What is common knowledge that still blows your mind?

So I was looking at a map which got me looking at a 3D globe, and while my brain knows just how small the world is and how Russia is actually closer to me going North than it is East to West, it still blows my mind just how close it is.

Or how close Japan is to Russia, and how if you look at the Sea of Japan it's basically a ring of the Koreas, China, Russia, and Japan...and how they're all just sort of facing eachother. No wonder the region has such a long and violent history, but I suppose you can say that about everywhere.

Or how you could have a train go from Paris, through Europe, Russia, and with a long 70-mile tunnel under the Bering Strait you could reach North America and go to New York.

And then it got me thinking about Pangea and how it really isn't that big of a stretch to imagine how there was one big super-continent.

Anyway, it got me thinking...what is common knowledge (or, perhaps, a simple fact) that still blows your mind, or something you easily forget and when you're reminded of it you're like "OH WOW! I totally forgot about that!"

I don't know if this is common knowledge, but I came across not long ago and it blew my mind:

1. The average weight of a man in USA is 90.5kg with an average height of 1.75cm

The average weight of a woman in USA is 77.5kg with an average height of 1.61cm

Not with the intention of being offensive, people have their own eating habits, but for a person that has lived most of his adult life in east Asia, those numbers are mind-blowing. The weight, not the height.

2. Another one that I came to see recently. Nigeria is estimated to have more new borns in 2023 than China.

1. There is an arrow on your display board in the car that shows you where the gastank is located.
2. Most fires aren't extinguished by water.
3. There are 31 years worth of videos being uploaded on YouTube every day

First thing that comes to mind: the Great Pyramids of Giza were already 2,500 years old by the time of Cleopatra. They were more ancient to her then she is to us.

the estimates that the number of stars in the universe outnumbers the number of grains of sand on earth still gets me. particularly when sitting on a beach with miles of sand around me

Over 20% of gen z identifying as LGBT in the states.

Some say this rise is because more people are comfortable comming out.. but I don't think so.

I remember the whole nature vs nurture debate on people being gay, and people got mad if you went against the nature side of things that claimed gay people were all born that way (your born gay) and instead believed people could be socially conditioned to be gay. I believe more than ever it can be conditioned on people with thier surroundings and what they are exposed too.

Every time look at birds now try to see the dinosaur in them.

Humans can take massive shits.

kinda similar to there's more potential moves on a chessboard than atoms in the universe. not sure if it's apocryphal or not but still blows my mind when i hear it

@sargentd: I read a study in college (oh ****, 20 years ago?!) that monitored the subject's brain activity while they were being shown images of attractive people. They found about 20% of of them had activity in their frontal lobes associated with attraction when shown pictures of someone of their same sex. At the time, I thought that number was way too high, like they must have drawn their sample from Castro Street in San Francisco. But the fact it lines up with Gen Z, the first generation to really grow up with very little stigma toward that sort of thing, is quite interesting.

Anyway, I came here to say the surface tension of water. My kids were playing with some cups in the bathtub last night, and started seeing how far they could get the water to bubble up before it would spill over the side. Crazy how high it will go when you add drops in gradually.

The billions of stars that exist. It's amazing how many there are.

Oooooooh here's another one:

If you had a tournament where you flipped a coin with every person on the planet participating, it would only take like ~30 rounds to finish.

The world's current population (at the time I'm writing this) is 7,711,860,500. If we assume that flipping a coin yields 50% heads and 50% tails (meaning half of the current players will be eliminated in each round), then it would take on average log_2(7,711,860,500) = 32.844 rounds to eliminate all but 1 person. We can round that up to 33 though.

*Pulled from Reddit*

Same.

Sometimes you can really see it.

Google "Shoebill stork". If there was ever a "not a dinosaur but totally could be a dinosaur" bird, it's that.

Yeah.

Do you feel reassured by it? I know most people feel scared or insignificant, but I've always felt safe. Like....billions of stars and, so far, we are the only ones lucky enough to exist (again, as far as we know).

