Pigs can't look directly upwards. Neither can we, when standing on all fours. This is because ours and pigs necks are constructed in the same way.

Giant isopods have a life expectancy of 6-9 years, but one of them in an aquarium went on a hunger strike for 5 years.

You can double an hourly rate to approximate the annual wage. $30/hr ~= $60k / year.

Because 50 paid weeks * 40 paid hours = 2000 hours -> 2k

$30 * 2k = $60k

There are more atoms of hydrogen in a molecule of water than there are stars in the whole solar system.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted, the heat of it turned a man's brain to glass.

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.

Everyone knows you jump in the pool in summer, smell the chlorine, and know the water is clean, right?

Fun fact- chlorine dissolved in pool water at the usual sanitation levels has almost no perceptible smell or taste.
HOWEVER, when chlorine binds with certain organic substances, especially ammonia (from the urea in sweat and urine), the result is chloramine which has a significant chlorine-y smell. Chloramine has essentially no disinfecting properties.

So when you go to the public pool and get a whiff of chlorine and think 'man they're using a lot of chlorine today', no, it probably means someone peed in the pool.

You're welcome :)

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.

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...

Female hyenas have pseudo penises

If sound could travel through space, from the distance we are to it, the sun would be as loud as a jackhammer everywhere on the planet, all the time.

The continents move at roughly the same speed that your fingernails grow.

Ketchup, or catsup, which is the same word latinized differently, was a fish sauce from China.

The western Europeans and American colonists used the recipe, and expanded it to things like mushrooms and many other ingredients. (for proof, look at the ketchup entry on wikipedia).

Tomato ketchup (which is specified on your bottle still today) wasn't invented until we realized that tomatoes weren't poisonous despite their color, and their sweetness and tang totally rocked with the ketchup recipe.

Now we use it to eat frenched fries, which aren't French! In fact, they are Belgian, and are named because they used a cooking technique invented by the French called "frenching" which has evolved into deep frying.

So, you are dipping your belgian potatoes into a chinese sauce that use a North American fruit as a base.

And with this information, you shall father nations!

Fake raspberry flavour comes from Beaver anal glands.

https://culinarylore.com/food-history:beaver-anal-glands-raspberry-flavor/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoreum

With vanishingly rare exception, addicts choose the mood altering substance that is closest to what the medically accepted treatment for their underlying disorder(s) would be.

People who are addicted to alcohol, without exception, have an underlying anxiety disorder.

People with ADHD and similar brain functioning tend to choose amphetamines.

The list goes on and it gets very complicated, because most mood altering substances have multiple effects, and most people have a blend of underlying issues. But the point is, there is a very noteworthy observation there, I feel.

I feel qualified to say this as myself I am 11 years sober and have worked in the field of addiction for 8 years and I'm formally educated.

The Mission Impossible theme, you know, the "Dun! Dun! DADA! Dun! Dun! Duhduh!" one, written in 5/4 time? That's supposed to spell MI for Mission: Impossible, in Morse code. --.. dash dash dot dot, MI. The first two notes are dotted quarter notes, 1.5 beats each for a total of 3 beats, then two quarter notes for each dot, total of 2 beats, grand total of 5 beats per measure. 5/4 time.

FIND A PRACTICAL USE FOR THAT SHIT.

The Moon is 384,400 km away from Earth. If you took every elephant on Earth and stacked them one atop another most of them would die.

9,000 years before the cradle of civilizations oldest structures. There were already humans in The Americas

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.

human brains use bang-bang control to control our body movement. all muscles are either on or off, with many individually actuateable groups of fibers per major muscle group. if youve ever lifted weights and started to shake on a hard lift, thats your body switching rapidly between different muscle fibers trying to complete the lift. body feedback takes more than 100 ms, which is way too long to do active feedback control on a lot of the really fast actions we do with our bodies, so for those our brain just does it open loop. it generates a sequence based on your intent and past training and just lets it rip, but we for sure can modify the sequence midway.

this is part of why humanoid robots look so uncanny when they move, they do continuous control which is fundamentally different from how we move our bodies. our brains have special pathways that process others body movements and what those robots do doesnt line up with how we know our bodies move so it looks wrong.

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.

Multiple species have evolved into crab body plans, and only a subset of "crabs" are actually true crabs. For example coconut crabs evolved from a hermit crab ancestor. King crabs too.

The tendency to adopt the crab meta for your species is called carcinization.

The theme song for the game Civilization IV is The Lord's Prayer is Swahili.

monads are monoids in the category of endofunctors.

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.

Sharks evolved before Saturn's rings and the North Star existed.

If you own a rig to run local LLMs, your computer can also pretty much run weather prediction softwares

GraphCast: AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting — Google DeepMind https://share.google/R24aEDxkDuFfnitzo

This is the most recent one I learnt.