Post facts that opened your eye.

[Telcontar]

@sherrylynn

I believe the word should not be average, which can easily be skewed by one value being much higher/lower than the others. It should be median - meaning that half of a group are higher and half are lower.

Given a normal distribution, the mean, median, and mode should technically all be the same. I suspect IQ scores are more or less normally distributed, meaning that half the population is not necessarily below average in IQ…but i’d be surprised if it were off by more than a percent or two.

Regarding the OP’s point, that i am surrounded by the best and brightest of America makes me seriously concerned about the other 95%.

[gurujulp]

@Bacon_Salt

Sampiro, your thing about genealogy reminded me of my own eye-opener.

The first one:
Let’s say my parents had a fight on the night I would have been conceived. It was nasty and Dad ended up sleeping on the couch. It’s okay, though because a few days later they made up and had the requisite make-up sex (Actually, it’s not because I’m now imagining my parents having sex). Or Dad had to work late or Mom took a little longer getting ready for bed. At any rate, in the jumble of life, a different sperm got to the egg. Nine months passed and out I came. Only, it’s highly statistically improbable that this person would have the exact same genetic makeup as me. If just about anything happened differently, it would be someone else walking around instead of me.

And it’s the same for every sexually reproducing organism ever.

As sad as it sounds, that blew my mind the first time I thought about it.

I still insist that the abortion my mom had was me, and I just had to wait several years and didn’t get to be half jewish, but damnit, I wanted her as a mom!

[gurujulp]

@Lumpy

That fusion reactors are a much less feasible proposition than I’d always presumed, thanks to the following simple fact: the total energy output of deuterium-tritium fusion is 17.6 MeV. However, 80% of the energy, or 14.1 MeV, is in the motion of the neutron which, having no electric charge can escape the plasma without leaving its energy behind to help sustain the reaction. And much of the remaining energy leaks away in the form of x-rays that the plasma is too “optically transparent” to retain.

Then, even if you can keep the fusion reaction going, the only practical way to generate electricity from it is by capturing the neutrons and x-rays in a surrounding themal blanket. So you’re using a millions-of-degrees plasma to create high-energy radiation, to boil steam.

And on top of that, those high-energy neutrons would be perfect for inducing fission in Uranium-238, whose lower energy neutrons would then be captured to produce plutonium. So fusion reactors add to nuclear proliferation, not eliminate it.

Well, to boil water anyway…

[gurujulp]

@UncleRojelio

Half the people you meet are dumber than average.

Not me, I only meet people smart enough to live in Northern California…

Edit: in person…

[gurujulp]

@olivesmarch4th

This is actually exactly how I view the universe (as a massive, constantly changing, evolving organism.) What you’re getting at is pantheism, I think. Everything is god.

That’s buddhism.

[WF_Tomba]

@gurujulp

That’s buddhism.

It’s not quite Buddhism unless it also includes the idea that life is suffering, that nirvana can be attained by the living, and that some people may attain nirvana but choose to remain in the world to help others get there. (At least, those are the basic concepts of Buddhism that I remember from my World Religions class in high school.)

[gurujulp]

@WF_Tomba

It’s not quite Buddhism unless it also includes the idea that life is suffering, that nirvana can be attained by the living, and that some people may attain nirvana but choose to remain in the world to help others get there. (At least, those are the basic concepts of Buddhism that I remember from my World Religions class in high school.)

Sorry- that was indeed a bit of solipsistic moment- it’s what I take as being the most important bit of buddhism and run with to create my own I-wish-it-could-be-true wanna-be belief system.

I can’t bring myself to believe in any sort of life after death, but damnit, I want to, and I have cobbled together a pretty fine untrue one to pine for!

I want to remember having been me!

[Cat_Whisperer]

@GuanoLad

Why is Average not so great? Because purely bell-shaped-curve speaking, it’s the most common level of skill, and not a measure of actual ability.

It’s not saying they only follow half the rules, or do everything half-assed. In fact it’s saying they are part of the majority group and follow the rules at the same level most other people do.

Average is not great when you’re talking about driving skills. We are very complacent about collision statistics, but average driving skills gets you:

There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States – one death every 13 minutes.

(From here.) Someone might be considered an average driver, but that is in no way good enough, and it continually amazes me that we as a society think it is.