It helps with my nihilism, and makes me optimistic as well. Like, we are all here randomly, nothing matters. If aliens do exist, by the time we are aware of them either a.) their civilization would come and go or b.) ours would.

It just makes me so grateful and happy, you know? Enjoy this "moment", be it the few decades we're on this planet or the few millennia we exist as the human race.

It really is amazing the size and/or volume of things that can come out of the human body.

Meh, 20% seems right to me. I don't think it's really all that political or social; it's always been about 20% (as @judaspete pointed out), it's just safer to be who you are now.

There's also more options! You don't have to be gay or straight. You can be bi or trans or asexual or just figuring it out and "questioning" I guess lol.

That's probably a factor as well. People like "Oh I don't have to be a lesbian or gay? I can be a T? A Q? An A? A P? 😋

I would be interested to see a follow up poll in like 10-20 years and what the % is then! Wonder if lower or higher. More folks might come out with age or maybe more would realize they were experimenting and not LGBTQ

from bill bryson's - a short history of nearly everything

IMAGINE TRYING TO live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is generally benign but at other times swiftly lethal. Depending on its state, it can scald you or freeze you. In the presence of certain organic molecules it can form carbonic acids so nasty that they can strip the leaves from trees and eat the faces off statuary. In bulk, when agitated, it can strike with a fury that no human edifice could withstand. Even for those who have learned to live with it, it is an often murderous substance. We call it water.

Water is everywhere. A potato is 80 percent water, a cow 74 percent, a bacterium 75 percent. A tomato, at 95 percent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 percent water, making us more liquid than solid by a margin of almost two to one. Water is strange stuff. It is formless and transparent, and yet we long to be beside it. It has no taste and yet we love the taste of it. We will travel great distances and pay small fortunes to see it in sunshine. And even though we know it is dangerous and drowns tens of thousands of people every year, we can’t wait to frolic in it.

amazing book btw

@mrbojangles25: Man has a natural fear of death. That's the reason why there are so many religions. I do believe that there is an afterlife, but even if were proven to me that there isn't one, I wouldn't care that much. I have satisfaction living in my current life on this Earth.

Magnets, solenoids, electric motors...

Also diodes, capacitors, logic gates, it's cool stuff and crazy how it all works but they're all very common

@DEVILinIRON: And also they drink bat poo coffee and eat anal gland raspberry sauce

@sargentd: I have read most of that increase is from young women that identify as bisexual while not actually having sex with other women...

@nirgal: Maybe it makes up for all the people who got a PhD in playing doctor or died a "confirmed bachelor" and choose to repress everything?

That time travel is technically possible. We just haven’t figured it out yet.

@girlusocrazy:

Not exactly what I said, but there is something to it.

https://www.axios.com/2022/02/17/lgbtq-generation-z-gallup

"Between the lines: 57% of LGBTQ Americans identify as bisexual, the most common identification among adults surveyed.

Gen Z women are roughly 3 times more likely than men to identify as LGBTQ and Millennial women are about two times as likely than men to identify as such, according to Gallup."

@nirgal: probably cus guys keep leading girls on that it's hot, so they say they swing both ways

@sargentd: I think it's a change of labels more than a change of behavior.

I remember being a kid and having female friends tell they sometimes liked to watch other women more than they like watching men.

I have had several girlfriends that admitted to be to sometimes being attracted to other women.

But i think its becoming more common to use those fleeting emotions to label you instead of your own behavior.

For me a more important question is are you having serious romantic relationships with people of your same gender ?

Form what I see on the outside, the people that answer yes to that question is not substancially higher than before.

On a second note， it's becoming socially incentivized to value diversity. (Defined narrowly in terms of racial and sexual diversity)

So people want to identify themselves as being diverse, regardless of whether their behavior actually reflects that.

I don't agree with that view. I don't think diversity is negative per se, but I also don't think that diversity is also necessarily valuable in all aspects.

