I’d have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.
1 - George W Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.
…in the same vein…
2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the ‘accounting’ of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.
… If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.
And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.
The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.
Most frequent occurence is the mode. Most ppl have 10. The median would be less than ten, while the mean average is skewed down, I would think, by some people losing fingers as the grow. Having extra fingers is pretty rare. So the mean might be 9.95 fingers, just to toss a number out.
I assume the median and mode are the same value, 10 fingers, but have no data to back that up. I guess saying mode would have been a safer statement to make, but think that even if 49% of people have 0-9 fingers, the median number of fingers would still be 10.
The median of a data set is the measure of center that is the middle value when the original data values are arranged in order of increasing (or decreasing) magnitude.
So ppl generally have, say, between 2 and 11 fingers. If those were your only 2 data points, the mean would equal the median, and there is no mode.
I was also assuming a sample size of more than two for it to be statically significant.
Mode assumes categorical data and is unbounded by range, whereas median makes the most sense for decimal numbers, albeit with rounding in this case
“People have
round(median(data))fingers”edit: though, if we’re counting just fingers and not counting half-fingers, then maybe this really is categorical data (¯\(ツ)/¯?)
The median of a data set is the measure of center that is the middle value when the original data values are arranged in order of increasing (or decreasing) magnitude.
So ppl generally have, say, between 2 and 11 fingers. If those were your only 2 data points, the mean would equal the median, and there is no mode.
Um akchully…
Median is a type of average
NERDDDDD!
Ok, I had assumed average was the same as mean, but see that it’s ambiguous. Saying “the mean person does not have 10 fingers” just sounds wrong though.
There is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.
Shouldn’t that be 2? Mars and Venus.
Pretty sure the one on Venus is dead.
well yeah, but that’s because the native robots killed it
Consider a dam that is 10m tall
Then consider the height of water behind that dam is 5m tall.
Does the dam need to be built stronger if the water behind it is 1 km long?
How about only 500m?
How about 1m?
The answer is, it doesn’t matter. Water exerts pressure equally regardless of how much water is behind it.
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Incompressible fluids are pretty insane
Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.
Technically only the pressures are equal, and the actual force will be linearly dependent on the area of the dam (or the surface area of the cylinder). That’s why you can make a tall water tank with relatively thin walls, but an actual dam will have to be quite thicc to handle the tensile/compressive stress (depending on the shape of the dam).
That is accounting for static bodies of water, wouldn’t there be force generated in a dynamic situation? Ie the flow of a fast river? Or if the lake is large enough tidal forces? I’m sure it’s negligible levels but still something that must be accounted for?
No, that’s absolutely true. Dynamic loads will need to be accounted for in real world examples.
Another point is that if the dam is 10m tall, it has to be built to withstand 10m of water. just because it sits at 5m most of the time doesn’t mean a heavy rain couldn’t raise the level, and if the dam collapses that’s going to be catastrophic vs just spilling over the top.
I’ve seen a few dynamic loads in my day and in my professional opinion I must agree
Thank you. Your hypothetical question has been a nagging, unresolved background radiation in my mind for decades, but I’d never gotten around to investigating.
by weight, theres more non-human DNA in you than human.
A few of my favorite fun facts are geography related.
The pacific side of the Panama canal is further east than the Atlantic side.
If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you’ll hit is Canada.
Lake Tahoe is further west than Los Angeles
If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you’ll hit is Canada.
There’s also Angle Inlet, Minnesota which is the only place in the contiguous United States north of the 49th parallel. To travel to Angle Inlet by road from other parts of Minnesota, or from anywhere in the United States, requires driving through Manitoba, Canada. It’s a really weird border.
Due to its high latitude and being in the middle of a continent, it is a contender for the most extreme winters in the contiguous United States.
Two square miles & 54 residents in North Bumblefuck, separated from the rest of the US by 60 miles. It’s an affront to reason.
