# Post facts that opened your eye. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 11, 2008, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262 "2008-11-11T23:20:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/141 "2008-11-13T03:33:32Z")
An average retiree get all he paid into Social Security back in less than two years. How is that possible? 80% of the money you spend on health care is spent in the last 2 years of your life. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/142 "2008-11-13T03:49:37Z")
Quoth **Lobsang** : > [@](#): > > That ones quite a mind bender. No matter what the thinness/surface area ratio is, you can still only fold it in half between 7 and 9 times. [Britney Gallivan](http://pomonahistorical.org/12times.htm) would like a word with you. Quoth **Sampiro** : > [@](#): > > -when your parents write checks, they actually have to have money to cover them (checks confused the hell out of me when I was a kid; I never understood why they didn’t just write checks for everything and save that money) Reminds me of when I was a kid. Whenever we’d go to the store and buy something, I always figured that we, the customers, were getting a much better deal than the store was. The customer gets a product _and_ some money (the change), while the store only gets some money. I also thought that a bank was a store where you bought money: Whenever you started running low, you’d go to the bank and give them some money, and they’d give you more money. Oh, I just remembered another childhood realization: As a child, I knew that there was something that adults did that led to pregnancy, and I knew that there was something adults did called “sex” that they didn’t like to talk about in front of kids, and I knew that there was some process that involved the insertion of a man’s penis into a woman’s vagina, but it wasn’t until another kid told me that I made the connection between those three seemingly unrelated concepts. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/143 "2008-11-13T04:04:22Z")
> [@Q.E.D](#): > > Let’s find out! First, let’s standardize a “drop.” We’ll say a drop is a sphere of water .5 cm in diameter, which is a volume of ~.065 cc. Given a molar mass of about 18 for water, that means our drop contains 3.35 x 10[sup]22[/sup] molecules. According to [this](http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/env99/env241.htm), the Earth has 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water, or 1.3 x 10[sup]24[/sup] cc, which is 2.0 x 10[sup]25[/sup] of our standardized drops. So, at least for this size drop, no, it’s not quite true. But, for a sufficiently large drop, it would be. > > Anyone wanna work out how big that drop must be? 2.2\*10^21 molecules in your drop, I believe. I get about 1.5cc as the size of the drop for which the ratio is the same. ---
**Author:** ![OpalCat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8edcca/32.png) [@OpalCat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OpalCat)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/144 "2008-11-13T04:43:17Z")
_glances around_ NERDS!!! _flee_ ---
**Author:** ![nivlac](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/3bc359/32.png) [@nivlac](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nivlac)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/145 "2008-11-13T05:45:40Z")
Two eye opening facts for me, one not scientific, the other scientific: [ul] [li]I remember the first time I saw my elementary school teacher in a store. Holy cow! Teachers exist outside of the classroom![/li] [li]In science the most mind blowing facts to me have to do with the atom. An atom is so small that 10 million of them lined up end to end will span the width of the period at the end of this paragraph! YET, they are mostly empty space! In fact if all the space in every atom were removed from every person on this earth, all of humanity will fit into the size of a sugar cube. That’s beyond amazing to me. And as to the discussion about drops of water etc. What I heard was that there are more atoms in a glass of water than glasses of water in all the oceans of the world.[/li][/ul] ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/146 "2008-11-13T05:52:42Z")
> [@Euthanasiast](#): > > That we are genetically closer to a chimpanzee than a mouse is to a rat. > > That a great many of the stars we think we now see in the night sky were dead long before the Earth was formed. The reason we see their light is because they were so far away that it is only just now reaching us. > > That somewhere between 97 and 99+ percent of all living things that once inhabited this planet are extinct. > > That there is absolutely nothing new or original in the Old Testament or the New Testament. Everything is either plagiarized from texts from older religions or various forms of art that predated the books. > > That some of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all from the Salem Witch Trials are almost exclusively the result of a mistranslation of a single line in the King James version of the Bible. > > I could do this for days. Yes you could, but practically nothing you’ve written so far is accurate, so please don’t embarrass yourself (or bore us) any further. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/147 "2008-11-13T06:02:40Z")
> [@](#): > > In science the most mind blowing facts to me have to do with the atom. An atom is so small that 10 million of them lined up end to end will span the width of the period at the end of this paragraph! YET, they are mostly empty space! No, they’re not mostly empty space. The space of an atom is jam packed full of fields (mostly electromagnetic fields, in this case). This may sound like pointless quibbling, except that the bits between the so-called empty space, like the protons and electrons, are themselves made of fields, too. And thank you, **OpalCat**. ---
**Author:** ![OpalCat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8edcca/32.png) [@OpalCat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OpalCat)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/148 "2008-11-13T06:48:07Z")
Revenge of the Nerds was filmed in my hometown. It’s as good a battlecry as any… I had a moment of epiphanic clarity once where I saw a connection between all living things, and how that connection was what we called god… but it was almost completely visual/emotional and I have never really been able to successfully put into words exactly what that epiphany was. I can recall it vividly but it isn’t based on any kind of knowledge, so it’s really hard to convey it to anyone else. It changed how I saw everything, though, forever. ---
**Author:** ![WormTheRed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/bbe5ce/32.png) [@WormTheRed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WormTheRed)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 6:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/149 "2008-11-13T06:51:46Z")
> [@Valgard](#): > > 1. Flamingos are pink because of their diet. What? Could they be blue then if they ate something else? ---
**Author:** ![sjc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e5b9ba/32.png) [@sjc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sjc)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/150 "2008-11-13T07:30:54Z")
> [@UncleRojelio](#): > > Half the people you meet are dumber than average. Half the people _I_ meet? How do you know who I meet? ---
