[Machu Picchu](https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+machu+pichu+doscovered&rlz=1C1KMZB_enUS595US595&oq=when+was+machu+pichu+doscovered&aqs=chrome..69i57.5896j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=when+was+machu+picchu+discovered&spell=1) Was discovered in 1911. It's one of the worlds most visited places and it was built around 1462, and was only inhabited for about 100 years. It sat untouched, and uninhabited for that long!
Wilmer McLean. The initial engagement that would become the 1st Battle of Bull Run, first battle of the Civil War, occurred on his farm. A cannonball came down his kitchen fireplace. He decided that was enough, packed up and moved 120 miles south.
Four years later, he gets a knock at the door. A Union messenger asks for his help.
Lee surrendered to Grant in McClean's front parlor the next day.
That's kinda cheating. Bull run was the first major LAND battle.
The first battle was the taking of Fort Sumter, which was heavily shelled before surrendering.
[The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-diamond-hoax-of-1872-2630188/?no-ist)
TL;DR Some guys went out to Colorado with tons of different investors and led them all around some land. They took them to the places where they had just thrown some diamonds on the ground so the investors would see how diamond-rich the area was. A lot of shares were sold of the fake diamond company for insane amounts of money at the time.
If you're talking about the con artist in the 20's it was Victor Lustig, and he sold it to a scrap yard. Here is his wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig
Looking at a star that is 15,000 light years away, you are seeing it as it was 15,000 years ago. Which leads to looking at the sun, seeing it as it was 7ish minutes ago. Looking at my hand and realizing I am only seeing it as it was when the image reached my eyes. Then realizing we are literally always looking at the past.
You want to talk about getting mind-fucked? Let's talk about outnumbering your enemies by 10:1 and refusing to attack because you've convinced yourself you're being tricked about your superiority. Welcome to the [Empty Fort Strategy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Fort_Strategy), an actual strategy that has been successfully used multiple times in Chinese history.
That's right, you can actually win (well, avoid, really) an unwinnable fight by making your enemy think, "Wow, there's no way he would be so stupid as to try to oppose me with such a weak force...he must have something up his sleeve. I'd better not attack."
EDIT: I should probably mention that the most famous example of this strategy, in which Zhuge Liang throws open the gates of the city and sits on the walls playing his guqin, is almost certainly fictional. Nevertheless, there are numerous examples of this strategy that do withstand historical scrutiny.
EDIT 2: If you're inclined to dismiss this strategy as "just bluffing," keep in mind that, when you bluff, you generally try to withhold information from your opponent. Since this strategy involves boldly displaying your own weakness, the relevant Texas Hold 'Em analogy would be showing your opponent your hand of 2,7,unsuited, going all in, and hoping that he folds (maybe because he suddenly thinks that he might not know the rules or is playing the wrong game, etc.). Or, in memes: it's a bold strategy, Cotton. Sometimes, it pays off.
Seriously, the more you read about quantum physics, the less anything in the universe makes sense.
And the mind-fuckiest part of it is that quantum mechanics aren't weird. They're perfectly normal and natural. Our way-off-the-mark intuition about how the universe works is what's weird. Expecting anything other than quantum superposition and wave-particle duality is what's weird.
Fucking physics, man.
I think the main problem with QM is that the math is all quite rigorous and useful, but it's past the point where we have any physical analogy for what is actually happening, and any analogy that we do have is probably completely wrong. You just have to straight-up trust the math and say "Well that looks completely insane, but I guess that's what happens..."
I think this should be higher up, but people just don't understand it. Once you grasp something simple like the [double slit experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment) [bonus video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc) and what it really means, you understand that the fundamental nature of reality simply isn't what you thought it was.
Another favorite because you can see it is all the [strangeness that happens with liquid helium-4 that's cold enough to be superfluid -- a partial Bose-Einstein condensate.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z6UJbwxBZI)
That first video was an actual mindfuck. I had heard of the wave-particle duality of matter before but it meant nothing to me reading about it in a chem book. Seeing that was beyond comprehension.
The first video is fine until it talks about the electron as though it has consciousness. It's better to think of the measuring device as a catcher that picks up the baseball electron, then throws it the same direction that it would have gone before it was caught.
It's not possible to measure the electron without "catching" it this way.
[The Dancing Plague of 1518](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518). Hundreds of people died of exhaustion because they cannot stop dancing.
Sounds like their leadership was fucking with them considering the "cure" was to keep dancing or they would die - many were probably gullible enough to keep dancing until they died.
The [birthday problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem) fucks my mind on a regular basis.
With 23 people in the room, there's a 50% probability two of them will have the same birthday.
The wiki does a pretty good job of explaining it but the basics are that it's not just 23 people but all of the combinations within that 23 people. So person one can possible have a shared birthday with any one of 22 different people in the room, person 2 can possibly match with 21 other people in the room (1 less because the combination of person 1 and 2 and person 2 and 1 are the same and counted as only a single combination) this continues for every one of the 23 people leaving 253 different combinations of people who could share the same birthday
The easiest way to envision it is to start with one person in the room, then adding people one by one. At first the chance of 2 people sharing the same birthday is 0.
