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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.
And one that loses only 1 second per year is right only once every 43,200 years.
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
it is less than 4 times/day correct, if there is a speed difference between backward rotation and time.
Ah, shit, a clock that runs infinitely fast is always right.
Love your username
It’s also always wrong. Infinities are like that.
I’d have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.
1 - George W Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.
…in the same vein…
2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the ‘accounting’ of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.
… If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.
And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.
And make flower patterns on cloth
And big titty anime pics
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
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
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.
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
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.
Consider a dam that is 10m tall
Then consider the height of water behind that dam is 5m tall.
Does the dam need to be built stronger if the water behind it is 1 km long?
How about only 500m?
How about 1m?
The answer is, it doesn’t matter. Water exerts pressure equally regardless of how much water is behind it.
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Incompressible fluids are pretty insane
This is also why trees are so fucking crazy to think about. It is impossible to pump water up a hose more than ~32 feet. Like it’s literally physically impossible to stick a pump at the top of a tall building and suck water straight up a pipe. You need a complicated series of pumps and one-way valves to pump it up in stages. Because you’re not really “sucking” the water up the pipe. You’re just lowering the pressure in the pipe, and atmospheric pressure pushes the water upwards to fill the low pressure. After 32 feet tall, the top of the hose/pipe will be a perfect vacuum, atmospheric pressure won’t be able to push liquid water upwards any farther, and the water will just begin cold-boiling in the top of the pipe as the liquid water turns into gas (steam) to fill the vacuum.
But tall trees can move water all the way to their leaves by using only passive capillary action, and suction created by water evaporating out of their leaves. The capillary action is created by tiny straw-like fibers that run all the way up the tree and are bunched together really tightly. Due to surface tension, water is able to “climb” the capillaries as the surface tension fills as much surface area as possible. Then at the top of the tree, as the water evaporates out of the leaves, it draws up fresh water to fill the void.
But that means the bottom of the tree should need to support the pressure of all of the water above it. But it doesn’t, because the surface tension holds the water stable inside of the trunk.
Even crazier fact: it’s not just capillary action drawing water up trees. Trees are actually able to create negative pressure: https://www.science4all.org/article/the-amazing-physics-of-water-in-trees/
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Technically only the pressures are equal, and the actual force will be linearly dependent on the area of the dam (or the surface area of the cylinder). That’s why you can make a tall water tank with relatively thin walls, but an actual dam will have to be quite thicc to handle the tensile/compressive stress (depending on the shape of the dam).
That is accounting for static bodies of water, wouldn’t there be force generated in a dynamic situation? Ie the flow of a fast river? Or if the lake is large enough tidal forces? I’m sure it’s negligible levels but still something that must be accounted for?
No, that’s absolutely true. Dynamic loads will need to be accounted for in real world examples.
Another point is that if the dam is 10m tall, it has to be built to withstand 10m of water. just because it sits at 5m most of the time doesn’t mean a heavy rain couldn’t raise the level, and if the dam collapses that’s going to be catastrophic vs just spilling over the top.
I’ve seen a few dynamic loads in my day and in my professional opinion I must agree
Thank you. Your hypothetical question has been a nagging, unresolved background radiation in my mind for decades, but I’d never gotten around to investigating.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Um akchully…
Median is a type of average
NERDDDDD!
Ok, I had assumed average was the same as mean, but see that it’s ambiguous. Saying “the mean person does not have 10 fingers” just sounds wrong though.
Due to two facts:
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The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think
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The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.
It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.
There’s no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.
For some reason that reminds me of how the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, named Samoset, spoke to them in English. Then he came back later with another tribe member, Squanto, who also spoke English.
Forever establishing American expectations when traveling overseas.
isn’t english just the crab language that spontaneously comes into existence if given enough time?
What’s the details about a fax machine in the 1860s?
There are a few different ones by that point.
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There is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.
Shouldn’t that be 2? Mars and Venus.
Pretty sure the one on Venus is dead.
well yeah, but that’s because the native robots killed it
by weight, theres more non-human DNA in you than human.
Wait. Please explain. How is DNA inside me, a verifiable human, not human?
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
youre mostly bacterial dna
U got bugs in ur poop.
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
we all know what you do when you visit the zoo.
were those giraffes looking thirsty, hmmm?
I have heard that this is more true for some people in Tijuana.
Butterflies can remember things from their time as a caterpillar.
These memories are retained after going through metamorphosis, the breakdown of their caterpillar form into a cellular soup (or partial soup).
Details here
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
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.
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.
All borders are weird
omg la is east of reno what is happening rn
70% of Canadians live south of the 49th Parallel, the northern border of the US.
Humans have stripes that are invisible to us. However, cats can see our stripes.
Is it all humans or just those humans with two X chromosomes? Relevant video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw
Also in this video, we can see female cat’s stripes in their fur color.
By this logic, does this mean my striped cat doesn’t realize she has stripes?
Wait, what?!?
If I asked for stripes and got this, I’d want my money back.
Sharks are older than both trees and the north star
Both trees?
Laurelin and Telperion
Yeah Twin Pines Ma— I mean Lone Pine Mall.
Yes, both of them at the double tree inn obviously
Piney and Sticks
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
The Allies avoided bombing specific factories in Nazi Germany in which US oligarchs owned equity.
the point was to post unbeliavable facts
This is an eminently believable fact.
I’m just going to leave this here
yes, but those same oligarchs were the one’s funding the entire war effort at the time time, and - ohwaitnvm…
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.
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.
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.
I think my AI has a TV problem
There are more trees on earth by far than there are stars in the galaxy.
I had to looks this one up, but missed the “galaxy” vs “universe”. There are an estimated 3 trillion trees, 100-400 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, but potentially 1 septilliom stars in the universe.
However all three of these are estimates, so who actually knows.
I’m not sure where these numbers are from, but my guess is that you mean the Observable Universe, which is just the part of the universe that we can see.
We don’t know how big the full universe is, it could be infinite with an infinite number of stars.
Just some quick Google searches so not sure how reputable, but didn’t feel like copying random links.
But yeah, that’s why I called them out as estimates as I suspect there is a lot of room for error in those numbers.
