When the great pyramids were being built there was still woolly mammoths walking the earth.
Popes and priests before the renaissance (I can’t remember the specific cut off) were told not to fuck, but all did as it was seen that no one was that godly to deny sex. Early bishops were a hereditary position passed from “celibate” father to son. Oh and the Avignon popes basically built the first European sin city because one of them really loved fucking and gambling.
Reading The Sparrow. There is a discussion between characters (one is a priest) about celibacy. He quips:
“When asking 400 honest priests if they still partake in self pleasure, 398 will say yes.”
“What of the other two?”
“Elementary Watson. Clearly we can deduce they have no hands.”
“German” chocolate cakes aren’t actually German.
Häagen-Dazs ice cream is from the Bronx, New York.
Depends on what you mean by that. The creator’s last name was German. So really, they are German. Just not the way you are thinking.
It’s the same with Ceasar salad. It’s not the Caesar you are thinking of, but it is still Ceasar. The guy Ceasar from Mexico.
Sind sie Deutsch?
The moon of course causes the tides, but the tides are also causing the moon to drift away from earth.
And the moon drifting away is stealing some of our rotational energy, making the days longer.
We’re also lucky to be on this planet during the time the sun and moon’s apparent sizes match. Being able to see a total solar eclipse where you can see immediately around the sun without needing a spaceship might be incredibly rare in the universe. Though total solar eclipses in general are pretty common, assuming our gas giants’ accumulation of moons is typical for giant planets, they’d happen any time the moon passed through the giant’s shadow.
And the moon drifting away is stealing some of our rotational energy, making the days longer.
I have been noticing lately that the days seem longer, nice to know why
The aging sun will make the continental drift stop via increased solar activity which will accelerate rock weathering. This will break the carbon cycle long before the earth is absorbed by the sun going in its red giant phase.
UPDATE: the wiki has been updated! “However, a 2024 paper by RJ Graham et al. argues that silicate weathering is far less temperature-dependent than initially thought, and that falling carbon dioxide levels are unlikely to lead to the death of life on Earth” yay!
Female hyenas have pseudo penises
Tolkein came up with the broad strokes of the simarillion and other parts of his legendarium decades before thinking about hobbits.
He also had an incredible saga involving Santa, a talking polar bear, and the North Pole that he made for his children in letters.
We doing orb books now?
It’s possible to define an infinite sequence whose nth term must exist before it’s first.
do it now…
Let $\mu(x)=0$ if $\exists y<x\mu(y)=0$ or $x$ is the 20 millionth prime. $\mu(x)=\mu(x+1)+1$ otherwise. The elements of the sequence only become defined once the 20 millionth prime is found; till then they’ve yet to be constructed.
Bonus: The sequence $\nu$ is defined as follows.
Let $\nu(x)=0$ if $\exists y\leq x\mu(y)$ is perfect. $\nu(x)=\nu(x+1)+1$ otherwise.
We’re not sure if this is a sequence, even though it is algorithmically definable. Its existence relies on the existence of an odd perfect number.
Humans can’t feel wet, what we’re actually feeling is cold. It’s why when you have a cold patch on a blanket or carpet you can’t quite figure out if it’s wet or not.
It’s actually an even greater level of abstraction: we feel the rate of heat flow through our skin. This is (kind-of) why plastic feels warmer than metal. Colder things don’t feel colder because they are colder. Colder things feel colder because they more efficiently sap heat from our skin. Wet things feel colder because water and other highly conductive fluids which have wet the skin (and are thus in direct contact with it) are much more efficient in removing heat, thus feeling colder.
Sorry these facts are actually useful, please leave. ;)
Oh yeah? Well menthol tricks your nerves into thinking they’re losing more heat than they are, so if you dissolve a tiny crystal of menthol in everclear, you can make a tincture to rub on a part of your body that’s sweating, and it will feel naturally cool for about ten minutes, reducing discomfort from both heat and sweat! How’s that for “actually useful”?
This is so cool to know!!! Thank you!
I feel like that’s like “you can’t see or touch the world or experience time, your eyeballs and molecules that never touch anything are just affected by magnetic and gravitational waves and translate that to feeling and experiencing those things”
Like I guess it’s technically true in that perspective, but effectively false
Somewhere bongos started to play…
Is that a Jumanji reference?
deleted by creator
Are we assuming sound is traveling through space as if it were air?
If it were like sound through water it would be even louder.
Chronologically, Tyrannosaurus rex was closer to humans than to sauropods.
Closer? It’s standing right behind me isn’t it?
It’s closer than it appears.
I learned today that transplanted hearts will grow biologically younger or older to match the new body.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.15.751836v1
What if I replace most of my organs with younger ones? If a billionaire gets a whole body transplant, does that also de-age his brain?
It’s the blood that seems to matter more than the organs, and not all organs follow this rule. Kidneys for example don’t really change much.
You can double an hourly rate to approximate the annual wage. $30/hr ~= $60k / year.
Because 50 paid weeks * 40 paid hours = 2000 hours -> 2k
$30 * 2k = $60k
Sure, for people who work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Ugh that sounds exhausting.
My second favorite thing about this fact is it reliably brings out the troglodytes to gripe about the differences between different companies/countries/privileged life/careers.
While completely and utterly missing the point - that this works as a rapid estimate to roughly convert between hourly & salaried. It does not pretend to be accurate for all cases. It’s just a quick estimate that works for most people working full time positions. It’s meant for conversational use, not filing taxes.
If you own a rig to run local LLMs, your computer can also pretty much run weather prediction softwares
GraphCast: AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting — Google DeepMind https://share.google/R24aEDxkDuFfnitzo
This is the most recent one I learnt.
Fake raspberry flavour comes from Beaver anal glands.
https://culinarylore.com/food-history:beaver-anal-glands-raspberry-flavor/
Whelp… yet another thing to add to my never have again list.
Genuine castoreum is pretty rare in products nowadays, as it’s pretty expensive. Synthetic flavourings are typically used instead
So, it’s simulated Beaver anal glands?
