π mph is roughly e knots.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Emoticon :) has etymology stemming from emotion + icon. Tis from the 80s, early computer stuff
Emoji 😊 is japanese, from 絵文字 which is like, drawing + character, basically. It's a word MUCH older than computing.
False cognates. Sound similar, similar function, nothing to do with each other.
There's a :) in a typewritten cookbook I have from the 40s. I don't know how widespread smileys were back then, but they existed.
My favourite false cognate is the plural ending -s in French and English. The English one has Germanic roots, while the French one come from Latin accusative plural -as/-os. They are unrelated etymologically.
After looking it up I have to correct myself, the Germanic plural - s also come from the accusative plural
The people who built the stone towns of Gobekli Tepe and Carahan Tepe in Anatolia in Turkey, built and lived their villages so long ago, that the very first historical civilization recognized as such, with cities and writing - the ancient Sumerians - are closer to us in time than to those hunter/gatherer people, who lived near the ~~Atlas~~ Taurus Mountains foothills and the rivers and tributaries that eventually merge into the Eufrates further downstream.
The time between the last living stegosaurus and the last living tyrannosaurus is greater that the time between the last tyrannosaurus and today.
Almost all web traffic now uses the utf-8 encoding, a clever hack which works because ascii is a seven-bit code but web traffic uses 8-bit bytes.
- If the first bit is 0, treat the byte as ascii.
- if the first bit is 1, treat the byte as part of a multi-byte unicode character.
multi-byte characters in utf-8 can officially be up to four bytes long, with 11 of those 32 bits used for tracking the size of the multi-byte block. That leaves 2^21 code points available, about two million in total, easily enough for every alphabet you could need to write on a website, and all without breaking ascii.
Oh, I wondered about why there weren't more characters in the ASCII code set.
yep! the ascii standard was originally invented for teletypewriters, and includes four 'blocks' of 32 codes each, for 128 in total, so it only uses seven bits per code.
the first block, hex 00 - 1F, contains control codes for the typewriter. stuff like "newline", "backspace", and "ring bell" all go in here.
The second block has the digits are in order, from hex 30 = '0' all the way to hex 39 = '9',
The uppercase alphabet starts at hex 41 = 'A', and exactly one block later, the lowercase alphabet starts at hex 61 = 'a'. This means their binary codes are 100 0001 and 110 0001, differering only in a single bit! So you can easily convert between upper and lowercase ascii by flipping that bit.
The remaining space in the last three blocks is filled with various punctuation marks. I'm not sure if these are in any particular order.
The final ascii code, 7F, is reserved for "delete", because its binary representation is 111 1111, perfect for "deleting" data on a punch card by punching over it.
Very neat!
Honestly literally anything about QR codes. Those things are insane. Did you know there's a very obvious 01010101010101 pattern in it if you know where to look?
(look in-between the paper)
Yeah, timing marks! There's a few of them. So neat
...mother fucker... That's neat!
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The natural logarithm number e is the most efficient base, Benford's law shows that a collection of numbers where their logarithms are uniformly and randomly distributed, the probability of the first digit being 1 of any of the numbers is around 30%, and most humans can learn echolocation with some training.
Two from me:
People took the London tube to the last public hanging - https://londonist.com/london/undergroundtoapublichanging
The University of Oxford (1096) is older than the Aztec empire (1345)
Your ~~mom~~ moon is exactly at the right distance to give full eclipse of the sun
Wombats take square shits.
Goats have square pupils. It's like the banana and the human hand
Umm
In that we deliberately selected it to be that size and shape?
There are more grains of sand in the ocean than there are stars in our solar system.
if you like big numbers: there are significantly more ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards than there are atoms in the observable universe.
Every shuffle of the deck is almost certainly unique since folks been shuffling cards.
edit: ahh nice someone posted this exact fact at the top level lower down!
There are about 8x10^67 ways to shuffle a deck of cards, and about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe, so there are actually far, far more atoms.
thank you for the correction!
There's more than one grain of sand in the ocean????!?!?!?1one
I'm pretty happy about that. It's warm enough.
The firealarm speaks Welsh
what
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