• Commiunism@beehaw.org
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    42 minutes ago

    A somewhat political fact, but one that made some of my friends dumbfounded:

    When a bank issues a loan, it generates that money literally out of thin air and credits that money to the loan account rather than using deposits they already had. For example, if you want to borrow $100,000, the banker approves the loan and doesn’t hand over cash or move existing money around - instead, they just go on their system and credit your account with the sum, that’s it.

  • randombullet@programming.dev
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    2 hours ago

    Consider a dam that is 10m tall

    Then consider the height of water behind that dam is 5m tall.

    Does the dam need to be built stronger if the water behind it is 1 km long?

    How about only 500m?

    How about 1m?

    The answer is, it doesn’t matter. Water exerts pressure equally regardless of how much water is behind it.

    Therefore a graduated cylinder that is 10m tall needs to resist the same amount of force as a dam 10m tall regardless of how much water is behind the dam. Even a thin sliver of water 1mm thick and 5m tall has the same force as a 5m lake behind the dam.

    Incompressible fluids are pretty insane

  • socsa@piefed.social
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    2 hours ago

    That Mark Zuckerberg holds several records for most fists shoved inside a human body at once

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    3 hours ago

    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”

    • Nakoichi [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 hours ago

      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.

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago
        • camera → racehorse → leland → stanford → eugenics → nazis: There’s a lot there
          • camera → (developed for) → racehorse → (by) → leland: this I follow
          • eugenics → (popular in european elites with racehorse breed overtones) → nazis : this I follow
          • leland → (founded) → stanford : this I follow
          • stanford → (created) → eugenics : this I tentatively follow, but missing the gap of an entire atlantic ocean
    • POTOOOOOOOO@reddthat.comOP
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      3 hours ago

      Also an unbelievable fact, you responded to user Potoooooooo about Potoooooooo the horse.

      I really love this story about the horse.

  • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    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.

  • Elise@beehaw.org
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    7 hours ago

    Bees kill invaders in their nest by climbing all over them and shaking their bodies.

  • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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    8 hours ago

    James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You’re Beautiful. Reality is weird.)

    • Berttheduck@lemmy.ml
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      7 hours ago

      Care to expand on that one? I know he’s ex military but haven’t heard anything like that before.

      • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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        7 hours ago

        It’s explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn’t want his men to start WW3.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    Due to two facts:

    1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

    2. 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.

    • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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      7 hours ago

      For some reason that reminds me of how the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, named Samoset, spoke to them in English. Then he came back later with another tribe member, Squanto, who also spoke English.

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        3 hours ago

        isn’t english just the crab language that spontaneously comes into existence if given enough time?

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        5 hours ago

        1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.

        First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.

        Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:

        If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    10 hours ago

    I’d have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.

    1 - George W Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.

    …in the same vein…

    2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the ‘accounting’ of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.

    … If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.

    And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.