Here’s a place to just dump thoes little brain tears thoes weird thoughts you got during your 3 am shower i suck at writing so I’m just going to end it right here 
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when they repaint the lines on the road, the new lines dont match up with the old lines
do they really re-measure out where to paint them every time?
or do they just paint them at random or something
surely it would be easier to just paint over the old lines
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That is a amazing thought it is clear it came from a sharp mind!
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While I’m not 100%, I’m pretty sure that it changes based on civil engineering codes, set from a certain distance out from the centerline of the road. The centerline is chosen based on terrain details, among other things, i think.
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not to spam this one thread, but I cant believe I forgot to link the greatest collection of showerthoughts Ive ever seen
this guy is a genius, half of the thoughts in my head are quotes from his music or videos, but the notebook section specifically is relevant here
edit:
“houses evolved from trees gradually over a period of 60-80 million years.”
absolute banger how does he do it
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I shared this one on stream a little while back, but if you think about it:
Screws come from a machine that makes screws.
The machine that makes screws probably has screws in it.
If you go far enough back, you get to handmade tooling! Like there’s an unbroken lineage of tool usage stretching backwards in time and it always blows my mind that we’re able to get more precise tools out of less precise tools.
The way surface plates were made so we could have more precise machinery feels like humans exploiting a glitch in the universe:
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That is really cool, and I think that’s one of the interesting things about the folks who explore more primitive technology, trying to trace all the ways to get from nothing to what we have now. It’s also mind-boggling to think on how much knowledge goes into things we regard as banal in the modern day, some of which has actually been lost to time — we don’t actually know all the steps and techniques that were invented along the way, then discarded later in favor of what we have now.
I once read an article about a guy who decided to make a toaster from scratch, and by “from scratch”, he meant starting at the raw materials as you would find them in nature. It took at lot of writing to experts in many, many different fields — imagine being a professor of material science, getting an email from some guy asking how to refine iron ore to make a toaster — and the end result… Well, it toasted bread for a given value of toasted. Then toasted itself.
Unrelated, but a late night thought I had elsewhere — consciousness is a meaning-making machine. Words mean nothing until they’re read and interpreted.
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On that note, This is a video that actually breaks down all of that.
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If aliens encountered humans on earth, and their culture and language was identical to ours for sake of naming conventions (things are called the same thing), what do you think they’d call us.
Like, if we were some other animal, and everything else was the same, what would we call alien life that looks and acts like humans?
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My belive is they see us how we see monkeys.
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But if an outside alien force met us, what would they name us, in terms of a literal translation? Like octopods literal translation is 8 legs, what would aliens think are our distinguishing characteristics? Maybe we’d get a cute, affectionate name? Like with bunnies as a common name. What would humans be called if we couldn’t name ourselves
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Sea monkeys is taken, sorry
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Well to start off it would have to do somthing with the fact. We have intelligence so intervention 4 limbed mammal?
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My vote goes to featherless biped
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That’s a good one.
I think it would probably be something about like civilization, tool usage, destructive ability, or furless with Biped. 
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I forget if nomograms have come up anywhere yet, but they’re fun in a similar vein to the ‘more precise tools from less precise tools’ vibes: you can create a remarkably precise analog calculator capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and solving arbitrary linear equations using nothing but a compass and a straight edge, once you know how it only takes a few minutes to make and they’re often quite a lot faster to use than electronic calculators. ^-^ And that’s only brushing the surface of what can be done with them.
:P Also relating to that toaster anecdote, iirc it’s also a modern kenning in that space that the technology does not currently exist to create a no.2 pencil from scratch.
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Woah these are so cool! I love graphical depictions of mathematical problems, and fast approximation of things that are difficult or even impossible to solve precisely, and this is both of those things! I shall have to investigate further
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I do rather enjoy this brain teaser of a problem
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There used to be a really good youtube channel full of info about them, demonstrations, and recipes for making new ones called Nomographer but heartbreakingly the whole thing got taken down. I think it briefly moved to a blog which also got taken down?? If you can find any record of it it’s a great place to start, but please let me know if you do 'cause it’s kind of the only thing I had to recommend for learning more. ;-;
There are of course always slide rules, the Abaque, and less impressively but still fun Napier’s bones and Genaille-Lucas rods ^-^
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ok…
if zombies eat a human’s brain to turn them into a zombie
wouldn’t eating a zombie’s brain turn them into a human?
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