Ask Lemmy

African Wild Dogs decide on when to go hunting by voting. If there is a supermajority of votes in favor of hunting, they will go out and hunt. If that quorum is not reached, they will stay home.

π mph is roughly e knots.

In the movie "Catch Me If You Can", the french police officer that arrests Leonardo DiCaprio who is playing a young Frank Abagnale Jr. Is Frank Abagnale Jr.

If you have two arms, you have a higher than average number of arms.

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.

Hydrogen, if left on its own long enough, names itself.

Australia lost a war to emus

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 is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.

It's more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.

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.

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.

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)

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

The number of possible combinations of cards in a standard 52 card pack is so large that there is very little chance that any two packs of shuffled cards that have ever existed have ever been in the same order.

52 factorial is a larger number than the number of atoms in the observable universe.

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 lips and butthole are the two ends of the same tube. Same glaborous vermillion border type skin or something

Your ~~mom~~ moon is exactly at the right distance to give full eclipse of the sun

On Titan, you could strap on wings and fly around.

Moreover, the atmosphere is >5% natural gas, but without oxygen you can't burn it. I suppose oxygen would be considered the fuel in that case and you'd pipeline that instead? And being able to breathe would be a nice side-benefit.

Wombats take square shits.

That giraffes exist. I'm a simple man, and giraffes are awesome.

Kevin Spacey’s middle name is Spacey.

And that’s a rock fact.

There are more grains of sand in the ocean than there are stars in our solar system.

Early cycling laws and rights predate the invention of the automobile by decades. So it is actually the car that is the invasive newcomer.

"If left in the sun, mayonnaise grows hair."