Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
Wait, you’re saying that the Aztec empire was just 64 years old when Columbus discovered America and ships with conquistadors followed to butcher and enslave everyone?
Yeah, I’ve heard similar things in the past and I’m always confused by it.
There were people there prior to the Aztec empire conquering them. The Aztec empire is just a specific government that ruled the area at that specific time.
The Napoleonic empire, for comparison, only lasted 1804-1815 (with a hole in the middle).
And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than the construction on the great pyramids.
My local pub is older than the USA.
Oh, I have two good ones:
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Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
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You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn’t been there.
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.
Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. 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.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it’s productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)
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).
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.
Windmills last much longer than five years. They generally last 20-25. Wherever you heard that bullshit number from, ignore all the other info you got from them.
Not only windmills, but also every for of alternative energy production.
Wind turbines do not have a service life of 3 to 5 years. Where did you hear that?
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
I work in wind and I really wonder if these statistics include the deaths from the mining and refining of the radioactive material. And the steel and other materials needed for wind turbines. Interesting thoughts.
What are you trying to say by linking this article?
I mean, it even says that it was a mechanical issue - and the radiation danger was low. And even then, it’s just a single person. Looking at the bigger picture, the numbers game favors nuclear+wind+solar over fossile.
Just found it coincidental that today someone died from radiation at a nuclear power plant. It does not happen that often.
Not just that, but you might get less radiation swimming in the pool where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored than outdoors.
Haha, that’s a nice explanation
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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.
It does work, and I always feel like a lunatic if I do it.
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.
Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
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”.
And in 2023 the majority of Americans still have no discovered the joy of using a bidet.
Mostly because they think it will “turn you gay” or some shit
That’s a thought I did not need in my head.
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.
We can just make more sand from glass! 😂
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
Wasn’t this the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon
My brain can’t take this today.
Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies.
(also a good example of why correlation =/= causation)
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
I think they meant eventual fatality, unless 7% of the population is immortal
Dihydrogen monoxide kills!
Moose kill more people than bears every year.
Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.
That second one still fucks me up…
- Rikudou_Sage ( @rikudou@lemmings.world ) English13•1 year ago
- Wombat feces are cube shaped.
- Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
- Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
- Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.
Tomatoes are also a fruit
To all those people who say they don’t like fruit on their pizza.
Also pineapple on pizza is fantastic … mi dispiace
- Rikudou_Sage ( @rikudou@lemmings.world ) English1•1 year ago
Tomatoes are vegetables. If we’re speaking botanically, then squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, corn kernels, and bean are also fruit. US supreme court ruled that they’re vegetables. EU declared tomatoes to be fruit for the purpose of making jam, though.
Ice is a mineral. Just unstable at room temperature.
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.
Tiffany was a really common name in Ancient Rome.
Every Rubik’s Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.
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.
Note that that’s in the “half turn metric” where 90° and 180° turns of a single face are both considered “one move.” It’s the more common metric but not the only way to measure.
In the quarter turn metric, every scramble can be solved in at most 26 rotations (and the solutions are often very different from the optimal half turn metric solution!).
Also, both of these results are relatively recent compared to when the cube was invented. The HTM fact in 2010 and the QTM fact in 2014.
Air is a fluid.
What… how?
Difference between the colloquial and technical definitions of fluids. Colloquially, fluids are liquids. But technically, for example when discussing physics, it’s any substance of no fixed shape.
I was about to argue with you but the dictionary says you are right.
Take my upvote.
In english generally we see liquids to be the same as fluids but technically liquids are a state and fluids are matter that flows. Similarly we will see accuracy and precision as the same thing but accuracy is within a range where precision is exact.
As an example: Strawberries and raspberries aren’t even berries but pumpkins are botanically speaking. I would be accurate to regard strawberries and raspberries as berries as we use them as berries but I would not be precise.
According to any hydrodynamics code, so are solids.