What is something that sounds 100% false but is actually 100% true?
What is something that sounds 100% false but is actually 100% true?
652 comments
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The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
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Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it's a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm... Nah, those dots don't connect at all.
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It's even worse. The original US Constitution does not prohibit slavery. It wasn't until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed seventy years later - after a Civil War tore apart the country - that slavery was abolished. With the express exception of punishment for a crime. No qualifications for the severity of the crime. And that exception gets frequent use to this day in the penal system
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Not even just the highest rate. The highest number of incarcerated people! Countries with over 1b people still have fewer prisoners, total.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country
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The Star-spangled Banner (where the phrase “Land of the Free” comes from) was written in 1814, 51 years before slavery was abolished. The idea that America is or ever was the land of the free is a total joke.
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The third verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is not typically sung today. It refers to "the hireling and slave" among the foes of the Republic. "The hireling" refers to the mercenaries employed by the British crown in fighting the American revolutionaries. It is unclear whether "slave" is intended to derogate all British subjects as "slaves" of the crown, or if it specifically refers to enslaved Africans who were offered their freedom by the British if they fought against the revolution.
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This is actually not true any longer, El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate
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Sheesh. Step it up, America
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El Guardador
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Unfortunately this bonkers truth is so mundane at this point, I didn’t need to read passed “freedom”
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… and built its initial wealth on slavery revenue.
It’s a shame because there are a lot of other great things to be proud about when it comes to the US. I guess when people boast about US freedom, what they mean is democracy, and starting the end of the colonial era, inspiring a tidal wave of democratic uprisings around the world, which is accurate. I wish they didn’t use the word “freedom” for that.
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That's not all that exciting. All of Europe (and basically every other are of the world) was built on slave labor as well, that's literally what the colonial period was about. Also vikings were primarily about capturing slaves, Rome and Greece were mostly slaves, serfdom wasn't significantly different than slavery.
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Freedom™
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Democracy is a prerequisite for freedom, disenfranchisement, in any form, is a policy failure and should be mitigated.
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That's sounds 100% right and is 100% right
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This doesn't sound false though.
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Yeah, of all the words that can follow the legaly declared prohibition of slavery, except might be one of the dumbest you can pick…
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You see, the trick is to limit “freedom” to certain people. Then, it can easily be the most “free” country in the world (for those people).
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Many companies are making profits off of this. So many states have for profit prison systems and will get fined of they don't have enough people in those prisons. That is above the free labor most people have talked about.
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Freedom to consume is right there. They don't specify what freedom right?
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not subject guarantees in any United States territories. Misuse of free will may result in the loss of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Symptoms may include mental disease, tissue damage, cancer, and loss of all bodily and livelyvhood functions. Consultation with appropriate legal counsel is recommended before using free will, as complications may occur.
For more information ask your dumbass neighbor what's right for you.
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Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
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And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
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My local pub is older than the USA.
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As an American who lived in England for a couple years, that always just fascinated me. Some places just legit felt like I've stepped back in time.
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Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the construction on the great pyramids.
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Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
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So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?
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If you've ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you'd get it! They're fairly expensive, and aren't airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they'll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting
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you are loved and deserve happiness
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Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome
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Bullshit and lies.
No one loves me, and i deserve nothing, for I am trash.
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♥️
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perfect answer, everyone needs to be reminded this sometimes
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Awwww <3 that's something that should be taught at school AND home
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I love this!
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Oh, I have two good ones:
- Nuclear power causes less deaths per energy unit produced than wind. (source
- You have slightly less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than living on an average place.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
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To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.)
Truly no offense, but this is sort of burying the lede on Nuclear Power risks. Mathmatically coal releases more radiation - no question. It's also hard to pin down how many died due to Fukushima for ver good reasons: Correlation might be easy, but determining cause is ultra tough and no right-minded scientist would say it without overwhelming evidence (like they had something "hot" that fell on their roof and didn't know it for a long time). Also? They aren't dead yet. So we look to statistical life span models crossing multiple factors (proximity, time of exposure, contaminated environments and try to pin down cancer clusters attributable, and people can live for decades, etc....
The problem is that people rightly are concerned that in both Fukushima and Chernobyl (and 3 Mile for that matter) unforseen circumstances could have been catastrophically worse. You blow up a coal plant? You expose a region locally to it and it's probably "meh". You blow up a nuclear plant, and you get melt down corium hitting ground water or sea water with direct exposure to fissioning material and all the sudden you have entire nations at risk for subsequent spewing of hot material that will contaminate food supplies, water resevoirs, and linger on surfaces and be pulled into our lungs once it's in the dirt. Radioactive matieral is FAR more dangerous inside the body when you eat plants and animals that are exposed and pull it from the ground. Even cleaning down every surface, eventually you'll get some of it airborn to be breathed into our lungs again with wind storms, flooding and other natural erosion. The consequences are exponentially higher with Nuclear accidents and ignoring that is whitewashing. And that's not even getting into contamination from fuel enrichment, cooling ponds/pools leaking water, or the fact that it will take 30-40 years to clean up Fukushima (and they aren't sure how exactly that will happen and there could be another tsunami). Probably hundreds to try to clean up and contain Chernobyl - and given the current state of affairs we may find out even worse.
