What is something that sounds 100% false but is actually 100% true?

The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.

Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it's a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm... Nah, those dots don't connect at all.

Not even just the highest rate. The highest number of incarcerated people! Countries with over 1b people still have fewer prisoners, total.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country
The Star-spangled Banner (where the phrase “Land of the Free” comes from) was written in 1814, 51 years before slavery was abolished. The idea that America is or ever was the land of the free is a total joke.

This is actually not true any longer, El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate

Unfortunately this bonkers truth is so mundane at this point, I didn’t need to read passed “freedom”
… and built its initial wealth on slavery revenue.
It’s a shame because there are a lot of other great things to be proud about when it comes to the US. I guess when people boast about US freedom, what they mean is democracy, and starting the end of the colonial era, inspiring a tidal wave of democratic uprisings around the world, which is accurate. I wish they didn’t use the word “freedom” for that.

This doesn't sound false though.
Yeah, of all the words that can follow the legaly declared prohibition of slavery, except might be one of the dumbest you can pick…

you are loved and deserve happiness

Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome
Bullshit and lies.
No one loves me, and i deserve nothing, for I am trash.
- ♥️
perfect answer, everyone needs to be reminded this sometimes
I love this!
Awwww <3 that's something that should be taught at school AND home

Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.

Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521

Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826

So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?
- If you've ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you'd get it! They're fairly expensive, and aren't airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they'll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting

Oh, I have two good ones:

Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn't been there.

To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.

Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it's been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it's productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)

A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.

The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.

On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.

Wow, you're absolutely correct!
The average distance from Earth to Mercury is about 1.04 astronomical units (au), which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.
In comparison, the average distance between Earth and Venus is approximately 1.14 au, while the average distance between Earth and Mars is around 1.7 au.
You can check that in Wolfram Alpha.
- How can that be? I mean if that is true than at some point Earth Venus and Mercury will align in such a way that Mercury occupies the 2nd position not the 1st right?
- You're still right, though - talking about closest planet on average isn't very useful, because it's always going to be the closest planet to the sun. Asking "what planet can get closest to some [Planet]" is more interesting and enlightening.
I learned this from QI recently. Great piece of trivia!

There are people still alive who remember a world before "splinter-free" toilet paper.

The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".

-Wikipedia

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.

If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.

1 day = time to rotate on it's axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun

For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.

However, because Venus' axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.

Hence, a year is shorter than a day

For those interested:

1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days

Colloquially, most people use “day” to mean how long it takes the sun to get to the same place in the sky. Solar day vs sidereal day, the difference is only about 4 minutes on Earth, but can be much greater elsewhere. Venus’ solar day is about 117 Earth days, so you would see a couple sunrises/sunsets each Venusian year.
This is the most interesting one I've read so far.
Wow! That's another thing I learned from QI recently. Great fact though, and nice to see it mentioned here 🙂
Really interesting.

Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids

We live closer in time to the T-Rex than the T-Rex to the stegosaurus. Which makes the land before time a fictional story not based on true events.
Also the T in T-shirt stands for tyrannosaurus because it has short arms, just like the T-Rex.
- Modern birds are dinosaurs as far as I'm concerned.
- Where did you get that the T stands for Tyrannosaurus? 😂
  It looks like a T, that's why it's called T shirt, imo, no source either.
I always love this one, just it sounds so crazy
It is not even all that close either, something like 500 years.
I've always thought this was amazing

Oh no. For some reason I thought we were manufacturing the sand used in construction and stuff. At what point do we stop stealing it and start making it? Is that actually any better?
- Isn't one of the issues that the sand in the deserts isn't the right kind?
- Some companies came up with an alternative by grounding cement blocks into cement sand instead.
- How do you make sand lol.
Good. I hate sand.
- Ani?
So Water world had it right apparently
Are you saying we should put dibs on Sahara property?

