What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true?
What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true?
For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they're right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think "wow that's pretty," but every once in a while I let it hit me that I'm looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it's, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.
The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they're right there. I can point at one and say "look at that pretty star" and right now, a long distance away, it's just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there's life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.
And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It's over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?
Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month
If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there's more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined
Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.
And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.
EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!
There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.
Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...
Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.
Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
That "I" am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.
That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.
That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China
Japanfrom the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain
Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.
Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.
If you get 23 people in a room the odds of two of them sharing a birthday are 50%
The birthday paradox is a veridical paradox: it seems wrong at first glance but is, in fact, true. While it may seem surprising that only 23 individuals are required to reach a 50% probability of a shared birthday, this result is made more intuitive by considering that the birthday comparisons will be made between every possible pair of individuals. With 23 individuals, there are (23 × 22)/2 = 253 pairs to consider, far more than half the number of days in a year.
Don't know if it's bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I'd been lied to my whole life... a leap year isn't every 4 years.
So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.
So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on..
Quantum superpositioning. Schrödinger was right, it's absolutely ridiculous and the cat can't be alive and dead at the same time, box or not.
The problem is it provably does work that way, or at least in a way that is indistinguishable from it, ridiculous or not, and we don't really know why. We've learnt many of the rules, managed to trap particles in superimposed states, even discovered that plants take advantage of it to transport energy more efficiently, and it's just a thing that happens, an apparently fundamental rule of existence. And it doesn't make any fucking sense.
We can't touch objects, ever. Most of the space "occupied" by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I'm not willing to go down), and when we "touch" an object, it's just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It's the same reason why we don't fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.
The combustion engine. I know technically it's not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity's finer achievements. yes, it's not without its barbs like emissions, but that's a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.
That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.
Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.
In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That Brace saw a monkey on a boat in Long Island.
Although "commonly accepted" may be pushing it, i can't imagine a finite universe(, i.e., 'with a positive curvature'/spherical), with the old question : what happens at the edge if i push it with a stick ?
(I.i.r.c., the answer is that the edge is expanding faster than the speed of light or sthg)(And, kinda unrelated, fractal universes piling upon each other may make sense)
Humans can smell rain better than a shark can smell blood.
