π mph is roughly e knots.
The people who built the stone towns of Gobekli Tepe and Carahan Tepe in Anatolia in Turkey, built and lived their villages so long ago, that the very first historical civilization recognized as such, with cities and writing - the ancient Sumerians - are closer to us in time than to those hunter/gatherer people, who lived near the
AtlasTaurus Mountains foothills and the rivers and tributaries that eventually merge into the Eufrates further downstream.The time between the last living stegosaurus and the last living tyrannosaurus is greater that the time between the last tyrannosaurus and today.
Almost all web traffic now uses the utf-8 encoding, a clever hack which works because ascii is a seven-bit code but web traffic uses 8-bit bytes.
- If the first bit is 0, treat the byte as ascii.
- if the first bit is 1, treat the byte as part of a multi-byte unicode character.
multi-byte characters in utf-8 can officially be up to four bytes long, with 11 of those 32 bits used for tracking the size of the multi-byte block. That leaves 2^21 code points available, about two million in total, easily enough for every alphabet you could need to write on a website, and all without breaking ascii.
Oh, I wondered about why there weren't more characters in the ASCII code set.
yep! the ascii standard was originally invented for teletypewriters, and includes four 'blocks' of 32 codes each, for 128 in total, so it only uses seven bits per code.
the first block, hex 00 - 1F, contains control codes for the typewriter. stuff like "newline", "backspace", and "ring bell" all go in here.
The second block has the digits are in order, from hex 30 = '0' all the way to hex 39 = '9',
The uppercase alphabet starts at hex 41 = 'A', and exactly one block later, the lowercase alphabet starts at hex 61 = 'a'. This means their binary codes are 100 0001 and 110 0001, differering only in a single bit! So you can easily convert between upper and lowercase ascii by flipping that bit.
The remaining space in the last three blocks is filled with various punctuation marks. I'm not sure if these are in any particular order.
The final ascii code, 7F, is reserved for "delete", because its binary representation is 111 1111, perfect for "deleting" data on a punch card by punching over it.
Very neat!
Emoticon :) has etymology stemming from emotion + icon. Tis from the 80s, early computer stuff
Emoji 😊 is japanese, from 絵文字 which is like, drawing + character, basically. It's a word MUCH older than computing.
False cognates. Sound similar, similar function, nothing to do with each other.
There's a :) in a typewritten cookbook I have from the 40s. I don't know how widespread smileys were back then, but they existed.
My favourite false cognate is the plural ending -s in French and English. The English one has Germanic roots, while the French one come from Latin accusative plural -as/-os. They are unrelated etymologically.
After looking it up I have to correct myself, the Germanic plural - s also come from the accusative plural
The natural logarithm number e is the most efficient base, Benford's law shows that a collection of numbers where their logarithms are uniformly and randomly distributed, the probability of the first digit being 1 of any of the numbers is around 30%, and most humans can learn echolocation with some training.
Two from me:
People took the London tube to the last public hanging - https://londonist.com/london/undergroundtoapublichanging
The University of Oxford (1096) is older than the Aztec empire (1345)
African Wild Dogs decide on when to go hunting by voting. If there is a supermajority of votes in favor of hunting, they will go out and hunt. If that quorum is not reached, they will stay home.
Dingo Suffrage is my new punk band name
We have a Lemmy instance for this kind of stuff: https://lemmy.world/c/fakebandnames
That’s awesome! Maybe they should teach us some of their tricks…
If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.
I've always thought the drummer from Leppard was below average
In the movie "Catch Me If You Can", the french police officer that arrests Leonardo DiCaprio who is playing a young Frank Abagnale Jr. Is Frank Abagnale Jr.
Don’t know that. That’s kind of cool.
Hydrogen, if left on its own long enough, names itself.
How do you mean?
Over billions of years, hydrogen left on its own collapsed under gravity into stars, under went fusion, supernovaed, created all the heavier elements, formed secondary stars and rocky plants, evolved into creatures, which learnt chemistry and gave it a name. We're all stardust + time basically. But we're stardust that names itself.
That's a wild way to think about the universe. Gonna steal this
Two, wasn't it?
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
*are
There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.
It's more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.
The number of possible combinations of cards in a standard 52 card pack is so large that there is very little chance that any two packs of shuffled cards that have ever existed have ever been in the same order.
52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
I bet there are certain shuffled combinations that repeat. like, take a new deck, divide perfectly in half, do one perfect riffle. that has probably happened more than once.
Chess positions are like that too, after any "main line" it quickly becomes a never played game...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems more realistic to say:
- Playing the same game twice is unlikely because of the number of possible games, OR
- It's possible the same game has never been played twice, OR
- After a certain number of moves, it's very possible to create a never-played game
I'm certain I've played the same game multiple times, because I suck at chess and I fall into the same obvious traps over and over.
52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Not true, 52! ≈ 8x10^67 < 10^80.
If you divided the universe's mass into 52! parts, each part would contain ~1x10^13 atoms. Which, as far as solids go, is not visible to the naked eye. Which is still quite mental..
Honestly literally anything about QR codes. Those things are insane. Did you know there's a very obvious 01010101010101 pattern in it if you know where to look?
(look in-between the paper)Yeah, timing marks! There's a few of them. So neat
I don't get it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QR_Code_Structure_Example_3.svg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
OP is talking about the alternating pattern between the two straw papers. In the SVG from Wikipedia, this corresponds to the "timing"
...mother fucker... That's neat!
That giraffes exist. I'm a simple man, and giraffes are awesome.
On Titan, you could strap on wings and fly around.
Moreover, the atmosphere is >5% natural gas, but without oxygen you can't burn it. I suppose oxygen would be considered the fuel in that case and you'd pipeline that instead? And being able to breathe would be a nice side-benefit.
Wombats take square shits.
Goats have square pupils. It's like the banana and the human hand
Umm
In that we deliberately selected it to be that size and shape?
There are more grains of sand in the ocean than there are stars in our solar system.
if you like big numbers: there are significantly more ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards than there are atoms in the observable universe.
Every shuffle of the deck is almost certainly unique since folks been shuffling cards.
edit: ahh nice someone posted this exact fact at the top level lower down!
There's more than one grain of sand in the ocean????!?!?!?1one
I'm pretty happy about that. It's warm enough.
Early cycling laws and rights predate the invention of the automobile by decades. So it is actually the car that is the invasive newcomer.
Yeah, but it's the cyclist that annoys me (more than cars. Cars do annoy me as well). At least the ones wearing a helmet and riding a street bike.
If they're wearing a hoodie and a backpack I usually sympathize with them. They probably got jammed up and this is their only way to get to work, groceries, drugs, see someone, or whatever else they might need to go out for
Your view of cyclists contains a lot of assumptions that I don't find likely to be true often enough to be actionable
Two pieces of matter cannot exist at the exact same place at the exact same time.
Is this referring to the Pauli Exclusion Principle or just like macroscopic physical objects
There was an X-Files book I read when I was about 10 which says otherwise.
Fermion condensate
Did you know that, for every snake on Earth, there is one snake dick?
Emia means presence in blood.
Did you know you can save 15% or more by switching to Geico?
platypuses are venomous.
One side of the moon is always dark and therefore the other side is always light
For a funner fact: the only time this is not true is during a lunar eclipse, where the Earth's shadow means the entire moon is in shadow at once
I hope this is supposed to be a joke.
The firealarm speaks Welsh
what