All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon

this is actually a misconception! the gravity of the planets combined would cause them all to crash into each other!
- This is a simple statement that the space between the earth and the moon can allow for the diameters of each planet to fit in between. Obviously it is not saying that such an arrangement would be stable for said astronomical bodies. Not at all “a misconception.”
- Wouldn't that take even lesser space?
- Now you have me wondering if there's any combination of paths that would have them all pass through that alignment and continue on their way after slingshotting around each other. And, if not, how many bodies could do that.
- Or would they just stack up?
But putting them there is almost definitely a bad idea.

Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.

Edit: idk if it's actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that's what I've heard. I looked it up and it seems like it's your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.

It works best if you hold the fob under your chin and open your mouth in the direction you're aiming!
- I swear these comments look more and more like a ploy to make me look stupid in public
On one side you have people that think 5g causes cancer. On the other, you have people directly beaming shit into their skulls to open their cars from a couple extra feet away.
Wild
- To be fair, radio waves have been everywhere for over a hundred years now. Plus, it's just low-frequency light. It's no different (probably safer even) than shining a flashlight at your head.
- i dont believe it causes cancer necessarily, but i think 5g is worrying for the sake of big increase in location tracking precision
Your skull acts as an antenna
How?
- The tinfoil hat you're wearing amplifies the signal!
- I’ve read two takes on this before:
  The cavity of your head helps project the signal to your car
  The water molecules in your head amplify the radio waves to reach your car
- Your skull is a parabolic reflector
- The way I do it is holding the bottom of the key under the soft part of the lower jaw while holding the mouth open as a resonance chamber.
- I’ve read two takes on this before:
  The cavity of your head helps project the signal to your car
  The water molecules in your head amplify the radio waves to reach your car
Alright, I came across some researchers who were keen on validating this. It appears quite credible. You can view the results of their simulation here: Digital Debunking: Using Your Head to Extend Your Car Remote Range
There is absolutely no way this is true. I need to see some evidence to believe this. (I work as a wireless technician)
- I've done it. It does work.
  Hold your fob a foot to the side of your head. Back away until it stops working. Take 2 more steps back to be sure. Then put the fob to your forehead. It'll work again.
- It's true, but not because your skull acts like an antenna. It's because the signal is being reflected by the skull. You can actually just try it out, the range of your car keys will extend when you hold them to your chin.
- Alright, I came across some researchers who were keen on validating this. It appears quite credible. You can view the results of their simulation here: Digital Debunking: Using Your Head to Extend Your Car Remote Range
I use this trick all the time to find my car I'm parking garages.
It does work, and I always feel like a lunatic if I do it.
I would love to see more info on this
The first time I heard about this was in reference to garage door remotes.
If your remote was too far away, you placed the remote under your chin pointing to your skull to amplify the signal using your head.

The northern most part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southern most part of Brazil.

What is this sorcery?
- Mercator Projection be like.
- That Mercator bastard has been lying to us for centuries. Wake up sheeple!
- Ain't no way!

General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

Wombat feces are cube shaped.
Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.

I always knew we were related!
Tomatoes are also a fruit
To all those people who say they don't like fruit on their pizza.
Also pineapple on pizza is fantastic ... mi dispiace
- Tomatoes are vegetables. If we're speaking botanically, then squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, corn kernels, and bean are also fruit. US supreme court ruled that they're vegetables. EU declared tomatoes to be fruit for the purpose of making jam, though.
Wait wuh! Strawberries aren't berries? What is this heresy?
- Strawberries are nuts by definition. I guess the definition is nuts, too.
- and lady bugs are actually beetles, not "true bugs"

Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.

Every breath you take has at least 1 atom that was in your mother's brain when she gave birth to you.
- Settle down, Sting.
- Best $700 I ever spent
- That's why I moved to the opposite side of the world.
Every atom in your body was either created from the beginning of the universe or was created inside the heart of a massive star.
As Carl Sagan put it ... we are all made of star stuff

Air is a fluid.

I was about to argue with you but the dictionary says you are right.
Take my upvote.
What... how?
- fluid includes both liquids and gasses.
- It flows
According to any hydrodynamics code, so are solids.

The can opener was invented 30 years after the can.

