this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 12 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Every eye has a tiny blind spot near the middle. But your brain makes it disappear and you don't realize it's there.

You can verify this. Draw a dot on a bit of paper. Close one eye, stare at a fixed point, now move the paper around the center until the dot disappears...magic

What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation.. realizing that is a real mind blower

[–] juliebean@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

fun fact: the blind spot is because our optical sensors are installed backwards and that hole is so the optic nerve can pass back through the back of the eye to the brain. some other critters with independently evolved vision systems, such as cephalopods, avoided this particular evolutionary pitfall.

[–] murmelade@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Another fun fact: through that hole there's also vasculature and capillaries coming through and you can actually see them by looking at a well lit white surface and creating a tiny pinhole with your hand right in front of your eye and wiggling it. Better explained here at around 5:30

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[–] oyfrog@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

I'm going to qualify thisβ€”all vertebrate eyes have a blind spot. Cephalopods also have eyes that are like vertebrates (this type of eye is called 'camera eyes'), but their eye anatomy is such that no blind spot exists for them.

Piggybacking on your fact about the brain effectively editing what we visually perceive, we don't see our nose (unless you made a concerted effort to look at it) because the brain ignores it.

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[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

I'd have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.

1 - George W Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.

...in the same vein..

2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the 'accounting' of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from this IBM system.

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[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

by weight, theres more non-human DNA in you than human.

[–] Suck_on_my_Presence@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Wait. Please explain. How is DNA inside me, a verifiable human, not human?

[–] superkret@feddit.org 7 points 2 months ago

It's DNA from bacteria that live inside you.

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

U got bugs in ur poop.

youre mostly bacterial dna

[–] Chainweasel@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Your gut flora

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[–] MrTrono@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Sharks are older than both trees and the north star

[–] DemBoSain@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)
[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

Laurelin and Telperion

Yeah Twin Pines Ma--- I mean Lone Pine Mall.

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[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Lots of people know a broken clock is right twice per day, but many are unaware that a clock running backwards is right 4 times per day.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

And one that loses only 1 second per year is right only once every 43,200 years.

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[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.

[–] lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Most frequent occurence is the mode. Most ppl have 10. The median is probably 10 as well, while the mean average is skewed down, I would think, by some people losing fingers as the grow. Having extra fingers is pretty rare. So the mean might be 9.95 fingers, just to toss a number out.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

For 10 to not be the median it would also have to not be the case for the majority of people (just the plurality at best), and while I don't have proof handy I'm pretty sure a vast majority have exactly 10, making that the precise median and the mode. Only the mean would be a different number of digits. (Both definitions)

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[–] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Due to two facts:

  1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

  2. The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.

It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.

There's no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

For some reason that reminds me of how the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, named Samoset, spoke to them in English. Then he came back later with another tribe member, Squanto, who also spoke English.

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[–] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn't ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The first time I took mushrooms it had been after reading about this kind of thing for about a week.

I recall reading about a man who was effectively blind but his eyes worked fine. What didn't work fine was the part of his brain that interpreted what his eyes saw. So he just saw smeary streaks of light.

It's kind of like Linux without its V4L2 system for interpreting video capture devices. It can't actually see video without it.

That sounds like the story in the Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. There was also a story in there about a man who taught himself to see just fine, even though his eyes didn't work at all. His brain just made educated guesses.

Along those same lines, we're all blind literally around half the time we're awake. Our optic processing system can't keep up with the input as our eyes flit from thing to thing, so we don't see anything while they move. And they're moving constantly, even if we're not aware of it, because only the fovea in the center of the retina has a high enough density of receptors to see details, and also because of sensory fatigue from prolonged static stimulus. In short, we have a tiny field of detailed vision that's not even working much of the time. That field of vision that feels like a 4K video feed into the mind is a complete lie.

Like the way our subjective experience feels like a continuous, integrated mind fully in control of itself, but in reality, consciousness dips out a couple of times every minute while the brain attends to sensory input.

Even weirder, the conscious mind might not even exist, except as an illusory, emergent phenomenon of sensory experience and memory. There isn't a place in the brain where it 'lives', no part that's only ever active when we're conscious.

[–] randombullet@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Consider a dam that is 10m tall

Then consider the height of water behind that dam is 5m tall.

Does the dam need to be built stronger if the water behind it is 1 km long?

How about only 500m?

How about 1m?

The answer is, it doesn't matter. Water exerts pressure equally regardless of how much water is behind it.

Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.

Incompressible fluids are pretty insane

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.

Technically only the pressures are equal, and the actual force will be linearly dependent on the area of the dam (or the surface area of the cylinder). That's why you can make a tall water tank with relatively thin walls, but an actual dam will have to be quite thicc to handle the tensile/compressive stress (depending on the shape of the dam).

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[–] DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

There is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.

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[–] Suck_on_my_Presence@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Humans have stripes that are invisible to us. However, cats can see our stripes.

[–] lordgoose@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago

By this logic, does this mean my striped cat doesn't realize she has stripes?

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[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You're Beautiful. Reality is weird.)

[–] Berttheduck@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Care to expand on that one? I know he's ex military but haven't heard anything like that before.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn't want his men to start WW3.

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[–] MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Mary Queen of Scots was 6ft tall.

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[–] Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago

The three gorges dam has had an actual effect on the rotation of the earth (slowing it down by 0.06 seconds)

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Butterflies can remember things from their time as a caterpillar.

These memories are retained after going through metamorphosis, the breakdown of their caterpillar form into a cellular soup (or partial soup).

Details here

https://theconversation.com/despite-metamorphosis-moths-hold-on-to-memories-from-their-days-as-a-caterpillar-29859

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)
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[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Printer ink costs more per milliliter than human blood.

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[–] ashenone@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

A few of my favorite fun facts are geography related.

The pacific side of the Panama canal is further east than the Atlantic side.

If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you'll hit is Canada.

Lake Tahoe is further west than Los Angeles

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[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There are more trees on earth by far than there are stars in the galaxy.

[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

I had to looks this one up, but missed the "galaxy" vs "universe". There are an estimated 3 trillion trees, 100-400 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, but potentially 1 septilliom stars in the universe.

However all three of these are estimates, so who actually knows.

[–] SpaceFox@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

California has the same population as Australia.

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