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.
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.
I mean, you should be extra kind to most people most of the time. Comunism begins at home.
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.
Definitely agree and beautifully put :)
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.
You find a partner, who then MAY become a soul mate
it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment
Sounds like a terrible sorting algorithm /jk
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).
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.
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.
This one startled me.
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
What’s even more fascinating is that most of the stars we see in the sky are afterimages of primitive stars that died out long ago yet they shine as bright as the stars alive today
That doesn’t seem right. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across (give or take) and the life span of stars is measured in billions of years.
Most of the stars we see are in our galaxy, so at most, we are seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago, which means that the vast majority of them will still be around, and looking much the same as they did 100,000 years ago.
I seem to have made a mistake then. Thank you for correcting it.
Thinking about it further, if we’re talking about stars that we can see with telescopes, Hubble, James Webb etc, then you’re on the money. Stars in remote galaxies far outnumber the ones in our galaxy and show us glimpses of the early stages of the universe. And many of those stars are long gone
I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Humans can smell rain better than a shark can smell blood.
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.
Ok hold up so the way I’m understanding this is that its tilt (day) is slower than it’s rotation around the sun (year). Is that right or am I way off?
I mentioned this one to my friends the other day and it took so much convincing before they actually believed me! Definitely an interesting one. Venus also spins the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
I get people telling me “no, that’s impossible” every time I mention this fact.
“Search your feelings, you know it to be true”
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!
Wow I didn’t know this and I’ve never felt a similarity between seafood and mushrooms either in flavour or smell. But, still a cool fact.
It’s one of those things that feels really obvious if you cook a lot of east/south Asian dishes - shrimp sauce and mushroom soy sauce have a pretty similar aftersmell to them because they’re so concentrated
Your asswhole can stretch up to 8 inches without permanent deformation.
Also an adult raccoon can fit into a 4.5 inch hole.
Do with that info as you wish
Asswhole… lol
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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.”
Their bodies produce chemicals that cause them to forget how bad childbirth was.
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
Please dont do that
That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.
Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.
In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.
Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You’ve got a metal frame inside your body.
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 body knows iron is hard to uptake
I had to take iron supplements in the past because my periods were so bad that I would lose my vision and pass out from loss of blood.
I don’t have iron issues so I haven’t completely fact checked this, but I have read in various places that using cast iron skillets to cook with does add more iron to your foods to help supplement.
That is super interesting information and kind of makes sense with the seasoning involved.
But I recently learned you can get different enamel types that you don’t have to season.
I would think an enameled skillet would not provide any extra iron; the glass that the enamel is made of forms a barrier between the iron and everything else. That’s nice because you don’t have to worry about it rusting any more, but it also means no iron in your food.
Yeah, its like a trade off. I’m uneasy about having to season a pan for some reason. I’m pretty sure I have OCD and if I can’t clean a dish the way I clean my other dishes it bugs me to some extent.
Ah gotcha, I can understand how that might be a thing; cat iron is definitely something you treat differently than other dishes. There’s a whole fascinating level of nerdery to proper seasoning, but it’s definitely special cookware that doesn’t fit the usual patterns.
yeah, for some reason it gets to me that there is something left on the pan on purpose. My brain just wants me to scrub it all off.
There’s about 25 blimps in the world, and only 40-50 pilots.
doesn’t really fit the thread, but i was surprised when i learned that the empire state building has a blimp docking station
this is super cool.
That looks like sea creatures mating
They really thought blimps were gonna be a thing.
They should have been
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!
I’ve seen some of its secrets during the eclipse. It’s an angry, writhing tentacled thing. Be thankful it’s so far away.
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.
We did the same but with Special K in a blender, and held a magnet to the side of the blender’s cup.