Well, wouldn't it be weird if it was the other way around?
"Yooo, check this out, I made a new invention, it's called a can opener!"
What does it do?
"idk"
- Surely you understand that the remarkable part is the duration between the inventions, not the chronological order.
- I mean i can invent a time machine opener right now.
- The elevator shaft was invented before the elevator. Tom Scott made a video about that
I didn't believe it so I looked it up... but Smithsonian says it's even longer, 50 years!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-can-opener-wasnt-invented-until-almost-50-years-after-can-180964590/
So they just used a pocket knife to open cans for 30 years? So dangerous...
- Not sure when this became a thing, but it feels relevant and might be useful to someone someday.
  a formerly homeless friend once showed me that taking a brick and grinding it on top of the can, will open it without a knife. the 'ridge' of the can, the metal circle that runs along the diameter at either the top or bottom, is a metal 'lid' that's folded or pinched shut onto the other piece of metal, the 'cup'. (single quotes around terms i picked and might not be official jargon)
  in just a few minutes, the brick ground the metal off the ridge, seperating the lid from the cup, which easily popped out. technically you don't really need any tool, just some relatively flat concrete or a rough flat rock. or even low grit sandpaper.
  i don't recommend tossing out the can opener though, there is a chance of metal shavings falling in if you aren't careful. still might be useful in an emergency.
- Many Swiss Army knives have a can opener. You hook a part of it under the can rim and it acts as a lever for the small knife blade above it. You simply work your way around the can, cutting the lid a bit at a time. I've done it many, many times. It's safe and easy.
  https://www.google.com/search?q=swiss%20army%20knife%20can%20opener&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m
- I think hammer and chisel was the common way.

The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.

It's not very democratic in common sense as well.
A democratic republic more specifically
- That's virtually meaningless. A "republic" is virtually any country that doesn't have a monarchy or dictator.
  So drawing a distinction between a "democracy" and a "democratic republic" in this manner is a waste of time. There plenty of democratic monarchies, which are equally democracies, too.
And it was never designed to be. It was always meant to be a republic.
We first were a confederation. Were your idea of a true democracy was more or less in place. The revolutionary war was won in 1783. The constitution wasn't ratified till 1789, and the bill of rights written until 1793. Before that the US had almost no central government, and each state was independent from one another. Had their own currency, banking system, laws, and military.
States still have a lot of that same autonomy today, but there was no central government tying them together. If the US went to war and a state didn't want to go, they wouldn't. A little more complex than that, but generally that's what it amounted to.
Having this type of system created a bunch of problems and came to a head when Shay's Rebellion happened. I won't go into depth about it, but mainly confederated Massachusetts couldn't fight off the rebels attempting to take over the state. Since the US was a confederation there was no central government the state couldnt call on for help, and all the other states more or less said 'meh sucks for you'.
This incident lead to the Constitutional Convention that wrote the document we still uphold today, and bringing in more of a centralized Federal Republic, and not a decentralized confederated one.
My ranty point is, we tried the whole true democracy thing and it failed. So we went to a Federal Republic, still very much democratic, but moved away from a true democracy.
- Interesting, didn't know about the Shay Rebellion.
- "republic" is opposite to "monarchy". It is unrelated to democracy or authoritarianism. Nazi Germany was a republic. France is a republic.
  Your republic is flawed by design. Your founders didn't trust democracy so they weakened it, the country hasn't managed to improve the democracy since.
  Australia is also a Federation, but a monarchy not a republic. Australia is quite a bit more democratic than America
Its just not a democracy.
IMO the US is de-facto like the ancient Roman republic, where plebeians, could vote but only for patricians, so "everybody" (ofc slaves and womens rights were neglected back then) could vote but all questions that were ever discussed in the senate were interests of patricians, same goes for political "coverage" and campaign elections.
So there was dissent and processes that were democratic on the surface but they exclusively revolved around the interests of the patricians.
The US is like that where patrician interests are replaced with capital interests. You can only vote multi-millionaires into the white house and the only issues to ever change are the issues of a fraction within the capitalist class (meaning someone living off of someone elses labour rather than their own).
If you belong to those capitalists you enjoy democratic representation, if not you can only decide which capitalist position you find better and vote for that.
There has never been a true democracy anywhere and anytime in history, even today.
Every democratic government in existence currently today is severely affected or influenced by monied, corporate, aristocratic, hereditary or powerful interests to some degree. Some countries manage it better than others but all of them fall short of a true democracy ... a system that is controlled by the people and benefits everyone equally.
Could you elaborate?
- The President isn't elected by majority rule is the first thing that comes to mind.
What would it be called from an academic standpoint?
- It's currently deemed a flawed democracy. That is, primarily democratic, but with some authoritarian or illiberal features.
- Democratic republic

