• breadsmasher@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.

    • Asafum@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it’s a punishment for a crime.

      Hmmm… Nah, those dots don’t connect at all.

    • ritswd@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      … and built its initial wealth on slavery revenue.

      It’s a shame because there are a lot of other great things to be proud about when it comes to the US. I guess when people boast about US freedom, what they mean is democracy, and starting the end of the colonial era, inspiring a tidal wave of democratic uprisings around the world, which is accurate. I wish they didn’t use the word “freedom” for that.

  • Huffkin@feddit.uk
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    2 years ago

    Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.

    Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521

    • tristophe@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Don’t mean to pick, but Oxford was founded in 1096 and Cambridge in 1209.

      I worked for cambridge in 2009 and got a nice little 800 year badge

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.

  • Julian@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.

    Edit: idk if it’s actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that’s what I’ve heard. I looked it up and it seems like it’s your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.

  • swnt@feddit.de
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    2 years ago

    Oh, I have two good ones:

    1. Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)

    2. You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn’t been there.

    To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren’t. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it’s fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you’ll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.

    Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it’s productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)

    • elboyoloco@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.

      Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can’t do it.

      • KerPop47@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Did you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s only mandate is to ensure the safety of nuclear power, not to promote its implementation. Many regulatory bodies have a dual mandate to stop them from just shutting down what they’re supposed to regulate.

      • niucllos@lemm.ee
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        2 years ago

        If you’ve ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you’d get it! They’re fairly expensive, and aren’t airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they’ll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting

        • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
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          2 years ago

          It just occurred to me that zippos are basically the same type of oil lanterns that we’ve been using for thousands of years

  • ch00f@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.

    On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.

    • domage@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Wow, you’re absolutely correct!

      The average distance from Earth to Mercury is about 1.04 astronomical units (au), which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.

      In comparison, the average distance between Earth and Venus is approximately 1.14 au, while the average distance between Earth and Mars is around 1.7 au.

      You can check that in Wolfram Alpha.

    • fubo@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Well, no; Theophania was a common Christian name in the Eastern Roman Empire. “Tiffany” is an English version of Theophania, a Greek Christian name referring to the feast day also known as Epiphany or Three Kings Day. The masculine form is Theophanes.

      “Jennifer” is, by the way, the English form of the Welsh name Gwenhwyfar, also known in French as Guinevere.

  • BalpeenHammer@lemmy.nz
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    2 years ago

    Moose kill more people than bears every year.

    Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.

    • tieme@midwest.social
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      2 years ago

      I don’t think this is true for all of them. My cube takes at least a couple hundred rotations and then you have to take the stickers off and move them around to solve it.

      • wearling0600@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        I’m not sure how they got to that conclusion, but we can kinda guess.

        The tongue is PACKED with blood vessels, so in case of any damage it can get tons of nutrients to fix itself. But this takes a very energy-intensive.

        So if the rest of the body would have the same density of blood vessels, we’d need drastically more energy to feed all of that.

        And I guess they’re asserting that all else being the same we wouldn’t be able to ingest or process sufficient food to keep that going.

        It’s a bit of a strange argument though, I’m going far outside of my physiology understanding, but you’d have to imagine that had we evolved such advanced healing capabilities, we’d have also evolved the means to feed them. And OP underestimates just how much food someone can eat. As someone dealing with an ED, I can tell you that you can easily triple your calorie intake (though whether that’s sufficient I wouldn’t be able to say…).

        All in I’d look forward to OP defending their assertion.

        • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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          2 years ago

          I asked ChatGPT, because everyone knows it is a source of reliable and not hallucinated information.

          The human body has a remarkable capacity to heal itself, but the rate of healing can vary depending on the type of tissue and the extent of the injury. While it is true that the tongue, due to its rich blood supply, has a relatively fast healing process compared to other parts of the body, it doesn’t mean that the entire body would be unable to maintain its energy if it healed at the same rapid rate.

          The healing process requires energy and resources, including nutrients, oxygen, and metabolic activity. When a specific area of the body is injured, the body redirects resources to that area to facilitate the healing process. In the case of the tongue, the abundant blood supply helps deliver these resources efficiently, allowing for a faster healing time.

          If the entire body were to heal rapidly at the same pace as the tongue, it would require a significant amount of energy and resources. However, the body is highly adaptive and has complex systems in place to regulate energy usage and resource allocation. It prioritizes healing based on the severity and urgency of injuries, allowing for a balanced distribution of resources throughout the body.

          It’s important to note that healing rates can vary based on factors such as the type of tissue, the extent of the injury, individual health conditions, and other variables. While the tongue may heal relatively quickly, other parts of the body have their own healing mechanisms suited to their specific functions and requirements.

          Overall, the human body is designed to efficiently manage healing processes while maintaining energy balance and overall health.

          When I asked for sources it started backtracking very quickly

          • qprimed@lemmy.ml
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            2 years ago

            When I asked for sources it started backtracking very quickly

            oh, god… its more human than I realized. :(

      • psud@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it

        *It must be correct as it’s very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past

      • MBM@lemmings.world
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        2 years ago

        If you’re lucky, a clock that’s slightly too fast or too slow will be right once

    • Spaceinv8er@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      And it was never designed to be. It was always meant to be a republic.

      We first were a confederation. Were your idea of a true democracy was more or less in place. The revolutionary war was won in 1783. The constitution wasn’t ratified till 1789, and the bill of rights written until 1793. Before that the US had almost no central government, and each state was independent from one another. Had their own currency, banking system, laws, and military.

      States still have a lot of that same autonomy today, but there was no central government tying them together. If the US went to war and a state didn’t want to go, they wouldn’t. A little more complex than that, but generally that’s what it amounted to.

      Having this type of system created a bunch of problems and came to a head when Shay’s Rebellion happened. I won’t go into depth about it, but mainly confederated Massachusetts couldn’t fight off the rebels attempting to take over the state. Since the US was a confederation there was no central government the state couldnt call on for help, and all the other states more or less said ‘meh sucks for you’.

      This incident lead to the Constitutional Convention that wrote the document we still uphold today, and bringing in more of a centralized Federal Republic, and not a decentralized confederated one.

      My ranty point is, we tried the whole true democracy thing and it failed. So we went to a Federal Republic, still very much democratic, but moved away from a true democracy.

      • psud@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        “republic” is opposite to “monarchy”. It is unrelated to democracy or authoritarianism. Nazi Germany was a republic. France is a republic.

        Your republic is flawed by design. Your founders didn’t trust democracy so they weakened it, the country hasn’t managed to improve the democracy since.

        Australia is also a Federation, but a monarchy not a republic. Australia is quite a bit more democratic than America