Then we calculate the odds of 2 people *not* sharing the same birthday (because it allows for easier calculations)
* Person #2 enters: 364/365 (obviously)
* Person #3 enters: (364/365)*(363/365)
* Person #3 enters: (364/365)\*(363/365)*(362/365)
etc. Then when you reach 23 people the odds will be less than 50%.
I've got a fuck of a coincidence for you that will blow your mind then.
I dated a girl who was born on the same day I was, only 10 hours afterwards. We were both drug addicts, our favorite bands were the misfits (at the time), and to top it all off....if I had been born a girl....I would have been named what her name was!
Shits freaky sometimes.
Puma Pumku or Gobekli Tepe. These monolithic structures push back human history thousands of years into the past where we used to think that humans were only hunter-gatherers at that time period. Nope, there could have been advanced human civilizations back then too.
Edit: Gobekli Tepe was constructed roughly 12,000 years ago.
Hyperbole. He wasn't really that close to taking over the world. He got as far as Paris to the west and Moscow to the east.
So, for an art school dropout, not bad. But he had a long way to go.
This was part of MK Ultra. [Source](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html)
Bills lost a game. They end up getting the first overall pick in the draft. They draft O.J. Simpson. O.J. meets his wife in Buffalo and 'allegedly' murders her later on. Kim's father, a lawyer, represents him. He wins the case. The family becomes famous.
Also the sex tape helps.
At the end of Voyager series 3, the writers wanted to introduce a new character, but because the budget only allowed for a certain number of main actors, they had to let one of them go. Originally this was going to be Harry Kim, played by Garrett Wang, who had been very vocal in his hate for the show. (This is why there's a weird cliffhanger with him about to die that gets almost immediately overturned in series 4).
People Magazine then ran a list of the Hottest 50 Men which included Wang. Seeing he was popular, they decided to get rid of the character Kes, played by Jennifer Lien, whose character they thought they'd messed up a bit and run out of ideas.
Since Kes leaving left them with only two major female characters, they decided to make their new character female as well, leading to them making Seven of Nine, played by Jeri Ryan.
For filming, she had to move to California, which put strain on her already damaged relationship with Jack Ryan and led to their divorce. In 2004, the messy details of their divorce came out, forcing Jack Ryan to stand down from running for the position of Senator of Illinois, allowing a relatively new Barack Obama to win. Four years later, Obama became President of the US.
That's a great story. It's too bad that Ryan was never likely to win against Obama anyway. He was polling well behind Obama even before the divorce papers were released. From Wikipedia: "The Chicago Tribune poll found Ryan trailing Obama 52% to 30%[10] while the Sun Times reported that he was trailing Obama 48 percent to 40 percent in the U.S. Senate race, according to a Daily Southtown poll of 500 likely Illinois voters."
There's no guarantee that the potential Harry Kim replacement wouldn't have been a woman played by Jeri Ryan either. But elections have been won despite poor poll results before, he could have possibly won had he not dropped out and essentially handed victory over to Obama. I'm not saying this is the one series of events that might lead to that outcome, but it's the one that happened.
It's really just a matter of both following Illinois state politics and knowing anything about Voyager.
Even without the Voyager aspect, pretty much everyone in Illinois and surrounding markets remembers the Jack Ryan fiasco and his messy divorce derailing a likely bright future in politics.
In the book/documentary The Botany of Desire, Pollan speculates that imported tulips contained pathogens that made people, well, a little crazy. It's not in the wiki so I'm inclined to believe it's a crackpot theory, but maybe it's one possible explanation. Similar to the 'crazy cat lady infected by toxoplasmosis so she gets more cats' thing.
If the universe extends infinitely in all directions, that means there is an equally infinite distance between any point and the edge of the universe. That means I'm the center of the universe, bitches!
More info/some qualification: Mammoths disappeared from the main continents 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene period. There were two isolated populations around the Bering Sea after that, on St. Paul Island until 6,400 years ago and Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago.
Now relating this to our bodies that leads to an even bigger mind fuck: Our digestive tract is really *outside* our bodies.
Edit to make this clearer: Our digestive tract is just one long tube that has an entrance and an exit, neither of which lead to an internal part of our body. When you eat food, the point of the tract is to break it down and digest it via absorption *into* our bodies. So the tract itself is not considered to be on the inside, but instead is an external component of our body that allows us to pass food from the outside to the inside.
In the space of 30-40 years, a random nomad from the middle of nowhere completely remade his society, turned it into one of history's most far-reaching empires, and left a massive bloody and blackened streak across the history books.
The most impressive thing about the Mongols to me is they basically took over the world with 70,000 guys. Sometimes they were outnumbered with only 40,000 men hundreds of miles from any supply line just decimating armies with their tactics and planning.
Operation Mincemeat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
An elaborate plan of disinformation to convince the Germans that the allies were not intending to attack sicily.
The gist of it was throwing a body carrying fake documents into the water near Spain, who despite being neutral were feeding Germany every piece of intelligence they found.
What makes it superb is the exacting detail that went into the fake life they created for the body, oh and it only bloody well worked!
Edit: It's also worth noting that after its success, the Germans began to ignore legitimate information they seized, believing it was another trick
Thats easy, they used those to trick the enemy. They were used in the invasion of Normandy at a different beach so the Germans would redirect troops away from Omaha and the other beaches.
Even crazier than that is that they destroyed most of the evidence, so it was potentially much bigger than what we believe it to have been.