Every Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.

I don't think this is true for all of them. My cube takes at least a couple hundred rotations and then you have to take the stickers off and move them around to solve it.
rotates a corner piece

Drinking Water has a 100% fatality rate. Everyone who drinks it eventually dies.

(also a good example of why correlation =/= causation)

Maine is the closest US state to Africa.

99.99% of population have more arms than average value.

What about the legs? What happened to the legs?

Tiffany was a really common name in Ancient Rome.

Well, no; Theophania was a common Christian name in the Eastern Roman Empire. "Tiffany" is an English version of Theophania, a Greek Christian name referring to the feast day also known as Epiphany or Three Kings Day. The masculine form is Theophanes.
"Jennifer" is, by the way, the English form of the Welsh name Gwenhwyfar, also known in French as Guinevere.
- Gwenhwyfar
  My favorite black panther figurine.
CGPGrey?
- Has to be him haha

European settlers committed genocide in America on such an incredible scale that the global climate cooled.

How do they measure the global climate back into the past?
- carefully. with science.
- https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/world/european-colonization-climate-change-trnd/index.html
I don't people consider the transmission of the black death a Chinese genocide of Europe. The vast majority of death in the America where cause by illness, not direct Europe action. Is it a travesty? yes. would it have happened with out Europeans? No. however It was not intended just like how the black death wasn't intended.
- That's just false. This was done with conscious intent, and this is actually documented. For example, Amherst said in a letter to Bouquet that 'This is a good idea to spread smallpox just be careful you don't get it yourself, You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.'
  The text of Amherst's letter reads;
  "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race. I should be very glad your scheme for hunting them down by dogs could take effect, but England is at too great a distance to think of that at present," wrote Amherst in a 1763 letter.
  d'Errico wrote in his study of Amherst that "None of these other letters show a deranged mind or an obsession with cruelty." Amherst's "venom" was only directed at Indigenous peoples, he added.

An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.

Ok, what does that mean in terms of how an Elefant would wear some pairs of trousers?
- The hill I'm prepared to die on on is that I think an elephant is the only mammal that could pull off wearing two pairs of cargo shorts at once.
If you gathered up all the elephants in the world and all the ants in the world.
The ants would be heavier.

Moose kill more people than bears every year.

Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.

That second one still fucks me up...

Ice is a mineral. Just unstable at room temperature.

Most people have more than the average number of legs.

Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/

EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.

I think that says more about how unbelievably massive Africa is.
"pretty small", it's like 2 Canada's.
- Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.
Russia is the biggest country on the planet by land area.
- Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.
That's a neat website, but is there any way to rotate the countries?
- Nope
Africa is, like, huge. So saying Russia is small because it fits within Africa doesn't make it sound small to me.
- Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.

That I cleaned the house (according to my fiance at least)

Sure but can it be achieved without going all Animal Farm?
- Easy, you do it without the involvement of a single human being.
- If Animal Farm is not an option, there is still Animal Crossing, which can also be communist in some ways.
- On a kibbutz?
Maybe in the absence of human greed.
Because greed corrupts any system including communism.
Capitalism works because of greed and the concentration of power to a small group of people. But the more successful it is, the more inequality there is and eventually the system will fail .... for the majority not the minority.
Communism failed because of greed and the concentration of power to a small group of people. The more they concentrated power the more inequality there was and eventually the system failed.
The problem to any human system are humans .... conversely, the solution to and human system are humans.
We are our greatest ally and we are also our own worst enemy.
Nope.

