Thanks Hank Green.
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 Atlas 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.
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.
π mph is roughly e knots.
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)
Your
mommoon is exactly at the right distance to give full eclipse of the sunAlmost 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
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
Count me in.
And a one 🎶 and a two 🎶 and a one, two - one two three four!
Somebody once told me…
That’s awesome! Maybe they should teach us some of their tricks…
How do they indicate yay or nah
They sneeze!
Amazing they can just like do that on demand like that
I think it’s quiet or sneeze
Another interesting fact: dogs also use sneezing to communicate, though not in the same way. I also easily trained my dogs to indicate yes or no by either licking their lips or not doing anything.
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
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
…mother fucker… That’s 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”
If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.
And if you have one skeleton in your body, you’re below average.
Well now wait, if pregnant people have four (or more) arms, we’ve got to have more than half as many pregnant people as people missing one or more arms, right?
And what about the 5 arms I have in my freezer?
Ha that’s a good one
I’ve always thought the drummer from Leppard was below average
Two, wasn’t it?
There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.
It’s more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.
