Post facts that opened your eye.

[Saint_Cad]

Growing up in Seattle and Los Angleles my entire life, I was floored when I found out that not every ZIP code starts with a 9.

[Spice_Weasel]

@maladroit

take that one step further and that’s how I view the universe, that we’re small living components of something larger and possibly self-aware - could happen (I’m god, you’re god, we’re all god, god is everywhere. Wonder if our cells have religions of their own)

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.

[lisacurl]

Growing up in New Orleans, I was shocked to find out that bars had closing times and that there was such a thing as an open container law.

[Antinor01]

@EpicNonsense

I wonder what the average DoperQ is?

I believe we’ve determined it to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 180.

[Lobsang]

@Antinor01

I believe we’ve determined it to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 180.

Me feeul dum.

[fachverwirrt]

Ignoring the physical impossibility of it, if you folded a typical piece of paper (assume .003 inches thick) in half 100 times, it would be 10 billion light-years thick.

[Sofis]

@Lobsang

I think the bit that brings the notion down to earth is that the change happens at the chromosome level. I.e. we start out as technically female (with the only female chromosomes) and then something happens … that’s the best I can describe it without spending some time weeding out the proper explanation from the internet.

Do you mean that the Y-chromosome is inactive in early development? That could certainly be, but I don’t think it constitutes “being female”, and I don’t think X-chromosomes count as female (after all, everyone’s got them).
Given that Y-chromosomes are male-specific, I assume they are only relevant for sex differentiation, and given that the basic human machinery is the same for males and females, it’s reasonable that they would only come into play a bit down the line. But I do not think it is meaningful to assign a gender to the stages of human development before sex differentiation.

@lisacurl

It is rather an oversimplification is that the default is female. But the fetus does not need to have anything “happen” to develop female genitalia. The male fetus has to correctly develop and produce both testosterone and another hormone which suppresses development of the uterus in order to develop male genitalia.

I believe various levels of various hormones are required for the development of just about everything in the human body, surely also female genitalia? I can’t really think of male sexual differentiation as something that “happens” in a notably different way than any other part of fetal development. It doesn’t involve outside influence, it’s all genes and proteins and cells and stuff, in accordance with the standard rules of biology as it pertains to earth organisms.

Still, I’m not sure we disagree about anything substantial here :).

A note (not at you in particular, lisacurl, just the subject in general): I poked about on wikipedia a bit, and found this:
[

@Wikipedia

In the female, in the absence of testosterone support, the Wolffian ducts regresses

](Mesonephric duct - Wikipedia)
It seems that the “gender specific organs develop only to regress” thing goes both ways (in males, it is the Müllerian duct that regresses).

[Lobsang]

@fachverwirrt

Ignoring the physical impossibility of it, if you folded a typical piece of paper (assume .003 inches thick) in half 100 times, it would be 10 billion light-years thick.

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.

[davidw]

@fachverwirrt

Ignoring the physical impossibility of it, if you folded a typical piece of paper (assume .003 inches thick) in half 100 times, it would be 10 billion light-years thick.

Can you show your work? That sounds insane to me.

[fachverwirrt]

@davidw

Can you show your work? That sounds insane to me.

Use a scientific calculator (Windows’s calculator works fine).

2[sup]100[/sup] * .003 gives you the total inches. Divide by 63,360 (inches in a mile), then divide that by 6,000,000,000,000 (approximate number of miles in a light-year).

You should get 10,003,555,873.

The point being, doubling things makes them get big in a hurry.

[Valgard]

So many deep concepts here that I’m almost ashamed to admit that I first found out on the Dope that:

1. Pineapples don’t grow on trees.
2. Flamingos are pink because of their diet.

[Antinor01]

never mind

[Lobsang]

@Valgard

1. Pineapples don’t grow on trees.

What? :dubious:

[Laudenum]

@Zsofia

I had always known that there used to be a hell of a lot of passenger pigeons, but until yesterday I didn’t know they flew around in flocks of up to a BILLION. They hung out in the second largest groups of any animals we know about, second only to the desert locust.

And we ate them all essentially in a hundred years.

Remember that thread last week or so about “does an animal alone get lonely?” and we talked about Albert the Lonely Albatross? Screw Albert - Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had to be the most lonely creature on Earth.

Could you provide a cite?

That must have been a sight.

[Q.E.D]

@Lobsang

What? :dubious:

He said, “PINEAPPLES DON’T GROW ON TREES.”

[Lobsang]

@Q.E.D

He said, “PINEAPPLES DON’T GROW ON TREES.”

I genuinely did not know that! I have an image in my head of a pineapple tree. It looks very similar to a coconut tree but has pineapples hanging from it.

[MaxTheVool]

A googol is an emormous number, but one way to instantly dwarf it is to start talking about possible things… as in, the number of possible ways to fill a DVD with 1’s and 0’s (easy to precisely calculate), or the number of possible ways to interconnect the neurons in a human brain (much harder to precisely calculate).
Here’s one that I find freakish:
Suppose that at the end of each year, we produce a commemorative DVD chronicling the events of the year… it would include highlights of political, scientific, artistic, and cultural events of the year. Now, clearly, the DVD from 2008 would be vastly different than the DVD from 2007 and so forth. But there are only a finite (albeit enormously staggeringly huge) number of possible ways to fill a DVD. That means that if the humanity survives forever, eventually humanity will experience a year which, at least on the macro scale which can be documented on a DVD, is totally indistinguishable from some previous year.

[Lobsang]

Or the number of possible ways that Mel Gibson and Michael Winner are wastes of human life.

[BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed]

@Rich_Mann

I was amazed to discover that U.S./Iran problems actually date back to the 1953 CIA-backed coup d’etat in which Prime Minister Mossadegh was deposed and the Shah seized power. Mossadegh was opposed to foreign intervention in Iran and his ouster made him a martyr and hero to the Islamic world. The U.S. and Britain continued to back the Shah despite his autocratic rule until he was overthrown by popular movement enabling the religious fundamentalists to come to power.

For those scoring at home: The U.S. helped remove the democratically elected, popular leader of a foreign country and replaced him with a hated, tyrannical, hereditary monarch…and we wonder why they don’t like us!

Yeah, and it was because we and Britannia didn’t want there to be a chance of those wacky Iranians selling oil to Russia. Yep, we’re responsible for pushing social development back centuries in that country. Go us!

[Zsofia]

@Laudenum

Could you provide a cite?

That must have been a sight.

Do you take Wikipedia for cites? The article on “passenger pigeon” said that. Also that there would be more than a hundred nesting in one tree. Can you imagine the ecological impact of driving that species extinct?

And the kicker is that we ate them to death. Om nom nom!