Thanks Hank Green.
Two, wasn’t it?
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?
That is of you count them to be the same body. Genetically that isn’t so.
And what about the 5 arms I have in my freezer?
Ha that’s a good one
One side of the moon is always dark and therefore the other side is always light
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
I hope this is supposed to be a joke.
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.
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 Mountains foothills and the rivers and tributaries that eventually merge into the Eufrates further downstream.
Emia means presence in blood.
Magnemia is a nice state
There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.
It’s more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.
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.
Middle names are for messing around a bit
I think that is a very recent development.
Your lips and butthole are the two ends of the same tube
Shhh! Diffusion AI might hear you.
Time to screw with stable diffusion
platypuses are venomous.
Half of them.
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.
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.
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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?
It’s only in a statistical sense. Combinations based off a few shuffles from a standard sorted deck would be fairly common in practice.
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.
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.
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)
Your pinkie is a perfect fit for your nostril.
All of mine fit in my nostrils (ed gang), and none of either of ours fit in my husband’s.
Maybe yours is. Mine is more like the thumb.
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.
Very neat!
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.
