For example, Britain’s national mapping organisation’s brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It’s called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that’s because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.
I have a thick rope of muscle in my mouth that I can control accurately enough to speak with, swallow with, and dig popcorn fragments out from between my teeth with.
Just one of nature’s wacky solutions that applies to more than one problem. I should be grateful it doesn’t have thorns on it.
Airplanes. Like I get that we can make them stay up, but we can steer them?? Across entire continents and oceans? What the entire fuck
Even weirder is that the most efficient way to steer them is not in straight lines. Because the most efficient way to traverse a sphere is on a slight curve.
Get a string and pick two points along the equator on a globe. Stretch the string tight. It’ll bend into a slight curve above or below the equator (instead of following the equator directly) as you pull it, because the shortest distance between two points on a globe is not a straight line.
of course the shortest distance is a straight line, that’s literally the definition of a straight line.
The point is that you can’t follow a straight line on a globe, because that’s longer than taking a slight curve. If you take a straight line, you follow the entire circumference of the earth, but following a curved path allows you to avoid some of the width. Basically, the circumference means a straight line is more curved than a curved path.
Isn’t it still a straight line from the perspective of someone travelling it? It just appears curved because you’re looking at it from outside the curved surface.
i don’t even understand what you think ‘straight’ and ‘curved’ even mean at this point.
I’m talking about how in this image, the upper curved line is shorter than the straight line that follows the equator:
Because the curvature of the earth is greater than the curvature of the upper line. So by taking the upper curved line, you “skip” some of the curvature of the earth.
The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotion that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn’t work? How much that would suck? It’s amazing that it’s like… a thing.
Sight too (obviously, now that we’re thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be if you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I’m sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that’s emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That’s weeiird.
Water. Fresh drinking water straight from the tap.
And yet I’m seeing lots of people in the UK start to buy bottled water. Worse: canned water.
The shittification of public services in favour of private products is a creep I’m not paying enough attention to
I agree with the overall sentiment; but there is no way in hell that canned water is worse than plastic bottles.
Aluminium is infinitely more/easily recyclable than plastic, and has a much lower negative impact on the environment.
But to reiterate, filling up your own bottle from the tap is preferred - but if you have to buy water in a container: can > bottle
It’s not really the metal that’s bad, but the coating on the inside of the metal (in contact with your food/water), that raises concerns.
Glass is best, but food/water in glass containers are often considerably more expensive.
I am aware; but when the options are an entirely plastic container (clear, and readily able to oxidise and leech microplastics when exposed to light over long periods of time) versus a lined metal can (which is at least opaque) - cans are remain the lesser of two evils.
I don’t disagree at all. I wish we had more options.
More glass with compatibility with mason jar lids would be a win for everyone. You can recycle 5them if you want, reuse them easily, and they can remain in circulation for a very long time.
The only caveat with glass is that you have too many idiots breaking them on sidewalks, bike lanes, and parks.
Glass is also quite heavy, increasing logistics costs for transport - but in an ideal world where everything runs off renewable energy sources and stupid people didn’t ruin things for the rest of us - glass would indeed be the ideal medium.
But glass is easy to sterilize at the point of purchase and refilled. There are “zero waste” stores that do something like this already, so there’s nothing to bring in other than bulk product (instead of 100 cans or bottles).
Doesn’t work everywhere in our current, high-profit, low-care business models.
The thing about it is aluminum cans leach into their contents, especially if left open. Aluminum isn’t particularly harmful in that amount but it’s something you can taste, particularly with acidic contents. Not sure how much water suffers from this, but if it comes through in things with flavour, I’m sure it would come through in water, which is supposed to be flavourless, even if it’s not usually very acidic.
4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.
Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.
It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.
Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.
uBlock Origin ftw
uBlock Origin just prevents the network requests from these tracking frameworks from completing. All the javascript tracking code I believe still executes, just doesn’t return.
If it were possible it would be great to prevent these javascript frameworks from being loaded at all by the browser. But I guess the website javascript code would break.
It would be interesting to replace the tracking frameworks with an empty stubbed out implementation that does nothing. Not for sure how feasible that would be.
putting leeches on people
We still do that. Leeches are surprisingly useful when treating certain blood clots. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you’re trying to treat lol.
Those computers has less memory than a dollar store calculator. The bits in memory were physical magnets woven by hand into a mesh. It’s insane that it left our planet and came back with people alive.
Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.
Homelessness. But I don’t occasionally think about it. I see it every day. In the richest nation in recorded history.
And the wealth of only one single manchild is enough to pay housing for them all - at least in this nation…and probably in some more. (Just looked some numbers up - world economic forum reported in 2021 that there are 150 million people homeless in the world, that would be ~2700,- per individual homeless person, taking his net worth into account -for 770. 000 homeless people in the US it would be ~525. 000 per person)
The problem is that homelessness is, weirdly, more complicated than just giving people homes. It’s also about mental health issues (many of which we don’t yet have the ability to effectively treat), community, purpose, and a ton of other things.
It’s almost like everyone would benefit from a support system or safety net put in place by some community funded entity that would have the capability of putting those systems in place.
You’re right-I didn’t want to make it look simple. I’m just constantly stunned how wealth is distributed, which is one of many reasons for homelessness. A fair distribution could finance housing and support systems.
Last I heard we’re still in contact with Voyager 1
Driving.
Somehow millions of us go hurtling by each other mere inches away in multiple tons of steel, often in conditions less than ideal yet for the most part, it’s a safe way to travel.
We can’t even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others’ hands every day.
Even disregarding all the other drivers, we put ourselves in a metal can, hurtle towards solid objects, and simply count on the idea that on average, nothing catastrophic will happen.
Pure, random chance is enough to end us - animal pops into the road, a tree randomly falling, etc. - yet there we go, on yet another daily commute.
I have a long commute through the “middle of nowhere” so lots of time to think about things that ought to be downright terrifying. The thought of hitting one moose is bad. Never occurred to me until just the other day that two moose was not out of the realm of possibility.
Driving just gets more absurd the more you think about it.
Had it not been invented yet, would anyone get away with suggesting a machine propelled by explosions supplied by a tank of the most flammable liquid possible kept underneath the passenger seats?
Reminds me of the Asgard from Stargate and how there advanced race was surprised about how we us explosives to propel a bullet and “primitive” things they never really thought of or considered because there dangerous.
Our car centric world. We have somehow intersected everything and everywhere with death zone strips where people can’t go. And that’s entirely normal and accepted.
That milk forms such a big part of western diets considering where it comes from.
it’s the lactose tolerance pyramid scheme
Yeah dude the more I think of milk as sexual assault the stranger it feels.
Yeah dude the more I think of milk as sexual assault the stranger it feels.
Meat is outright murder and cannsbilism, and don’t get me started on eggs.
cannsbilism
I’m guessing cannibalism. But where are you shopping?
In the staff fridge at work someone used to label their milk as “breast milk” and people would go eeeww. Like it was snot or something. But from a cow’s breasts? Fine! So weird.
The USA drops approximately 15-20 million sterilized worms on Panama every day. Yes you read that right, it’s The Great American Worm Wall.
This is wild. Good share!
This seems like it would make for a good Wikipedia article, but am I could find was this section:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax#Control
