What's a fact that sounds totally made up, yet is completely true?
TonyHawksPoTater@kbin.social to 
I'll start: The Red Hot Chili Peppers are 3 years older than Guns N' Roses.
TonyHawksPoTater@kbin.social to TonyHawksPoTater@kbin.social to TonyHawksPoTater@kbin.social to I'll start: The Red Hot Chili Peppers are 3 years older than Guns N' Roses.
The American government was still paying out a civil war pension in 2020.
Another government related one. The UK government were until 2015 still paying compensation to families that made their wealth in the slave trade, for it's abolition. Another way to read this is that some wealthy families accepted tax payers money as compensation for their ancestors no longer being able to profit from the abuse of humans.
And people foam at the mouth at the idea of reparations being paid out to descendants of slaves…
Good point, slightly inaccurately made. They weren't still paying compensation in 2015. That was the year they finished paying off the debt taken out to pay compensation.
Virtual lamps use real electricity and produce real light, so even if though they are virtual they are also real
Wait... Processing....
So... a lamp in a video game is also a lamp in real life?
You could totally turn off the lights, sit next to the ingame lamp, and use that light to read or light your room. So, yes!
This is peak showerthoughts content.
Doesn't sound made up
A rose is either a woody perennial flowering plant of the genus Rosa in the family Rosaceae, or the flower it bears.
Sounds made up
Apples, pears, quinces, apricots, plums, cherries, peaches, raspberries, blackberries, loquats, strawberries, rose hips, hawthorns, and almonds are all members of the rose family (Rosaceae).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaceae
Surprised they didn't all get classified as Brassica oleracea yet.
They didn't teach calculus at Harvard when the school opened because it hadn't been discovered yet.
Your Intel CPU comes with a *nix operating system built in
Care to elaborate?
All Intel CPUs have a Management Engine, basically a smaller CPU within the CPU designed for controlling the rest of the chip. It's particularly good for things like IT management or devices because it operates with direct control over the other parts of the chip. This device's firmware is based on Minix.
it's also particularly good for the nsa, reason why many people decide to block it (or at least minimize what it can do, since it can't be blocked anymore)
Cool, thanks. I work at Intel for a third party, but I have no idea how they get the chip to actually work. I only get the manufacturing process. Thanks for the info
If you have 2 legs you have an above average amount of legs
How?
Because across the human population, there's almost nobody with 3 legs, but a considerable number of people with 1 leg. So the average number of legs across humanity is less than 2.
That means most people have an above average number of legs.
Also people with 0 legs bring the average down even further.
Hol up there, tell me about those people with 3 legs!
Oh just ask your mom, she'll tell you all about me!
One-legged people are letting the side down.
And here I thought I was decent in Math... Thank you for the explanation :)
Wrong. Pregnant women pull the average way up.
The northmost, eastmost, and westmost states in the US are all the same state.
Middle Island, Canada is south of 26% of US states, and over half of US states are at least partially north of it.
Yeah I'm gonna need to see a map. I don't understand this.
Alaska is the north-most US state, and it goes so far west that it actually pokes into the eastern hemisphere.
Here’s a map for the Canada one.
Ha! And here's me trying to picture how Maine can be called the West-most state!
Whoever wrote up that canada one doesn't understand the word "entirely"
Alaska crosses the 180th Meridian, which is the "wraparound" point between east and west.
Norway is more east, south, west and north than Finland
I checked both of those because I was like "Surely not??"
Texas as a political entity is older than Germany as a political entity.
Yup. And the people living in deep south Texas have, in some cases, been living there since long before the USA was a country.
Maine is the closest US state to the continent of Africa.
The lighter was invented before the match.
The white lines that divide the road on highways are about 10 feet long. Also, the space between each line is 30 feet. This may be US only. Don't know about other countries.
Traffic lights are also surprisingly big
The average person has 1 testicle and 1 ovary.
Actually the average would be LESS than 1 of each.
Yes, it would be less than 1, but I'd considered typing 0.99996 to be a waste of time and energy for a silly factoid, just like this reply to your comment.
This is the time and place for that silly factoid.
I guess typing "less than 1" is too much for you.
An Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester is a device that lets you test whether a light-sensitive bomb is a dud or not at arbitrary precision, without blowing it up. It is an example of interaction-free measurement.
The method does not really have any practical uses so far, although it has been demonstrated experimentally.
Five Nights at Freddy's is older than legal gay marriage (in the US).
Human ingenuity created technology capable of using zero inertia propulsion, zero point energy, and matter-energy transfer, before the 1930s.
I don't know enough of these words to think it's made up.
They're real theoretical science, but the kind of people who claim we already have them also tend to believe we're being visited by extra-terrestrials and vaccines contain microchips.
What's this?