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Sharks are older than trees
Every eye has a tiny blind spot near the middle. But your brain makes it disappear and you don’t realize it’s there.
You can verify this. Draw a dot on a bit of paper. Close one eye, stare at a fixed point, now move the paper around the center until the dot disappears…magic
What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation… realizing that is a real mind blower
fun fact: the blind spot is because our optical sensors are installed backwards and that hole is so the optic nerve can pass back through the back of the eye to the brain. some other critters with independently evolved vision systems, such as cephalopods, avoided this particular evolutionary pitfall.
Another fun fact: through that hole there’s also vasculature and capillaries coming through and you can actually see them by looking at a well lit white surface and creating a tiny pinhole with your hand right in front of your eye and wiggling it. Better explained here at around 5:30
That’s awesome, I had no idea, thank you for sharing
What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation…
It’s also a coordinated synthesis from all of your input senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc). It also explains why those who have a certain sense stunted (aka blindness, deaf, etc) report having all their other senses heightened. And it’s up to the individual’s brain to assemble those sensory inputs into a complete picture of the world around them, what we dub “reality.” Which then brings into question the nature of common reality, and what defines it. Trippy shit.
I’m going to qualify this—all vertebrate eyes have a blind spot. Cephalopods also have eyes that are like vertebrates (this type of eye is called ‘camera eyes’), but their eye anatomy is such that no blind spot exists for them.
Piggybacking on your fact about the brain effectively editing what we visually perceive, we don’t see our nose (unless you made a concerted effort to look at it) because the brain ignores it.
Oh I thought my eyes were fucked. I look at a star in my periphery and it’s there, I look at it directly and it’s fucking gone.
So, here’s a lesson from the flight physiology chapter of the private pilot syllabus:
Your vision is a lot worse than you think it is. You probably conceptualize your eye as similar to a digital camera, there’s a lens that focuses light on a sensor made up of an array of light sensitive cells, and that the edge of that array is as densely packed as the center. This is the case for a camera, but not for your eye.
Each of your eyes has over 30 million photoreceptors called rods and cones.
Rod cells come in one variety and are only really good for detecting presence or absence of light. They work well, or can work well, in very dim light, and they form the basis of your night vision. This is why in very dim conditions you might experience your vision in black and white.
Cone cells are less sensitive to light requiring relatively bright light to function, and come in three varieties that respond the strongest to low, middle and high wavelengths of light, what we know as red, green and blue. By comparing the relative intensities of these wavelengths, we can derive color vision. They don’t work well in low light conditions.
The sensor array in the back of your eye that contains these photosensitive cells, called the retina, is sparsely populated toward the edges and doesn’t have very good resolution. Try reading this sentence looking at it through the corner of your eye. It gets denser and denser, and the ratio of cones to rods increases, until you reach a tiny pit in the very center called the fovea.
This is difficult to put into words but unless you’ve been blind since birth you’ll understand what I mean: You use your whole retina to “see.” You use your fovea to “look.” The detailed center of your vision, the spot where you are “looking” is drawn from the fovea through the center of the lens out into the world. When you are looking at something, you are pointing your fovea(s) at it.
There are no rod cells in your fovea, only cones. So you have very high resolution color day vision, but next to no night vision, with your fovea.
This is why things like dim stars in the night sky can be more easily seen with your peripheral vision than your central vision. Your central vision does not have the cells to see well in the dark. It’s not in the anatomy.
We teach this to pilots because distant lights the pilot is using to navigate by, avoiding collisions with obstacles or other aircraft, might be dim enough that the night adjusted eye can’t actually see it with the center vision but can with peripheral vision.
The same chapter teaches about the “hole” through which the optic nerve passes and how that blind spot is capable of hiding something like another airplane from you, which is why you look around and don’t just stare out the windshield. It’s not often a problem because most of the time one eye can see into the other’s blind spot, but it’s useful to know that about your vision.
Each cell will detect some light, undergo a chemical process that fires an adjacent neuron, and then take a very brief moment to reset to be ready to do it again. Each cell is doing this independently, so your eyes don’t have a “frame rate” the way a camera does, but a flickering light begins to look continuous to humans at a rate of about 18 cycles per second and no flicker can be detected somewhere around 40.
Your occipital lobe takes in this choppy inconsistent resolution broken up mess of visual information passed to it via your optic nerves, does some RTX DLSS 4k HDR10 shit to it and outputs the continuous and smooth color 3D picture you consciousness experiences as “vision.”
AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT your brain does optical everything recognition. You can look at millions of different objects - the letters of the alphabet, tools, toys, people, individual people’s faces, leaves, flowers, creatures, stars, planets, moons, your own hands, and recognize what they are with astonishing speed and accuracy.
It’s what scientists call the hellawhack shiznit that happens inside your brizzle.
This isn’t due to the blind spot, but it is still pretty weird to experience! Here’s some more info if you are curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision
Also we only see the past since our vision has a bit of “latency”.
So I guess we never see reality but just a delayed representation of our environment as interpreted by our brain.
The three gorges dam has had an actual effect on the rotation of the earth (slowing it down by 0.06 seconds)
It’s actually 0.06 microseconds (0.00000006 seconds) per day, or ~22 μs (0.000021915 s) per year.
Also, technically, anything moving up or down in Earth’s gravitational field while physically connected to it is having an effect, however it’s usually to small to be reasonably measurable.
