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.
I have a thick rope of muscle in my mouth that I can control accurately enough to speak with, swallow with, and dig popcorn fragments out from between my teeth with.
Just one of nature’s wacky solutions that applies to more than one problem. I should be grateful it doesn’t have thorns on it.
Homelessness.
Water. Fresh drinking water straight from the tap.
And yet I’m seeing lots of people in the UK start to buy bottled water. Worse: canned water.
The shittification of public services in favour of private products is a creep I’m not paying enough attention to
I agree with the overall sentiment; but there is no way in hell that canned water is worse than plastic bottles.
Aluminium is infinitely more/easily recyclable than plastic, and has a much lower negative impact on the environment.
But to reiterate, filling up your own bottle from the tap is preferred - but if you have to buy water in a container: can > bottle
It’s not really the metal that’s bad, but the coating on the inside of the metal (in contact with your food/water), that raises concerns.
Glass is best, but food/water in glass containers are often considerably more expensive.
I am aware; but when the options are an entirely plastic container (clear, and readily able to oxidise and leech microplastics when exposed to light over long periods of time) versus a lined metal can (which is at least opaque) - cans are remain the lesser of two evils.
I don’t disagree at all. I wish we had more options.
More glass with compatibility with mason jar lids would be a win for everyone. You can recycle 5them if you want, reuse them easily, and they can remain in circulation for a very long time.
The only caveat with glass is that you have too many idiots breaking them on sidewalks, bike lanes, and parks.
I agree that metal is better than plastic, but it feels like they’re trying to categorise water with soda as a commodity
The thing about it is aluminum cans leach into their contents, especially if left open. Aluminum isn’t particularly harmful in that amount but it’s something you can taste, particularly with acidic contents. Not sure how much water suffers from this, but if it comes through in things with flavour, I’m sure it would come through in water, which is supposed to be flavourless, even if it’s not usually very acidic.
Printed currency.
Homelessness. But I don’t occasionally think about it. I see it every day. In the richest nation in recorded history.
What country? Is it really rich if it can’t look after its citizens?
It’s always been a rich man’s country. All for one, none for all.
And the wealth of only one single manchild is enough to pay housing for them all - at least in this nation…and probably in some more. (Just looked some numbers up - world economic forum reported in 2021 that there are 150 million people homeless in the world, that would be ~2700,- per individual homeless person, taking his net worth into account -for 770. 000 homeless people in the US it would be ~525. 000 per person)
The problem is that homelessness is, weirdly, more complicated than just giving people homes. It’s also about mental health issues (many of which we don’t yet have the ability to effectively treat), community, purpose, and a ton of other things.
It’s almost like everyone would benefit from a support system or safety net put in place by some community funded entity that would have the capability of putting those systems in place.
There are other problems for the homeless, but it makes treating those problems a lot easier when they have a home.
You can’t treat any existing mental health issues while people are living on the street developing new ones.
You’re right-I didn’t want to make it look simple. I’m just constantly stunned how wealth is distributed, which is one of many reasons for homelessness. A fair distribution could finance housing and support systems.
That milk forms such a big part of western diets considering where it comes from.
Yeah dude the more I think of milk as sexual assault the stranger it feels.
Yeah dude the more I think of milk as sexual assault the stranger it feels.
Meat is outright murder and cannsbilism, and don’t get me started on eggs.
In the staff fridge at work someone used to label their milk as “breast milk” and people would go eeeww. Like it was snot or something. But from a cow’s breasts? Fine! So weird.
Well humans do be gross
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
Fortunately, there is a Tom Scott video.
IIRC it’s not even the only sterilized insects US government air drops from planes. ( Fruit flies over LA? )
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!
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.
I believe they’re mostly made of alluminium
Have you ever thrown a can at the bin and had it land in Qatar international?
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.
You’re talking about great circle routes, which is why long distance airplane flights look strangely curved on most flat projection maps.
What’s even more fun is Coriolis force, which in the Northern hemisphere will deflect your path slightly to the right. Pilots tend not to think about it because the wind is a much greater force for deflection but it’s there.
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.
i don’t even understand what you think ‘straight’ and ‘curved’ even mean at this point.
Isn’t it still a straight line from the perspective of someone travelling it? It just appears curved because you’re looking at it from outside the curved surface.
The vastness of time and space.
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
Last I heard we’re still in contact with Voyager 1
Voyager 1 is the antithesis of planned obsolescence¹, with it long outlasting its mission
¹the real kind, no the meme kind liberals often say that things are the result of
So amazing, the amount of incredible science we’ve been able to do with the Voyager program.
Our car centric world. We have somehow intersected everything and everywhere with death zone strips where people can’t go. And that’s entirely normal and accepted.
Humans be allowed in, on and across roads in many countries. Jay walking is the most insane non-crime I’ve ever heard of. I still don’t really believe it exists…
So, yeah, car centric cities are both terrible and insane - but not every city in the world is that way; thankfully.
I’m fortunate enough to live in a walkable neighborhood. When I moved here walkability didn’t really factor in; I have friends here and I liked the apartment.
Man, it is so nice. I definitely appreciate it now and will try to factor it in in the future. I am absolutely convinced that walkability fosters community and cars reinforce social isolation.
I still have my car but I consider it and driving a burden. If I had to replace it I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.
Was kind of mind blowing moment when I was old enough to pay attention to the main underlying plot line of Who Framed Rodger Rabbit being about killing off public transport for cars. Like it is very clearly stated throughout the movie, but as a child it just went over my head. Not like I didn’t pay attention to when it was being talked about, just not able to appreciate the meaning. I also am from a more rural area, so things like public transportation were not something I interacted with outside of seeing it on TV shows and movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Is the inspiration behind it, I think.
Thanks for sharing!
Gravity and breathing
The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotional 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 of 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.
Alternatively, if sound worked in a vacuum, the way light does, The Sun would be the loudest thing in the solar system.
I’m pretty sure in that case the sound alone would kill us…
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.
Really makes me wonder what cybernetics will look like in a hundred, a thousand(!) years. No-one can experience someone else’s consciousness. But if an artificial brain extension generated consciousness the same way we do and if it could be swapped between people safely. It might be the first time we have something saying, objectively, it has experienced being both of us in each of our brains and we see “red” the same way. The mind boggles…
And yet on top of that, humans have worked out a way to send that information everywhere in a fraction of a second.
Lightning trapped in sand etc. I used to play a kids game called Turing Tower which shows how all logic operations can be replicated with little plastic seesaws and marbles. If you put the bits of plastic on the board in the right way you can see marbles falling by gravity performing binary addition. It blows my mind that that’s all that’s going on in my PC, just a trillion times the scale. I’ve worked in IT all my life and it continually surprises me that any of this stuff even works.
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.
uBlock Origin ftw
uBlock Origin just prevents the network requests from these tracking frameworks from completing. All the javascript tracking code I believe still executes, just doesn’t return.
If it were possible it would be great to prevent these javascript frameworks from being loaded at all by the browser. But I guess the website javascript code would break.
It would be interesting to replace the tracking frameworks with an empty stubbed out implementation that does nothing. Not for sure how feasible that would be.
May I see a source on this? I’d love to read more about it.
I was actually trying to do some research on this as well to verify my claim, but couldn’t find a definitive answer. I’m not for sure whether uBlock blocks complete JavaScript libraries from loading by default or if it is only blocks the HTTP request like PiHole.
I did find this interesting project by DuckDuckGo which provides empty implementations of the JavaScript libraries when adblockers break the site. This seems to imply that some adblockers do prevent the JavaScript library from loading at all.
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.
to be fair, most of the calculations were done on Earth
Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.
