Whats the least fun fact you know?

StThicket@reddthat.com to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 168 points –
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70% of the worlds surface is covered in water. None of that water is fizzy. Therefore the earth is technically flat…

I’ll be my coat, no need to send the pitchforks.

You're so wrong!

Only 70% of the Earth is flat.

I’m on part of the remaining 30% and feel flat everyday. Explain that, mainstream media!

If the world is round, why are my tits flat? Checkmate libtards!

Good news, ocean acidification is literally the result of the ocean absorbing more CO2, and thus becoming less flat. Bad news, it's kinda causing a shit ton of animals to die, especially coral.

Don't worry. The water might be flat, but we've been working on carbonating the air for some time now.

There are natural mineral springs that make water fizzy. Just saying

Many people who die "of old age" have an utterly miserable time of it at the end, sometimes for months or years. Medical treatment to keep a person alive when they've already lost their faculties irrecoverably can be incredibly cruel.

There's a reason that longevity research focuses on prolonging healthy life, not just prolonging life processes.

There's no such thing as dying of old age. Just dying of something where you're old enough where people go "yeah that tracks" instead of "oh no! so young!".

"Stranger Danger" is largely a myth as the most likely place for a child to be abused is in their own home and the most likely culprit is a trusted family member.

That's why I don't trust family members that would abuse my kids.

I don't trust myself with my kids either since I'm a close relative, I exclusively only entrust my kids to totally random strangers off the Internet.

The number of transgender people that have been credibly accused of molesting children is minuscule. There are nearly 10,000 Catholic priests and church employees that have been credibly accused of child molestation. Catholic priests and Catholic church employees are more likely to assault children than school teachers (more priests etc. have been credibly accused than school teachers, and there are fa, far more school teachers than priests et al.)

And that's not even getting into the "youth pastor that rapes teen girls" trope.

Your eyes have “immune privilege” meaning your immune system effectively does not know they exist as it would attack them and make you go blind if it did.

Additional unfun fact, in case the implication goes by anyone; some few folks have discovered exactly how much it sucks when your immune system discovers your eyes and have, indeed, gone blind because of it :(

Meaning, if you ever get a cut in your eye, go to the doctor, or else you'll lose the eye.

My dog scratched his eye to the point of having an ulcer. Went to the emergency room ASAP 💸

I was in the Army, and stabbed myself in the eye with so. Many. Branches. So much damage.

That was decades ago, and I'm not blind yet... what's the point at which it becomes a danger?

Actual penetration. When the outside touches anything inside the eye. Something poking the outside really really hard isn't going to introduce your antibodies to the inside of the eye.

The same applies to the testicles.

If your immune system discovers your testicles you'll go blind? Is that what happens if you masturbate too much?

There's tons of carbon frozen in Arctic permafrost. As the planet warms up, the ice melts, dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere and causing a runaway effect.

There's also tons of carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. As the planet warms up, the warmer sea can hold less carbon dioxide, dumping even more CO² into the atmosphere and accelerating the runaway effect.

Statistically speaking, 30 of the dalmatians in the movie 101 Dalmatians were deaf.

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Just in case anyone was looking for a slickly-animated, duck-filled video with soothing narration that they could watch to learn more, here:

https://youtu.be/ijFm6DxNVyI

Correction, it should be the entire observable universe not the entire universe since light outside the observable universe cannot reach us due to expansion thus anything that travels at speed of light can also not reach us.

Either way, unless we can prove that our current understanding of physics is wrong, devastation at a universal scale could happen any time, anywhere.

This is a disingenuous way to phrase this. Our current understanding of physics leads us to hypothesize that our universe could be metastable, there is no proof that we actually exist in such a state.

Of all the big scary things in the universe, this one scares me the least. Even if it does happen and is the worst-case scenario you just cease to exist at the speed of light before you even know something is happening. No pain, no dread at your inevitable demise, you just are living your life normally and in a nanosecond you are gone. Not a bad way to go, imo.

Once the expansion of the universe has accelerated enough we should be safe from this, right? My thinking is that if some galaxy starts collapsing as you described, but all surrounding galaxies are moving away at FTL speeds, it would never reach them.

That would reduce the chances, but this could happen to literally any particle. Kind of hard to avoid it when it's in one of your spleen molecules.

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There is an athropod that will replace a fish's tongue.

There's also a woman that will replace my will to live. I call her my ex-wife.