@nirgal: don't disagree,

I do think that kind of "diversity" is surface level crap, especially when people can kinda pick and choose what they want to be. Trans, bi, gender fluid, pansexual, polyamourous, it's surface level crap, doesn't say anything of substance about the person, if it isn't diversity of thought, I don't really consider it diverse.

Where do you live?

@sargentd: I love the term "polyamourous". It makes me laugh so much.

People have been sleeping around for tens of thousands of years, now you give it a fancy label and instead of being promiscuous, you are just "diverse"

California

I think if I went straight West like on a flattened out map I'd have to cross the whole pacific ocean, but if I went sort of north towards Alaska I'd almost be there.

That trickle-down economics never trickles down, but so many are gullible enough to believe it.

Ah, so you're referring to the Bering Strait. Over 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age, Siberia (Asian part of Russia) was connected to Alaska via the Bering Strait. This was how America was first discovered by Siberians who crossed the Bering Straight into Alaska and gave birth to the indigenous people of North America. In other words, indigenous people of both America and Russia have shared ancestry. That reminds me...

Japan's indigenous people, the Ainu, are also genetically related to the Siberians of Russia as well as the natives of North America. Most modern Japanese are mainly descended from later populations who came from Korea, but a small fraction of their DNA also comes from the Ainu. This is referenced in Metal Gear Solid, when Vulcan Raven (a native Inuit of Alaska) finds out Solid Snake is part-Japanese and says they have shared ancestry... In other words, indigenous populations of America, Russia and Japan all have shared ancestry.

And still do! I think it's been long enough since its implementation that we need to realize this.

If anything, we need to try out "trickle up" more. Tax the rich, fund the bottom, elevate them up and start bolstering the middle class in the US, which is not doing well. Middle-class folks used to be home owners, now we're lifelong renters it seems like.

Brandon steal election and no body do any thing. RIP USA.

I said common knowledge. Conspiracy theories don't count (in fact they might be the polar opposite)

Try again.

dang, i'm actually just around 5'8 and 86kg or so...and used to be a lot heavier. Thankfully I lost a lot of weight, and hoping to lose another 15kg or so.

How long it takes for light to travel, and looking at stars in the night sky: among those stars are ones that stopped existing millions of years ago and what you see is just how long it took for that light to reach Earth.

That GoFundMe is the go to for paying your medical bills in the US

@blaznwiipspman1: good for you dude! Controlling the weight is a struggle and it's for life. I am lately also spending more time looking for tasty foods that don't make you fat.

That's a good one and links to mine. I moved from the UK to Canada, and medication is covered in the UK, but not in Canada without insurance (in certain instances). My meds cost thousands per 3 months (all they are allowed to provide by law), and I had to sign up to ODSP to cover the costs whilst on disability. I pay taxes out the nose (property/income/sales).

Except he didn't, and you are believing the lies of a conman.

-------

That we landed on the moon. Still blows my mind every time I ponder the effort and collaboration that was required.

Dude, right?

And to think we did it on the technology from the 60's! I mean...it's crazy. And that rocket! The size of a huge building all to put something into space that's smaller than a one-room apartment. The sheer amount of energy needed.

**** it, time to load up Kerbal Space Program and land on the Mun.

While I don't agree with it, I really can sort of see where the Fake Moon Landing conspiracy theorists are coming from. It really is unbelievable in some ways. I can see how people can make the jump to literally unbelievable.

This is a good one. One related to it is that the likely answer to the Fermi Paradox has been known all along as a basic tenet of physics, and we simply choose to ignore it because it's fun to contemplate otherwise.

That being that the speed of light is (probably) a hard barrier that can't be passed, and space is so unfathomably huge it means that barrier makes travel between life bearing worlds impossible at worst and impractical at best.

@MirkoS77: And they made it back alive too

You trolling or you that dumb??