**Author:** ![sjc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e5b9ba/32.png) [@sjc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sjc)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/151 "2008-11-13T07:36:28Z")
> [@Euthanasiast](#): > > That some of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all from the Salem Witch Trials are almost exclusively the result of a mistranslation of a single line in the King James version of the Bible. > > I could do this for days. This can’t possibly be true in its entirety. The King James Bible was an _English_ version of the bible that was translated after much of the Spanish Inquisition had already happened. The Spanish, as Catholics, would have used a Latin Text. Possibly it is mistranslation found in Jerome’s Vulgate, not The King James Bible? ---
**Author:** ![RandMcnally](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b782af/32.png) [@RandMcnally](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RandMcnally)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 8:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/152 "2008-11-13T08:08:35Z")
> [@EpicNonsense](#): > > I wonder what the average DoperQ is? A googol. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 8:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/153 "2008-11-13T08:31:41Z")
> [@cmosdes](#): > > I don’t mean to pick on this, but why do people always assume that half of \ is less than the average? > > If Bill Gates and 9 other shmos like me sit down for dinner together, 9 of us will be well below the average income. Not 5. I assure you, in that case, half of you will indeed be below the median income. (Among those ten individuals.) ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/154 "2008-11-13T08:38:21Z")
My contribution: as I [mentioned here a while ago](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=483887), it occurred to me that the collective conscious life experience of humanity is far longer than the age of the universe. Something like 106 billion people have ever lived, And Wikipedia tells me that the estimated age of the universe is 13.73 billion years. So assuming that throughout history, people had an average life expectancy at birth of 10 years, then the collective time lived by all humans so far is over a trillion years. Each one of those people was an individual with his or her perceptions of the world, most of them had people they loved, things they enjoyed and disliked, happiness and pain. A trillion years of that. And that collective experience amounts to over seventy times the age of the universe. ---
**Author:** ![Euthanasiast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Euthanasiast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euthanasiast)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/155 "2008-11-13T08:54:37Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > Yes you could, but practically nothing you’ve written so far is accurate, so please don’t embarrass yourself (or bore us) any further. Practically nothing?! Embarrass myself?! \*That we are genetically closer to a chimpanzee than a mouse is to a rat. You’re saying that you disagree with this, and that I embarrass myself for saying it? \*That somewhere between 97 and 99+ percent of all living things that once inhabited this planet are extinct. And that? I’m embarrassing myself for that one as well? \*That there is absolutely nothing new or original in the Old Testament or the New Testament. Everything is either plagiarized from texts from older religions or various forms of art that predated the books. And that? Oh please, **PLEASE** embarrass me regarding the above. In fact, and for calling me out in such a childish and asinine manner, I now **require** it. Otherwise it’s going to get incredibly embarrassing and astonishingly not boring around here rabbit-fast, friend. ---
**Author:** ![Crowbar\_of\_Irony\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f08c70/32.png) [@Crowbar\_of\_Irony\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crowbar_of_Irony_3)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 9:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/156 "2008-11-13T09:21:26Z")
That a single equation could represent an entire graph of irregular shape. I couldn’t understand any bit of Calculus then. With this, I begin to appreciate why I am even learning this. ---
**Author:** ![Ale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@Ale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ale)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 10:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/157 "2008-11-13T10:16:53Z")
Here’s an eye opening fact: _My alarm clock is set to 8:30 AM_ 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Radegast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c4cdca/32.png) [@Radegast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Radegast)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/158 "2008-11-13T12:11:52Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > When I was in grade school, I repeatedly blew my own mind by trying to reason out why I was there, as opposed to anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t grasp the immense weight of trivia that somehow added up to my presence in that location at that time. The whole Universe had to have worked out just right. > > Here’s another sense of scale meditation: Within the last half-century, we’ve gone from even relatively small computers filling rooms and requiring special power supplies to computers of much greater speed and power being etched into a flake of silicon that could reside comfortably on the top of your thumb. > > Due to photolithography, modern integrated circuits are Hieronymus machines: The detailed design of the machine _is_ the machine. Software is even more esoteric: It is the power of _logos_, the sacred Word, made real, and given direct power over physical entities. > > We etch something into rock and control it with words. Golems are real and they give us our daily pornography. Derleth – That is one of the very best things I’ve seen on this message board. Ever. Bravo. ---
**Author:** ![BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bcef8e/32.png) [@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/159 "2008-11-13T12:19:16Z")
> [@RandMcnally](#): > > A googol. Probably closer to a Google, actually. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Duke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e8c25b/32.png) [@Duke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duke)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262/160 "2008-11-13T12:58:04Z")
> [@Euthanasiast](#): > > That some of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and all from the Salem Witch Trials are almost exclusively the result of a mistranslation of a single line in the King James version of the Bible. That’s a neat trick, considering the King James Version was produced in 1611, while the Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478 and was largely over in 1530. Not to mention that the Spanish Inquisition was run by Catholics who would have exclusively used the Vulgate (Latin) Bible. Not to also mention that, if the Spanish Inquisition had been using a vernacular Bible, it would have been one in Spanish, not English. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-facts-that-opened-your-eye/472262.md?page=9)