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)
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Your ~~mom~~ moon is exactly at the right distance to give full eclipse of the sun
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.
Oh, I wondered about why there weren't more characters in the ASCII code set.
yep! the ascii standard was originally invented for teletypewriters, and includes four 'blocks' of 32 codes each, for 128 in total, so it only uses seven bits per code.
the first block, hex 00 - 1F, contains control codes for the typewriter. stuff like "newline", "backspace", and "ring bell" all go in here.
The second block has the digits are in order, from hex 30 = '0' all the way to hex 39 = '9',
The uppercase alphabet starts at hex 41 = 'A', and exactly one block later, the lowercase alphabet starts at hex 61 = 'a'. This means their binary codes are 100 0001 and 110 0001, differering only in a single bit! So you can easily convert between upper and lowercase ascii by flipping that bit.
The remaining space in the last three blocks is filled with various punctuation marks. I'm not sure if these are in any particular order.
The final ascii code, 7F, is reserved for "delete", because its binary representation is 111 1111, perfect for "deleting" data on a punch card by punching over it.
Very neat!
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.
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.
My favourite false cognate is the plural ending -s in French and English. The English one has Germanic roots, while the French one come from Latin accusative plural -as/-os. They are unrelated etymologically.
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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)
Yeah, timing marks! There's a few of them. So neat
...mother fucker... That's neat!
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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.
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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.
That’s awesome! Maybe they should teach us some of their tricks…
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Hydrogen, if left on its own long enough, names itself.
That's a wild way to think about the universe. Gonna steal this
How do you mean?
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.
If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.
I've always thought the drummer from Leppard was below average
And if you have one skeleton in your body, you're below average.
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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Wombats take square shits.
Goats have square pupils. It's like the banana and the human hand
There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.
It's more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.
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.
I bet there are certain shuffled combinations that repeat. like, take a new deck, divide perfectly in half, do one perfect riffle. that has probably happened more than once.
Chess positions are like that too, after any "main line" it quickly becomes a never played game...
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There are more grains of sand in the ocean than there are stars in our solar system.
if you like big numbers: there are significantly more ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards than there are atoms in the observable universe.
Every shuffle of the deck is almost certainly unique since folks been shuffling cards.
edit: ahh nice someone posted this exact fact at the top level lower down!
There are about 8x10^67 ways to shuffle a deck of cards, and about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe, so there are actually far, far more atoms.
thank you for the correction!
I'm pretty happy about that. It's warm enough.
Your lips and butthole are the two ends of the same tube. Same glaborous vermillion border type skin or something
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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.
Kevin Spacey’s middle name is Spacey.
And that’s a rock fact.
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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