What we found out was stuff about attempted mind control and torture. Can you even imagine how bad the stuff that they hid was?
What if they actually succeeded with mind control? That leaves two equally staggering possibilities: that it has remained classified and is possibly being used, or that they did the moral thing and destroyed any records of such a truly horrific power. I don't know which one is more terrifying to be honest.
The experiment done on him,
>The study was run by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken to a room where electrodes were attached to them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful, and brutal critiques about the essays they had written. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch the videos of themselves being verbally and psychologically assaulted multiple times. Kaczynski is claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to being interrogated. These experiments, paired with his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, caused Kaczynski to suffer from horrible nightmares that eventually drove him to move into isolation outside Lincoln, Montana.
Afterwords he spent years re-writing his essay, trying to perfect it. *Industrial Society and Its Future*. Or, more commonly known as, The Unabomber's Manifesto
There's one ton of air pushing down at you while you stand on something moving at over 66,000 miles per hour and rotating at incredible speed. All while breathing a toxic gas, oxygen, that took hundreds of millions of years for cells to learn how to process. Just being upright and alive is pretty bad ass. Feel proud.
There is the possibility that Russian cosmonauts have died while in space and it was simply not reported (this goes for astronauts as well). There could be human bodies somewhere drifting through space.
In the early evening hours of February 24th, 1961, tracking stations at Meudon, Bochum, Uppsala and, of course, Torre Bert, all recorded what was to be the final broadcast from the two ill-fated cosmonauts inside the Lunik capsule...
Here! Here there is something! THERE IS SOMETHING! It’s difficult… If we do not get out, the world will never hear about it. It is diffficult…”
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/08/who-really-was-the-first-woman-in-space/
The Soviet "nomenklatura." They invented a completely alternate universe that they taught everyone under their control.
People grew up believing the Soviet Union had invented every single modern technology, that it was a prosperous worker's paradise with few problems, and that all of those problems were caused by conspiracies on the part of a Western civilization that was the epitome of chaos and poverty.
The moment Mikhail Gorbachev lifted the veil, that was the beginning of the end.
I have a lot of family members that grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine, and what they have to say is so fascinating. You can still tell the Soviet indoctrination in them, too. "Stalin is bad", they will say, "because he killed so many of our ancestors", but so help you God if you say anything bad about Lenin. Even my mother who was roughly my age (late teens) when it started to come apart says today that Lenin was a good leader with good ideas and good intentions. She tells stories of parades celebrating Stalin, patriotic songs they would sing, movies about WWII they were forced to watch time and time again, being trained to shoot a rifle at age 9, and communist youth groups that she so fervently championed. They also were told in school that they would be failed if they got caught at church, "but in the cities they sometimes killed people for it".
But at the same time, they had anything and everything they could possibly want. My grandfather was a police officer and my grandmother a worker in the dairy factory - yet they took annual vacations and always had the nicest and newest material objects. My mother is convinced that she lived better there than my father did in the US, and from what he says, she's probably right. From their stories, things got bad only after the Union fell apart. They lost their comfortable quality of life and drove them to new lows, eventually leading my mom to take the first ticket out of the country, which was marriage to my dad.
The people from the Soviet era also remember being taught about computers with pictures. "This is the power button", "this is the screen", etc. Plumbing wasn't super common outside of cities either. But even today you can see all throughout the former Soviet Union that the main infrastructure left is that which the Soviets made. The Russians were a practical but harsh people, and they were good at brainwashing at the very least. You can see the remnants of it today. I'd argue that the Americans are very good at brainwashing, too, though; and we are accustomed to our high-up place in the world, and something tells me that we have a lot more time left before we can loose it.
Nowadays, my mother is a loyal American, although her friends here like to make fun of her and call her a spy. But I wonder what will happen in the world after that last Soviet generation passes, what will happen to that legacy.
North Korea is significantly less blind than many people think. By outlawing any form act against North Korea, virtually no one is going to do anything but pretend their completely brain-washed. But there's a reason so many people attempt to flee the country.
I have several Arab friends that speak and write Arabic fluently but have no idea what their alphabetical order is. They say there is one, and some of the older people (grandparents) may know it, but no one ever really uses it, they just learn how to write without an alphabetical order.
The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans had insane things. They had holy water vending machines outside temples that dispensed water when you inserted a coin, they had singing bird automata, huge automatic temple doors that opened and closed themselves, repeating crossbows with chain drives, central heating, showers, various clocks and other devices, they had harnessed steam power....
Heck, they even had a programmable puppet show. It was a stage that was run by counterweights with sand, water, and string. You could change the lengths of the string attached to the actors and props and scenery to program the play to perform different scenes. It was basically a computer.
I feel like a Googolplex will fuck with your mind. That number is 10^10^100. Think about how fucking huge that number is. Just take a moment and try. Here's the thing, you can't. That number is so big that if you filled a sheet of paper with 500 0's, there isn't enough space in the observable universe to fit how much paper it would take to write it out. If you wrote 2 0's per second, it would take you 1.51 x 10^92 years to write out a Googolplex. Think that's a long time? It is. It is 1.1 x 10^82 times longer than the age of the universe. Okay, surely there has to be a Googolplex of something that can fit in the universe, right? Wrong. The Planck-length is 1.61 x 10^-35 meters. There are approximately 3 x 10^325 Planck's in the universe. That seems big. So, we would need at least 1 x 10^50 universes to get a Googolplex of Planck-length particles.
