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.

    • Cass.Forest@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment

      Sounds like a terrible sorting algorithm /jk

    • 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.

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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

    • raptir@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

    • zirzedolta@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            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

  • 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

  • SargTeaPot@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    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

  • Rocky60@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates

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      1 year ago

      Tides are a phenomenon where the height of the edge of a body of water shifts relative to the shore. A phenomenon is a thing. Why should explaining its cause in those terms have any effect on that?

  • glibg10b@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Here’s one: Iron doesn’t have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can’t smell coins after washing them

  • evatronic@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The sun could’ve gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn’t know for another 20 seconds or so.

  • 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.

  • bradorsomething@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.”