What's something you just learned, that you should have known for a while?

Don't mess around with partitions on your disk when it's past midnight, you're extremely stressed, and you don't have (easily accessible) backups.

That if they stop loving you, they won't start again no matter how hard you try.

I found out that I could disassemble my vacuum's dirt container further so I can clear it out easier. The container has a big plastic tube that runs through it and I've been squeezing my hand around it to grab clumps of pet hair that get stuck. The other day while I was trying to clear the container, the plastic tube fell out. Turns out I just needed to twist and pull the tube. I've had this vacuum for 8 years.

There is no animal called "cow".

Cow is a term for females of multiple species.

The animal that gives us milk is called cattle. Female cattle are cows. Male cattle are bulls.

I always thought cattle was a synonym for livestock, but it is a species of animal.

When using Google Maps for driving directions, you can swipe left and it will show/speak the next upcoming step. I had no idea about this and I've been using Google maps for ages.

This summer I found out I’m autistic. I’m 60 years old.

"Making ends meet" i use to think it was, "Making ends meat" like all you can afford is the cut of bits off of undesirable meat. I never saw it written down before, and now I feel dumb.

I’ll interpret “just learned” as in the last year or so

• Lifting weights is good for you and you should do it
• Running is only bad for your knees if your form sucks, your shoes suck, or you overtrain. Done correctly it’s good for you in basically every way.
• Eat an inconvenient amount of protein, it’s also good for you.

That West Berlin was an enclave deep within GDR, completely encircled by the Berlin wall. For some reason I thought that Berlin was right at the border between FRG and GDR with the wall splitting it in half.

You never know how far you'll go to save a pet until it happens.

With UEFI bios you no longer need a boot menu like Grub for choosing an OS to boot. You can just use the boot menu of the bios.

(You still need Grub for booting Linux, but no need to show it for long seconds just so you can select Windows from it, if for some reason you have a Windows installed too.)

At 4 AM this morning I learned there was a smoke alarm in my office. Also that the beep it makes when the battery is dead is loud as fuck. Loud enough to wake me from a dead sleep in another room.

Economics. I never understood it that well having taken two years of high school classes for law and government, then watched a single Economics Explained video and understood so much that I hadn’t understood before.

I realized too late in my life that friendships of any kind or flavor all have a lifespan. This can mean anything, five minutes in line at the movies, childhood into high school, a semester of college, or your whole life.

Context: the friends I’ve (m35) had since childhood and into my adulthood have slowly and silently withered away due a multitude of reasons but mostly because we each have things going on in our life and those had taken precedence over cultivating and caring for our friendships. Sure we text for holidays or birthdays, but it all feels hollow compared to what we had together for literal decades.

“Conifers” comes from “Cone” as in Pine Cone

“Mammals” as in Mammary glands

Those are the two that come to mind but there have been several more in the same vein of these as I rapidly approach the conclusion of my fifth decade…

That Russia wasn't the aggressor in the Cuba missile crisis. They were responding to the US installing missiles pointed at them from Turkey and Italy.

The actual rules of Scattergories. I had no idea that the rules I grew up with were not the actual rules, and the actual rules make the game much easier.

I'm reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. One of the things he talks about is how snap decisions (quick emotional reactions to stimuli) are so fast because they skip over certain parts of your central nervous system. This is why these decisions are often unwise/unreasonable; they skip the part of your brain that does logical reasoning. This is necessary for fight/flight decisions but not great for emotionally-charged conversations.

In retrospect, this seems obvious.