All borders are weird
omg la is east of reno what is happening rn
- Catalan children get (some) of their Christmas presents by beating a cute piece of wood that then shits the presents out onto the floor. Seriously.
- There was a British guy who fought in WW2 with a scottish broadsword and bagpipes. However, the best thing is that he wasn’t even a Scotsman.
- On a small enough timescale, the electric field actually bounces around in your wires for a while after you flick a switch, even if it’s DC, just to “figure out” where it “needs to go”.
- More than twice as much time had passed from the invention of the motorcycle until the first motorcycle backflip, then had from the invention of the airplane until the first humans landing on the moon.
That Mark Zuckerberg holds several records for most fists shoved inside a human body at once
Just once it would be nice to see him on the receiving end
A somewhat political fact, but one that made some of my friends dumbfounded:
When a bank issues a loan, it generates that money literally out of thin air and credits that money to the loan account rather than using deposits they already had. For example, if you want to borrow $100,000, the banker approves the loan and doesn’t hand over cash or move existing money around - instead, they just go on their system and credit your account with the sum, that’s it.
While I think your point is true that its much more abstract than people realize. When I worked at a bank and we disbursed loans and credited/debited fees it was from “GLs” (General Ledger?) which were basically just separate accounts to help keep track. Like we had a “member service” one which was for basically anything with good reason. One time someone did a very large amount but he just basically got told to do it a different way.
Its all just in a computer. I could’ve accidentally credited someone a million dollars but it would’ve been realized when I tried to close my drawer and balance everything out. And the branch would have to be balanced at the end of the day so I assume the bank did as well.
On a related note banks take out loans from other banks. I think a lot of people don’t realize that banks have savings accounts so they have money to lend.
Which is why a “run on the Bank” or “Bank run” is unsustainable for Banks these days.
There are more trees on earth by far than there are stars in the galaxy.
There was this racehorse named Pot-8-Os who won over 25 races and went on to sire a horse empire of winners. His father was a legend himself named “Eclipse”
Also an unbelievable fact, you responded to user Potoooooooo about Potoooooooo the horse.
I really love this story about the horse.
yesss… coincidence… hehee… *runs away*
looks into rhe distance
I guess, I will never know the truth.
A single tear slides down OP’s face
James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You’re Beautiful. Reality is weird.)
Care to expand on that one? I know he’s ex military but haven’t heard anything like that before.
It’s explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn’t want his men to start WW3.
Well damn. That’s a pretty cool thing to do. Thanks for sharing.
Nothing insane, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band are older than Guns ‘N’ Roses.
Printer ink costs more per milliliter than human blood.
“Wow you signed the document in blood, you must be really hardcore.”
“No I’m just cheap.”
If two moving balls hit each other and bounce apart, it’s the exact same thing as if you held the frame steady on one ball and viewed the other ball as moving faster. Just seems like the stationary ball gets heavier…
Perspective is everything.
Yeah, this one took me a while to wrap my head around and intuitively “get it”. I first learned it was true from that mythbusters episode where they correct their past mistakes… and even they had thought that two cars hitting head on would receive the same energy as hitting a stationary wall at the speed of the sum of their speeds. They were corrected in letters written to them, and then they experimentally verified it.
And even seeing the experimental verification, it still took me a while to really get it. The opposite speeds cancel out, making you go from your speed to zero. Same as if you hit a brick wall at that speed.
Let’s say the two cars are going 50 mph (kph, whatever unit you want). 50-50=0. You experience the same as hitting the brick wall. It’s the difference between initial speed and final speed that matters, not the sum of their speeds.
This has a caveat though, you have to assume that both cars are the same mass.
If a truck hits a car head on, it is likely that the car doesn’t go just to 0 but to some -ve number as the much more massive truck plows through the car and reverses its direction.
This link is about the moon but it starts by covering how to view space and orbital objects including simulators which allow one to do what you describe, as well as the ability to move the camera from on ball to the other and many other interesting simulations. https://ciechanow.ski/moon/