• Fondots@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The book is over half a century old now, so the numbers may be a bit off, but this sort of conversation always reminds me of this quote

      “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.”

      -Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

      • raresbears@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        1 year ago

        Kinda reminds me of this

        Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

    • hrimfaxi_work@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      We’re even older than that! There is compelling evidence that Homo Sapiens has existed for 400k years, and there’s unprovocative evidence that we’ve been around for 250k years or so.

    • TempleSquare@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      More adults are alive now than adults who died.

      Most of humanity didn’t survive to adulthood.

      • Chainweasel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Which is why the average life expectancy was in the 30s forever. If you made it past childhood you were likely to make it to old age, but the infant mortality rate was through the roof which brought the average down to less than half of what it is today. People regularly lived into their 70s-80s before, but the average of 30 years makes people think that’s all the longer people normally lived.

  • Stillhart@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    “The days get shorter in the winter.”

    Actually winter begins on the shortest day of the year so the days are getting longer in the winter.

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    In Shrek 2 Pinocchio is trying to avoid lying by using double negatives. He knows where Shrek is. He says “I don’t know where he’s not.” This is actually a lie (though his nose doesn’t grow). If he knew where Shrek was he would know everywhere Shrek isn’t. You can’t just randomly throw negatives into a sentence and expect it to be a double negative.

    Edit: It was Shrek the Third, not Shrek 2.

    • sunbytes@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I guess it depends on if the nose grows with untrue information, or lies.

      Because if it’s lies all he needs to do is THINK it’s the truth and his nose won’t grow.

      If his nose grows because the information is not true, then this is one hell of a power. You could get him to theorise on the meaning of life.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        The intent of the scene was clear. He’s just trying to say a lot of double negatives and be confusing. It’s not a moment of world building for the mechanics of Pinocchio’s nose lol

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        That’s because of friction and air resistance which are still forces. Repeat the same experiment in outer space where there’s no atmosphere or stuff in the way and you won’t see that

        There’s even things like ion engines that take advantage of that by producing tiny amounts of thrust but run over long amounts of time to build up quite a bit of speed

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster

        • redballooon@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Having taken not only Highschool physics but also university physics courses I know that.

          That doesn’t change that for most people in most environments the sentence “if an object isn’t pushed it’ll stop” is, in fact, true.

          It becomes false only if you change the context, but I would argue, if you know all the facts and scenarios, that’s willful misunderstanding.

          • Sethayy@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Ngl saying it isnt pushed vs isnt acted on by a force are entirely difference scenarios, a push is a subset of forces (as im sure you know with your uni courses right ;)

            Else newtons laws would be incorrect on a macro scale, which to say at the least would be… concerning

        • redballooon@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          A statement so general that it is useless.high school physics does so many simplifications that it’s only about very specific experiments in real life, but is generally not very accurate.

          • Sethayy@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Statistical approximations are a large part of complex systems, such as the summation of billions of forces of atoms.

            Id argue given the insane ammount of moving parts, a simplication as easy to understand as Newtonian mechanics is extremely accurate, at least compared to the limited input data

            • redballooon@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              We’re talking here about the consideration of friction and air resistance…

              • Sethayy@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Oh my I really overestimated your standpoint there, your argument is simply the existence of eletrostatic forces? Cause I can gaurentee the original comment takes that into consideration, under the term ‘forces’ - highschool or not such is true until the limits of Newtonian mechanics.

                Simplified, if something has no forces acting on it, it also has no electrostatic resistance (aka friction), and will follow newtons 2nd law - remain at rest or in motion, as the original comment stated.

                I thought you were debating why the comment didnt take quantum effects into consideration lol

                • redballooon@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  Oh my, the level to which nitpickers will go… my point is that the “false” statement from OC is in fact true for most people in their daily life. Try to ride a bike to understand what they experience.

                  It’s not even necessary to qualify that statement, unless you are discussing situations on earth vs situations in space. That’s why OC is false imo, because he takes a common understanding out of its context.

                  The statement is false in space travel and planet mechanics, which most people don’t do daily, and don’t need to consider, or if you look at it from the point of the physics book, which in this case conveniently ignores the situation most people are in most of their lifes: on earth where friction and air resistance are a reality.

                  My whole point is this context shift is willful misunderstanding.

          • reliv3@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            As a high school physics teacher, if this is the hill you’re willing to die on, then you neither understood the content in your high school physics class nor your university physics class. Newton’s 2nd law is generally accurate in most scenarios even without simplifications.

              • reliv3@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Yes, like you stopping to peddle your bike…

                A simple force diagram and application of newton’s 2nd law predicts the bike should accelerate to the left while it’s velocity is towards the right. This means the bike should slow down.

  • Neon@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    The pyramids were already hundreds of years old when the last Woolly Mammoth died.

  • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    I expect downvotes and deletion.

    Left vs right wing politics. Both are the same. The real conflict is between powerful and powerless. Both sides claim to be fighting against this, while pitting the middle class against either the upper (left) or lower (right) classes.

    • novibe@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      The “left” in the US is really actually center-right. And the “right” is far-right. So yes, both the “left” and “right” in the US are basically the same. Neoliberalism is just fascism with a smart suit and empty platitudes after all.

      But saying the left and right are the same when talking about political ideology (and not the political landscape of the USA) is extremely wrong.

      The right wants to conserve existing power structures or revert to previous ones. The left wants to dismantle power structures and bring about egalitarianism.

      That is the dichotomy. To the right hierarchy, to the left egalitarianism.

      The USA has been the subject of the most powerful and long lasting propaganda machine and psyops in history.

    • glimse@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’ll get downvoted because it’s an extremely cold Enlightened Centrist take. You’re cherry picking one, albeit major, thing they have in common and ignoring the difference between the policies they enact.

      Yes at the end of the day the real battle is absolutely between the 99% and 1% but to pretend that there is no discernable difference between the two major parties is asinine.

    • Ilikecheese@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It depends on if you’re talking about left vs right politicians or left vs right political viewpoints. If you’re talking about viewpoints, I absolutely disagree with what you’re saying. If you’re talking about politicians, especially in the US, then sadly, you’re mostly correct. The left say they want to make tons of changes but when push comes to shove, there’s enough money in politics to stop any real changes from happening no matter which party is supposedly in charge.

      • RustedSwitch@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would add that this is only true in general, and on a sliding scale. There are some pure of heart on both sides. True conservatives that mean well, and true progressives.