For example, Britain’s national mapping organisation’s brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It’s called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that’s because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.
The USA drops approximately 15-20 million sterilized worms on Panama every day. Yes you read that right, it’s The Great American Worm Wall.
This is wild. Good share!
This seems like it would make for a good Wikipedia article, but am I could find was this section:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax#Control
I just looked this up because I didn’t believe you, but you aren’t spinnin’ tales, my friend. This is true, and it’s blowing my mind. Thank you for sharing this fact!
Supply chains. It’s mindblowing how that patch of cabbage got to the produce section at your grocery store. Or how the parts of that gadget you bought at best buy were sourced, assembled, and shipped to the store. Some products that have multiple parts are shipped multiple times across countries, sometimes back and forth, as they get built and assembled by different factories.
And some of those parts cost less than a penny to produce or even purchase when done in bulk!
Scale. That’s the one thing I can’t get my head around
4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.
Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.
It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.
Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.
Those computers has less memory than a dollar store calculator. The bits in memory were physical magnets woven by hand into a mesh. It’s insane that it left our planet and came back with people alive.
Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.
Driving.
Somehow millions of us go hurtling by each other mere inches away in multiple tons of steel, often in conditions less than ideal yet for the most part, it’s a safe way to travel.
We can’t even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others’ hands every day.
Even disregarding all the other drivers, we put ourselves in a metal can, hurtle towards solid objects, and simply count on the idea that on average, nothing catastrophic will happen.
Pure, random chance is enough to end us - animal pops into the road, a tree randomly falling, etc. - yet there we go, on yet another daily commute.
I have a long commute through the “middle of nowhere” so lots of time to think about things that ought to be downright terrifying. The thought of hitting one moose is bad. Never occurred to me until just the other day that two moose was not out of the realm of possibility.
What if we were able do to travel around in a robot suit that we could fully control. Oh yeah, thats a car.
Driving just gets more absurd the more you think about it.
Had it not been invented yet, would anyone get away with suggesting a machine propelled by explosions supplied by a tank of the most flammable liquid possible kept underneath the passenger seats?
Reminds me of the Asgard from Stargate and how there advanced race was surprised about how we us explosives to propel a bullet and “primitive” things they never really thought of or considered because there dangerous.
Your comment just reminded me of a sci-fi short story about how humans solve every problem eith explosions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/16fx8tc/humans_solve_problems_with_explosions/
If you think driving’s weird, think about flying, too. We put several tons of that explode-y liquid, along with a bunch of people, into a big metal tube and shoot it into the sky. And we made that form of transportation several orders of magnitude safer than driving.
I feel like it’s probably going to go down in safety an order of magnitude or two in the US given, you know, The Horrors.
Not just merely a machine powered by explosions, sitting on volatile liquids… but one in which we’ve decided that it’s also a great place to enjoy some music, maybe a nice beverage, and as a great way to take our attention off into vast distances to the sides to “see the sights”.
I think to myself as I steer with one knee, trying to simultaneously drink my coffee and light a cigarette…
You don’t need to worry about crashing. You’ll be protected by an unmaintained bomb that can inflate a pillow faster than you can travel 18 inches at 70 mph yet somehow never goes off accidentally.
somehow never goes off accidentally
Unfortunately not never
We can’t even collectively agree on most topics, yet we put our lives in each others’ hands every day.
Yeah, someone can do a lot of damage simply by ignoring the double yellow divider on a two-way highway.
Last I heard we’re still in contact with Voyager 1
Airplanes. Like I get that we can make them stay up, but we can steer them?? Across entire continents and oceans? What the entire fuck
They are made of steel, lmao… how silly do they think we are.
Even weirder is that the most efficient way to steer them is not in straight lines. Because the most efficient way to traverse a sphere is on a slight curve.
Get a string and pick two points along the equator on a globe. Stretch the string tight. It’ll bend into a slight curve above or below the equator (instead of following the equator directly) as you pull it, because the shortest distance between two points on a globe is not a straight line.
of course the shortest distance is a straight line, that’s literally the definition of a straight line.
The point is that you can’t follow a straight line on a globe, because that’s longer than taking a slight curve. If you take a straight line, you follow the entire circumference of the earth, but following a curved path allows you to avoid some of the width. Basically, the circumference means a straight line is more curved than a curved path.
The vastness of time and space.
The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotions that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn’t work? How much that would suck? It’s amazing that it’s like… a thing.
Sight too (obviously, now that we’re thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be if you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I’m sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that’s emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That’s weeiird.
And yet on top of that, humans have worked out a way to send that information everywhere in a fraction of a second.
And because everyone’s glob of neurons is independent from each other, we have no way of conclusively determining if everyone’s glob interprets things the same way.
Gravity and breathing
