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.

  • Urist@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Damage@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
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        1 year ago

        Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you

        That catch is, you need to find that someone in the first place, and that takes a bit of looking around. So in effect, soul mates are found.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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).

      • Urist@lemmy.ml
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        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.

  • whileloop@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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!

    • dudinax@programming.dev
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      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.

    • Sombyr@lemmy.one
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      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.”

  • Mothra@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • beteljuice@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

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

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I saw 1tb microsd cards for sale at the shops the other day and had a bit of a ‘what the fuck…’ moment

      • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Urist@lemmy.ml
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      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.

  • Iraglassceiling [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

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

    • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        In high school my graduating class was 38. The one before us was 21, the one after 18.

        Coincidently there was a massive blizzard that snowed everybody into their house for a week about 9 months before my birthday.

  • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Quantum superpositioning. Schrödinger was right, it’s absolutely ridiculous and the cat can’t be alive and dead at the same time, box or not.

    The problem is it provably does work that way, or at least in a way that is indistinguishable from it, ridiculous or not, and we don’t really know why. We’ve learnt many of the rules, managed to trap particles in superimposed states, even discovered that plants take advantage of it to transport energy more efficiently, and it’s just a thing that happens, an apparently fundamental rule of existence. And it doesn’t make any fucking sense.

    • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      That bomb detecting thing is absolutely crazy, I think it’s one of those things most people have heard of but consigned to the bin of things that couldn’t possibly be true

  • purahna@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Similar metal in the human body one, Vitamin B12 has cobalt in it. Absolutely wild. I guess that’s not really commonly known but it’s still worth mentioning

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • rahmad@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Can you elaborate on the math here? (I believe you, I just want to understand the simulation parameters better).

        • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          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.