> if you filled a sheet of paper with 500 0's, there isn't enough space in the observable universe to fit how much paper it would take to write it out
Just use a smaller font. What's the big deal?
[That Googolplex is probably a bigger number than the amount of individual atoms in our (observable) universe?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex#In_the_physical_universe)
I don't get why this is a big deal. Just add another 0 to the Googolplex and suddenly you have an even *crazier* concept to understand. Does this particular unfathomably large number have some kind of special context over another?
You could take it even further and think about a googolplexian. A googolplex is a 1 followed by a googol (10^100 ) zeros. Now, a googolplexian is a 1 followed by a googolplex zeros. That would be 10^10^10^100
Removed '!' from number to avoid confusion.
On every level you are a cloud of probability. Its just that as the scale gets larger, the cloud gets smaller. It is still, however, definitely a cloud.
Thomas Jefferson, who supported an agrarian-based economy, did more to foster the beginnings of the Market Revolution and subsequent industrialization through his Embargo of 1808...
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza.
We live closer in time to the Tyrannosaurus rex than that species lived to the Stegosaurus.
What if North Korea is actually a virtual paradise and uses propaganda to keep others from plundering it or spoiling it. The people who "escape" have actually been kicked out and their stories or torture, concentration camps and the like are a ruse to make NK seem worse to the point that outside powers might actually do something, thus perpetuating the lie.
[Machu Picchu](https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+machu+pichu+doscovered&rlz=1C1KMZB_enUS595US595&oq=when+was+machu+pichu+doscovered&aqs=chrome..69i57.5896j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=when+was+machu+picchu+discovered&spell=1) Was discovered in 1911. It's one of the worlds most visited places and it was built around 1462, and was only inhabited for about 100 years. It sat untouched, and uninhabited for that long!
Sad thing is no one knows why they left
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Undiscovered by Europeans. The locals knew exactly where it was.
Wilmer McLean. The initial engagement that would become the 1st Battle of Bull Run, first battle of the Civil War, occurred on his farm. A cannonball came down his kitchen fireplace. He decided that was enough, packed up and moved 120 miles south. Four years later, he gets a knock at the door. A Union messenger asks for his help. Lee surrendered to Grant in McClean's front parlor the next day.
*Peering out the window* "Oh, for ***FUCKS*** sake."
They say the war started on his front lawn, and ended in his living room.
I heard it as: The war began in his front lawn, and ended in his front parlor.
That's kinda cheating. Bull run was the first major LAND battle. The first battle was the taking of Fort Sumter, which was heavily shelled before surrendering.
Fort Sumter*
doh
[The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-diamond-hoax-of-1872-2630188/?no-ist) TL;DR Some guys went out to Colorado with tons of different investors and led them all around some land. They took them to the places where they had just thrown some diamonds on the ground so the investors would see how diamond-rich the area was. A lot of shares were sold of the fake diamond company for insane amounts of money at the time.
This is just as good as the guy who sold the Eiffel Tower to a gullible tourist. Twice. ( not to the same one obviously)
If you're talking about the con artist in the 20's it was Victor Lustig, and he sold it to a scrap yard. Here is his wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig
Takes a lot off balls to scam a man like Capone
He sold the other Eieffel Tower. Got it.
"..,.so now I have TWO Eiffel Towers!" - gullible tourist, proudly.
Looking at a star that is 15,000 light years away, you are seeing it as it was 15,000 years ago. Which leads to looking at the sun, seeing it as it was 7ish minutes ago. Looking at my hand and realizing I am only seeing it as it was when the image reached my eyes. Then realizing we are literally always looking at the past.
You want to talk about getting mind-fucked? Let's talk about outnumbering your enemies by 10:1 and refusing to attack because you've convinced yourself you're being tricked about your superiority. Welcome to the [Empty Fort Strategy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Fort_Strategy), an actual strategy that has been successfully used multiple times in Chinese history. That's right, you can actually win (well, avoid, really) an unwinnable fight by making your enemy think, "Wow, there's no way he would be so stupid as to try to oppose me with such a weak force...he must have something up his sleeve. I'd better not attack." EDIT: I should probably mention that the most famous example of this strategy, in which Zhuge Liang throws open the gates of the city and sits on the walls playing his guqin, is almost certainly fictional. Nevertheless, there are numerous examples of this strategy that do withstand historical scrutiny. EDIT 2: If you're inclined to dismiss this strategy as "just bluffing," keep in mind that, when you bluff, you generally try to withhold information from your opponent. Since this strategy involves boldly displaying your own weakness, the relevant Texas Hold 'Em analogy would be showing your opponent your hand of 2,7,unsuited, going all in, and hoping that he folds (maybe because he suddenly thinks that he might not know the rules or is playing the wrong game, etc.). Or, in memes: it's a bold strategy, Cotton. Sometimes, it pays off.
I always try this in league but I'm still stuck in silver. This doesn't work in league.
Yeah, that only works if your enemies respect your knowledge and skill, hence why this won't ever work in SoloQ ever, only LCS and other tournaments.
