Thanks Hank Green.
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.
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.
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.
After looking it up I have to correct myself, the Germanic plural - s also come from the accusative plural
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.
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
I don’t get it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QR_Code_Structure_Example_3.svg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
OP is talking about the alternating pattern between the two straw papers. In the SVG from Wikipedia, this corresponds to the “timing”
…mother fucker… That’s neat!
Wombats take square shits.
Goats have square pupils. It’s like the banana and the human hand
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!
I’m pretty happy about that. It’s warm enough.
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.
Don’t know that. That’s kind of cool.
Hydrogen, if left on its own long enough, names itself.
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.
That’s a wild way to think about the universe. Gonna steal this
If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.
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?
And what about the 5 arms I have in my freezer?
Ha that’s a good one
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.
Dingo Suffrage is my new punk band name
We have a Lemmy instance for this kind of stuff: https://lemmy.world/c/fakebandnames
Count me in.
That’s awesome! Maybe they should teach us some of their tricks…
How do they indicate yay or nah
They sneeze!
Amazing they can just like do that on demand like that
I think it’s quiet or sneeze
Another interesting fact: dogs also use sneezing to communicate, though not in the same way. I also easily trained my dogs to indicate yes or no by either licking their lips or not doing anything.
Two, wasn’t it?
Your lips and butthole are the two ends of the same tube. Same glaborous vermillion border type skin or something
Shhh! Diffusion AI might hear you.
Time to screw with stable diffusion
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.
Chess positions are like that too, after any “main line” it quickly becomes a never played game…
52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Not true, 52! ≈ 8x10^67 < 10^80.
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…
How can we even know that?
It’s only in a statistical sense. Combinations based off a few shuffles from a standard sorted deck would be fairly common in practice.
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.
There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.
It’s more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
*are
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.