BTW, I'm pro-nuclear. Thorium salts seem a good way to go and we probably would already have these if not for the nuclear arms race making nations hungry for plutonium. Please don't short sell everyone's intelligence because you can claim "only" a handful of people died due to Fukushima. Direct death is only one facet. Lives were disrupted (and displaced) and for a while there, the impacts spread to the US across the Pacific and there were discussions of evacuating like 1/3 of Japan's population outside an exclusion zone. You can be pro nuclear while still acknowledging that some fears are real and well founded, and unfortunately the industry has proven gaps in safety that make it harder and harder to argue when we have Solar and Wind and rapidly ramping power storage. Nuclear is likely to simply be outcompeted over time (just like Coal and NG).
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Iv read about Thorium the last 3-4 years and it seems so promising. Im really disapointed that the push is not greater as it would make everything a lot more safe.
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Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.
Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can't do it.
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Not just that, but you might get less radiation swimming in the pool where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored than outdoors.
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Haha, that's a nice explanation
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Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.
Though they're on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there's a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don't have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They've been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.
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Wind turbines do not have a service life of 3 to 5 years. Where did you hear that?
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Even when things go wrong, it's not as bad as with the other classic fossile energy sources. Exactly this calculation is included in the world in data source on deaths per kWh which I linked.
When we have car accidents normalised, massive climate change, air pollution from fossile fuels, then even the occasional nuclear accident isn't really a problem.
The problem is, that these accidents get much more attention than they deserve given how many deaths are caused by fossile fuels. When calibrating for deaths, fossile fuels should get around 100x the attention
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A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.
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A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.
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A broken clock may occasionally be right but it's regularly useless
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time dilation ftw!
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If you're lucky, a clock that's slightly too fast or too slow will be right once
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My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it
*It must be correct as it's very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past
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A clock running backwards turns left and is therefor never right.
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It's right the 4 times the hands overlap at 12 and 6.
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There are people still alive who remember a world before "splinter-free" toilet paper.
The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".
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And in 2023 the majority of Americans still have not discovered the joy of using a bidet.
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Mostly because they think it will “turn you gay” or some shit
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That's my favorite Wikipedia page now. Love that Wikipedia takes itself so seriously that they actually list the uses of toilet paper.
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I enjoyed "See also: Anal Hygiene"
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History smells awful.
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til: nokia sold toilet paper
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That's a thought I did not need in my head.
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The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.
On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.
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Wow, you're absolutely correct!
The average distance from Earth to Mercury is about 1.04 astronomical units (au), which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.
In comparison, the average distance between Earth and Venus is approximately 1.14 au, while the average distance between Earth and Mars is around 1.7 au.
You can check that in Wolfram Alpha.
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I learned this from QI recently. Great piece of trivia!
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Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
Edit: idk if it's actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that's what I've heard. I looked it up and it seems like it's your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.
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On one side you have people that think 5g causes cancer. On the other, you have people directly beaming shit into their skulls to open their cars from a couple extra feet away.
Wild
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Your skull acts as an antenna
How?
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The tinfoil hat you're wearing amplifies the signal!
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Your skull is a parabolic reflector
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The way I do it is holding the bottom of the key under the soft part of the lower jaw while holding the mouth open as a resonance chamber.
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I’ve read two takes on this before:
- The cavity of your head helps project the signal to your car
- The water molecules in your head amplify the radio waves to reach your car
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Alright, I came across some researchers who were keen on validating this. It appears quite credible. You can view the results of their simulation here: Digital Debunking: Using Your Head to Extend Your Car Remote Range
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It does work, and I always feel like a lunatic if I do it.
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There is absolutely no way this is true. I need to see some evidence to believe this. (I work as a wireless technician)
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I've done it. It does work.
Hold your fob a foot to the side of your head. Back away until it stops working. Take 2 more steps back to be sure. Then put the fob to your forehead. It'll work again.
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Alright, I came across some researchers who were keen on validating this. It appears quite credible. You can view the results of their simulation here: Digital Debunking: Using Your Head to Extend Your Car Remote Range
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It definitely works. I do it all the time.
Next time you're in a parking lot, try to click your fob from a distance where it doesn't work. Then hold it to your chin or skull and click it. It almost doubles the range.
