To be fair, “do hummingbirds have feet” seems eminently wikipediable. I’d like to think that if I ever felt the need to drunk-dial an expert, it’d be for something less trivial.
There is an episode of HIMYM where they are in a similar situation. Before the smart phones they would argue over some things for days, now they just check it in 10 seconds. No fun.
Telephones existed for a century before wikkipedia...
In the before times: The guinness book of records started as a promo by the guinness brewery given to pub owners to settle bar argumnets like this one.
Not even 20 years ago smart phones and the internet weren’t ubiquitous. I’m only 35 but even I remember personal stories about bar disagreements where we just simply couldn’t use our phones to search the net. Because all they were capable of is dialing a number and Snake.
I’m around the same age and I’m pretty sure we had Google on our phones by the time we could drink. That was the in between time where they still had buttons, but they had browsers and colorful screens. First iPhone released in 07. We were pretty much the first ones to have ‘smartish’ phones, though, so some people definitely still had snake bricks.
I think most people also still weren’t used to having the world’s knowledge in their pockets and would forget that Google was even there, too. It’s crazy how easily urban legends and false rumors spread around back then, before everybody knew how to fact check. I remember some particularly interesting ones about Marilyn Manson and Lil Bow Wow.
Exactly. Our legal drinking age is 18, but we were binge drinking every Friday from the age of 15. Not one bartender gives a shit here. At least back in the day. That’s 2003-2004.
Way back in the 1950s some guy had the same observation you did. He came up with an idea for a book that would solve disputes over trivia by bar patrons. 70 years later the Guinness Book of World Records has over 22,000 entries in their database.
began as an idea conceived by British engineer and industrialist Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery, to solve trivia questions among bar patrons. During the early 1950s Beaver was involved in a dispute during a shooting party about the fastest game bird in Europe; however, the answer could not be found in any bird reference book.
Women were allowed to go to medical school in the Victorian area? I thought they were all being crushed to death by corsets and having their uteruses removed?
So fun fact - the clothes were made to look like the proportions were wild and therefore historical corsets were not as crazy tight as we would assume.
Can confirm. I’ve made and worn historically accurate Victorian corsets for a few decades. They’re actually quite comfortable, supportive, and great for back pain.
The fainting thing is a myth. You can breathe fine and even touch your toes easily.
Only a few people were doing extreme tight lacing for clout – basically the equivalent of the Kardashians – but since photography was expensive and the media was like it is now, those were the ones we heard about most. Regular women weren’t doing that.
I have a question out of curiosity… Is it supportive in a good way or do the ab and back muscles start to weaken with time if you don’t make an effort to strengthen them?
They’re supportive like a back brace. Modern back brace construction borrows quite a bit from corseting.
If you wore them too tightly for prolonged periods because you were an actress or socialite, your core muscles may weaken eventually because the corset did all the posture work, sure.
That was a thing, but pretty rare since average women wouldn’t tighten to impractical amounts.
Some of them are a bit oversimplified. For example, the so-called “fear of long words” is actually specifically supposed to be referring to an anxiety about misspelling or mispronouncing long words, which is a slightly more sensible and relatable phenomenon. Then there apparently some that are just made up, like apparently the palindrome ones.
Nah not really. There’s a bunch of names that were given just for the sake of inventing a names and getting attention. From Wikipedia: >>> Many -phobia lists circulate on the Internet, with words collected from indiscriminate sources, often copying each other. Also, a number of psychiatric websites exist that at the first glance cover a huge number of phobias, but in fact use a standard text to fit any phobia and reuse it for all unusual phobias by merely changing the name. Sometimes it leads to bizarre results, such as suggestions to cure “prostitute phobia”.[2] Such practice is known as content spamming and is used to attract search engines.
An article published in 1897 in American Journal of Psychology noted “the absurd tendency to give Greek names to objects feared (which, as Arndt says, would give us such terms as klopsophobia – fear of thieves, triakaidekaphobia – fear of the number 13…)”.[3]
Anatidaephobia is the phobia of being watched by a duck. The phobia even specifies that the fear is not that the duck will attack, but that it will simply spy on you and it hides from you. Funny enough there is a game by the same name that literally surrounds around hiding from ducks.
When I was little, my mom dropped me and her friends kid off at a church for arts and crafts, I was 5. We we given toilet paper rolls, pipe cleaner, glue, and some other stuff to make butterflies. I studiously started making mine, I got the wings, the antenna and asked what I was supposed to use for the legs. A full grown ass women look me right in the eye and said “Butterflies don’t have legs”.
I had seen butterflies land on flowers and latch on with legs, I was so confused how an adult wouldn’t know that.
Stupid/inconstant adults stick in your mind. I’m lucky to have mostly had good teachers, just one teaching vowels one week taught us a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y
Then the next week tested our learning, and marked my answer “a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y” wrong because it’s only aeiou. Sure teacher. No vowels at all in by, but the same sound at the beginning of bicycle has one.
I think they must have been reading from a book when teaching, but working from their own ideas for the test
Fun fact: next time you see the moon in the day, study the angle of the sunlight hitting it — it doesn’t appear to line up with the sun. This is a perspective trick based on the fact the sun is way further away than the moon yet we perceive them the same distance. And no I cannot intuitively grasp this.
