Asklemmy

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. One day takes 243 Earth days, while a year takes 225.

Maybe it's not "well known", but still interesting in my opinion.

Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they're right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think "wow that's pretty," but every once in a while I let it hit me that I'm looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it's, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.

The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they're right there. I can point at one and say "look at that pretty star" and right now, a long distance away, it's just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there's life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.

And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It's over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?

Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month

If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there's more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined

There's a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren't supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!

Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he'll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy

Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.

And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.

EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!

There are only 24 episodes of the initial run of The Jetsons and only 25 of Scooby Doo. They got aired as reruns for decades before more episodes were made. There are only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean.

There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.

Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...

Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.

Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.

In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.

The sun could've gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn't know for another 20 seconds or so.

That "I" am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.

That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.

That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.

That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.

That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China ~~Japan~~ from the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.

That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain

Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.

Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.

Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.

there's people that don't like music.

The mitochondria in all but your blood cells are a different species than us with their own separate DNA.

The birthday paradox

If you get 23 people in a room the odds of two of them sharing a birthday are 50%

The birthday paradox is a veridical paradox: it seems wrong at first glance but is, in fact, true. While it may seem surprising that only 23 individuals are required to reach a 50% probability of a shared birthday, this result is made more intuitive by considering that the birthday comparisons will be made between every possible pair of individuals. With 23 individuals, there are (23 × 22)/2 = 253 pairs to consider, far more than half the number of days in a year.

Don't know if it's bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I'd been lied to my whole life... a leap year isn't every 4 years.

So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.

So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on..

Alaska is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost US state.

That the first civilian hot air balloon was perceived as a flying monster by rural French onlookers who tried to bring it down before beating it with sticks.

Makes the whole Hartlepool monkey story seem sane.

Quantum superpositioning. Schrödinger was right, it's absolutely ridiculous and the cat can't be alive and dead at the same time, box or not.

The problem is it provably does work that way, or at least in a way that is indistinguishable from it, ridiculous or not, and we don't really know why. We've learnt many of the rules, managed to trap particles in superimposed states, even discovered that plants take advantage of it to transport energy more efficiently, and it's just a thing that happens, an apparently fundamental rule of existence. And it doesn't make any fucking sense.

There's about 25 blimps in the world, and only 40-50 pilots.

Your bones are made of calcium, which is also a metal. You've got a metal frame inside your body.

There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates

Here's one: Iron doesn't have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can't smell coins after washing them

Your asswhole can stretch up to 8 inches without permanent deformation.

Also an adult raccoon can fit into a 4.5 inch hole.

Do with that info as you wish

We can't touch objects, ever. Most of the space "occupied" by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I'm not willing to go down), and when we "touch" an object, it's just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It's the same reason why we don't fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.

The combustion engine. I know technically it's not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity's finer achievements. yes, it's not without its barbs like emissions, but that's a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.

The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.

The relatively short time humanity has been around

The universe is finite but expanding

The Monty Hall problem

The absolute scale of devastation created by humanity