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I use this trick all the time to find my car I'm parking garages.
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The first time I heard about this was in reference to garage door remotes.
If your remote was too far away, you placed the remote under your chin pointing to your skull to amplify the signal using your head.
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I would love to see more info on this
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A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.
1 day = time to rotate on it's axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun
For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.
However, because Venus' axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.
Hence, a year is shorter than a day
For those interested:
1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days
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Colloquially, most people use “day” to mean how long it takes the sun to get to the same place in the sky. Solar day vs sidereal day, the difference is only about 4 minutes on Earth, but can be much greater elsewhere. Venus’ solar day is about 117 Earth days, so you would see a couple sunrises/sunsets each Venusian year.
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This is the most interesting one I've read so far.
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Wow! That's another thing I learned from QI recently. Great fact though, and nice to see it mentioned here 🙂
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Really interesting.
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The world is running out of sand.
It's one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.
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Oh no. For some reason I thought we were manufacturing the sand used in construction and stuff. At what point do we stop stealing it and start making it? Is that actually any better?
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So Water world had it right apparently
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Are you saying we should put dibs on Sahara property?
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General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
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Wasn't this the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
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Isn't this Judge Doom's plan?
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All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon
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But putting them there is almost definitely a bad idea.
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this is actually a misconception! the gravity of the planets combined would cause them all to crash into each other!
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Now you have me wondering if there's any combination of paths that would have them all pass through that alignment and continue on their way after slingshotting around each other. And, if not, how many bodies could do that.
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Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.
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Every breath you take has at least 1 atom that was in your mother's brain when she gave birth to you.
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Settle down, Sting.
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Best $700 I ever spent
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That's why I moved to the opposite side of the world.
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Every atom in your body was either created from the beginning of the universe or was created inside the heart of a massive star.
As Carl Sagan put it ... we are all made of star stuff
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The can opener was invented 30 years after the can.
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Well, wouldn't it be weird if it was the other way around?
"Yooo, check this out, I made a new invention, it's called a can opener!"
What does it do?
"idk" -
I didn't believe it so I looked it up... but Smithsonian says it's even longer, 50 years!
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So they just used a pocket knife to open cans for 30 years? So dangerous...
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Not sure when this became a thing, but it feels relevant and might be useful to someone someday.
a formerly homeless friend once showed me that taking a brick and grinding it on top of the can, will open it without a knife. the 'ridge' of the can, the metal circle that runs along the diameter at either the top or bottom, is a metal 'lid' that's folded or pinched shut onto the other piece of metal, the 'cup'. (single quotes around terms i picked and might not be official jargon)
in just a few minutes, the brick ground the metal off the ridge, seperating the lid from the cup, which easily popped out. technically you don't really need any tool, just some relatively flat concrete or a rough flat rock. or even low grit sandpaper.
i don't recommend tossing out the can opener though, there is a chance of metal shavings falling in if you aren't careful. still might be useful in an emergency.
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Many Swiss Army knives have a can opener. You hook a part of it under the can rim and it acts as a lever for the small knife blade above it. You simply work your way around the can, cutting the lid a bit at a time. I've done it many, many times. It's safe and easy.
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I think hammer and chisel was the common way.
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Every Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.
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I don't think this is true for all of them. My cube takes at least a couple hundred rotations and then you have to take the stickers off and move them around to solve it.
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nooooo dont peel the stickers
take it apart
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Consider: Hammer.
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rotates a corner piece
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Maine is the closest US state to Africa.
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I once read a blog from a sailing group that pointed out that there is possible sea route where you could sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia in a straight line and end up in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Most people have more than the average number of legs.
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The average person has one fallopian tube
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99.99% of population have more arms than average value.
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What about the legs? What happened to the legs?
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how
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Ice is a mineral. Just unstable at room temperature.
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Water is actually a very unusual substance. When it freezes into a solid, instead of becoming heavier and sinking in liquid water, it begins bouyant and floats.
If it didn't have this property, our planet would have turned into an ice ball and never thawed out.
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This sounds good for birthdays ...
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That I cleaned the house (according to my fiance at least)
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Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies.
(also a good example of why correlation =/= causation)
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Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate.
93%, actually.
https://www.good.is/infographics/the-population-of-the-dead-how-many-people-have-ever-lived
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Tiffany was a really common name in Ancient Rome.
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Well, no; Theophania was a common Christian name in the Eastern Roman Empire. "Tiffany" is an English version of Theophania, a Greek Christian name referring to the feast day also known as Epiphany or Three Kings Day. The masculine form is Theophanes.
"Jennifer" is, by the way, the English form of the Welsh name Gwenhwyfar, also known in French as Guinevere.
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CGPGrey?