It has to do with apparent size of the sun and moon. The sun is 400 times wider than the moon and coincidentally 400 times further away, so they look the same size. With no other reference points as to how big each object is, we perceive them to be the same distance.
Last year my daughter told me her grade 4 teacher had told the class “Well nobody really knows how magnets work” to which my science-obsessed daughter replied “You mean you don’t really know how magnets work!”
I confirmed to her that yes, our understanding of magnetism is about as complete as it can get. Of all the mysteries the universe has to offer, magnetism is not one of them.
Okay, but, with other forces, like electricity, we understand that elections are bumping down the line and the force/motion of that can be used to do work or something.
With magnetism, it’s more like, a complete black box, we can see what happens when we do x, but we have no idea what makes it do that. Magnetism it’s measurable, we know it exists, we don’t know how it exists. We know it works, but we can’t figure out why it works.
It’s a bit like gravity. We have some good theories, but that’s about it.
Isn’t it the alignment of molecules in a material so that their electrical charges are all oriented in the same direction, thus attracting the opposite charged ions of other molecules in other objects towards the corresponding side of the magnet material? That’s why magnetism only affects materials like iron where the molecules naturally form in a uniform orientation during it’s transition from solid to liquid, and not other material that has a more random orientation.
I mean, I guess when you really boil it down, there may still be some question as to why positively charged ions are attracted to negatively charged ions in the first place. But then we’re getting into quantum mechanics which is way deeper of an answer than a grade schooler would be looking for and so far down the rabbit hole that making a claim like “we dont know how magnets work” is only true in the technical sense. And by that, I mean it holds as much truth as “we don’t know how anything works”.
It’s a bit like gravity. We have some good theories, but that’s about it.
No! That’s the point I’m trying to make! Gravity and its source truly are a mystery (aside from the basic fact that it causes mass to attract other mass, of course)
Magnetism is a well defined component of the electromagnetic force. We know what it is, where it comes from, and why it has the effect that it does. We’ve known most of this for a century! The study of electromagnetism came early to the field of physics because it’s easy to work with and understand on human scales.
To be very short, moving electricity creates magnetism; moving magnetism creates electricity. A permanent magnet is magnetic because most of the electrons are spinning the same way, creating magnetism. That’s it.
That is what you tell the grade 4 students.
Later you can teach them about magnetic domains, dipole moment, electric and magnetic fields and their relationship to radio waves etc… But these are all things we know, and I feel like it’s important that kids know that humanity has in fact mastered magnetism.
Sure there is still a lot to learn, but at this point it’s engineering, not science. Practical things like magnetic alloys or optimal field arrangements for motors.
For completeness, we cannot say for sure if we even exist. The universe could very well just be an imagination and nothing really matters, including the laws of physics and our understanding of magnets.
I’m addicted to solipsism. I know I’m meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But I’ve been thinking that when I die and cease to observe the universe and be aware that it exists, then what’s the point of it existing?
I think that’s why I could never fully latch on to atheism. To believe there is no power behind the universe is madness. Of course there’s a higher power! One whose power not only created the universe, but has determined it’s every action and outcome since creation. It is an absolute power, there is not a single atom in this universe that can go against it. It is omnipotent, it has already determined the future and it’s path can not be changed. It controls the thoughts, actions, dreams, and beliefs of every living being.
The funny thing is, for all the arguments and wars about religion, humanity has known about this God for over a millennia; and over the years our understanding of it has only grown. We even gave it an agreed upon name.
Very cool. Are there laws about practicing medicine without a license (at least in some jurisdictions) that might need to be navigated carefully when, for instance, making a prosthetic or some such for a human?
I remember looking into the OpenEEG projecct long ago. I remember hearing of folks getting into legal trouble for lending a homemade EEG unit to someone else. Not sure if that applies to 3d-printed “medical … and quality-of-life” devices (for humans.)
I believe there is, hence the notes on the sidebar and wiki; this started from someone on reddit that could not afford a prosthetic. I am just moving a copy here as I helped with that one. The wiki is open to edit for such a page, which will be done eventually if it takes off.
Are you serious? They really have what amounts to an exoskeleton? Or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a whole-body rib cage?
Just searched and found this fun article. Not really a skeleton but a collection of really stiff hairs or feathers (loosely: the genes are the same ones responsible for “other skin appendages” in vertebrates).
Interesting. That page says “few vertebrae”, but the image makes it look to me like a full set.
On the other hand, if I found an animal with no ribs and pelvis and only the rudimentary limbs typically found in fish, I’d tend to say that the skeleton was missing. Or at least, ahem, skeletal.
Thanks. My first impression was that there was some funny business, but then I found what I thought was a decent article.
If you could see the reality of what you just said, she was a hemiplegic in a wheelchair, she had bed sores, she is now cremated and sprinkled over her parents in a graveyard.
In fact, the word “brown” is the morph of the original word for bear. Whatever humans used for brown was overshadowed long ago by the very experience of bear itself, and the color alone became a prevalent warning against that thing that is the single most terrifying brown in existence.
Well, maybe. There’s also a competing hypothesis that says it’s the other way around, i.e. “bear” is derived from “brown”; the old word for “bear” became taboo, possibly for fear that speaking the beast’s name would summon it. Either way, the fear of bears has certainly left a mark on the Germanic languages.
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