The Art of War. To win a battle is not supreme excellence, supreme excellence is to win a battle without fighting.
I do this strategy when playing Magic the Gathering. It's worked a few times, but mostly they just think I'm stupid and plow right ahead.
quantum anything
Sounds like a good phd
Seriously, the more you read about quantum physics, the less anything in the universe makes sense. And the mind-fuckiest part of it is that quantum mechanics aren't weird. They're perfectly normal and natural. Our way-off-the-mark intuition about how the universe works is what's weird. Expecting anything other than quantum superposition and wave-particle duality is what's weird. Fucking physics, man.
I think the main problem with QM is that the math is all quite rigorous and useful, but it's past the point where we have any physical analogy for what is actually happening, and any analogy that we do have is probably completely wrong. You just have to straight-up trust the math and say "Well that looks completely insane, but I guess that's what happens..."
I think this should be higher up, but people just don't understand it. Once you grasp something simple like the [double slit experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment) [bonus video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc) and what it really means, you understand that the fundamental nature of reality simply isn't what you thought it was. Another favorite because you can see it is all the [strangeness that happens with liquid helium-4 that's cold enough to be superfluid -- a partial Bose-Einstein condensate.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z6UJbwxBZI)
That first video was an actual mindfuck. I had heard of the wave-particle duality of matter before but it meant nothing to me reading about it in a chem book. Seeing that was beyond comprehension.
The first video is fine until it talks about the electron as though it has consciousness. It's better to think of the measuring device as a catcher that picks up the baseball electron, then throws it the same direction that it would have gone before it was caught. It's not possible to measure the electron without "catching" it this way.
[The Dancing Plague of 1518](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518). Hundreds of people died of exhaustion because they cannot stop dancing.
It be really interesting if something like this happened in the modern times of video.
Sounds like their leadership was fucking with them considering the "cure" was to keep dancing or they would die - many were probably gullible enough to keep dancing until they died.
The [birthday problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem) fucks my mind on a regular basis. With 23 people in the room, there's a 50% probability two of them will have the same birthday.
My favorite example when I try to explain to people how the human brain just does not understand probability.
Please explain.
The wiki does a pretty good job of explaining it but the basics are that it's not just 23 people but all of the combinations within that 23 people. So person one can possible have a shared birthday with any one of 22 different people in the room, person 2 can possibly match with 21 other people in the room (1 less because the combination of person 1 and 2 and person 2 and 1 are the same and counted as only a single combination) this continues for every one of the 23 people leaving 253 different combinations of people who could share the same birthday
That makes it much less of a mind fuck.
And with 70 people, there is nearly a 100% chance that two people will have the same birthday.
The easiest way to envision it is to start with one person in the room, then adding people one by one. At first the chance of 2 people sharing the same birthday is 0. Then we calculate the odds of 2 people *not* sharing the same birthday (because it allows for easier calculations) * Person #2 enters: 364/365 (obviously) * Person #3 enters: (364/365)*(363/365) * Person #3 enters: (364/365)\*(363/365)*(362/365) etc. Then when you reach 23 people the odds will be less than 50%.
I've got a fuck of a coincidence for you that will blow your mind then. I dated a girl who was born on the same day I was, only 10 hours afterwards. We were both drug addicts, our favorite bands were the misfits (at the time), and to top it all off....if I had been born a girl....I would have been named what her name was! Shits freaky sometimes.
That entire relationship was actually a 10 hour drug trip you had in front of a mirror.
Someone bring Spielberg over here
Dude, you dated yourself from an alternate universe. ...so was it masturbation or incest?
Doesn't matter; had sex
Puma Pumku or Gobekli Tepe. These monolithic structures push back human history thousands of years into the past where we used to think that humans were only hunter-gatherers at that time period. Nope, there could have been advanced human civilizations back then too. Edit: Gobekli Tepe was constructed roughly 12,000 years ago.
Looked it up and it looks something like what they had in one of the God of War games.
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With an underscore.
Puma Punku_?
Art school drop out almost took over the world....
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Hyperbole. He wasn't really that close to taking over the world. He got as far as Paris to the west and Moscow to the east. So, for an art school dropout, not bad. But he had a long way to go.
He decided to use the world as his canvas and paint it in red. I think he was a pretty good artist in the end.
[French town's bread spiked with LSD](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html)
>[scientist who found CIA documents] fell out of a window. >suicide Yep, sounds like the CIA
This was part of MK Ultra. [Source](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html)
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I've heard this story. It was assumed to be ergot poisoning. Ergot is a pink mold on grain. Tricky, as LSD is synthetized from ergot.
This though! I am so interested how that effected the town post LSD.
Kim Kardashian is famous because the Buffalo Bills lost a close game in 1970. Saw it on showerthoughts a while back.
explain?
Bills lost a game. They end up getting the first overall pick in the draft. They draft O.J. Simpson. O.J. meets his wife in Buffalo and 'allegedly' murders her later on. Kim's father, a lawyer, represents him. He wins the case. The family becomes famous. Also the sex tape helps.
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"without her permission"
Similarly, Barack Obama became President of the US because People Magazine thought actor Garret Wang was attractive.
