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Due to two facts:
The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think
The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.
It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.
There's no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.
Nothing insane, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band are older than Guns 'N' Roses.
There was this racehorse named Pot-8-Os who won over 25 races and went on to sire a horse empire of winners. His father was a legend himself named "Eclipse"
Did you also know that one of the first motion pictures was shot to measure the gate of a race horse by Leland Stanford, who would go on to create Stanford University where the eugenics movement would get its legs and horse breeding theories of genetic prowess were applied to humans, and subsequently they would use the Stanford University as a test bed to breed umbermensch that would go on to inspire the Nazis? Yes this sounds insane but all of it is true. Also college football became a method to study human combat ability for the US military.
The bluestones in Stonehenge come from West Wales. Instead of quarrying stone from near the monument, they dragged these huge blocks from ~278km away. Likewise, the altar stone comes from ~700km away in North-East Scotland. It must've been very important for the ancient Britons to've used these specific rocks for some reason, but their religious practices were conveyed via a now extinct oral tradition so no-one knows exactly why they did it.
I thought this got debunked?
Edit: no, it was just the alter (from Scotland!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207lqdn755o you are correct.
Every eye has a tiny blind spot near the middle. But your brain makes it disappear and you don't realize it's there.
You can verify this. Draw a dot on a bit of paper. Close one eye, stare at a fixed point, now move the paper around the center until the dot disappears...magic
What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation.. realizing that is a real mind blower
fun fact: the blind spot is because our optical sensors are installed backwards and that hole is so the optic nerve can pass back through the back of the eye to the brain. some other critters with independently evolved vision systems, such as cephalopods, avoided this particular evolutionary pitfall.
The Allies avoided bombing specific factories in Nazi Germany in which US oligarchs owned equity.
the point was to post unbeliavable facts
The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.
James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You're Beautiful. Reality is weird.)
A few of my favorite fun facts are geography related.
The pacific side of the Panama canal is further east than the Atlantic side.
If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you'll hit is Canada.
Lake Tahoe is further west than Los Angeles
70% of Canadians live south of the 49th Parallel, the northern border of the US.
If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country youโll hit is Canada.
There's also Angle Inlet, Minnesota which is the only place in the contiguous United States north of the 49th parallel. To travel to Angle Inlet by road from other parts of Minnesota, or from anywhere in the United States, requires driving through Manitoba, Canada. It's a really weird border.
The three gorges dam has had an actual effect on the rotation of the earth (slowing it down by 0.06 seconds)
It's actually 0.06 microseconds (0.00000006 seconds) per day, or ~22 ฮผs (0.000021915 s) per year.
Also, technically, anything moving up or down in Earth's gravitational field while physically connected to it is having an effect, however it's usually to small to be reasonably measurable.
(I wonder what would happen if the rotation speed was changed by 0.06 seconds per day - that feels like a lot, adding up to 22 seconds per year, but would anyone except timekeeping nerds actually notice? I don't even know how to begin figuring something like that out.)
Humans have stripes that are invisible to us. However, cats can see our stripes.
Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.
Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.
You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn't ever actually in their field of view.
Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.
This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?
You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.