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Has to be him haha
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European settlers committed genocide in America on such an incredible scale that the global climate cooled.
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How do they measure the global climate back into the past?
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carefully. with science.
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I don't people consider the transmission of the black death a Chinese genocide of Europe. The vast majority of death in the America where cause by illness, not direct Europe action. Is it a travesty? yes. would it have happened with out Europeans? No. however It was not intended just like how the black death wasn't intended.
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That's just false. This was done with conscious intent, and this is actually documented. For example, Amherst said in a letter to Bouquet that 'This is a good idea to spread smallpox just be careful you don't get it yourself, You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.'
The text of Amherst's letter reads;
d'Errico wrote in his study of Amherst that "None of these other letters show a deranged mind or an obsession with cruelty." Amherst's "venom" was only directed at Indigenous peoples, he added.
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Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/
EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.
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I think that says more about how unbelievably massive Africa is.
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"pretty small", it's like 2 Canada's.
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Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.
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Russia is the biggest country on the planet by land area.
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Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.
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That's a neat website, but is there any way to rotate the countries?
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Nope
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Texas is larger than any country in Europe except Russia.
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Wait, is Russia in Europe?
Edit: apparently it's in both. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_the_continents
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So American.
Lol :-)
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Hand sanitizer is ~120 proof alcohol. (Not a recommendation to drink it, since it's usually spiked with bad-tasting additives to keep people from doing just that. Some commercial hand sanitizers swap out ethanol for isopropyl alcohol, i.e. rubbing alcohol, which is more toxic when ingested.)
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Weird, all the sanitizers I've seen have a big ass label that says "non-alcohol" on them, both sprayed and gel-like
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Not all sanitizers are alcohol based. Some are chlorine based and probably other kinds too. The cheap ones during covid that smelled like shit vodka were definitely ethanol based though.
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Yeah the cheap hand sanitizer I have smells like tequila.
At least that's what I tell people at work.
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During the covid quarantine many alcoholic beverage companies in my country temporarily switched production lines to hand sanitizer using some of the same raw materials. The result were hand sanitizers and alcohol that had the weirdest smells.
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Turtles can, in fact, breathe through their butts.
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We might actually not know why magnets work.
The formula used to prove the functionality of magnets can also be used to prove the existence of a theoretical state called a monopolar magnet - positive or negative on both sides. So either monopolar magnets can exist, even if in some esoteric circumstance, or we don't know why magnets work.
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There are four stanzas to the Star Spangled Banner (the US national anthem) and what you typically here at sporting events is only the first.
Bonus fun fact, the fourth stanza contains the line that, in the 1860s became the shorter, "In God We Trust," motto on coinage that eventually became the national motto of the US in the 1950s (which was also when it was added to paper money). That original line from the fourth stanza was, "And this be our motto - 'In God is our trust.'"
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The first can/tin opener wasn’t invented until about 75 years after canned food started being produced. During that time, people used hammers and chisels to open cans.
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Another comment presented this same fact, but the years is 30 instead 75. Heck, what's the truth.
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Moose are prey to Orca Whales.
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It’s more expensive to execute a person on death row than to keep them imprisoned for life.
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In the United States.
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How can that be? I figure it costs a lot to keep a person in jail for a year. Multiply by 40. How is an execution more expensive than that?
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In future space travel spaghettification will be a serious concern.
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Wait why? I thought that was only a thing if you get close to a black hole. Why would it be a serious concern? Couldn't you just avoid the black holes?
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Yea maybe, but would still concern the hell out of me...
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It can also matter if you are travelling close to the speed of light.
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Yummy.
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The world's two largest cities by area are both on Greenland.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/largest-city-in-the-world-by-area
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That would be a diameter of about 800 km. Don't they have multiple centers that could be called towns? With churches, administration and schools? They just can't be bothered to split it up.
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The towns in this municipality on Greenland used to be split up. The main capital is among them, so it made sense to grasp the 800 km circumference even if it's just a few people. Anyway it's according to the topic, so as stupid as it might be, it is factually the largest cities by area, and goes to show that the question of which is the largest city is ambiguous.
Tokyo is usually considered the largest city, due to the largest population overall, but it doesn't have the largest area (Greenland) nor the largest population of a single municipal (Chongqing, China) nor the largest density (Macau, China) nor the largest area of skyscrapers (Hong Kong), so it's a thing depending on definitions.
It doesn't really matter much. If you're in the middle it, it's all just city until the horizon. Well, except for Greenland. You can probably throw a stone across all the houses in the largest city by area.
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Hard sell to consider towns of 20k and 10k people are cities. I grew up in rural Midwest with higher population densities than that.
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In Lithuania, the smallest city (i.e. settlement with a city status), Panemunė, has a population of ~300. Source: Wikipedia
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