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What's something that's taken for granted that occasionally makes you think, wait wtf? (feddit.uk)

submitted 20 hours ago by manicdave@feddit.uk to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] manicdave@feddit.uk 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

And yet on top of that, humans have worked out a way to send that information everywhere in a fraction of a second.

[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Lightning trapped in sand etc. I used to play a kids game called Turing Tumble 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.