for the save icon.
I really get the feeling that this question isn’t being asked seriously but here goes.
Floppy disks are an older removable storage format for a computer. The media inside the disks was flexible like a piece of paper, hence the term “floppy”. There were three different common sizes, there was an 8", a 5.25", and a 3.5". The 8" and 5.25" had the flexible media in a sort of heavy fabric and plastic sheath that was itself flexible, amd the 3.5" disks had a hard plastic cover on the outside, with a sliding metal door, and some people erroneously called these “hard disks”.
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.
Let’s stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn’t believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen… the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
Please tell us more or other things!
The sun could’ve gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn’t know for another 20 seconds or so.
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.
That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.
That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China
Japanfrom the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain
Walking through the Sea of Japan is a bit of a challenge, though.
Haha okay there is some water thats true.
Duh! Just wait for low tide!
Between Japan and the EU, there is an ocean. You also need to swim, not only walk.
Swimming is walking in water /s
Maybe he plans to wear a weight belt.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That’s not true though. You need REM sleep. Sleeping doesn’t mean you’re K.O. You’re processing things and regenerating. That’s like the exact opposite of being K.O.
But you’re out. That processing is so intense you have to de-link nearly all environmental inputs.
It’s necessary to clean out all the lactic acid buildup from thinking.
Ive suffered insomnia. It’s wild how after long enough you stop developing short term memory. Which; when experienced, translates to; it’s 10am. You just got done cleaning the garage cuz…cuz. You’re drinking coffee watching clips from the today show on yr phone. You look up. It’s 9pm and dark outside. You’re sitting on the couch. You felt no time pass in between. You ask yr wife about dinner with her grandparents that you were supposed to go to. Oh. You did go. And you drove (wait…WHAT). Apparently you were as charming as ever. No memories of it.
It’s like someone else is living your life.
That’s when I went to the Dr. for sleep meds. I trust myself to be myself… but naw fam, life’s too short. I never blanked out work so fuck that
Omg that sounds crazy… like in Memento.
Okay true, but you also need deep sleep a lot otherwise you dont regenerate. Also the body is fully K.O. which may make more sense
I get very little deep sleep. Is that part of why my injuries take so long to heal and feel like shit all the time
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
It’s even weirder than that. “You” are a story that your brain tells itself so that you can explain your needs to other people. Without other people, or at least the pretend image of other people, there’s nothing like what we think of as a human personality.
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
If you get into mindfulness meditation a little bit, the concept of self in general shifts in really weird ways. Like I know that I am an individual entity in the world, but the sense of an individual actor or driver within my consciousness has faded somewhat. When you recognize that the thoughts or feelings that manifest in consciousness are about as much under your control as whether the wind is blowing or what the people across the room are talking about, it gives you a new perspective on life.
Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.
Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.
Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.
Can you elaborate on the math here? (I believe you, I just want to understand the simulation parameters better).
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Also, in this simulation are the customers arriving in equally spaced intervals or is random arrival time within the bounds assumed?
In the linked article they are arriving randomly. It takes 10 minutes per customer and they arrive every 10.3 minutes.
Aren’t they arriving slightly slower than can be served, according to these numbers:
If one customer takes 10 minutes to serve, you can serve 6 customers in an hour
and you get 5.8 customers every hour, which is less than 6
So you serve 6 customers, meaning you have a leftover capacity of 0.2 per hour or 1 extra customer every 5 hours
Maybe the numbers are switched over or I am misunderstanding something
Edit: nevermind, read the link in the thread and realised I treated the average as the actual serving time and I’m guessing that’s what makes it non intuitive. I’m still not entirely clear on how it works.
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They’re arriving slower than they can be processed. So the line shrinks slowly it there’s a line.
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Not OP, but this website should explain everything.
Thanks! This article really clears up a lot of the details that help the simulation make sense.
Assume the bank opens up to a long line and it makes sense.
Intuitive way to see why is that 6.1 customers per hour would mean infinite waiting time (when it reaches a steady state)
The mitochondria in all but your blood cells are a different species than us with their own separate DNA.
You mean the power house of the cell?
i love my powerful little friends
They have their own separate genetic code, yes, but that doesn’t make them a separate species, because they aren’t a distinct organism at all. They don’t exist in the absence of our cells.
Maybe it is semantics as you are correct but others do consider them a separate species that just happen to live in our cells. https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-anatomy/mitochondria-what-are-they-and-why-do-we-have-them#:~:text=Two separate species became one,in every other human alive.
Wait what?
