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[–] 17 points 3 years ago (2 children)

The country claiming to have the most β€œfreedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.

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    [–] 12 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.

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

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    [–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    you are loved and deserve happiness

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    [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

    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.

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    [–] 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

    Oh, I have two good ones:

    1. Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)

    2. 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)

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    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.)

    Truly no offense, but this is sort of burying the lede on Nuclear Power risks. Mathmatically coal releases more radiation - no question. It's also hard to pin down how many died due to Fukushima for ver good reasons: Correlation might be easy, but determining cause is ultra tough and no right-minded scientist would say it without overwhelming evidence (like they had something "hot" that fell on their roof and didn't know it for a long time). Also? They aren't dead yet. So we look to statistical life span models crossing multiple factors (proximity, time of exposure, contaminated environments and try to pin down cancer clusters attributable, and people can live for decades, etc....

    The problem is that people rightly are concerned that in both Fukushima and Chernobyl (and 3 Mile for that matter) unforseen circumstances could have been catastrophically worse. You blow up a coal plant? You expose a region locally to it and it's probably "meh". You blow up a nuclear plant, and you get melt down corium hitting ground water or sea water with direct exposure to fissioning material and all the sudden you have entire nations at risk for subsequent spewing of hot material that will contaminate food supplies, water resevoirs, and linger on surfaces and be pulled into our lungs once it's in the dirt. Radioactive matieral is FAR more dangerous inside the body when you eat plants and animals that are exposed and pull it from the ground. Even cleaning down every surface, eventually you'll get some of it airborn to be breathed into our lungs again with wind storms, flooding and other natural erosion. The consequences are exponentially higher with Nuclear accidents and ignoring that is whitewashing. And that's not even getting into contamination from fuel enrichment, cooling ponds/pools leaking water, or the fact that it will take 30-40 years to clean up Fukushima (and they aren't sure how exactly that will happen and there could be another tsunami). Probably hundreds to try to clean up and contain Chernobyl - and given the current state of affairs we may find out even worse.

    BTW, I'm pro-nuclear. Thorium salts seem a good way to go and we probably would already have these if not for the nuclear arms race making nations hungry for plutonium. Please don't short sell everyone's intelligence because you can claim "only" a handful of people died due to Fukushima. Direct death is only one facet. Lives were disrupted (and displaced) and for a while there, the impacts spread to the US across the Pacific and there were discussions of evacuating like 1/3 of Japan's population outside an exclusion zone. You can be pro nuclear while still acknowledging that some fears are real and well founded, and unfortunately the industry has proven gaps in safety that make it harder and harder to argue when we have Solar and Wind and rapidly ramping power storage. Nuclear is likely to simply be outcompeted over time (just like Coal and NG).

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    [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    The world is running out of sand.

    It's one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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

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    [–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Colloquially, most people use β€œday” 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.

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    [–] 5 points 3 years ago (6 children)
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    [–] 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it

    *It must be correct as it's very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past

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    [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Moose kill more people than bears every year.

    Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.

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    [–] 3 points 3 years ago
    • 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.
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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

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

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

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

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    [–] 3 points 3 years ago (4 children)

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

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    [–] 2 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    The can opener was invented 30 years after the can.

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    [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

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

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    [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (7 children)

    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.

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    [–] 2 points 3 years ago

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

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

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

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

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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