At least half of men don’t wash their hands before leaving a public restroom. Literally everything is covered in dick stuff. Source: 30+ years of using public restrooms as a male.
- You have no idea what shape your visual field is
- You’ve never seen your neighbors carrying groceries inside
- Your pinkie is a perfect fit for your nostril
Here’s one more:
Dark Forest Theory as a solution to the Fermi Paradox.
This theory was around long before Lee Cuixin and done much better. Saberhagen’s Berserker series is a much better example, and has the added bonus of believable character development in his books.
Hell, Battlestar Galactica was the same thing done 5 years before TBP came out, and way more interestingly.
I’d read that David Brin reviewed something similar in '83, but I didn’t chase it down to Saberhagen.
In following the links provided in the Wiki article, for the Berserker Hypothesis, there is the following:
The Berserker hypothesis is distinct from the dark forest hypothesis in that under the latter, many alien civilizations could still exist provided they keep silent. The dark forest hypothesis can be viewed as a special case of the Berserker hypothesis, if the ‘deadly Berserker probes’ are (e.g. due to resource scarcity) only sent to star systems that show signs of intelligent life.
So, silence is survival in the Dark Forest. The Berserker Hypothesis seeks and destroys.
e: Nice call on BSG as well! Though, that considered only human and Cylon life.
And, for my part, Cixin Liu’s second book was a really solid read. The first book, Three Body Problem, suffered all of the hallmarks of the pains taken to establish a story and a world. The last book, Death’s End, while mostly good, also suffered in needing to bring the grand story to a close.
We’re going to have to disagree on those books. I found the first one amateurish and hand-wavy SF with terrible character development, and the second one was just a ridiculous deus-ex-machina plot point that invalidated all the rest of the previous and possible future plot pivot points, with continued terrible character development. I wouldn’t know about the third, by this point I was done giving him any more of my money.
I’m surprised about Brin’s article there, because all his work has been pretty upbeat about galactic species generally getting along, though with its rough points.
Personally, I chalk up the great silence to very short species lifespans after achieving spaceflight. Maybe they all go post-singularity and become undetectable, or run out of resources and go primitive again. Or just die off/suicide, which seems like where we’re headed. If we have a century of relatively powerful transmissions, what’s the chance of anyone being close enough in that short period of time to detect us?
I guess we are going to have to disagree. The writing style and, as I perceived it, motivations within the text were clearly not of the Western tradition. It’s true, in lending the benefit of doubt, I may have enjoyed it more precisely because I disregarded standard writing mores, tropes, and conventions because it was a translated work.
I’m curious: Did you also try Murakami’s 1Q84? I found that I had to suspend expectations there in much the same manner.
I think I’d agree with you wrt. short species lifespans after developing telecommunications, space flight, and highly concentrated energy sources. The leap in capacity for attendant social distortion — and extortion — has brought us to the brink of global destruction many times since Signal Hill in 1901. The Kardashev Scale comes to mind here. The leap from about Type 0.73, ostensibly where we are now, to Type 1.0 is fraught.
As for the communications we have sent, the early ones were low-power and, over a distance of 100 ly, would significantly degrade against background EM radiation. At a range of 50 ly, where our first, more powerful and higher fidelity digital transmissions have reached, there are relatively few star systems — about 1300 (source). This source uses data from 1991, so there may be more, but not many, that are magnitude 6.5 or brighter.
live smallpox cultures still exist in american and russian labs.
most people born after 1980 are not vaccinated against smallpox and do not possess the natural immunity boost that would come from environmental exposure to the disease.
in the 1500s the introduction of smallpox into the similarly unprotected peoples of the americas caused an apocalyptic population collapse.
True, but we do have the vaccine and the means to mass-produce and administer. That’s why I’m not worried about smallpox.
Thanks to Ed Jenner
Here’s a fun one
You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.
Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.
You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.
So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.
Enjoy your swim!
This is the reason why I don’t want to go to pools anymore.
You didn’t mention the important part - sweat does that too. So it might not be pee, just sweaty people getting washed off. Which is better, to be fair.
Fun video from Mark Rober about the topic. How to measure how much pee is in your pool
nah no way because my town heavily chlorinates the tap water and that shit reeks like a swimming pool… or is someone pissing in the tap???
Chloramines are disinfectants used to treat drinking water. Chloramines are most commonly formed when ammonia is added to chlorine to treat drinking water.
The chlorine does its job, and whatever shit it kills becomes chloramine. Chlorine does have a smaller smell of its own so maybe they just put a shit ton of it in also.
Your Tap water being dirty is Not an Option? When they chlorine it, there’s certainly a need to get it Clean from e.g. the Pipes or other contaminants
🤢🤮 oh god why did I read this
My wife was so mad at me when I explained this to her. She said the chlorine smell would give her nostalgia and I ruined it.
