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[-] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 383 points 1 year ago

The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.

[-] Asafum@lemmy.world 141 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] zkikiz@lemmy.ml 72 points 1 year ago

And many plantations converted to prisons that are still in operation to this day.

And many states can't reduce their prison populations because then they'd lose free labor.

And some states use prison labor to staff the governor's mansion with butlers.

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[-] Pilkins@lemmy.world 49 points 1 year ago

Not even just the highest rate. The highest number of incarcerated people! Countries with over 1b people still have fewer prisoners, total.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country

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[-] Huffkin@feddit.uk 217 points 1 year ago

Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.

Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521

[-] tristophe@lemmy.world 114 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 37 points 1 year ago

And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.

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[-] baconeater@lemm.ee 207 points 1 year ago

Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826

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[-] darcy@sh.itjust.works 201 points 1 year ago

you are loved and deserve happiness

Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome

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[-] swnt@feddit.de 159 points 1 year ago

Oh, I have two good ones:

  1. Nuclear power causes less deaths per energy unit produced than wind. (source

  2. You have slightly less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than living on an average place.

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.

[-] massacre@lemmy.ml 72 points 1 year ago

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).

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[-] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 157 points 1 year ago

A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.

[-] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 111 points 1 year ago

A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.

[-] lazyslacker@sh.itjust.works 39 points 1 year ago

At this point you get into a philosophical discussion about what "right" really means

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[-] Bishma@social.fossware.space 149 points 1 year ago

There are people still alive who remember a world before "splinter-free" toilet paper.

The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".

-Wikipedia

[-] ch00f@lemmy.world 131 points 1 year ago

The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.

On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.

[-] domage@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

Wow, you're absolutely correct!

The average distance from Earth to Mercury is about 1.04 astronomical units (au), which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.

In comparison, the average distance between Earth and Venus is approximately 1.14 au, while the average distance between Earth and Mars is around 1.7 au.

You can check that in Wolfram Alpha.

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[-] julianh@lemm.ee 124 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] undercrust@lemmy.world 49 points 1 year ago

It works best if you hold the fob under your chin and open your mouth in the direction you're aiming!

[-] RogueTyre@lemmy.fmhy.ml 75 points 1 year ago

I swear these comments look more and more like a ploy to make me look stupid in public

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[-] LordOfLocksley@lemmy.world 117 points 1 year ago

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.

If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.

1 day = time to rotate on it's axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun

For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.

However, because Venus' axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.

Hence, a year is shorter than a day

For those interested:

1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days

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[-] Wanderer@lemm.ee 114 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] SpooneyOdin@lemmy.ml 113 points 1 year ago

Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids

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[-] zkikiz@lemmy.ml 108 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] Flannels9658@lemmy.ml 108 points 1 year ago

All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon

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[-] 1019throw@lemmy.world 95 points 1 year ago

The northern most part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southern most part of Brazil.

[-] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 58 points 1 year ago
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[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 87 points 1 year ago
  • 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.
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[-] TauZero@mander.xyz 85 points 1 year ago

Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.

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[-] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 76 points 1 year ago

The can opener was invented 30 years after the can.

[-] Borovicka@lemmy.world 60 points 1 year ago

Well, wouldn't it be weird if it was the other way around?

"Yooo, check this out, I made a new invention, it's called a can opener!"
What does it do?
"idk"

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[-] freundTech@feddit.de 71 points 1 year ago

Every Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.

[-] tieme@midwest.social 82 points 1 year ago

I don't think this is true for all of them. My cube takes at least a couple hundred rotations and then you have to take the stickers off and move them around to solve it.

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[-] supersane@lemmy.ml 69 points 1 year ago
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[-] teft@lemmy.world 68 points 1 year ago

Maine is the closest US state to Africa.

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[-] Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml 51 points 1 year ago

The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.

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[-] jocanib@lemmy.world 50 points 1 year ago

Most people have more than the average number of legs.

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[-] pocopene@lemmy.world 47 points 1 year ago

99.99% of population have more arms than average value.

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[-] Yaks@lemmy.fmhy.ml 46 points 1 year ago

Ice is a mineral. Just unstable at room temperature.

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[-] Llamajockey@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago

That I cleaned the house (according to my fiance at least)

[-] Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies.

(also a good example of why correlation =/= causation)

[-] Clav64@lemmy.ml 39 points 1 year ago

An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.

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[-] BalpeenHammer@lemmy.nz 38 points 1 year ago

Moose kill more people than bears every year.

Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.

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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
610 points (97.4% liked)

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