There are tiny little creatures living on your face that poop on it.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Combinatorics scares me, the immense size of seemingly trivial things.
For example: If you take a simple 52 card poker deck, shuffle it well, some combination of 4-5 riffles and 4-5 cuts, it is basically 100% certain that the order of all the cards has never been seen before and will never been seen again unless you intentionally order them like that.
52 factorial is an unimaginable number, the amount of unique combinations is so immense it really freaks me out. And all from a simple deck of playing cards.
Chess is another example. Assuming you aren't deliberately trying to copy a specific game, and assuming the game goes longer than around a dozen moves, you will never play the same game ever again, and nobody else for the rest of our civilization ever will either. The amount of possible unique chess games with 40 moves is far far larger than the number of stars in the entire observable universe.
You could play 100 complete chess games with around 40 moves every single second for the rest of your life and you would never replay a game and no other people on earth would ever replay any of your games, they all would be unique.
One last freaky one: There are different sizes of infinity, like literally, there are entire categories of infinities that are larger than other ones.
I won't get into the math here, you can find lots of great vids online explaining it. But here is the freaky fact: There are infinitely more numbers between 1 and 2 than the entire infinite set of natural numbers 1, 2, 3...
In fact, there are infinitely more numbers between any fraction of natural numbers, than the entire infinite natural numbers, no matter how small you make the fraction...
Natural numbers being infinite, how it be possible for the values between 1 and 2 to be "more infinite" ?
It's called countable and uncountable infinity. the idea here is that there are uncountably many numbers between 1 and 2, while there are only countably infinite natural numbers. it actually makes sense when you think about it. let's assume for a moment that the numbers between 1 and 2 are the same "size" of infinity as the natural numbers. If that were true, you'd be able to map every number between 1 and 2 to a natural number. but here's the thing, say you map some number "a" to 22 and another number "b" to 23. Now take the average of these two numbers, (a + b)/2 = c the number "c" is still between 1 and 2, but it hasn’t been mapped to any natural number. this means that there are more numbers between 1 and 2 than there are natural numbers proving that the infinity of real numbers is a different, larger kind of infinity than the infinity of the natural numbers
This reminds me of a one of Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion. The following is from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:
Suppose a very fast runner—such as mythical Atalanta—needs to run for the bus. Clearly before she reaches the bus stop she must run half-way, as Aristotle says. There’s no problem there; supposing a constant motion it will take her 1/2 the time to run half-way there and 1/2 the time to run the rest of the way. Now she must also run half-way to the half-way point—i.e., a 1/4 of the total distance—before she reaches the half-way point, but again she is left with a finite number of finite lengths to run, and plenty of time to do it. And before she reaches 1/4 of the way she must reach 1/2 of 1/4=1/8 of the way; and before that a 1/16; and so on. There is no problem at any finite point in this series, but what if the halving is carried out infinitely many times? The resulting series contains no first distance to run, for any possible first distance could be divided in half, and hence would not be first after all. However it does contain a final distance, namely 1/2 of the way; and a penultimate distance, 1/4 of the way; and a third to last distance, 1/8 of the way; and so on. Thus the series of distances that Atalanta is required to run is: …, then 1/16 of the way, then 1/8 of the way, then 1/4 of the way, and finally 1/2 of the way (for now we are not suggesting that she stops at the end of each segment and then starts running at the beginning of the next—we are thinking of her continuous run being composed of such parts). And now there is a problem, for this description of her run has her travelling an infinite number of finite distances, which, Zeno would have us conclude, must take an infinite time, which is to say it is never completed. And since the argument does not depend on the distance or who or what the mover is, it follows that no finite distance can ever be traveled, which is to say that all motion is impossible. (Note that the paradox could easily be generated in the other direction so that Atalanta must first run half way, then half the remaining way, then half of that and so on, so that she must run the following endless sequence of fractions of the total distance: 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8, then ….)
