What's something that's not common knowledge but you think everyone should know?
What's something that's not common knowledge but you think everyone should know?
Specifically thinking of stuff that make your life better in the long run but all kinds of answers are welcome!
I've recently learnt about lifetraps and it's made a huge positive impact on how I view myself and my relationships
- Exercise grows your hippocampus
- So do antidepressants according to recent research
- Small hippocampal volume is an excellent predictor of depression and anxiety
- Exercise grows your hippocampus, in a dose-dependent way
- Exercise grows your hippocampus
- Exercise grows your hippocampus
This is the most important fact I have ever learned.
This is true regardless of symptom severity or health status, every person is at risk. I think most people really aren't aware of this, they absorbed the narrative that it's gone, mild, only kills/harms the vulnerable, etc. This isn't really their fault, there are a lot of factors that have led people to that belief, but people should know their lives and livelihoods are much more at risk now than 4 years ago.
And that this isn't inevitable, there are simple methods of disrupting transmission and protecting yourself and others. COVID-19 is here to stay (unless we do something about that) and it has impacts on every person infected and on society at large. That shouldn't mean folks accept illness and worse quality of life. We adapt and adopt precautions in our life to reduce long-term health impacts, like we've done before with many other illnesses that plague humanity.
Drowning is very fast, seconds not minutes like in the movies. People in distress can take minutes before they are actively drowning. Active drowning is silent, they will not be yelling for help. It looks like the person is "climbing" or pushing down at the water. They will be vertical in the water and may be "bobbing", going underwater and resurfacing. They will have their head tilted back parallel to the surface of the water.
If you see someone go under in open water keep looking at where they went under while calling for help, don't take your eyes off it. If you are the only one who saw them go under, your job is to direct others to where they went down. In open water it's very hard to find people because the bottom isn't visible.
Something that applies when you get a little older - if you’re in a relatively specific job field, don’t burn your bridges at a job you’re going to leave. You never know who will be sitting across the table from you at the interview, at the meeting table, on the job site. People in the same field tend to move around in the same jobs as you. If it’s someone you burned, you may not get the job, or if you do, it could be pretty miserable.
When you're about to face a high risk, high reward situation, you should willfully, willingly start to hyperventilate, as this helps your brain ...
NEVER take any stranger's advice on the internet as credible without checking it with a specialist. This is especially true when said advice relates to your health and/or safety.
What wasn’t reasoned in, can’t be reasoned out. Many people who suffer from conspiratorial thinking need help and support more than evidence and debate.
Tires can get damaged internally and the only real way to tell is to dismount them from the rim. If there is internal damage they can potentially explode while being filled with air.
I see a lot of people filling up their tires while sitting straight infront of them and if they do explode it explodes straight outward. My tip is to connect the air gauge and then stand of to the side while filling, just in case.
Mitochondria (the famous powerhouse of the cell) is a symbiotic bacteria that became so entangled with our cell that neither can now live without the other. Sorry to everyone who knows, in some regions this is not common knowledge. Knowing this makes your life immensely better because it's such a cool fact.
Use windows + p to change the presentation settings on a laptop when connecting to a monitor or audio / video system. This lets you quickly change between laptop, dual display, and extended desktop.
Windows + x and then b brings up a menu where you can turn on "presention" mode, preventing the laptop from going to sleep during a presentation.
Cars are way more expensive than you think, and getting rid of it will make you happier and way wealthier.
Lithium batteries are happiest between 20 and 80% state of charge. You should not store them outside of that range. Charging a little often also doesn't hurt your battery like many seem to believe.
Charging while cold is bad, but storing in cold is good.
Also, NiMh and NiCd batteries are different tha Lithium based ones. Check what type of battery you have. Phones and EVs are almost always lithium though.
Take the following with a big spoon of salt, since I am not a lawyer. Those are the results of interest and some reading on that topic.
Insulting someone is illegal in Germany (§ 185 StGB). You can get financial penalties and in worst cases some jailtime. However, if you insult someone back immediately, those can cancel each other out and the judge can exempt both of you or one of you from punishment (§ 199 StGB). Furthermore, since it is considered a crime, you could, theoretically, detain the culprit in case they want to flee until you are able to get some identification on them, i.e., see their ID card, or until someone like the police arrives (§ 127 StPO). Also this is not okay if you already know the person or have easy means to determine their ID (e.g., your neighbour or someone working at a facility you visit). In all cases the proportionality of your actions are important. (Beating someone senseless just to detain them, because they called you an avocado in a mean way is certainly not okay. This might be slightly different however, if the person in question commited a violent crime and is still acting violently.)
Evolution was largely theorized and understood down to the nuance that each parent contributed to a 'doubled seed' for trait inheritance and that trait success depended on survival of the fittest well before Jesus was even born.