I know this is boomer humor but this got an audible laugh out of me.

I feel like it would be even more boomer if it was about their wife and not their ex-wife.

You should read the John Dies at the End series

Or the Laundry Files series.

::: spoiler spoiler There's an eldritch cult that uses mutant cymothoans for mind control. Some of them replace other body parts instead of the tongue. :::

That there's notorious war criminals still alive such as Henry Kissinger that probably won't face any repercussions for their atrocities in their lifetimes.

Also there are billionaires and politicians in power that could easily at least start switching to clean energy and plastic alternatives but choose not to.

Kissinger received a fucking Nobel Peace Prize.

It was one of the defining moments of my childhood that turned me into a radical.

Jason Steele (of Charlie the Unicorn fame) used to do a show called Vulo Lives which has a recurring game called Guess That War Criminal. The hint was always that they were also a Nobel Peace Prize winner. There were... quite a few of them.

Honestly, they're all brilliant but the Grimace and Picachu episodes in particular are amazing:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI6HmVcz0NXoYFk41DycPJX3vttujU2G1

And I bet Alfred Nobel is still rolling in his grave for that considering the whole reason he proposed the Nobel Prizes.

Kissinger was on the board of Theranos, which feels a little anachronistic to me.

Fanta's creation was a result of American companies cutting off business with Germany during WWII. Coca Cola stopped sending ingredients to the local bottling plant in Germany but the ones there still wanted to work and make money. They took the ingredients they still had access to and made a new drink, Fanta! Once the war was over and Coca Cola made contact with them again they liked the new drink and just made it part of their brand.

I had to stop telling this normally as it tends to make people hate me for making them feel bad about drinking Fanta. I tell them it's fine. I drive a Volkswagen. But they still feel gross about it so I stopped telling people or at least tell them that they may not want to drink Fanta anymore and give them the choice.

Coca-Cola never gave up thier german subsidiary Coca-Cola GmbH and they never willingly stopped sending syrup.

Syrup was stopped by the allied blockades. They ran out of stockpiles in 1943 and so the owner created Fanta with apple cider scraps.

The Dutch Coca-Cola plant had similar supply issues and they sent the Fanta branding up there as well but used elderberry.

After the war Coca-Cola regained their subsidiaries and the Fanta branding.

Fanta would be discontinued in 1949.

The current Fanta we know today was created in Italy in 1955 to complete with an unknown Italian PepsiCo product.

This makes me want to drink Fanta more than Cola though.

I don't blame the workers for wanting to continue earning their money. I wonder whether they provided the new drink freely to Coke once the contact came back, or if Coke just took it...

That our memories are all we really know and have. They're also volatile, and are usually changed to support a narrative.

Be careful.

Hey remember when you promised to give me that $100? Don't tell me your memory has changed to support the narrative that you've forgotten!

“There are a group of people who believe that each day, when they sleep, they die,” the old man continued. “They believe that consciousness doesn’t continue—that if it is interrupted, a new soul is born when the body awakes.” The old man continued....

“The thing about this philosophy is how difficult it is to disprove,” the old man said. “How do you know that you are the same you as yesterday? You would never know if a new soul came to inhabit your body, so long as it had the same memories. But then … if it acts the same, and thinks it is you, why would it matter? What is it to be you?"

We forget things but we remember people. As long as you take one life lesson from every person you meet you’ll never forget the important stuff.

There was once a study to test the amount of "poop particles" (feces based bacteria) on everyday objects. The study consisted of putting objects in places that would be more or less likely to have feces and a control group which was isolated from any source of feces based bacteria to the best of their ability. The microbiologists running the study were unable to tell which group was the control.

This is written to the best of my memory and some details may be wrong but the meaning is the same

In graduate school I swabbed a public toilet seat and wiped the specimen in a Petri dish. My cohort swabbed the bottom of their shoe and did the same. The public toilet specimen grew virtually nothing. The shoe specimen grew the equivalent of a rainforest in bacteria.

I can't believe Americans wear shoes inside.

You expect us to step on our bathroom carpet in our bare feet?

LMAO, I was like what the fuck is bathroom carpet, then I got the joke. It's a joke right? Please.

2 of the rentals I've lived in had bathroom carpet.

Rentals.

Student accommodation..

They were probably 40% vomit, 25% filth, 25% jizz and 10% actual carpet.