Great explanation by the way.
I get that, but it's kinda the same as saying "I dare you!" ; "I dare you to infinity!" ; "nuh uh, I dare you to double infinity!"
Sure it's more theoretically, but not really functionally more.
It's like when you say something is full. Double full doesn't mean anything, but there's still a difference between full of marbles and full of sand depending what you're trying to deduce. There's functional applications for this comparison. We could theoretically say there's twice as much sand than marbles in "full" if were interested in "counting".
The same way we have this idea of full, we have the idea of infinity which can affect certain mathematics. Full doesn't tell you the size of the container, it's a concept. A bucket twice as large is still full, so there are different kinds of full like we have different kinds of infinity.
When talking about infinity, basically everything is theoretical
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It's weird but the amount of natural numbers is "countable" if you had infinite time and patience, you could count "1,2,3..." to infinity. It is the countable infinity.
The amount of numbers between 1 and 2 is not countable. No matter what strategies you use, there will always be numbers that you miss. It's like counting the numbers of points in a line, you can always find more even at infinity. It is the uncountable infinity.
I greatly recommand you the hilbert's infinite hotel problem, you can find videos about it on youtube, it covers this question.
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Basically, if two quantities are the same, you can pair them off. It's possible to prove you cannot pair off all real numbers with all integers. (It works for integers and all rational numbers, though)
How many infinities you accept as meaningful is a matter of preference, really. You don't even have to accept basic infinity or normal really big numbers as real, if you don't want to. Accepting "all of them" tends to lead to contradictions; not accepting, like, 3 is just weird and obtuse.
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In one of Vsauce's videos he suggested a good visualisation of the number of unique shuffles of a deck of cards that was originally suggested by Scott Czepiel.
Imagine you have a friend that is shuffling a deck of cards and ordering the deck uniquely every second. Also imagine that every action you take is completed instantaneously.
You stand on the equator. Wait a billion years. Then take a step. Wait another billion years. Then take another step. Continue this until you have got back to where you started.
Then take 0.02ml from the Pacific Ocean. Wait another billion years. Then take a step. Continue until you get back to where you started and take another drop out of the Pacific Ocean.
Repeat this process until the entire Pacific Ocean is empty. Then place a sheet of paper on the ground at sea level.
Refill the ocean and repeat - wait a billion years between steps as you walk around the equator, take a drop of water out of the Pacific Ocean every time you get back to where you started and place a piece of paper on the ground in a tower before refilling the Pacific Ocean and repeating.
When the tower of paper reaches the sun do you think that your friend has managed to produce each, unique ordering of the cards?
Nope! Not even close...
If you were to repeat all of the above 3000 times, then he'd be pretty much done.
There is a legally permissable organic contamination amount in any food, especially if it's processed. Bugs, hair, nail clippings, dirt, mouse shit, whatever - all ground up and processed asking with the product. And it can be in almost anything, including that one you really like.
everyone makes mistakes :)
Every study performed on insect counts has concluded that overall insect populations are declining, though there is not complete global coverage of data. One study in Germany found that the flying insect population had decreased by 75% from 1990 to 2015.
A 2019 survey of 24 entomologists working on six continents found that on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the worst, all the scientists rated the severity of the insect decline crisis as being between 8–10.
Nothing scares me quite as much as the thought that I might live to see global ecological collapse.
My younger friend asked why some old cars had a piece of plexiglass on the front of the hood.
I had to explain that thirty years ago, in this area, you would drive through enough bugs in a day to cover your windscreen. The bug shield would help deflect them. It was a pretty grim lunch after that.
I remember a road trip to Poland to my grandparents place. The trip took around 10h by car over the german and polish highway.
On the first trip the car windshield was plastered in little dead flying insects.
The las time we went there (about 10 years ago) there was not even close to the amount on the windshield.
If you think about it, when was the last time you saw a lighting bug. I've never seen a firefly in my entire life despite living in a country that had native species.
