Thanks Hank Green.

  • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 days ago

    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.

  • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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.

      • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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        10 days 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.

  • joe_archer@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    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.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Chess positions are like that too, after any “main line” it quickly becomes a never played game…

      • triptrapper@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems more realistic to say:

        1. Playing the same game twice is unlikely because of the number of possible games, OR
        2. It’s possible the same game has never been played twice, OR
        3. After a certain number of moves, it’s very possible to create a never-played game

        I’m certain I’ve played the same game multiple times, because I suck at chess and I fall into the same obvious traps over and over.

        • Valmond@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          You were in a main-line then.

          And what you states is matematics/statistics, but if you take that ar face value, you could just win the lottery 10000 times in a row too.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
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      11 days ago

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

      Not true, 52! ≈ 8x10^67 < 10^80.

      • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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        11 days 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…

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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        10 days ago

        It’s only in a statistical sense. Combinations based off a few shuffles from a standard sorted deck would be fairly common in practice.

      • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        The first part is a matter of probabilities. It’s very unlikely by virtue of the sheer number of possible configurations vs how many times a deck is shuffled in history (even erring on the high side)

        For the second part, the composition of elements in most stars is known. And the total mass of the universe is approximated by observing gravitational effects. Which is what you need to work out approx number of atoms.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      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.

  • frank@sopuli.xyz
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    10 days ago

    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.

    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
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      10 days 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.

    • jxk@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      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.

      • jxk@sh.itjust.works
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        10 days ago

        After looking it up I have to correct myself, the Germanic plural - s also come from the accusative plural

  • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
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    10 days ago

    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)

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

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

  • nycki@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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.

      • nycki@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        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.

  • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
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    10 days 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.