Some do. Most don't (in my experience).

I live in California. The only people I know who wear shoes in the house are those with neurological damage making it painful for them to walk around in socks, slippers, or barefoot. CRPS sucks.

"No shirt, no shoes, no service". You get kicked out of most places if you don't have shoes.

Toilet seats are naturally smooth and bacteria have a hard time staying on the surface. Most public toilet seats have an additional antimicrobial coating.

That can also mean we're doing pretty damn well just with toilets.

A factoid is something that looks like a fact, but is not

The universally accepted meaning is:

a brief or trivial item of news or information

Interestingly, here's what Merriam Webster says about the origin of the word:

We can thank Norman Mailer for factoid: he used the word in his 1973 book Marilyn (about Marilyn Monroe), and he is believed to be the coiner of the word. In the book, he explains that factoids are "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." Mailer's use of the -oid suffix (which traces back to the ancient Greek word eidos, meaning "appearance" or "form") follows in the pattern of humanoid: just as a humanoid appears to be human but is not, a factoid appears to be factual but is not. The word has since evolved so that now it most often refers to things that decidedly are facts, just not ones that are significant.

So you decided to ignore the last sentence?

No, I've just looked it up after reading your comment

There are more Panda Express restaurants than there are pandas.

Damn, that's depressing. But considering the pandas sense of self preservation, it makes total sense.

The guy who shot john Wikes Booth was once solicited by prostitutes. He was so so appalled by his boner that he decided to castrate himself with pinking shears (scissors). He then goes to church and walks it off before seeing a doctor.

The real sad part is that he was undeniably driven insane by his work as a hat maker. Fur hats were shaped and then brushed with mercury, which led to hat makers getting mercury poisoning from the fumes.

Basically the poor guy melted his brain, chopped of his balls, enlisted into the union army and was forced to march on a boken leg, killed the most infamous man in the world, and was then locked up in an asylum.

Cats can't taste sugar.

They still come for your sweets because they smell the fat in them, typically from butter in baked goods or chocolate.

Conditions on the road of bones in Russia were so bad that and it was so hard for them all to be taken to a cemetery that, for every meter of road, there's a body of an overworked road worker buried underneath the road. And the road never got to anywhere good.

That fairness doesn't exist, everyone has their own idea of it based on their background, experience and belief system.

I was thinking about this recently. You know the MLK quote about the universe bending toward justice? The eventual heat death of the universe is the only way everything will be equal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

Asimov has a short story I just read while backpacking in the mountains this past weekend. It's about humanity attempting to reverse entropy. The Last Question is probably my favorite short story ever.

The universal definition of "fair" is "everything is bent very slightly in my favor".

Several (if not all) of the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion probably didn’t die immediately. They likely remained conscious and aware for at least several seconds, and died on impact with the ocean surface.

You're never more than eight feet away from a spider.

8 feet = 2,438 meter

I'm pretty sure 8ft is less than 2.4km

Europeans use a , instead of a .

It's really weird when they do it while speaking English though because then they're just wrong

What about if you're on an aircraft or boat? If there are no spiders aboard, you'd be more than 8 feet away.

My partner owns a boat. It has more spiders than any place I've ever been.

Genocides typically are never actually punished and their main perpetrators often get away with it.

If you rape someone in the U.S., your odds of going to jail for it are only 0.01% . A hundredth of a percent. 0.01 out of 100 rapists ever actually see jail or prison.

[citation needed]

I highly doubt that for every 10 000 rape cases reported only one is actually successfully pursued by law enforcement.

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I once, out of curiosity, mounted an expedition to the darkest regions of the internet, aka The Dark Web.

There's some shit there that can scar you for life. Don't ever go there, seriously.

I was on the Internet in the wild west period when you could just as easily stumble upon the kind of stuff you can only find on the dark web just making a Yahoo search.

Ahh the days of orgish, rotten, thisisacryforhelp, stile project, theync

Why, when I saw.my first decapitation video I was merely a boy!

Yeah, the internet used to be fucked. There were noooo rules. It was kinda like paradise but with landmines. Lots of landmines.

It still is very fucked especially sites like reddit sometimes

Edit: maybe i underestimated the internet a bit

Oh you sweet summer child. Reddit has moderation, administration, ...rules? Policies, terms of use?

Reddit is the Disney Channel.

