this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

African Wild Dogs decide on when to go hunting by voting. If there is a supermajority of votes in favor of hunting, they will go out and hunt. If that quorum is not reached, they will stay home.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Dingo Suffrage is my new punk band name

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago

That’s awesome! Maybe they should teach us some of their tricks…

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

How do they indicate yay or nah

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I think it's quiet or sneeze

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

And if you have one skeleton in your body, you're below average.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Well now wait, if pregnant people have four (or more) arms, we’ve got to have more than half as many pregnant people as people missing one or more arms, right?

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

In the movie "Catch Me If You Can", the french police officer that arrests Leonardo DiCaprio who is playing a young Frank Abagnale Jr. Is Frank Abagnale Jr.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Don’t know that. That’s kind of cool.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Hydrogen, if left on its own long enough, names itself.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

That's a wild way to think about the universe. Gonna steal this

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

Over billions of years, hydrogen left on its own collapsed under gravity into stars, under went fusion, supernovaed, created all the heavier elements, formed secondary stars and rocky plants, evolved into creatures, which learnt chemistry and gave it a name. We're all stardust + time basically. But we're stardust that names itself.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 weeks ago

There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.

It's more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (6 children)

The number of possible combinations of cards in a standard 52 card pack is so large that there is very little chance that any two packs of shuffled cards that have ever existed have ever been in the same order.

52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Chess positions are like that too, after any "main line" it quickly becomes a never played game...

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.

Not true, 52! ≈ 8x10^67 < 10^80.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

If you divided the universe's mass into 52! parts, each part would contain ~1x10^13 atoms. Which, as far as solids go, is not visible to the naked eye. Which is still quite mental..

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

Honestly literally anything about QR codes. Those things are insane. Did you know there's a very obvious 01010101010101 pattern in it if you know where to look?


(look in-between the paper)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, timing marks! There's a few of them. So neat

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Emoticon :) has etymology stemming from emotion + icon. Tis from the 80s, early computer stuff

Emoji 😊 is japanese, from 絵文字 which is like, drawing + character, basically. It's a word MUCH older than computing.

False cognates. Sound similar, similar function, nothing to do with each other.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

There's a :) in a typewritten cookbook I have from the 40s. I don't know how widespread smileys were back then, but they existed.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Your lips and butthole are the two ends of the same tube. Same glaborous vermillion border type skin or something

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Almost all web traffic now uses the utf-8 encoding, a clever hack which works because ascii is a seven-bit code but web traffic uses 8-bit bytes.

  • If the first bit is 0, treat the byte as ascii.
  • if the first bit is 1, treat the byte as part of a multi-byte unicode character.

multi-byte characters in utf-8 can officially be up to four bytes long, with 11 of those 32 bits used for tracking the size of the multi-byte block. That leaves 2^21 code points available, about two million in total, easily enough for every alphabet you could need to write on a website, and all without breaking ascii.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

That giraffes exist. I'm a simple man, and giraffes are awesome.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Kevin Spacey’s middle name is Spacey.

And that’s a rock fact.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

For anyone else wanting to look this up: yep. His full name is Kevin Spacey Fowler. Not Kevin Spacey Spacey as I thought OP meant.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

On Titan, you could strap on wings and fly around.

Moreover, the atmosphere is >5% natural gas, but without oxygen you can't burn it. I suppose oxygen would be considered the fuel in that case and you'd pipeline that instead? And being able to breathe would be a nice side-benefit.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Wombats take square shits.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

There are more grains of sand in the ocean than there are stars in our solar system.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Two pieces of matter cannot exist at the exact same place at the exact same time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Fermion condensate

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Early cycling laws and rights predate the invention of the automobile by decades. So it is actually the car that is the invasive newcomer.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Your ~~mom~~ moon is exactly at the right distance to give full eclipse of the sun

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Two from me:

People took the London tube to the last public hanging - https://londonist.com/london/undergroundtoapublichanging

The University of Oxford (1096) is older than the Aztec empire (1345)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

"If left in the sun, mayonnaise grows hair."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

The hard part is getting the mayonnaise into the sun.

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[–] Upust_Krwi 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Emia means presence in blood.

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