Asklemmy

Lots of people know a broken clock is right twice per day, but many are unaware that a clock running backwards is right 4 times per day.

I'd have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.

1 - George W Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.

...in the same vein..

2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the 'accounting' of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.

... If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.

And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.

Consider a dam that is 10m tall

Then consider the height of water behind that dam is 5m tall.

Does the dam need to be built stronger if the water behind it is 1 km long?

How about only 500m?

How about 1m?

The answer is, it doesn't matter. Water exerts pressure equally regardless of how much water is behind it.

Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.

Incompressible fluids are pretty insane

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

The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.

There is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.

Due to two facts:

1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

2. The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.

It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.

There's no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.

by weight, theres more non-human DNA in you than human.

Butterflies can remember things from their time as a caterpillar.

These memories are retained after going through metamorphosis, the breakdown of their caterpillar form into a cellular soup (or partial soup).

Details here

https://theconversation.com/despite-metamorphosis-moths-hold-on-to-memories-from-their-days-as-a-caterpillar-29859

Sharks are older than both trees and the north star

Humans have stripes that are invisible to us. However, cats can see our stripes.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn't ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

A few of my favorite fun facts are geography related.

The pacific side of the Panama canal is further east than the Atlantic side.

If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you'll hit is Canada.

Lake Tahoe is further west than Los Angeles

There are more trees on earth by far than there are stars in the galaxy.

That Mark Zuckerberg holds several records for most fists shoved inside a human body at once

The fax machine predates the (first) American Civil War.

• Catalan children get (some) of their Christmas presents by beating a cute piece of wood that then shits the presents out onto the floor. Seriously.
• There was a British guy who fought in WW2 with a scottish broadsword and bagpipes. However, the best thing is that he wasn't even a Scotsman.
• On a small enough timescale, the electric field actually bounces around in your wires for a while after you flick a switch, even if it's DC, just to "figure out" where it "needs to go".
• More than twice as much time had passed from the invention of the motorcycle until the first motorcycle backflip, then had from the invention of the airplane until the first humans landing on the moon.

Mary Queen of Scots was 6ft tall.

James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You're Beautiful. Reality is weird.)

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"

A somewhat political fact, but one that made some of my friends dumbfounded:

When a bank issues a loan, it generates that money literally out of thin air and credits that money to the loan account rather than using deposits they already had. For example, if you want to borrow $100,000, the banker approves the loan and doesn't hand over cash or move existing money around - instead, they just go on their system and credit your account with the sum, that's it.

Nothing insane, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band are older than Guns 'N' Roses.

Printer ink costs more per milliliter than human blood.

California has the same population as Australia.

Bees kill invaders in their nest by climbing all over them and shaking their bodies.

Glenn Close was in Hook