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What's something that's taken for granted that occasionally makes you think, wait wtf? (feddit.uk)

submitted 8 hours ago by manicdave@feddit.uk to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For example, Britain's national mapping organisation's brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It's called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that's because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.

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[–] FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 11 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotional that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn't work? How much that would suck? It's amazing that it's like.. a thing.

Sight too (obviously, now that we're thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be of you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I'm sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that's emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That's weeiird.

[–] Tower@lemm.ee 1 points 5 hours ago

And because everyone's glob of neurons is independent from each other, we have no way of conclusively determining if everyone's glob interprets things the same way.

[–] manicdave@feddit.uk 3 points 7 hours ago

And yet on top of that, humans have worked out a way to send that information everywhere in a fraction of a second.