The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.
The relatively short time humanity has been around
The universe is finite but expanding
The Monty Hall problem
The absolute scale of devastation created by humanity
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Yo OP. We're carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it's pure carbon. Why wouldn't we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.
I'm just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.
Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don't see the point in quantifying with maths.
I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Beyond that, the idea that's gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.
Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.
I'm mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.
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The USA has 157 million workers, shuffling 140,000 years of work a day. One in 4 has an idea. One in five of those is a good idea. Two thousand stakeholders can make it an innovative idea. So, they can pump 3.5 years of brute force innovation into the world every single day. That's well over a thousand years of advancement per year.
Critical mass populations that can keep up with their own development are a serious creative force to be reckoned with. And human evolution has been exceeded by innovation, dramatically.
But thousands of years of experience die off every day too.
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Using engine brakes can cause your car to not use fuel in some cases.
I've read and heard this from different sources (even driving instructors) and I don't get how it's possible. Your engine is still running, doesn't it use at least as much as it does while it's idling?
Edit: thank you all for your answers. I knew how the engine brake effect worked, my confusion was about exactly why the engine didn't consume fuel in the process. I now understand so thanks all.
Usually your engine uses fuel to turn your wheels.
When you engine brake, your wheels turn your engine.
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The fact that things are able to float, despite of gravity pulling all objects towards the big mass of Earth. You would think that the push of gravity should be more than enough to overcome the slight fluid displacement that allows balloons and boats to push away from the Earth's surface.
So when your rowboat is floating, it can displace a certain volume of water and if it displaces more than that volume the water spills over the sides and it sinks. We talk about how many tons of water it’s displacing because that tells us what the total weight of the boat, you, cooler, beers, tackle and oars can be before the boat sinks.
You already knew that though. What might not be clear is what that weight measurement actually is.
Weight is the acceleration due to gravity that an object experiences. So if your rowboat is able to displace a volume of water that experiences more acceleration due to gravity than it and all it’s contents do, it will stay on top of the water in a state we call floating even though it and some of the contents may be more dense than water!
Now your rowboat is different than the balls in that floating glass ball thermometer your aunt bought out of sharper image in one very unique way: it can’t function when submerged! Those little suckers will go up and down all day, but once water starts coming in over your gunwales you gotta get rid of it or the boat sinks and won’t come up.
So there’s a point of no return where your boat can’t stay afloat any more.
When it displaces a volume of water that experiences less acceleration due to gravity than it and all its contents do, it and all its contents are pulled under the surface of the water. At that point, density determines what happens to the boat and it’s cargo. The boat itself may be denser than an equivalent volume of water and sink, but the beers and cooler are less dense than water and they float. You may be more dense than water, but instead of sinking you tread water and push your head up above the surface.
When the swamped boat sinks, it experiences more acceleration due to gravity than the water around it and pushes that water aside on its way to the bottom of the lake. The beers experience less acceleration due to gravity than the water around them so the water is pulled underneath them and they float. The air pocket inside each can also lends some displacement to the cause.
So the volume of fluid displaced isn’t “slight”. It’s exactly what gravity itself requires for objects to sink or float!
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To be fair, the single iron atoms are surrounded by a lot of carbony goodness. There's a few metals that have minor biological uses in humans like that, and even sodium and potassium are metals in pure form.
It's hella weird to me how we suddenly developed democracy and industrialisation after thousands of years of kind of the same thing. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation; right now I'm playing with Lanchester's laws as a theory.
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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.
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Concepts coming from quantium mechanics take you into a rabbit hole. 2022 Nobel winning experiment that proved universe is not locally real.
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