Tell me about someone really interesting that you know.

BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world to [Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation@lemmy.world – 40 points –
11

I know a guy who used to be an LA County Sheriff's deputy. He took a vacation to go scuba diving and loved it so much he went home, quit his job, moved countries, and started his own scuba business in Mexico (which is how I met him). Lived there for almost 20 years and built an incredibly successful business because his customer service, attention to detail, and commitment to providing a great experience were top notch. He met his future wife there, who was from Spain. After many years they left Mexico and moved to Spain where he now lives in semi-retirement, in a really beautiful place straight out of the Gladiator movie, gardening and enjoying a peaceful life and going on adventures all over. I've rarely met anyone who chased their dreams so successfully.

You can lose about 7% of your bodyweight in a single day before it starts to impair your performance. For a 180 lb person, that means you can lose almost 13 lbs of sweat. The average human stores about a day's worth of calories in muscle glycogen. Once you burn through that, you'll experience something called "hitting the wall". People who aren't trained for this will quite literally just... stop working. They'll fall over and not be able to move. With training, you can make your body better at burning fat to keep your muscles moving even when you surpass the limits of normal human endurance.

Source: used to run ultramarathons and do alpine style mountaineering

Anesthesia had to be discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered five times.

Also related to anesthesia, those of us with the red hair gene need 20% more of it for it to work.

Anesthesia is the most interesting topic I can think of! Like you literally can be knocked so unconscious and have bodily organs removed and be woken up and not feel a thing? That's fascinating.

I used to know this lady who was a retired cheff and now she did wildlife rescue. She would specialise in reptiles, so usually most of her calls were to remove snakes that got into people's homes. In particular I remember one occasion in which we went bushwalking with our uni course, and she spotted - and handled- a wild python for us to see. That was pretty cool.