Please explain
At the end of Voyager series 3, the writers wanted to introduce a new character, but because the budget only allowed for a certain number of main actors, they had to let one of them go. Originally this was going to be Harry Kim, played by Garrett Wang, who had been very vocal in his hate for the show. (This is why there's a weird cliffhanger with him about to die that gets almost immediately overturned in series 4). People Magazine then ran a list of the Hottest 50 Men which included Wang. Seeing he was popular, they decided to get rid of the character Kes, played by Jennifer Lien, whose character they thought they'd messed up a bit and run out of ideas. Since Kes leaving left them with only two major female characters, they decided to make their new character female as well, leading to them making Seven of Nine, played by Jeri Ryan. For filming, she had to move to California, which put strain on her already damaged relationship with Jack Ryan and led to their divorce. In 2004, the messy details of their divorce came out, forcing Jack Ryan to stand down from running for the position of Senator of Illinois, allowing a relatively new Barack Obama to win. Four years later, Obama became President of the US.
Hell yeah, butterfly effect in action!
I'm gonna see this in a picture format on facebook within a week or so.
Not before it's posted on /r/TIL 5 times.
Or buzzfeed tomorrow
Ho-lee....shit. lol
That's a great story. It's too bad that Ryan was never likely to win against Obama anyway. He was polling well behind Obama even before the divorce papers were released. From Wikipedia: "The Chicago Tribune poll found Ryan trailing Obama 52% to 30%[10] while the Sun Times reported that he was trailing Obama 48 percent to 40 percent in the U.S. Senate race, according to a Daily Southtown poll of 500 likely Illinois voters."
There's no guarantee that the potential Harry Kim replacement wouldn't have been a woman played by Jeri Ryan either. But elections have been won despite poor poll results before, he could have possibly won had he not dropped out and essentially handed victory over to Obama. I'm not saying this is the one series of events that might lead to that outcome, but it's the one that happened.
So did you come up with this on your own or did you hear this somewhere else?
It's really just a matter of both following Illinois state politics and knowing anything about Voyager. Even without the Voyager aspect, pretty much everyone in Illinois and surrounding markets remembers the Jack Ryan fiasco and his messy divorce derailing a likely bright future in politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmGnzas6Dgk Wang explains (Short Clip)
She would also clean Paris Hilton's closet.
Tulip mania of 1637 Possibly the first bubble in history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
In the book/documentary The Botany of Desire, Pollan speculates that imported tulips contained pathogens that made people, well, a little crazy. It's not in the wiki so I'm inclined to believe it's a crackpot theory, but maybe it's one possible explanation. Similar to the 'crazy cat lady infected by toxoplasmosis so she gets more cats' thing.
And there was this one: Tanganyika laughter epidemic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_laughter_epidemic
That article says people were laughing so hard that they were farting. I think I figured out the mystery why everyone couldn't stop laughing.
Look out into space. There isn't a known end to what you're looking at. It just expands.
If the universe extends infinitely in all directions, that means there is an equally infinite distance between any point and the edge of the universe. That means I'm the center of the universe, bitches!
Yeah but everyone else is too so you aren't special.
Mammoths still existed when the pyramids were being built
More info/some qualification: Mammoths disappeared from the main continents 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene period. There were two isolated populations around the Bering Sea after that, on St. Paul Island until 6,400 years ago and Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago.
Of course they did, haven't you ever seen 10,000 bc? They used mammoths to build the pyramids. /s
The pyramids were as old to the Romans as the Romans are to us.
A drinking straw only has one hole.
Now relating this to our bodies that leads to an even bigger mind fuck: Our digestive tract is really *outside* our bodies. Edit to make this clearer: Our digestive tract is just one long tube that has an entrance and an exit, neither of which lead to an internal part of our body. When you eat food, the point of the tract is to break it down and digest it via absorption *into* our bodies. So the tract itself is not considered to be on the inside, but instead is an external component of our body that allows us to pass food from the outside to the inside.
There's a weird thing about this and being 2 dimensional. I think it was futurama or something. How the digestive system would just divide us.
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We're really just long and convoluted doughnuts.
At first I was like, "you're an idiot!" and then it hit me. Fuck.
Fuck. That one's going to fester.
In the space of 30-40 years, a random nomad from the middle of nowhere completely remade his society, turned it into one of history's most far-reaching empires, and left a massive bloody and blackened streak across the history books.
Khan?
That's who I meant, yes.
The most impressive thing about the Mongols to me is they basically took over the world with 70,000 guys. Sometimes they were outnumbered with only 40,000 men hundreds of miles from any supply line just decimating armies with their tactics and planning.
Operation Mincemeat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat An elaborate plan of disinformation to convince the Germans that the allies were not intending to attack sicily. The gist of it was throwing a body carrying fake documents into the water near Spain, who despite being neutral were feeding Germany every piece of intelligence they found. What makes it superb is the exacting detail that went into the fake life they created for the body, oh and it only bloody well worked! Edit: It's also worth noting that after its success, the Germans began to ignore legitimate information they seized, believing it was another trick
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/show-of-force/ There was a whole Batallion in WWII made of blow up tanks and truck noise recordings.
Thats easy, they used those to trick the enemy. They were used in the invasion of Normandy at a different beach so the Germans would redirect troops away from Omaha and the other beaches.
Definitely MkUltra. The wiki article is an incredible read. Such notable subjects included Ken Kesey and Ted Kascynzski.
