12 points

Every eye has a tiny blind spot near the middle. But your brain makes it disappear and you don’t realize it’s there.

You can verify this. Draw a dot on a bit of paper. Close one eye, stare at a fixed point, now move the paper around the center until the dot disappears…magic

What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation… realizing that is a real mind blower

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3 points

I’m going to qualify this—all vertebrate eyes have a blind spot. Cephalopods also have eyes that are like vertebrates (this type of eye is called ‘camera eyes’), but their eye anatomy is such that no blind spot exists for them.

Piggybacking on your fact about the brain effectively editing what we visually perceive, we don’t see our nose (unless you made a concerted effort to look at it) because the brain ignores it.

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2 points
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What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation…

It’s also a coordinated synthesis from all of your input senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc). It also explains why those who have a certain sense stunted (aka blindness, deaf, etc) report having all their other senses heightened. And it’s up to the individual’s brain to assemble those sensory inputs into a complete picture of the world around them, what we dub “reality.” Which then brings into question the nature of common reality, and what defines it. Trippy shit.

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3 points

fun fact: the blind spot is because our optical sensors are installed backwards and that hole is so the optic nerve can pass back through the back of the eye to the brain. some other critters with independently evolved vision systems, such as cephalopods, avoided this particular evolutionary pitfall.

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4 points

Another fun fact: through that hole there’s also vasculature and capillaries coming through and you can actually see them by looking at a well lit white surface and creating a tiny pinhole with your hand right in front of your eye and wiggling it. Better explained here at around 5:30

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1 point

That’s awesome, I had no idea, thank you for sharing

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1 point

Oh I thought my eyes were fucked. I look at a star in my periphery and it’s there, I look at it directly and it’s fucking gone.

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1 point

This isn’t due to the blind spot, but it is still pretty weird to experience! Here’s some more info if you are curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision

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12 points

by weight, theres more non-human DNA in you than human.

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3 points

Wait. Please explain. How is DNA inside me, a verifiable human, not human?

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6 points

youre mostly bacterial dna

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7 points

U got bugs in ur poop.

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7 points

It’s DNA from bacteria that live inside you.

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4 points

Your gut flora

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0 points
*

we all know what you do when you visit the zoo.
were those giraffes looking thirsty, hmmm?

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10 points

The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.

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6 points

Most frequent occurence is the mode. Most ppl have 10. The median is probably 10 as well, while the mean average is skewed down, I would think, by some people losing fingers as the grow. Having extra fingers is pretty rare. So the mean might be 9.95 fingers, just to toss a number out.

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1 point

I assume the median and mode are the same value, 10 fingers, but have no data to back that up. I guess saying mode would have been a safer statement to make, but think that even if 49% of people have 0-9 fingers, the median number of fingers would still be 10.

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2 points

For 10 to not be the median it would also have to not be the case for the majority of people (just the plurality at best), and while I don’t have proof handy I’m pretty sure a vast majority have exactly 10, making that the precise median and the mode. Only the mean would be a different number of digits. (Both definitions)

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1 point
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Mode assumes categorical data and is unbounded by range, whereas median makes the most sense for decimal numbers, albeit with rounding in this case

“People have round(median(data)) fingers”

edit: though, if we’re counting just fingers and not counting half-fingers, then maybe this really is categorical data (¯\(ツ)/¯?)

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2 points

Glenn Close was in Hook

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2 points

Samuel L Jackson was in Grease. The movie.

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-1 points

Not the Boo Box!

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11 points

Lots of people know a broken clock is right twice per day, but many are unaware that a clock running backwards is right 4 times per day.

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4 points

And one that loses only 1 second per year is right only once every 43,200 years.

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1 point

a clock running backwards is moving away from the current time at twice the rate, so isn’t your example the same as saying that a clock that runs twice as fast is right 4 times a day?

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1 point

No, if you go twice as fast, it would only align with one at 12 and one at 24. It’s not about speed, it’s about the intersections of forward and backward laps.

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