When the great pyramids were being built there was still woolly mammoths walking the earth.

  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 hours ago

    Tolkein came up with the broad strokes of the simarillion and other parts of his legendarium decades before thinking about hobbits.

    He also had an incredible saga involving Santa, a talking polar bear, and the North Pole that he made for his children in letters.

  • IamMoonPie@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Humans can’t feel wet, what we’re actually feeling is cold. It’s why when you have a cold patch on a blanket or carpet you can’t quite figure out if it’s wet or not.

    • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      It’s actually an even greater level of abstraction: we feel the rate of heat flow through our skin. This is (kind-of) why plastic feels warmer than metal. Colder things don’t feel colder because they are colder. Colder things feel colder because they more efficiently sap heat from our skin. Wet things feel colder because water and other highly conductive fluids which have wet the skin (and are thus in direct contact with it) are much more efficient in removing heat, thus feeling colder. This is the twofold reason why oil doesn’t feel as cold as water: it has significantly worse heat conductivity, and it doesn’t readily evaporate (as evaporation is a highly endothermic process, sapping heat even more efficiently than a conductive liquid on its own.)

        • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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          1 hour ago

          Oh yeah? Well menthol tricks your nerves into thinking they’re losing more heat than they are, so if you dissolve a tiny crystal of menthol in everclear, you can make a tincture to rub on a part of your body that’s sweating, and it will feel naturally cool for about ten minutes, reducing discomfort from both heat and sweat! How’s that for “actually useful”?

    • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 hours ago

      I feel like that’s like “you can’t see or touch the world or experience time, your eyeballs and molecules that never touch anything are just affected by magnetic and gravitational waves and translate that to feeling and experiencing those things”

      Like I guess it’s technically true in that perspective, but effectively false

      • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Let $\mu(x)=0$ if $\exists y<x\mu(y)=0$ or $x$ is the 20 millionth prime. $\mu(x)=\mu(x+1)+1$ otherwise. The elements of the sequence only become defined once the 20 millionth prime is found; till then they’ve yet to be constructed.

        Bonus: The sequence $\nu$ is defined as follows.

        Let $\nu(x)=0$ if $\exists y\leq x\mu(y)$ is perfect. $\nu(x)=\nu(x+1)+1$ otherwise.

        We’re not sure if this is a sequence, even though it is algorithmically definable. Its existence relies on the existence of an odd perfect number.

  • whoxtank28@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    There is no thru line from mouth to urethra. You drink water, it gets absorbed into your blood, your urinary system filters excess water and waste, you pee it out. Your pee is filtered blood, the only thru line for water to take from your mouth is your ass. I understood that when it was taught, but I didn’t really think about it…

  • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Useless knowledge.

    When playing Mechwarrior 2 on a Windows 2000 system, make sure to change your video mode to 32bit color.

    I’ll throw in a useful tip too!

    You can buy USB foot switches for your computer and assign keystrokes and other functions to them.

    Almost feels like cheating when you are playing a tactical shooter and can lean left or right and strafe on demand without crossing any controls. Having microphone activation, map, inventory, or any number of misc actions boud to a foot pedal makes a huge difference in your ability to play a game.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      Further knowledge about Mechwarrior 2: 31st century combat:

      At various stages in the campaigns, you’ll face off against Elementals, escort a Tarantula, and fight a Battlemaster. Through cheat codes, you can add these to the mech lab and play in them in the “Trial of Grievance” free play mode. The Elemental works fine, it functions as a tiny mech, the Tarantula works mostly correctly, but it isn’t 4-legged. It looks like it is but the front two legs are legally arms, they can be blown off and it works fine. Trying to select the Battlemaster in the mech lab will immediately crash the game.

      Cheat codes for Mechwarrior 2 were the very, very first thing I searched the internet for.

  • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    The gorgeous Lunar Moth exits the chrysilys fully formed, without a mouth or other structure for the intake of nutrients. It only exists to fly and breed at that point and expires around a week later.

  • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    The people who got anime to take off in the US are the same people who started the furry fandom.

    The Superman symbol was based off of the symbol for a sci fi fan club.

    Conventions, and sci fi as we know it, are because of one electronics magazine.

  • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    The guy who did localization for the Zambak magazine’s Turkish translation of “the alice in wonderland” has the cool birthday January 1st, 1969.

    (Might’ve been another magazine, could not find a picture online)