7mo ago

What is your favourite fact?

Thanks Hank Green.

108 comments

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.
- Dingo Suffrage is my new punk band name
  
  We have a Lemmy instance for this kind of stuff: https://lemmy.world/c/fakebandnames
- That’s awesome! Maybe they should teach us some of their tricks…
- How do they indicate yay or nah
  
  They sneeze!
  
  I think it's quiet or sneeze

If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.
- And if you have one skeleton in your body, you're below average.
  
  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?
  
  Ha that's a good one
- I've always thought the drummer from Leppard was below average

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.
- Don’t know that. That’s kind of cool.

Australia lost a war to emus
- Two, wasn't it?

Hydrogen, if left on its own long enough, names itself.
- That's a wild way to think about the universe. Gonna steal this
- How do you mean?
  
  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.

There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.
It's more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
- *are

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.
- Chess positions are like that too, after any "main line" it quickly becomes a never played game...
  
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems more realistic to say:
  Playing the same game twice is unlikely because of the number of possible games, OR
  It's possible the same game has never been played twice, OR
  After a certain number of moves, it's very possible to create a never-played game
  I'm certain I've played the same game multiple times, because I suck at chess and I fall into the same obvious traps over and over.
- 52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
  Not true, 52! ≈ 8x10^{67 < 10}80.
  
  If you divided the universe's mass into 52! parts, each part would contain ~1x10^13 atoms. Which, as far as solids go, is not visible to the naked eye. Which is still quite mental..
- How can we even know that?
  
  The first part is a matter of probabilities. It's very unlikely by virtue of the sheer number of possible configurations vs how many times a deck is shuffled in history (even erring on the high side)
  For the second part, the composition of elements in most stars is known. And the total mass of the universe is approximated by observing gravitational effects. Which is what you need to work out approx number of atoms.
  
  It's only in a statistical sense. Combinations based off a few shuffles from a standard sorted deck would be fairly common in practice.
- I bet there are certain shuffled combinations that repeat. like, take a new deck, divide perfectly in half, do one perfect riffle. that has probably happened more than once.

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)
- Yeah, timing marks! There's a few of them. So neat
- ...mother fucker... That's neat!
- I don't get it.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QR_Code_Structure_Example_3.svg
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
  OP is talking about the alternating pattern between the two straw papers. In the SVG from Wikipedia, this corresponds to the "timing"

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.
- 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.
- My favourite false cognate is the plural ending -s in French and English. The English one has Germanic roots, while the French one come from Latin accusative plural -as/-os. They are unrelated etymologically.
  
  After looking it up I have to correct myself, the Germanic plural - s also come from the accusative plural

Your lips and butthole are the two ends of the same tube. Same glaborous vermillion border type skin or something
- Shhh! Diffusion AI might hear you.
  
  Time to screw with stable diffusion

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.
- Oh, I wondered about why there weren't more characters in the ASCII code set.
  
  yep! the ascii standard was originally invented for teletypewriters, and includes four 'blocks' of 32 codes each, for 128 in total, so it only uses seven bits per code.
  the first block, hex 00 - 1F, contains control codes for the typewriter. stuff like "newline", "backspace", and "ring bell" all go in here.
  The second block has the digits are in order, from hex 30 = '0' all the way to hex 39 = '9',
  The uppercase alphabet starts at hex 41 = 'A', and exactly one block later, the lowercase alphabet starts at hex 61 = 'a'. This means their binary codes are 100 0001 and 110 0001, differering only in a single bit! So you can easily convert between upper and lowercase ascii by flipping that bit.
  The remaining space in the last three blocks is filled with various punctuation marks. I'm not sure if these are in any particular order.
  The final ascii code, 7F, is reserved for "delete", because its binary representation is 111 1111, perfect for "deleting" data on a punch card by punching over it.
- Very neat!

That giraffes exist. I'm a simple man, and giraffes are awesome.
- I like Girafarig, the Pokamon
  
  Its name is Girafarig, which is most of "giraffe" forward and backward

Kevin Spacey’s middle name is Spacey.
And that’s a rock fact.
- 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.
  
  Who the fuck gives their kid a middle name of Spacey? No wonder he turned out weird.
- Thank you Gregory.

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.

Wombats take square shits.
- Goats have square pupils. It's like the banana and the human hand
  
  Umm
  In that we deliberately selected it to be that size and shape?

There are more grains of sand in the ocean than there are stars in our solar system.
- I'm pretty happy about that. It's warm enough.
- There's more than one grain of sand in the ocean????!?!?!?1one

Early cycling laws and rights predate the invention of the automobile by decades. So it is actually the car that is the invasive newcomer.
- Yeah, but it's the cyclist that annoys me (more than cars. Cars do annoy me as well). At least the ones wearing a helmet and riding a street bike.
  If they're wearing a hoodie and a backpack I usually sympathize with them. They probably got jammed up and this is their only way to get to work, groceries, drugs, see someone, or whatever else they might need to go out for
  
  Your view of cyclists contains a lot of assumptions that I don't find likely to be true often enough to be actionable

Two pieces of matter cannot exist at the exact same place at the exact same time.
- Fermion condensate
- Is this referring to the Pauli Exclusion Principle or just like macroscopic physical objects
- There was an X-Files book I read when I was about 10 which says otherwise.

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)

"If left in the sun, mayonnaise grows hair."
- The hard part is getting the mayonnaise into the sun.
- “If your bra is too tight, it's uncomfortable. If you're a boy and your bra is too tight, I'm uncomfortable.” — Lori Beth Denberg, All That

Emia means presence in blood.
- Magnemia is a nice state

π mph is roughly e knots.

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

platypuses are venomous.
- Half of them.
  
  Assuming their sexual distribution is equal.

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.

Did you know that, for every snake on Earth, there is one snake dick?
- This assumes there is an exact 1:1 ratio of male to female snakes, which is almost certainly not the case.
  
  I think the reference is to male snakes having a forked penis.

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.

The firealarm speaks Welsh
- what

Your pinkie is a perfect fit for your nostril.
- Maybe yours is. Mine is more like the thumb.
- All of mine fit in my nostrils (ed gang), and none of either of ours fit in my husband’s.

Did you know you can save 15% or more by switching to Geico?

One side of the moon is always dark and therefore the other side is always light
- I hope this is supposed to be a joke.
- For a funner fact: the only time this is not true is during a lunar eclipse, where the Earth's shadow means the entire moon is in shadow at once

108 comments