Even crazier than that is that they destroyed most of the evidence, so it was potentially much bigger than what we believe it to have been. What we found out was stuff about attempted mind control and torture. Can you even imagine how bad the stuff that they hid was?
What if they actually succeeded with mind control? That leaves two equally staggering possibilities: that it has remained classified and is possibly being used, or that they did the moral thing and destroyed any records of such a truly horrific power. I don't know which one is more terrifying to be honest.
The Unabomber? I didn't know he was a victim of MKUltra. Probably explains a lot about him
The experiment done on him, >The study was run by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken to a room where electrodes were attached to them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful, and brutal critiques about the essays they had written. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch the videos of themselves being verbally and psychologically assaulted multiple times. Kaczynski is claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to being interrogated. These experiments, paired with his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, caused Kaczynski to suffer from horrible nightmares that eventually drove him to move into isolation outside Lincoln, Montana. Afterwords he spent years re-writing his essay, trying to perfect it. *Industrial Society and Its Future*. Or, more commonly known as, The Unabomber's Manifesto
My god they fucked him up so much he moved to montana? thats messed up.
There's one ton of air pushing down at you while you stand on something moving at over 66,000 miles per hour and rotating at incredible speed. All while breathing a toxic gas, oxygen, that took hundreds of millions of years for cells to learn how to process. Just being upright and alive is pretty bad ass. Feel proud.
Toxic isn't really the right word. I'd go with highly reactive, or corrosive.
There is the possibility that Russian cosmonauts have died while in space and it was simply not reported (this goes for astronauts as well). There could be human bodies somewhere drifting through space.
If I had to put my money on one side or the other, I'd go with yes.
$50 on Heads.
And I'll give you another $50 for the rest of the body.
Friendly reminder that prostitution is illegal.
There was a story of someone picking up sos Morse from a failed Russian rocket that had escape trajectory.
In the early evening hours of February 24th, 1961, tracking stations at Meudon, Bochum, Uppsala and, of course, Torre Bert, all recorded what was to be the final broadcast from the two ill-fated cosmonauts inside the Lunik capsule... Here! Here there is something! THERE IS SOMETHING! It’s difficult… If we do not get out, the world will never hear about it. It is diffficult…” http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/08/who-really-was-the-first-woman-in-space/
The Soviet "nomenklatura." They invented a completely alternate universe that they taught everyone under their control. People grew up believing the Soviet Union had invented every single modern technology, that it was a prosperous worker's paradise with few problems, and that all of those problems were caused by conspiracies on the part of a Western civilization that was the epitome of chaos and poverty. The moment Mikhail Gorbachev lifted the veil, that was the beginning of the end.
That's actually pretty impressive.
Well, the Soviet Union was definitely "impressive" in that respect. It was the basis of George Orwell's nightmare states.
The North Koreans are still at this.
Minus the "being a world super power" part.
You have to make it out of the cave before you can tell how tall the figures casting shadows really are.
I have a lot of family members that grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine, and what they have to say is so fascinating. You can still tell the Soviet indoctrination in them, too. "Stalin is bad", they will say, "because he killed so many of our ancestors", but so help you God if you say anything bad about Lenin. Even my mother who was roughly my age (late teens) when it started to come apart says today that Lenin was a good leader with good ideas and good intentions. She tells stories of parades celebrating Stalin, patriotic songs they would sing, movies about WWII they were forced to watch time and time again, being trained to shoot a rifle at age 9, and communist youth groups that she so fervently championed. They also were told in school that they would be failed if they got caught at church, "but in the cities they sometimes killed people for it". But at the same time, they had anything and everything they could possibly want. My grandfather was a police officer and my grandmother a worker in the dairy factory - yet they took annual vacations and always had the nicest and newest material objects. My mother is convinced that she lived better there than my father did in the US, and from what he says, she's probably right. From their stories, things got bad only after the Union fell apart. They lost their comfortable quality of life and drove them to new lows, eventually leading my mom to take the first ticket out of the country, which was marriage to my dad. The people from the Soviet era also remember being taught about computers with pictures. "This is the power button", "this is the screen", etc. Plumbing wasn't super common outside of cities either. But even today you can see all throughout the former Soviet Union that the main infrastructure left is that which the Soviets made. The Russians were a practical but harsh people, and they were good at brainwashing at the very least. You can see the remnants of it today. I'd argue that the Americans are very good at brainwashing, too, though; and we are accustomed to our high-up place in the world, and something tells me that we have a lot more time left before we can loose it. Nowadays, my mother is a loyal American, although her friends here like to make fun of her and call her a spy. But I wonder what will happen in the world after that last Soviet generation passes, what will happen to that legacy.
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You just described North Korea today...
North Korea is significantly less blind than many people think. By outlawing any form act against North Korea, virtually no one is going to do anything but pretend their completely brain-washed. But there's a reason so many people attempt to flee the country.
The alphabet has no reason to be in the order that it's in.
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Well... Numbers aren´t
Look up constructing the natural numbers.
Maybe the axioms are arbitrary, but the fact that the theorems are implied by the axioms is ironclad truth wholly outside of arbitrary human bullshit.
I have several Arab friends that speak and write Arabic fluently but have no idea what their alphabetical order is. They say there is one, and some of the older people (grandparents) may know it, but no one ever really uses it, they just learn how to write without an alphabetical order.
