Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?
If you've ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you'd get it! They're fairly expensive, and aren't airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they'll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting
It just occurred to me that zippos are basically the same type of oil lanterns that we've been using for thousands of years
you are loved and deserve happiness
Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome
Bullshit and lies.
No one loves me, and i deserve nothing, for I am trash.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
Don’t mean to pick, but Oxford was founded in 1096 and Cambridge in 1209.
I worked for cambridge in 2009 and got a nice little 800 year badge
Thats 900 years dumbass
Edit: you got epic trolled by summzashi!!!
My local pub is older than the USA.
And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the construction on the great pyramids.
Wait, you're saying that the Aztec empire was just 64 years old when Columbus discovered America and ships with conquistadors followed to butcher and enslave everyone?
Yeah, I've heard similar things in the past and I'm always confused by it.
There were people there prior to the Aztec empire conquering them. The Aztec empire is just a specific government that ruled the area at that specific time.
The Napoleonic empire, for comparison, only lasted 1804-1815 (with a hole in the middle).
General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Isn’t this Judge Doom’s plan?
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.
At this point you get into a philosophical discussion about what “right” really means
Two wrong don’t make a right, but three left turns do.
Or if the “present” actually exists
My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it
*It must be correct as it’s very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past
If you’re lucky, a clock that’s slightly too fast or too slow will be right once
This only works with 1-dimensional time though.
Luckily we don’t build clocks for n-dimensional time
Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
Edit: idk if it’s actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that’s what I’ve heard. I looked it up and it seems like it’s your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.
On one side you have people that think 5g causes cancer. On the other, you have people directly beaming shit into their skulls to open their cars from a couple extra feet away.
Wild
i dont believe it causes cancer necessarily, but i think 5g is worrying for the sake of big increase in location tracking precision
Air is a fluid.
What… how?
It flows
what about a glacier? it’s solid but it kinda flows too
So does glass almost, glass is not a liquid, there are more than 5 stated of matter, a lot more, but glass is still a type of solid. It has some characteristics that recemble the characteristics of a really slow moving liquid.
Well glaciers contain both solid and liquid parts. When you compress ice it turns to liquid. Water isn’t really easy to compress, liquid water can be lower than 0c (freezing), which is called super cooled, and it turns to ice when it’d not compressed anymore. You can make super cooled water or even soda at home, and if you give the bottle a shake it will turn to ice in a couple of seconds. Also the ground under the glacier will be moved together with the ice and water, there is do much force there. When a part of a glacier breaks off it’s called calving, like when a cow gives birth to a calf
According to any hydrodynamics code, so are solids.
The world is running out of sand.
It’s one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.
Oh, I have two good ones:
-
Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
-
You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn’t been there.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren’t. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it’s fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you’ll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it’s productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)
To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.)
Truly no offense, but this is sort of burying the lede on Nuclear Power risks. Mathmatically coal releases more radiation - no question. It’s also hard to pin down how many died due to Fukushima for ver good reasons: Correlation might be easy, but determining cause is ultra tough and no right-minded scientist would say it without overwhelming evidence (like they had something “hot” that fell on their roof and didn’t know it for a long time). Also? They aren’t dead yet. So we look to statistical life span models crossing multiple factors (proximity, time of exposure, contaminated environments and try to pin down cancer clusters attributable, and people can live for decades, etc…
The problem is that people rightly are concerned that in both Fukushima and Chernobyl (and 3 Mile for that matter) unforseen circumstances could have been catastrophically worse. You blow up a coal plant? You expose a region locally to it and it’s probably “meh”. You blow up a nuclear plant, and you get melt down corium hitting ground water or sea water with direct exposure to fissioning material and all the sudden you have entire nations at risk for subsequent spewing of hot material that will contaminate food supplies, water resevoirs, and linger on surfaces and be pulled into our lungs once it’s in the dirt. Radioactive matieral is FAR more dangerous inside the body when you eat plants and animals that are exposed and pull it from the ground. Even cleaning down every surface, eventually you’ll get some of it airborn to be breathed into our lungs again with wind storms, flooding and other natural erosion. The consequences are exponentially higher with Nuclear accidents and ignoring that is whitewashing. And that’s not even getting into contamination from fuel enrichment, cooling ponds/pools leaking water, or the fact that it will take 30-40 years to clean up Fukushima (and they aren’t sure how exactly that will happen and there could be another tsunami). Probably hundreds to try to clean up and contain Chernobyl - and given the current state of affairs we may find out even worse.
BTW, I’m pro-nuclear. Thorium salts seem a good way to go and we probably would already have these if not for the nuclear arms race making nations hungry for plutonium. Please don’t short sell everyone’s intelligence because you can claim “only” a handful of people died due to Fukushima. Direct death is only one facet. Lives were disrupted (and displaced) and for a while there, the impacts spread to the US across the Pacific and there were discussions of evacuating like 1/3 of Japan’s population outside an exclusion zone. You can be pro nuclear while still acknowledging that some fears are real and well founded, and unfortunately the industry has proven gaps in safety that make it harder and harder to argue when we have Solar and Wind and rapidly ramping power storage. Nuclear is likely to simply be outcompeted over time (just like Coal and NG).
Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.
Though they’re on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there’s a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don’t have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They’ve been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.
Wind turbines do not have a service life of 3 to 5 years. Where did you hear that?
Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.
Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can’t do it.
Did you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s only mandate is to ensure the safety of nuclear power, not to promote its implementation. Many regulatory bodies have a dual mandate to stop them from just shutting down what they’re supposed to regulate.
-
Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/
EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it’s still really huge.
I think that says more about how unbelievably massive Africa is.
“pretty small”, it’s like 2 Canada’s.
Africa is, like, huge. So saying Russia is small because it fits within Africa doesn’t make it sound small to me.
Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it’s still really huge.
Wait so it’s purely projection distortion that makes Russia seem half the size of the old world?? This blew my mind.
Also fun fact Google seems to have stopped outlining Russia (not other countries) when you click them in Google Maps.
You got me clicking countries on the map now. I really can’t find a consistent reason why sometimes it shows the outline and sometimes it doesn’t…
- Canada: yes
- Russia: no
- South Korea: no
- China: no
- Spain: no
- France: yes
- Iraq: yes
- Kyrgyzstan: no
- Mongolia: yes
- Japan: no
- USA: yes
- Malaysia: yes
What pattern is there here???
Maybe if there are territorial disputes / conflicts (Ukraine also no) they do this instead of picking a side? No idea
- Wombat feces are cube shaped.
- Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
- Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
- Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.
The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it’s a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm… Nah, those dots don’t connect at all.
All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon
this is actually a misconception! the gravity of the planets combined would cause them all to crash into each other!
Or would they just stack up?
I just did a simulation with representative bodies that included spheroid objects of varying densities to approximate the makeup of the major solar bodies and all the fruit bounced everywhere and the lady behind the counter is really upset now.
Moose kill more people than bears every year.
Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.
An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.