(In fact, the author who wrote the only surviving book detailing this used the specific language of calling failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path" around 80 years before the parable of the sower described how seed that fell by the wayside of the path didn't reproduce but that which found fertile soil produced more and more - a parable unanimously spoken in public in canon but provided a secret explanation thereafter and one believed by 'heretics' to have been referring to seeds described extremely similar to how Leucretius described his "seeds of things" in De Rerum Natura, the aforementioned book. Also, in the extra-canonical scripture this 'heretical' group followed, the parable of the sower immediately followed a couplet of sayings about how no matter if lion ate man or man ate lion that man was inevitable and how the human being was like a large fish selected from many small fish in the sea.)
Basic cybersecurity skills, like
- don't click on random links in random emails
- identify phishing/scam emails
- use a password manager & generate long enough passwords
- know how long a safe password is
- use unique passwords everywhere
- use an ad blocker
- don't click on sketchy links
- identify sketchy links
- don't share your personal data when it's not necessary
- make offline & online backups
- change the admin and wifi passwords of your home router from the factory default
- have some sort of a firewall and antivirus software
- etc...
All salespeople in every shop have negotiation brackets (well perhaps except grocery supermarkets) for most products and are willing to go down on the price if that may encourage you to buy. The negotiation wiggle space is normally included in the price and yeah, they do know you're uncomfortable haggling and will go out of their way to not discourage you from purchase.
Also, but this is something I only heard from a colleague, you can negotiate up to 40% off if you convince them to purchase the product using their employee discount (so bulk price) and split the difference off the record.
Health related:
- "Healthy food" is a grift meant to sell you shit. And by that I mean most "Healthy Foods" you find on the supermarket or are advertised as superfoods or are at the core of the latest fad diet are in fact just as trashy as any other ultraprocessed prepackaged food. Even if they are truly healthy foodstuffs, they are often something that isn't a staple of people's everyday diets (usually shit that is part of the diet in a foreign culture, but not on the West) that you get massively overcharged for because "Muh superfood".
- The real way to eat healthy is to buy fresh ingredients, cook your own meals, and inform yourself on what your body actually needs so you can be smart about what you cook... But that requires time and work investment, which most people cannot afford to do, which is why obesity is more common in poor folk than on rich folk. Have I mentioned that knowing certain stuff will make you, if not politically radicalised, very angry regardless?
Computer related:
- In windows 10 and 11 if you press Win+V instead of Ctrl+V you'll get the option to activate clipboard history. After that, you can use Win+V to get a little menu that lists things that were in your clipboard and which you replaced by copying/cutting something else. You can then choose what to paste. Linux has plenty of programs that add this functionality and was in fact there first. No idea about MacOS.
- Learning a bit of your operating system's command line interface will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run -- And you don't need to become one of those turbo-weirdos that uses nothing BUT the CLI -- But the reason the good ol' console-host/terminal-emulator has stuck around after all these years is that there is a lot of shit that is just faster and more practical to do by typing a few words vs. going through 10 different menus and tabs.
- Save yourself some money: If you're not gonna be doing hardcore state-of-the-art gaming or heavy video editing or some other intense task, a middle-of-the-road computer from ten years ago with some light upgrades will carry you just fine. Get a used PC, get a decent quality SATA SSD and some extra sticks of RAM (8 minimum, ideally 16 or more) and you'll be all set for everyday internet browsing and office tasks and shit. Heck, slap in a GPU later and you can get away with playing a lot of games, if not with DigitalFoundry tier performance.
You do not have to embody or enact your thoughts and feelings.
We have no real moment-to-moment control over what comes down that highway…it just comes, an endless firehose of bs, at times, and it is entirely possible to notice and observe this activity, instead of being swept along and/or making it all mean things.
Most of what society tells us will make us feel happy and fulfilled in life is bullshit. Living a good life is primarily about your personal relationships. Things like social status and personal wealth are far less important.
How to sing, dance and make music.
Life would be different if people wouldn't argue but express their emotions in a song.
You don't suddenly lose money to taxes by entering a higher tax bracket (by getting a raise, working overtime, etc.). All your money in the lower bracket is taxed the same, no matter how much you make.
Drowning is very fast, seconds not minutes like in the movies. People in distress can take minutes before they are actively drowning. Active drowning is silent, they will not be yelling for help. It looks like the person is "climbing" or pushing down at the water. They will be vertical in the water and may be "bobbing", going underwater and resurfacing. They will have their head tilted back parallel to the surface of the water.
If you see someone go under in open water keep looking at where they went under while calling for help, don't take your eyes off it. If you are the only one who saw them go under, your job is to direct others to where they went down. In open water it's very hard to find people because the bottom isn't visible.
Ironically, most people I know doesn't know how to use their phones or computers at all.
Not all of the people require more knowledge than Excel, but it's very useful to recognize types of errors, backups, where are the settings you may need and how to find your device options.