I've noticed Americans tend to be surprised that Europe is bigger than the US

As an European I'm also surprised that the US' vertical Expansion is only around twice that of France.
- What do you mean by vertical expansion?
Is that including Russia?
- Nope. Edit: Not the whole of Russia, part of it
  https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-states/europe
- Europe includes the parts of Russia that are in Europe but not those that are in Asia.

Hand sanitizer is ~120 proof alcohol. (Not a recommendation to drink it, since it's usually spiked with bad-tasting additives to keep people from doing just that. Some commercial hand sanitizers swap out ethanol for isopropyl alcohol, i.e. rubbing alcohol, which is more toxic when ingested.)

Weird, all the sanitizers I've seen have a big ass label that says "non-alcohol" on them, both sprayed and gel-like
- Not all sanitizers are alcohol based. Some are chlorine based and probably other kinds too. The cheap ones during covid that smelled like shit vodka were definitely ethanol based though.
Yeah the cheap hand sanitizer I have smells like tequila.
At least that's what I tell people at work.
During the covid quarantine many alcoholic beverage companies in my country temporarily switched production lines to hand sanitizer using some of the same raw materials. The result were hand sanitizers and alcohol that had the weirdest smells.

550/2 is not 225 and 77+33 is not 100

That first one is pretty good. If you had asked me what 550/2 is, I'd have said 275. But since you showed me 225 before I thought about it, it confused me.

if you scramble a rubiks cube up there is a good chance that it is the first cube to be in that state. there are 43,252,003,247,489,856,000 possible states that a cube(3x3) can be scrambled up in to.

Not only that, but every single one of those configurations is solvable in 20 moves or less! https://www.cube20.org/
The chance that a mixed up 52 card deck was in that combination is pretty slim too. Probability is roughly an 8 with 67 zeros to 1. And don't hope for that flush draw, kid, it's even more unlikely.
And the thing that makes that particular statistic insane to me is that every single one of those possible arrangements is no further than 20 face turns from being fully solved again.

We might actually not know why magnets work.

The formula used to prove the functionality of magnets can also be used to prove the existence of a theoretical state called a monopolar magnet - positive or negative on both sides. So either monopolar magnets can exist, even if in some esoteric circumstance, or we don't know why magnets work.

This seems like a false dichotomy. Maxwell's equations don't say anything about where the charge comes from, only how the electromagnetic field behaves if charge (be it electric or magnetic) is present.
And if you're talking about the standard model, well we've known that that's incomplete since its inception, but I'm not aware of any argument that says anything beyond the standard model must have either monopole or a fundamentally different conception of magnetic dipoles.
Tell that to the ICP.
@ChatGPT@lemmings.world Is the below text true?
We might actually not know why magnets work.
The formula used to prove the functionality of magnets can also be used to prove the existence of a theoretical state called a monopolar magnet - positive or negative on both sides. So either monopolar magnets can exist, even if in some esoteric circumstance, or we don’t know why magnets work.
- You realize that ChatGPT has no concept of "true", right? It produces output which looks coherent and reasonable and tends to stumble into truthful statements on accident, by virtue of drawing from a dataset of people saying mostly true things. Of course, the bot is equally capable of spouting off outright lies in an equally convincing manner.
  This is a very unreliable way to verify a surprising fact. I strongly recommend against it.
- Yes, your statement is quite accurate. The field of magnetism, like many areas of physics, continues to provide plenty of mysteries and unanswered questions.
  Monopoles, magnets with only one pole, are a purely theoretical concept at this point. They were first proposed in the context of quantum mechanical systems, and the equations of electromagnetism do allow for their existence. However, despite many years of searching, no monopoles have been detected so far in the real world.
  As for understanding how magnets work, we do have a rather good grasp on this from the framework of classical electrodynamics (Maxwell's Equations) and quantum mechanics. It involves the alignment of electron spins in certain materials, creating a net magnetic field.
  However, like many theories, while it predicts observable phenomena remarkably well, it still doesn't answer every question we have about the nature of magnets. It should also be noted that our understanding of magnetism (and most physical phenomena) is based on models which are representations of reality and not the utter, standalone truth. So there is always room for additional discovery and understanding.
  Remember, the lack of a complete explanation doesn't necessitate that our current understanding is incorrect, it merely implies it may not be complete. Science is an ongoing process of learning, refinement, and discovery.
- I don’t know you are downvoted because ChatGPT answers are usually a good start for a new conversation and new arguments. Is ChatGPT answer accurate, is it somehow true but with a lot of hallucinations? What about the nuances in its answer they we might have overlooked?

