Wednesday, February 15, 2017

what is the most 'mind boggling' fact you know?

Reddit top voted comments...

That in WWII, an American airman by the name of Alan Magee survived a free fall from 22,000 ft without a parachute and survived after becoming a prisoner of war for 2 years. (More about him at Link)

Squids have donut shaped brains, and their food pipe runs through it, meaning they can get brain damage from eating something too large.

That France was still executing by guillotine during the first Star Wars movie.

Betelgeuse is the 31th biggest star we know of in the universe. It is so big that, if you replaced our sun and put Betelgeuse in its spot, Betelgeuse would almost reach Jupiter's orbit.

There are roughly 200 corpses on Mount Everest that are used as way points for climbers.

Giraffes and humans possess the same amount of neck bones, *the same*.

Ants stretch.
It is completely believable and hardly surprising, but think about that tiny little thing just stretching away...

12 comments:

GOODSTUFF said...

This is a photo blog that asks the questions; is PI (π) embedded in our RNA code and are there right angels in nature?

http://goodstuffsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/natures-pi.html

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

That before there was everything there was nothing.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I know I exist.

Methadras said...

That there is an observable and unobservable universe. That the universe is flat, but we don't know how thick it is.

ndspinelli said...

That a special breed of dog in Russia can detect a one grain of sand sized explosive residue in an enclosed suitcase.

The Dude said...

I don't care how thin you mash it, every universe has two sides.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

That before there was everything there was nothing.

Funny. It just occurred to me that there was no nothing before there was everything because there was no before.

Everything, including time, was in that hot dense state.

Without time there was no before and no after.

The mind boggles.

Methadras said...

Eric, I have a another working theory that there was actually something that we called the nothing only because we don't truly understand the nature of nothing. That nothing is actually time. Time while an integral part of space, hence space-time was actually a solitary component in the nothing. Since it's expanse is infinite, it is therefore equatable to nothing, but since no matter or energy occupied the same space that it did, it therefore qualifies as nothing.

Also, because it was there before the great expansion of matter and energy (GEME as I like to call it. I hate the term Big Bang), the great nothing or time is actually a permeable substrate meaning that like a fabric it is waiting to absorb anything that comes in contact with it. Imagine an empty sphere and inside that empty sphere is a substance or a field called time and it's just waiting to for something to interact with, that's exactly what it did when matter and energy were introduced to it. In fact, I suspect highly that time helped facilitate GEME by wicking it across itself in all directions, at all points, at the same time. Otherwise, how do you explain the even distribution of energy and matter through the universe?

Time preceded the universe and it will continue on even after ever single quark dephases from this reality in absolute zero universal heat death in a google years.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

A lot to think about Meth. Thanks

Methadras said...

Lem, this is just my theory. I don't know if anyone else has thought of time in this way.

Jeff said...

Hard to believe that birds are dinosaurs. Distant relatives of gasoline.

Sorry to be annoying, Lem, but it's "same number of neck bones". "Amount" is reserved for uncountable things, like rainfall & traffic. Carry on..

Methadras said...

Oh, here is another mind boggling thing and I've experienced this personally. Being on the outside edge of a rain storm. I've literally been on the other side of a rain storm. Yeah, you get pelted by a few drop, but it was one of the coolest things I've ever experienced. I was walking on a trail and I see from afar a rainstorm coming so I figured, meh, I'll just mozy right on through it without issue. Well, as it came in my direction, it never actually hit me, it skirted along side me. On one side it was dry-ish and on the other I could put my hand in it and get wet. Bizarre and wonderful.