[Tenebras]

@gurujulp

Well, to boil water anyway…

Water’s just another word for steam that got too cold.

[The_Second_Stone]

@cmosdes

I don’t mean to pick on this, but why do people always assume that half of <whatever> 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.

Nope, Gates’ income when he was CEO of Microsoft was around $350,000 per year. His net worth was in the equity, not income.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Zsofia

I have read that the number of intestinal fauna that you’ll have in your guts over the course of your life is greater than the number of human beings who have ever lived. Most of you, of course, is not actually you. You don’t even fart your own farts; you outsource that.

Assuming that as another poster said that there have been 100 billion or so human beings, you have more bacteria in your gut right now than that.

People have an estimated 10 to 50 trillion human cells in a body. Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos

500 to 1000 different types of bacteria live in the typical human body. Human microbiome - Wikipedia

A bacteria cell is usually 1/100 the size of a human cell. Cell Parts - How Cells Work | HowStuffWorks

Bacteria cells outnumber people cells in a human body 10 to 1.

Humans Have Ten Times More Bacteria Than Human Cells: How Do Microbial...

Human beings are mostly not human beings, but bacteria when measured by the number of cells. And then not even that. A virus is much smaller than a bacteria. Bacteria vs. Viruses<!-- --> | DrGreene

So the next time you think I’m scum, you are mostly correct, by number, not mass or volume.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Euthanasiast

Give me an example then, of something new or original in the Bible that did not exist anywhere previous in either prior religions or writings or plays or poems or anywhere else, and I’ll take you seriously. I admit that I should have excluded the Inquisitions from the King James reference, but as for the other, I am certain that I am right. How about PM me with just **ONE ** example that is either new or original in the Bible, and I’ll consider myself educated.

Or don’t, and I’ll consider **you **educated.

Monotheism. Judaism invented it. No other religion had it before then.

[Koxinga]

@The_Second_Stone

Monotheism. Judaism invented it. No other religion had it before then.

Atenism. 14th century BC.

[Nava]

@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.

The Inquisidores read the King James Bible? I thought they were more into the Vulgata…

[The_Second_Stone]

@Koxinga

Atenism. 14th century BC.

Interesting. I, of course, knew about Aten from the History Channel, but didn’t realize it was monotheistic.

[robby]

I’m certainly no biologist, but I enjoy reading books like “The Ancestor’s Tale” by Richard Dawkins.

It was an eye-opening experience for me when I first learned that the DNA of my cells (my nuclear DNA) is different than the DNA of the mitochondria in each of my cells (my mitochondrial DNA). Further, all of the mitochondria in my body were inherited from my mother only, and having different DNA than my nuclear DNA, are not really part of “me.” More weird is the fact than none of my cells actually have the ability to utilize oxygen for respiration on their own without these mitochondria.

Every time one of the cells of my body divides, the population of mitochondria is divided up between the two daughter cells.

Even more strange is that the prevailing theory for the development of these types of cells (eukaryotes) is a type of symbiotic relationship between my ancestral cells and those ancestral mitochondria. Today, all multi-cellular life (including all plant and animal cells), are symbiotes of this type.

[OpalCat]

Girls are born with all of the eggs they will ever have already in her ovaries. This means that, technically, they are “made” by her mother in the womb, just as she was made by her mother. In a way, this means that her children are created from eggs her mother made. So in a way, everyone’s maternal grandmother is also their mother, and in a way your own mother didn’t actually make the egg that you started out as. So you’re sort of the product of your grandmother’s egg and your father’s sperm. Kind of.
Eeew!

[Sr_Siete]

@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.

In any case, I very much doubt that the Spanish Inquisition cared at all for the King James version. Not only would they have been unable to understand a word of English, but their heyday was the fifteen century, whereas King James was published in the 1600’s.

[Euthanasiast]

@The_Second_Stone

Monotheism. Judaism invented it. No other religion had it before then.

Wrong.

One of the oldest examples of monotheism is Atenism, the worship of the sun disk god Aten, created by Nefertiti and her husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten (who is the father of King Tut). This was very controversial, and therefore erased after the deaths of the royal couple by priests who opposed them, causing the religion to be unknown. The worship of Aten is much older than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

And there are others.

[Euthanasiast]

Or what Koxinga said.