The moderation took way too long but I understand that it could be even worse but the internet is still a fucked up place maybe less than before but still bad

It's not "oops, I accidentally stumbled upon a cache of child porn" fucked, like back in the early days of the WWW.

You'll run into fucked up people; but the content is like Sesame Street levels of fucked by comparison.

There are some useful websites out there if by darknet you mean the Tor network. BBC, Debian, Reddit, and Z-Library (an eBook download site that had its content availability reduced after legal pressure) for example have onion domains.

LMAO what a bullshit, why does this dumb answer has 20 upvotes?

I highly doubt it, my mind was s very strong and I have seen many thing in my life, gruesome death, abuse you name it. Nothing disturbs me. In comparison, the average person is too sensitive

Thinking of it a bit differently, have you considered you might not be sensitive enough? There's some real benefits to living with a healthy dose of sensitivity; for one, it is part of a healthy response to situations that could be physically harmful to you. Best of luck out there :)

I'm actively avoiding growing insensitive to stuff like this

My sense of normalcy kinda depends on not being apathetic to abuse

The age of consent in Germany is 14.

Also applies to other countries in Europe iirc, but I can't confirm that because that's not something I'm willing to put in my search history again.

Edit: It's more complex than that, read the replies by @Mrs_deWinter@feddit.de and @Turun@feddit.de.

Age of consent in Germany is a staggered system. With 14 you're able to consent under specific conditions (them being there's no exploitative element to the relationship), but still could file charge against the older person if they're over 16. With 16 the first rule still applies; from 18 on you're able to consent, period.

So for example when I was 14 I had a boyfriend, also 14, and neither of us committed any crime under this ruling. The law acknowledges that teenagers are allowed to have relationships with each other while putting every borderline case through a case-by-case hearing at court.

It's actually a really good idea, so it kinda is a fun fact.

That's a great idea.

At 14/15 you want to fool about if you have an equally young partner and there's nothing really criminal about it - just discovering sexuality.

14 and 30 though really does have a different ring to it and if that's considered, then credit to the system.

Only for kids in the same age range. And quite frankly, I think that's the right way to do it. As if a law would make horny teenagers not have sex.

Setting the age of consent to 18 years just technically makes them pedophiles if you actually enforce it. And I'm of the opinion that laws should be enforced or removed entirely. Having a law and usually not enforcing it gives rise to a dangerous middle ground where persecution depends on other arbitrary factors. Like income, race or how well the cop likes you.

(If you are interested in German law, just reply and I can explain/translate the relevant parts of the law for you)

Edit: translation is also available here: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html relevant are sections 176 and 182, which combine to give the often cited 14 years. Even though it never says anything about being above 14 years makes something legal! It is phrased in such a way that kids can have sex legally, while also preventing exploitation of minors.

And yet Europe seemingly has less child predators than the US.

And you can start drinking beer at 15 if at least one parent is around and agrees.

The Europeans must be asleep seeing that this is still upvoted and the US hasn't been mentioned yet.

edit: nvm they've arrived

Everyone is eventually going to die.

That's only an unfun fact if you make it one.

Well, basically. Everyone has a different sense of humour.

At the rate of advancement of tech it’s conceivable that there is life alive now that may never die.

As I get older I see more unfair aspects of the world

My daughter used to say "that's not fair" all the time. I would tell her "Life isn't fair. If you expect it to be, you will only set yourself up for failure and disappointment."

She never listened to me, though.

355/113 is the best fractional approximation of pi with less than 5 digits on both numerator and denominator, with 6 decimal digits of precision. It is constructed by taking the sequence of the first 3 odd numbers, each repeated exactly once, as such: "113355", then splitting the resulting string in halves, taking the first half as denominator, and the second as numerator.

A 4-set venn diagram can't be constructed with circles because it wouldn't show exclusive intersections between opposed sets.

A talks to B, B talks to C; A is married, C is not married. Therefore, a married person is talking to a non-married person.

for the third one because it stumped me a bit, there are 2 posibilites:

  • Am -> Bu -> Cu
  • Am -> Bm -> Cu

Either way there is a married person talking to a non-married person.

Most of the computer users think the Internet is a synonym for Facebook.

Little do they know it's actually a synonym for Amazon Web Services

Consistently, every time as far as I can tell, any communication forum or forum subsection of sufficient size that is done with open invitation under pretenses of "free speech" will bring in pedophiles and nazis that will take over if nothing is done about them, no matter the original intent.