A book that I love that covers this in an accessible manner is “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochrondria and the Meaning of Life” by Nick Lane
Basically, it looks like a single cell, predatory amoeba of some sort engulfed a parasitic bacterium that was the ancestor to mitochondria, and instead of being digested, it ended up living inside the amoeba, helping to produce energy.
This is a big deal because the way that cells harness energy is by doing some cool biochemistry across a membrane. When a cell has to rely on its main, cell membrane to do this, then the energy production is proportional to the cell’s surface area, which means that it’s proportional to the cell’s radius squared (E ∝ r^2 ) . However, the energy requirements of the cell are determined by its volume, which means that energy requirements are proportional to cell radius cubed ( E ∝ r^3 ). For small numbers the difference between r^3 and r^2 isn’t much, but as radius increases, the cell volume far outstrips its surface area, which means that there was an upper ceiling on how big a cell could get while still fulfilling its energy requirements.
Mitochrondria allow cells to break this size limit by decoupling energy production from cell size, because scaling up energy production is as simple as having more Mitochrondria. Mitochrondria have their own independent genome - in the years since the endosymbiotic event, the mitochrondrial genome has shrunk a lot, because it’s sort of like moving in with a friend who already has a house full of furniture - no sense in having duplicates.
That’s so rad. Thanks!
It still weirds me out how ancient organisms could pick up biochemical mechanisms like Kiryu learns fighting styles. “That’s rad!” and now we have mitochondria.
Yeah mitochondrial RNA is separately inherited and only from the mother, because the egg cell has mitochondria whereas the sperm does not.
there’s people that don’t like music.
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Can you tolerate it at least, or you get annoyed if it’s playing at an event/Uber/supermarket etc?
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Wait, what? Are you saying you actively don’t like music? I mean i can (kind of) understand if a person doesn’t really get a pleasure response from listening to music, but you’re saying listening to music actually gives you a displeasure response?? ALL music? It’s ok if that’s the case, you didn’t choose to have that response, but i just want to be clear that this is what you’re saying?
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Man that sucks. But it seems like you’re doing better these days, so that’s good.
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A lot of music generates unpleasant sensations for me too, though I can tolerate it a bit. Unlike the other commenter though, I can enjoy a lot of other music. What’s unusual in my opinion is that it’s all music, not the negative response. Lucky you if the worst that music can get from you is indifference!
I see. I totally get what you mean, it’s taken me years to learn how to tolerate a lot of music I don’t like. Thanks for sharing
I used to be like this, but with movies. When I first met my wife, she was utterly baffled at the concept of somebody not enjoying movies, and she made it her mission to make me enjoy them.
Come to think of it, she actually doesn’t like music much. I’ve failed to change her opinion on that though because my taste in music is shit (and I’m proud of it.)
I am still like this with movies and TV.
It just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve seen a handful of movies/shows that I’d call “not boring as shit” ever, and even then, its not something I’d choose to do myself, but is fine if I’m, like, chillin and chatting with people or whatever.
Might be my neurodivergence, might also just be how much of a reader I am. Movies are just so slow compared to reading.
That’s basically how I was. Honestly, the reason I enjoy movies nowadays isn’t really because it’s my thing, but because my wife is always so excited to show me the movies she likes, and I can’t help but enjoy myself when it’s making her happy.
I rarely watch movies on my own, or with other people besides her, but when I do, it’s usually because I think it’d be fun to tell her all about it, and maybe watch it with her too.
I’m also bigger on reading, but I have really severe, unmedicated ADHD, so I can’t sit down with an actual book for longer than a few minutes. Gotta have pretty pictures, like a manga or graphic novel or something (and even then it’s hard.)
Good movies demand attention.
Good audio books I can listen to while I play my favorite video game.
I’m the opposite. I can’t ever ‘zone out’ while listening/watching/reading/playing stuff; I can’t even listen to music while playing games, and usually turn background music on low or off.
As a person who was born liking music, I indeed find it too bizarre to believe to be true.
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I have since changed my tune.
Ba-dum tsh
I thought my significant other was one of these to a certain extent. It does weird things to me as a DJ. Turns out that she just likes the limited music that she likes and cannot stand most everything else.
that just makes it easier to make a playlist with all their favorite songs.
Chipmunks and Avett Brothers, a playlist only rose colored glasses can help with.
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For me it’s not like I don’t like music, but there are large stretches of time, where I do not care so much for it. I would guess that I haven’t actively choosen to hear music for weaks, possibly months, now. Obviously excluding the music you can’t avoid, like background music in movies and video games etc.
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