A man’s penis is generally cleaner than his hands, because his dick is kept behind two sets of fabric and isn’t used to touch nearly everything.
I always wash my hands before I pee, don’t want to get my penis dirty…
I’ve heard this but I’ve also never heard of hand smegma, so…
Wtf is smegma and why have you heard of dick smegma?
You must have circumcised nails then
If you managed to hold your hand closed 24/7, you’d get it too. Same thing happens when you get a cast off.
The article below this is
Donald Trump says that if wins the White House, he’ll fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” of taking office.
Imagine a criminal openly admitting he’ll use his power to evade justice, and somehow half the country is still voting for him
Neuroscience shows that rulers will always become evil.
Getting more power actually changes your brain, suppressing your ability to use empathy. The very powerful will always struggle to remember that others are human and don’t want to be hurt.
Humane behavior and hierarchy are mutually exclusive. Heirarchical organization encourages humans to hurt each other.
The data is skewed. All of the functioning systems we use reward concentrations of power.
Thereby, systems of rule must distribute power and contest the concentration of power. It literally takes a village to save us from ourselves.
David Graeber and David Wengrow introduced me to historical examples of non-hierarchical societies in The Dawn of Everything.
The fact that power results in antisocial behavior has been understood for millenia.
Lots of societies have had cultural infrastructure of equality that attempts to mitigate this weakness in our biology and prevent harmful levels of power accumulation. The basque village layouts that Davids Graeber & Wengrove talk about, or the practise of ‘insulting the meat’ of successful hunters.
Which is why I feel that for humanity to succeed we will eventually need an entirely new form of societal governance to replace capitalism & communism, just as those systems replaced feudalism and tribalism. Something like technoism where decisions are made and enacted by machines, incapable of self motivation; or geneticism where leaders’ selfish impulses are either bred or edited out of them. We are still many, many years off from technology being able to accomplish this, but the only way to overcome the human factor is to… well… remove the human factor.
This is why the US needs to switch to metric.
Eyeing my geometry set suspiciously
I don’t think I’m ever going to forget, I went on a road trip and when I was in Arizona stopped at a rest stop and took a leak and washed my hands afterwards.
This native guy walked in, and I only call him out for being native because I’m native also so it’s kind of cool to see another one in the wild, and he immediately said, “Get some poop on your hands? I only wash my hands when I get poop on them.”
So yeah, I never touch anything in a bathroom without like at least a paper towel between me if I can avoid it
Or the dude was fucking with you and you took it so hard it impacted you permanently
Hate when that happens…
Your body generates around 600.000 new cells every second.
Crazy IMO.
I guess that the same number of cells also dies in the same period!
Seems logical!
Not me, I’m getting fatter.
That’s a lot of significant digits.
Let’s just call it six hundred
It’s six hundred thousand.
Gross I don’t want ‘em
I’ll take 'em if I can choose where they grow! Lol
Butt penis or breasts 😋?
If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.
If that counter attack is headed to North Korea, any land based missiles will head over the arctic circle, over Russian airspace where similar shoot/no shoot decisions will have to be made in a similar timeframe.
If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.
US nuclear deterrence in 2024 doesn’t rely on launch-on-warning, but on the expectation that no hostile power has the ability to locate and destroy the US ballistic missile submarine fleet prior to them performing their counterlaunches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_strike
In nuclear strategy, a retaliatory strike or second-strike capability is a country’s assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. To have such an ability (and to convince an opponent of its viability) is considered vital in nuclear deterrence, as otherwise the other side might attempt to try to win a nuclear war in one massive first strike against its opponent’s own nuclear forces.
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are the traditional, but very expensive, method of providing a second strike capability, though they need to be supported by a reliable method of identifying who the attacker is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_on_warning
Launch on warning (LOW), or fire on warning, is a strategy of nuclear weapon retaliation where a retaliatory strike is launched upon warning of enemy nuclear attack and while its missiles are still in the air, before detonation occurs.
In 1997, a US official stated that the US had the technical capability for launch on warning but did not intend to use a launch on warning posture and that the position had not changed in the 1997 presidential decision directive on nuclear weapon doctrine.
This non-reliance on launch-on-warning is also true of the French and British nuclear deterrents – the British don’t even maintain a nuclear arsenal other than on subs, so they haven’t even bothered with maintaining the option to do so, and the French only use tactical ALCMs in addition to the strategic sub-launched weapons; those weapons probably would be poorly-suited for such a role.
The Brits rather famously have the “letter of last resort”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort
The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the prime minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines and stored on board of each. They contain orders on what action to take if an enemy nuclear strike has both destroyed the British government and has also killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and their designated “second person” of responsibility, typically a high-ranking member of the Cabinet such as the deputy prime minister or the first secretary of state. If the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of His Majesty’s Government.