(I wonder what would happen if the rotation speed was changed by 0.06 seconds per day - that feels like a lot, adding up to 22 seconds per year, but would anyone except timekeeping nerds actually notice? I don’t even know how to begin figuring something like that out.)
There was this racehorse named Pot-8-Os who won over 25 races and went on to sire a horse empire of winners. His father was a legend himself named “Eclipse”
Also an unbelievable fact, you responded to user Potoooooooo about Potoooooooo the horse.
I really love this story about the horse.
yesss… coincidence… hehee… *runs away*
looks into rhe distance
I guess, I will never know the truth.
A single tear slides down OP’s face
Did you also know that one of the first motion pictures was shot to measure the gate of a race horse by Leland Stanford, who would go on to create Stanford University where the eugenics movement would get its legs and horse breeding theories of genetic prowess were applied to humans, and subsequently they would use the Stanford University as a test bed to breed umbermensch that would go on to inspire the Nazis? Yes this sounds insane but all of it is true. Also college football became a method to study human combat ability for the US military.
- camera → racehorse → leland → stanford → eugenics → nazis: There’s a lot there
- camera → (developed for) → racehorse → (by) → leland: this I follow
- eugenics → (popular in european elites with racehorse breed overtones) → nazis : this I follow
- leland → (founded) → stanford : this I follow
- stanford → (created) → eugenics : this I tentatively follow, but missing the gap of an entire atlantic ocean
You should read Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris
- camera → racehorse → leland → stanford → eugenics → nazis: There’s a lot there
The bluestones in Stonehenge come from West Wales. Instead of quarrying stone from near the monument, they dragged these huge blocks from ~278km away. Likewise, the altar stone comes from ~700km away in North-East Scotland. It must’ve been very important for the ancient Britons to’ve used these specific rocks for some reason, but their religious practices were conveyed via a now extinct oral tradition so no-one knows exactly why they did it.
I thought this got debunked?
Edit: no, it was just the alter (from Scotland!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207lqdn755o you are correct.
(History Channel Hair Guy)
“MAGNETS”
James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You’re Beautiful. Reality is weird.)
Care to expand on that one? I know he’s ex military but haven’t heard anything like that before.
It’s explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn’t want his men to start WW3.
Well damn. That’s a pretty cool thing to do. Thanks for sharing.
If you travel due south from Detroit the first foreign country you will hit is Canada.
Takes flight to Detroit Airport, starts heading south: “Canada here I come!”…
The Allies avoided bombing specific factories in Nazi Germany in which US oligarchs owned equity.
I’m just going to leave this here
yes, but those same oligarchs were the one’s funding the entire war effort at the time time, and - oh wait
the point was to post unbeliavable facts
This is an eminently believable fact.
The one I say themost is probably that there are 10 times as many germ cells in your body as human cells, but due to their size it is only around 8 pounds of your weight.
But the one I love the most is that there are more unique ways to shuffle a deck of cards than there are grains of sand on Earth.
There is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.
Shouldn’t that be 2? Mars and Venus.
Pretty sure the one on Venus is dead.
well yeah, but that’s because the native robots killed it
There are more atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system
That’s…pretty believable.
Consistency of an axiomatic system that contains arithmetic can be proven in this system if and only if it is inconsistent.
Not really favourite, but definitely most unbelievable: They elected Donald Trump for president in the US. Twice.
So far!
Bees kill invaders in their nest by climbing all over them and shaking their bodies.
…and boiling them to death with their combined body heat.
The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.
Um akchully…
Median is a type of average
Most frequent occurence is the mode. Most ppl have 10. The median would be less than ten, while the mean average is skewed down, I would think, by some people losing fingers as the grow. Having extra fingers is pretty rare. So the mean might be 9.95 fingers, just to toss a number out.
I assume the median and mode are the same value, 10 fingers, but have no data to back that up. I guess saying mode would have been a safer statement to make, but think that even if 49% of people have 0-9 fingers, the median number of fingers would still be 10.
The median of a data set is the measure of center that is the middle value when the original data values are arranged in order of increasing (or decreasing) magnitude.
So ppl generally have, say, between 2 and 11 fingers. If those were your only 2 data points, the mean would equal the median, and there is no mode.
I was also assuming a sample size of more than two for it to be statically significant.
For 10 to not be the median it would also have to not be the case for the majority of people (just the plurality at best), and while I don’t have proof handy I’m pretty sure a vast majority have exactly 10, making that the precise median and the mode. Only the mean would be a different number of digits. (Both definitions)
The median of a data set is the measure of center that is the middle value when the original data values are arranged in order of increasing (or decreasing) magnitude.
So ppl generally have, say, between 2 and 11 fingers. If those were your only 2 data points, the mean would equal the median, and there is no mode.
Yes, but we don’t have only those two points.
It’s well known that most people have one specific value, so much so that our entire number system is based on it (literally the base, it’s ten)
Mode assumes categorical data and is unbounded by range, whereas median makes the most sense for decimal numbers, albeit with rounding in this case
“People have
round(median(data))fingers”edit: though, if we’re counting just fingers and not counting half-fingers, then maybe this really is categorical data (¯\(ツ)/¯?)
The median of a data set is the measure of center that is the middle value when the original data values are arranged in order of increasing (or decreasing) magnitude.
So ppl generally have, say, between 2 and 11 fingers. If those were your only 2 data points, the mean would equal the median, and there is no mode.