As a kid, I would see hundreds of them around bushes and trees. Now I see one or two per summer.
But that’s all gods plan, right?
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If you separate the halves of your brain, they can operate relatively fine independently of each other, each controlling roughly half of the body. When one half does something, and the other half is asked why they did it, the other half will make up a plausible reason why they just did that action. There's a theory that this is basically how your brain works all the time, just guessing why it did things, and potentially with multiple processes happening in relative isolation that aren't consciously aware of each other.
Fun fact: your left eye doesn’t go only to your right brain. The left half of your field of vision in your left eye goes to your right brain. Same with the right half of your left eye, and your right eye is split up similarly. How nuts is that?
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There is a possibility that the Higgs field isn't at it's lowest energy state, and that a random quantum tunneling event could drag the Higgs field to that lower state. In this unsettling scenario, a bubble pops into existence somewhere in the universe. Inside the bubble, the laws of physics are wildly different than they are outside the bubble. The bubble expands at the speed of light, eventually taking over the entire universe. Galaxies drift apart, atoms can’t hold themselves together, and the ways that particles interact are fundamentally changed. Whatever form the universe takes after this event certainly wouldn’t be hospitable for humans.
So spontaneous instant death. Not scarier than an aneurysm.
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Each year, is about a 1/2 of 1 percent the sun will give out a flare so big, it will not only destroy all power distribution to the half of the earth exposed, and destroy the internet there, but cut off food distribution, starving most of the population in any county . Last time it happened was in the 1800s but no stuff to destroy then. And food was local.
It would be years before things were normal . Our current setup is literally doomed to failure for a random half of the earth
There was a bit of tech around at the time - telegraph. The flare sparked fires in telegraph offices and shocked some operators. As in electric shock, not a big fright, though no doubt also that. Some operators disconnected their batteries and were able to communicate by the auroral current alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
The descriptions of the aurora are wild.
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and Bostrom's simulation hypothesis and Pascal's wager, all subject to serious validity threats. All of these thought experiments are unfalsifiable. They can all be explained with different theories. They all rely on circular reasoning. They all anthropomorphize entities that maybe don't resemble humans at all. They all fall for the mind projection fallacy. They all are prey to selection bias, because they cherry-pick scenarios among countless alternatives.
Gamma ray bursts from celestial events such as a supernova. One of these - GRB 221009 released 1,000 times more energy in 5 minutes than our Sun has emitted throughout its 4.5 billion year life. GRBs from different galaxies have set off detectors on earth designed to detect nuclear explosions. One of these in our galaxy, pointed directly at earth could end all life on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
There are about the same number of bacteria cells in your body as human cells, and some of the bacteria in your intestines, 'gut biome', can affect your preferences for certain foods effectively controlling your mind.
A 'reference man' (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria,
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19136
Is eating behavior manipulated by the gastrointestinal microbiota? Evolutionary pressures and potential mechanisms:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201400071
That probably freaks me out just as much as time passing not being fundamental under B time indicated by general relativity or free will being illusory and the universe is more likely deterministic.
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Microbiology can be so much fun!
Streptococcus pyogenes causes a flesh-eating disease (necrotizing fasciitis). This species of bacteria releases toxins that kill living tissue, so you better make sure that paper cut doesn’t get infected.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is famous for a bunch of different pandemics over the centuries. If you thought covid was fun, imagine coughing up blood.
Clostridium botulinum is special, because it produces a very spicy toxin, so you don’t even have to ingest any living cells or spores of C. botulinum to get killed by it. If you do, you can even have your very own toxin factory inside you.
Vibrio cholerae is another classic responsible for numerous pandemics. This one is a bit different, because it involves lethal amounts of diarrhea.
Oh, and the scary bit? There are people who don’t believe bacteria or viruses exist. They actively oppose taking measures against these things. Humans can be truly horrifying at times.
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