If the letters are not used during the term of the prime minister who wrote them, they are destroyed unopened after that person leaves office, so that their content remains unknown to anyone except the issuer.
Process
A new prime minister writes a set of letters immediately after taking office and being told by the Chief of the Defence Staff “precisely what damage a Trident missile could cause”. The documents are then delivered to the submarines in sealed envelopes, and the previous prime minister’s letters are destroyed without being opened.
In the event of the deaths of both the prime minister and the designated alternative decision-maker as a result of a nuclear strike, the commander(s) of any nuclear submarine(s) on patrol at the time would use a series of checks to ascertain whether the letters of last resort must be opened.
According to Peter Hennessy’s book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, the process by which a Vanguard-class submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting.
In 1983, the procedure for Polaris submarines was to open the envelopes if there was an evident nuclear attack, or if all UK naval broadcasts had ceased for four hours.
Options
While the contents of these letters are secret, according to the December 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary The Human Button, there were four known options given to the prime minister to include in the letters. The prime minister might instruct the submarine commander to:
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retaliate with nuclear weapons;
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not retaliate;
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use their own judgement; or,
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place the submarine under an allied country’s command, if possible. The documentary mentions Australia and the United States.
The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: “Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there”, “Go to Australia”, “Retaliate”, or “Use your own judgement”. The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.
"Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there"
JFC nuclear weapons are horrifying
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That is why subs with nukes are hidding someplace. If the president is wrong and now the us doesn’t exist the captan will finish ending the world
russia has the same
Most nuclear enabled countries have nuclear subs. I believe here in the UK our entire nuclear deterrent is based on trident missiles fired from submarines.
You are probably right, russia is just the only other country I’m sure of.
Basically why it’s called MAD (mutually assured destruction). You’ll either get the first shot for free, or everyone kills everyone.
There’s an anecdote about a U2 naming a song “One Minute Warning” if I recall correctly: many years ago, when a UK prime minister learned the US got 6 minutes, they asked how long the UK would have. The response: “I suppose we’d have about a minute.”
Did you listen to that hardcore history episode? It was crazy
Yeah I did! I’m hoping my library get the book. Hell I might buy it, read it and donate it after
At birth there are usually more males than females. Around adulthood age they are roughly equal, and around our death there are way more females than males.
Another one, kinda romantic as well. Most life long couples, when one of them dies due to old age, the other one follows soon. Despite women having a longer life span than men.
Another interesting one, most relationships end within 7 years. Once the 7 year period has passed, the likelihood of that relationship lasting till death increases significantly. It’s called 7 year ick.
My marriage is up after exactly 7 years. Granted we were together for more like 11-12, but the marriage 7
9 years going strong I’m in the clear
Most doesn’t mean all
Hey, congratulations! We just made nine years over here too
There are about 20 supervolcanoes on earth which each have the capacity to kill billions should they erupt.
And suppress global warming for a long time in the process. Yeah, bring it on!
I know about the Yellowstone Caldera but I didn’t realize there were that many more
I found this article interesting on Caldera systems…
https://www.usgs.gov/news/caldera-systems-a-worldwide-family-more-just-yellowstone
Heres two:
The ratio between cells of your body that belong to you vs. cells on or in your body that are microorganisms is about 1:1 — slightly favouring the bacteria.
If the Sun were destroyed, we would not know about it until more than 8 minutes after it happened.
I claim ownership of the microorganisms in and on my body. I am not merely human; I am a glorious amalgamation of trillions of distinct beings, working in harmony to bring you shitposts!
This is one of the larger plot holes in the 1980s remake of The Fly, in my opinion.
Cronenberg is a countryman. I’ll hand him a pass on that one.
I actually thought we had way more microorganisms vs are cells because they are so small.
In 2016, the number of bacteria was reviewed, and the estimate reduced from 300 trillion to about 38 trillion microorganisms.
thanks. I hate this kind of thing because im sitting there like. why did I think that. hopefully this whole thing will burn the more up to date info into my brain.
Meanwhile here I am washing before and after, just because I saw it on House.
(Despite the fact that he makes a big deal about it in the first episode and in the numerous times we see him go to the bathroom following that he never once does it again. (Yes. I checked.))
First episodes almost always don’t count as far as lore goes, even if some things do carry over.
Uh-oh Spagetti-O’s
At least half of men don’t wash their hands before leaving a public restroom.
How does this work in the US? I’m assuming with the amount of gigantic pickup trucks and guns, a lot of guys require tweezers and magnifying glasses to find their dicks
Do they wash the tweezers?
Really well done. Creative and informed. Yes, we have tweezer-washing stations and very few men use them. Good question.
and very few men use them.
Brave of them to behave like they have modern healthcare rights lol