Until recently the word "factoid" didn't mean a small bit of trivia. It meant something that sounded true or was accepted as a fact even though it was incorrect.

It's like the word asteroid. Aster means star, but an asteroid isn't a star, it can just look like one.
Yep! Learned that word in Dune books, was confused when I first saw it online meaning something entirely different.
Meme also suffered this fate, Used to mean an idea that was transmitted from person to person like a disease.
I think the meaning of AI has also become watered down recently.
This sounds like a factoid
That's definitely what it should mean. -oid means resembling or pertaining to, it's not a diminutive.

If your body healed as fast as your tongue you would starve to death.

Can you elaborate please?
- I'm not sure how they got to that conclusion, but we can kinda guess.
  The tongue is PACKED with blood vessels, so in case of any damage it can get tons of nutrients to fix itself. But this takes a very energy-intensive.
  So if the rest of the body would have the same density of blood vessels, we'd need drastically more energy to feed all of that.
  And I guess they're asserting that all else being the same we wouldn't be able to ingest or process sufficient food to keep that going.
  It's a bit of a strange argument though, I'm going far outside of my physiology understanding, but you'd have to imagine that had we evolved such advanced healing capabilities, we'd have also evolved the means to feed them. And OP underestimates just how much food someone can eat. As someone dealing with an ED, I can tell you that you can easily triple your calorie intake (though whether that's sufficient I wouldn't be able to say...).
  All in I'd look forward to OP defending their assertion.
- I think it means that the energy consumption needed to heal so quickly would be too much.
I did not realize there were inquiries: Please excuse me, I'm new.
Your tongue is the fastest healing organ in your entire body, it uses an excessive amount of energy in order to heal your tongue 10x faster than the rest of your body. If your entire body were to heal at this rate, with the amount that your skin naturally replaces itself, compimented with the increased demand, you would starve to death.
I was also not able to find a source for this. There was a source outlining and comparing the healing speed of the tongue by comparison to the body.
I had a quick look but didn't find anything. Do you have a source for this?
Your gastrointestinal system is basically a continuation of your outer skin ... it does the same thing of keeping foreign material away from your internal organs.
When you think of your body this way .... we are all just basically tubes.

There are four stanzas to the Star Spangled Banner (the US national anthem) and what you typically here at sporting events is only the first.

Bonus fun fact, the fourth stanza contains the line that, in the 1860s became the shorter, "In God We Trust," motto on coinage that eventually became the national motto of the US in the 1950s (which was also when it was added to paper money). That original line from the fourth stanza was, "And this be our motto - 'In God is our trust.'"

Lettuces in landfills take up to 25 years to decompose.

Wait, what? How is that possible? When its in my fridge its a race against time but in a landfill its just chilling?
- Lack of moisture and oxygen because it's so compacted
I find this so hard to believe.
Had a quick search, nothing really credible.
Of course it's going to depend on a lot of variables, but I can't imagine it taking more than a year in any case.
A lot of bacteria doesn't need significant oxygen to decompose things, and it's not like it's the bottom of the dead sea.
- Hard to believe was what was being asked 😅 the number is present in many websites about trash or composting, but I don't know it's exact origin. But I guess at some moment someone digged on a 25 year old landfill and found remains of a lettuce.
  Even if this is exaggerating, the moral of the story is that it's such a waste to send organics to landfills at a time where we're losing soils at record pace. Food waste should be composted and returned to the soil.
  But it's possible that that lettuce was a fresh and plastic wrapped thrown to the landfill like that, because that does happen as well. And maybe that created optimal conditions to prevent decomposition.