Yeah the whole concept of light and its speed is pretty awesome and really humbling. It helps apply a practical metric (time) to the something that is more or less incomprehensible. Like "Oh, yeah, if you wanted to get to Pluto it'd take 20 years...if you could do it at all". Well, let me think about that...20 years ago I was in high school. Now I'm almost 40."

Or you see a star, and you realize the light you're seeing is a few thousands years old or whatever. Where were we at a few thousand years ago? Pre-industrial? No, wait...pre-agricultural. We were still hunting mammoth!

And yeah, I try not to think about the Fermi Paradox. It's kind of depressing and a major reason why I tend towards nihilism 🤣

@mrbojangles25: Ohhh.... Interesting perspective on the Fermi Paradox. I always found it optimistic, myself.

A universe so full of possibilities and of such scope that we can truly only ever glimpse a handful (those in our solar system). I suppose we can lament our inability to experience them, but I'd rather celebrate that they're present. I was reading earlier this week that the furthest known star is 28 billion light years from Earth - or was, I guess it's probably actually dead now - and how humbling is that?! It would take 28 billion years years to reach it at the maximum speed the laws of physics theoretically allow. By the time we left Earth and reached it, enough time would have passed for our Sun to have been born and died twice over

Kinda sorta.

Thing is, if you’re going to fake something so monumental, why do it six times over, thereby increasing the likelihood of exposure, when the goal would be achieved by just one landing? Especially for something so important to national interests. If they wanted to pull the lie off and were smart, they‘d do it and then distance themselves as far from it as possible once achieved. If you do it over and over and over again, you are multiplying the chances of a mess up, and when everything must be perfection, why would you do that?

l can see where conspiracy theorists are coming from if I really try I suppose, but every single angle and argument ultimately reduces down to sheer stupidity. Conspiracies are so focused on the trees that they’re incapable of pulling back and seeing how idiotic their positions are when looking at the forest. Aside, I believe most conspiracies aren’t predicated on evidence at all (at least the genuine ones, and not those people who want attention or are trolling), but are based in psychological and emotional reasoning (such as religion, contrarianism, etc) and are simply skewing the evidence to merit conclusions to vindicate a worldview they already hold.

That's mostly because we can't comprehends such big numbers. What is more insane to me about it is that at this point the usual estimate of 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable universe is starting to be replaced by 2 trillion.

Speaking of atoms, it's insane to me that the incomprehensible number of 10^82 atoms in the universe seems like way too low, when you compare in to the 7*10^27 atoms in a 70kg human and 10^57 in the entire solar system.

That's mostly because the Moon landing conspiracy theorists don't even know about the other 5 times, or claim that only the 1st was faked, as if that somehow makes sense.

Idiots don't even know about Apollo 18, where they found the moon spiders.

Nah, for real though. Can you even imagine watching an "earthrise". It's just incredible.

I forget what the psychological thing is called where astronauts go into space and they see Earth for the first time, but it's supposed to be one of the most humbling experiences a human being can go through.

Honestly it makes me want to cry sometimes just thinking about it. Our little blue ball. How lucky we are to have it.

*sniffle*

I'm not crying! You're crying!!

@mrbojangles25: The overview effect. Apparently some people felt something similar using VR. Sounds cool.

@mrbojangles25:

always good to watch once in a while

I have earthrise framed on my wall in my bedroom. My favorite scene from Apollo 13:

I don't think I would have been able to go to the Moon, I'd be so overpowered by emotion I'd be paralyzed. I remember reading an interview of one of the Apollo astronauts, forget which, but he was like, "Yeah, I didn't have time to get emotional because I had a job to do...".

Man....I don't care who you are, if you're not profoundly moved by seeing Earth hanging there in the blackness from 200k miles away, you're simply not human. Going to the moon and walking on it would be a life-altering experience, I couldn't even imagine it. I greatly envy those who had the opportunity, and especially feel for Lovell and Haise, who were so close on 13. What a loss. Lovell always downplayed it, but to be that close and miss out must secretly eat him up. That's something I could never get over.