this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Maybe I'm not remembering how they work correctly, but I thought sliderules and abacus...es...abacuses? abacii?... just helped you repeat operations and keep track of the work you'd done, rather than executing mathematical functions for you

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 days ago

Sliderules definitely do operations for you. The basic multiplication sliderule uses logarithmic scales to do multiplication by addition. Abaci (it is in fact a Latin word that takes the -i plural, but "abacuses" is generally acceptable) do just help you keep track, but I believe you can use clever tricks to mechanically simplify complex operations.

[–] OryxAndCake@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

Upvoted for 'abacii', it's a very pleasing word and I'm going to be saying it all day now.

There are a lot of really fun maths videos on youtube about abacii and slide rules and all the cool things that can be done with them. (I was going to link you one or two but falling into the youtube distraction hole trying to find them is going to massively derail my day.)