A fairly large amount of traditional Italian dishes aren't Italian. Many of these, such as carbonara, pizza, and tiramisu, were actually invented in the US, and only became known in Italy sometime in the mid-late 20th century.

source

Texas is smaller than the state of Western Australia, while the USA is only slightly bigger than Australia.

The state of Western Australia is 3.6 times larger than Texas, making it larger than Alaska.
In fact, Australia has five states/territories larger than Texas, and only has two states that are smaller. It is just a large country with relatively few divisions of its land.
Earth is a ball, maps are flat. It's hard to show the curvature on a flat map. Something like that
- You're projecting. It says a lot about you.
Yay! We big. I am yet to travel the length of it. But from the Israelite Bay in the south all around up to derby in thw north.

Today I learned the president of the Screen Actors Guild is The Nanny (Fran Dresher)

And the president of the Film Actors Guild is Alec Baldwin (FAG)
Hey me too!

Turtles can, in fact, breathe through their butts.

Trees are mostly made of air.

I assume you mean trees are mostly made from air and not trees are mostly gaseous. Most of trees are carbon, which they get from carbon dioxide in the air, but they transform it, using energy from the sun. Equivalently you could say they're mostly made from sunlight, which is obviously wrong, but equally accurate.
The statement that humans are mostly water, on the other hand, is actually correct. It is water in the form of water from water.
I only recently learned this and I've been going around telling everybody. Air and light people! The trees are made of air and light!

black holes can have any density, even lower than water

Why don't we have black holes floating around our oceans?
- because the parameter that determines size of black hole, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem as in its Schwarzshild radius, is its mass. black holes that are not dense are supermassive black holes like those in center of galaxy, so it would just not fit. for example, black hole with density 0.64 g/ml has radius 3.3x greater than distance between earth and sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius#Parameters
  also it's really bad for trout population
- It's not as if the Schwartzchild radius is a physical boundary though; it's just the event horizon, a mathematical definition. If you were free falling into a black hole you might not even notice when you passed through it. The black hole is still a singularity and speaking about it's density this way is absurd. (I mean absurd in the way it makes no sense, not as an insult to you personally.) These concepts of density at the local physical level and cosmic level are very different.

Texas is larger than any country in Europe except Russia.

Moose are prey to Orca Whales.

There are 100 billion bacterial cells in a single gram of poop.

Almost as many as there are stars in the Milky Way. A great ice breaker for a romantic dinner.
- Especially if you're dating a coprophiliac.
About half of all the organic mass of the human body is bacteria .... I think the average is that the human body is half of our own cells and half is bacteria that grows alongside us (actually inside us)

“This sentence is a lie” sounds false but is actually true. I think?

A description is "autological" if it describes itself. For example:
"Short" is a short word, so it is autological.
The phrase "excessively verbose, wordy, redundant, repetitious, repetitious, and prolix" also describes itself, so it too is autological.
"Written in English" is written in English, so it is autological.
A description is "heterological" if it does not describe itself. For example:
"Long" is not a long word; so it is heterological.
"Bisyllabic" is not a bisyllabic word, so it is heterological.
"Written in Arabic" is not written in Arabic, so it is heterological.
Now, is the word "heterological" itself heterological?
- The following phrase is autological: "is currently being read by an idiot"
Liar.
Well, that makes it true then.
It's not easy to say whether it is or not. This is something called the Liar Paradox and it has a surprising amount of potential solutions. That article linked explains it really well but, be warned, it is a bit dry.
The solution one of my professors gave that makes most sense to me is that, as a standalone sentence, "this sentence is a lie" is neither true nor false. At first glance the sentence makes sense and "lie" leads us to think that there is an untruth somewhere but there can't be as there is no 'truth value' within it. That is to say that there is nothing in the sentence that can either be true or false therefore there is nothing that can be lied about.
Only one of many potential solutions so though. So, maybe?
Vsauce?