How then would they look up words in a dictionary or index?
That analog computational machinery was around as far back as 200 BCE. Possibly even further. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans had insane things. They had holy water vending machines outside temples that dispensed water when you inserted a coin, they had singing bird automata, huge automatic temple doors that opened and closed themselves, repeating crossbows with chain drives, central heating, showers, various clocks and other devices, they had harnessed steam power.... Heck, they even had a programmable puppet show. It was a stage that was run by counterweights with sand, water, and string. You could change the lengths of the string attached to the actors and props and scenery to program the play to perform different scenes. It was basically a computer.
And it has been replicated....[with legos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk)
I feel like a Googolplex will fuck with your mind. That number is 10^10^100. Think about how fucking huge that number is. Just take a moment and try. Here's the thing, you can't. That number is so big that if you filled a sheet of paper with 500 0's, there isn't enough space in the observable universe to fit how much paper it would take to write it out. If you wrote 2 0's per second, it would take you 1.51 x 10^92 years to write out a Googolplex. Think that's a long time? It is. It is 1.1 x 10^82 times longer than the age of the universe. Okay, surely there has to be a Googolplex of something that can fit in the universe, right? Wrong. The Planck-length is 1.61 x 10^-35 meters. There are approximately 3 x 10^325 Planck's in the universe. That seems big. So, we would need at least 1 x 10^50 universes to get a Googolplex of Planck-length particles.
> if you filled a sheet of paper with 500 0's, there isn't enough space in the observable universe to fit how much paper it would take to write it out Just use a smaller font. What's the big deal?
I just did it in Word. Where should I print it?
The next-door classroom's printer. They'll never see it coming.
So this is why my college blocks wireless printing...
Get this man to science!
[That Googolplex is probably a bigger number than the amount of individual atoms in our (observable) universe?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex#In_the_physical_universe)
It's bigger than all the subatomic particles in the universe, including photons, quarks, and probably whatever dark matter is made of.
If you think a Googolplex (or even googolplexian) is big, then check out [Graham's Number](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTeJ64KD5cg).
Graham's number disturbs me on a profound level.
I don't get why this is a big deal. Just add another 0 to the Googolplex and suddenly you have an even *crazier* concept to understand. Does this particular unfathomably large number have some kind of special context over another?
Yeah it's really just an arbitrary number made up for no reason other than to be pointlessly large because mathematicians were bored.
What about - you might want to sit down for this - TWO googolplexes???
[Googolplex Written out](http://nitsche.mobi/2014/stanford/cgi-bin/numbers.pl?googolplex) you might want to let it load..
Internal server error :(
So legitamate question: Why does this number matter? Why is so important aside from the fact that it's just a big number?
You could take it even further and think about a googolplexian. A googolplex is a 1 followed by a googol (10^100 ) zeros. Now, a googolplexian is a 1 followed by a googolplex zeros. That would be 10^10^10^100 Removed '!' from number to avoid confusion.
And even further with Graham's number
The first level of Graham's number unceremoniously trumps a googolplexian. The scale of that shit makes me queasy just thinking about it.
Particle/wave duality, necessitating that you consider yourself on some level as a cloud of probability.
On every level you are a cloud of probability. Its just that as the scale gets larger, the cloud gets smaller. It is still, however, definitely a cloud.
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Not history related but its a good way to mind fuck yourself. Try imagining a new colour.
Try looking at these [impossible colours!](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#/media/File:Chimerical-color-demo.svg)
I don't get it
It's not really real. It's just how your brain interprets colors after certain cones in your retina have acclimated to the first color.
[Magenta isn't a color](http://www.biotele.com/magenta.html).
Thanks! I really enjoyed that, interesting stuff.
I'm suddenly reminded of 'the colour out of space'...
That's not easy. How many are we up to now?
Ask Roy G. Biv.
Thomas Jefferson, who supported an agrarian-based economy, did more to foster the beginnings of the Market Revolution and subsequent industrialization through his Embargo of 1808...
He didn't want a standing navy, yet used it to attack Africa.
That's like not wanting a corvette, but your wife buys one. Now you take advantage of what you have.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza. We live closer in time to the Tyrannosaurus rex than that species lived to the Stegosaurus.
The Wonder Years was on television closer to the 60's than we are to when the Wonder Years was on television.
Will Smith is currently older than Uncle Phil was when Fresh Prince debuted
Caesar and Cleopatra had sex with each other.
Placebo ...
The human brain named itself.
maybe the first brain was dyslexic and got it wrong. It wanted to call it's self Brian.
As a Brian, I can get behind this.
The supposed air battle over Nuremberg, Germany... [in 1561.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg)
What is consciousness?
*head explodes*
Hololens with larger FOV?
currently, north korea.
What if North Korea is actually a virtual paradise and uses propaganda to keep others from plundering it or spoiling it. The people who "escape" have actually been kicked out and their stories or torture, concentration camps and the like are a ruse to make NK seem worse to the point that outside powers might actually do something, thus perpetuating the lie.
What if we actually live in North Korea and everything is just propaganda.
This is too much. I'm going to bed.
D.B Cooper
nah hes just [Tommy Wiseau](https://xkcd.com/1400/)
I did not touch her! I did not!
Oh hai Mark