The Paradox of Tolerance in a nutshell...

Does anyone remember Voat? Man, that place went downhill real fast.

Voat? Man, that place went downhill real fast.

freeze-gamer gate era attempt at a chuddier reddit-logo , yeah I do.

I remember it splintering off from reddit. Never went there or checked on it, never heard a thing from it since. What happened?

It went hard right almost immediately when Reddit banned a couple subreddits like/r/fatPeopleHate and other similarly cheerful places. At least on Lemmy we can just let those kinda servers be in their own little septic tanks.

It went offline, as do all of those platforms that only cater to one subreddit's worth of users (especially the edgy ones). But it wouldn't surprise me if the admin had three letter agencies breathing down their neck and just packed it in.

The good news is that from any given person's POV, it would be over in an instant, and nobody would suffer or even have a chance to be terrified by the knowledge of the void consuming them.

You meant to reply to the quantum physics fact, I'm sure.

There are physicist, respected ones, that believe the universe is deterministic. That we don’t have free will.

And psychologists that believe that feeling of consciousness is a result of the brain developing a self-supervising function for higher order thinking.

Essentially free will is just an illusion.

Lol you posting this is what was always meant to happen, same as how I am here and read your comment and replied.

Of the 2 compatible explanations, I really like the many worlds theory over hidden variables. Many worlds explains this unexplainable randomness, the probabilistic nature of subatomic particle movements, by saying all possible movements happen…. The probabilities just indicate the likelihood that our reality is the one that movement X happens in.

And then you throw the block universe in, and it’s just all the more beautiful.

All possible combinations of atomic interactions all happen. Well “happen” is so linear time thinking, they all just exist.

What difference does it make?

Well, if true, it doesn’t make any difference. Because it always was and always will be. Nothing makes any difference.

But in another way, it’s kinda neat. I guess it’s simultaneously a not fun fact, and a fun fact.

There are physicist, respected ones, that believe the universe is deterministic.

Quantum mechanics involves true randomness, so it is already proven that the universe is not deterministic.

That doesn't mean we have free will, though. Random actions are no more free than predetermined ones.

I think the argument they make is that quantum randomness doesn't have any way of influencing our choices, the scales are too different. I disagree, I think quantum randomness is free will, and there's some sort of quantum amplifier, for lack of a better word, that bridges the gap between particle interactions and consciousness. But since there is no way to prove or disprove such a thing, since it is by definition indistinguishable from chance, it's basically naval gazing...

Of the 2 compatible explanations, I really like the many worlds theory over hidden variables. Many worlds explains this unexplainable randomness, the probabilistic nature of subatomic particle movements, by saying all possible movements happen…. The probabilities just indicate the likelihood that our reality is the one that movement X happens in.

Some of the top scientists believe in a higher power god. NdGT makes the argument in one of his lectures that until that number is zero you have no right to look down on them for believing in a higher power.

Uh… ok.

I want saying you you but instead the royal you. That's where a lot of the determinism their cones from. God doesn't play dice with the universe and all that. Which is entirely taken out of context from Einstein and a lot of people wrongly think Einstein was religious but he wasn't. Still the quote remains and have kept scientists religious for decades.

I like Sabine Hossenfelders way of explaining things, she disregards god altogether. It’s not necessary for these explanations.

I saw some other scientists basically throwing a hissy fit about determinism, and how they wouldn’t get credit for being so smart and making the discoveries and stuff if determinism was true. Like obviously I’m so smart, I’m making hypotheses so I’ve got free will.

It was utterly embarrassing, I was looking for a legit counter view to see what the other side said. And the first two videos I found were PhDs throwing tantrums on podcasts.

But to those that believe in a god generally, sure, with our current knowledge anything is a possibility… just some theories have more standing than others… but some also are nicer to believe in, and just make sense for a being to want to believe.

Ducky from Land Before Time was murdered by her step dad for being too famous

Factually incorrect.

Judith Barsi (and her mother) was killed by her biological father before he killed himself.

There is no evidence pointing to any anger of fame. Both of her major roles (The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven)were released after her death.

The father was an abusive drunk that threated to kill the family and himself multiple times.

The clarification is appreciated

Death isn't synonym of end of the life.

Lack of oxygen at birth doesn't mean low IQ.

Every time you blink, your eyeballs roll up into the back of your eye socket and roll back to the original spot quickly

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