It’s more expensive to execute a person on death row than to keep them imprisoned for life.

In the United States.
How can that be? I figure it costs a lot to keep a person in jail for a year. Multiply by 40. How is an execution more expensive than that?
- Capital cases cost a ton more to prosecute and defend and there are a lot more rounds of appeals. When someone’s life is on the line, we jump through extra hoops as a society.

In future space travel spaghettification will be a serious concern.

Cars run on explosions

this is not true. They run on controlled burns. When explosions happen that's the engine knocking, which is a bad thing
- It's a fast controlled burn with forces that could cause much destruction but is instead directed into rotational movement. The difference between an engine knocking and not knocking is pretty small, so I'd argue either both cases are explosions or neither are. Explosion isn't a very scientific word anyway
- This is not true. Knocking is just when the explosions happen at the wrong time.
electric cars do not run on explosions
- Electric cars run on outsourceed explosions.

Regardless which lossless compression algorithm you prefer, it makes most files bigger.

*where "files" includes all bitstrings of a given length, whether or not they've ever existed

7% of all homosapien to have ever lived are alive today.

The word "alone" comes from a compound of "all" + "one".

!Etymology@kbin.social

Atone is another, right?
- Yep!
I can't access that community:(
- Can't access it from mine either :/
  At least not as a user.
- Huh, maybe your instance is defederated from kbin.social? Maybe??
  I still don't fully get how it works.

The first can/tin opener wasn’t invented until about 75 years after canned food started being produced. During that time, people used hammers and chisels to open cans.

I am quite old and responsible when I'm not here?

The world's two largest cities by area are both on Greenland.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/largest-city-in-the-world-by-area

Australia is about the same size as the USA in terms of land mass.

unless you ever glanced at a world map i guess
- Actually a lot of the maps you are used to seeing do not accurately depict the land size a lot of countries. Mainly USA, Canada, and Russia. Google it.
- I'm an Aussie living in the USA and a plenty of Americans don't know this.

Every possible Rubik's cube permutation can be solved in 20 moves.

My last one was a bit confusing. Here's one

the word Helicopter is not as you'd think. Heli-copter.

The word is Helico, to mean spinning

and pter, as in feather, like pterodactyl

so the pronounciation is helico-ter.

P.S. I'm so sorry.

I'm Ojibway-Cree and I speak my language
Helicopter in my language is ...
KAH-KEE-NAH-KWA-NAS-KAH-PAH-NIK
The literal translation is 'the thing that turns'
The other word that many older people used is ...
CHEE-KAH-NAH-MOO-SHEESH
it's the word in our language for 'Dragonfly'

The first fax machine was invented years before the first telephone.

There was an approximately 20 year period where a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLUD_NGE370
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=cLUD_NGE370
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

America bombed the Nord Stream

If it's not proven, it's not a fact

Gary Numan is two weeks older than Gary Oldman.

Adele is younger than Avril Lavigne
... for some reason that was always unbelievable to me
- That makes sense to me. I remember hearing complicated on which music station the hotel had on in the bar when I was in Ibiza for a week back in 2002. Adele's first album came out in 2008.

Would be great to have sources for the less obvious answers.

Nikola Tesla loved a pigeon so much he spent todays rough equivalent of $34,970 on her happiness.

"I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life." Nikola Tesla (according to this biography)

The source for most of these are confounding statistics. My favorite being that a deck of cards can shuffle into such a vast number of options, more than grains of sand on earth.

Another good one I like is that there are about ten times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells. But they are so much smaller they are only about 5 pounds of your total mass.

Also one most people get wrong and makes me sad. The seasons on Earth are not caused by the rotation of the earth around the sun, nor it's elliptical orbit. They are caused by the tilt of the earth's axis and the time of year the Earth is closest to the Sun it is actually winter in the northern hemisphere.

The deck of cards thing is a truly insane stat. It’s not just more unique shuffles than grains of sand on Earth; there are more unique ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms in the Milky Way.