Things that are true that you dont believe

yeppydeppy

I find it hard to believe that people are that stupid, they believe in reiki, astrology, psychics, gods, spirits, ouija boards (started life as a board game) and all sorts of other bull**** and they believe it without proof, on the word of someone else. I mean come on are you really that feckin' thick?

Alun

Wibbs wrote: »

It gets weirder when you consider that taking your body as a whole, your cells are about the same number as the bacteria living in and on you. You're half "microscopic creepies". We're as much an ecosystem as an organism, which I think is cool myself.

Over time, there have been many estimates of the ratio of bacteria to cells, I believe until recently it was considered to be 10:1 in favour of bacteria, but recent research suggests it's roughly 4:3.

angryIreGamer

this statement is a lie.

jimgoose

DavyD_83 wrote: »

That Pi never repeats itself, how can you have infinite arrangements of a finite number of digits (1-9)...

That isn't quite what's meant - when it's said that Pi never repeats itself, what's meant is that it never gets into a pattern that repeats forever. If it did, it would be a rational number, and it isn't. That's the real point, and it's why 22/7 is only an approximation - Pi can never accurately be expressed as a fraction.

Mickeroo

I don't think science definitively says "no two snowflakes are the same", that's just a colloquial take on it. I think it's more a case of "snowflakes are so complex that it is highly unlikely to ever find an identical pair".

jimgoose

Mickeroo wrote: »

I don't think science definitively says "no two snowflakes are the same", that's just a colloquial take on it. I think it's more a case of "snowflakes are so complex that it is highly unlikely to ever find an identical pair".

Indeed. When you get down to the atomic level, the probability of finding two identical is in the vicinity of 10^18/1 against, because of the small amount (1 molecule in ~5,000) of deuterium in water.

b318isp

Mickeroo wrote: »

I don't think science definitively says "no two snowflakes are the same", that's just a colloquial take on it. I think it's more a case of "snowflakes are so complex that it is highly unlikely to ever find an identical pair".

I suspect that is true of any crystalline structure, such as salt - or even grains of sand. The 6 axis close up of snowflakes we often see don't actually show the microscopic variations.

Timberrrrrrrr

Still can't believe Trump is president

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MadamRazz

That we built the pyramids.............but at this point in the Big Bang Theory seasons its mostly just to annoy my OH

Skylinehead

MadamRazz wrote: »

That we built the pyramids.............but at this point in the Big Bang Theory seasons its mostly just to annoy my OH

They're alien landing pads.

nelly17

The whole Trump thing - clearly the world has gone mad

Arghus

Spooky Action at a Distance.

And Trump.

PARlance

hank scorpio89 wrote: »

I was talking to a friend earlier and we somehow ended up in a debate about snowflakes..you no the old no two snowflakes are the same theory.
His basic argument was its science.my argument was i fail to believe 2 identical snow flakes have never fallen before.how can science even prove this ..got me thinking what other things are suposedly true that you dont beleieve ???

Scientific theories are constantly being disproven. So there's a good chance you may be proven correct, in time. Think it's called pessimistic induction.

QI had a piece on it before. ~10% of their facts will have been disproven within a year of the show airing iirc.

jimgoose

PARlance wrote: »

...QI had a piece on it before. ~10% of their facts will have been disproven within a year of the show airing iirc.

...in accordance with Stephen Fry's First Cromulence Theorem.

seamus

mahamageehad wrote: »

For me it's the birthday thing. If you put 23 random people in a room there's a 50% chance 2 will have same birthday. If you put 75 people, that rises to 99.9% possibility. I've seen the maths, I know it's true, I still don't believe it though.

Link: https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-birthday-paradox/

To be fair, the link there actually explains why you have trouble believing it.

In a room of 23, do you think of the 22 comparisons where your birthday is being compared against someone else’s? Probably.

Do you think of the 231 comparisons where someone who is not you is being checked against someone else who is not you? Do you realize there are so many? Probably not.

The fact that we neglect the 10 times as many comparisons that don’t include us helps us see why the “paradox” can happen.

In other words, you're looking at room of 23 people and thinking "that's 22 birthday comparisons. Versus 365 days in the year, of course the odds are tiny".

Imagine you have 23 people in a room, and you want to make pairs (11 pairs + 1 spare). There are 253 different combinations of that; 253 unique pairs of people. That's where the 50:50 comes from; not numerical trickery, but the bias in our own heads to only consider things from our personal perspective.

Mena Mitty

Alun wrote: »

Over time, there have been many estimates of the ratio of bacteria to cells, I believe until recently it was considered to be 10:1 in favour of bacteria, but recent research suggests it's roughly 4:3.

Now my brain cells are all confussed about the sums and that.

But things are looking up, the 2017 All Ireland Autonomous Bacteria Deathmatch final is on tomorrow...Big Bad Bacilli versus the one and only..there can be no other.. Machete Spirochete the referee for the day will be fairplay man...The Great E.Coli Esq.

DrumSteve

That space is unending.

And if it's not, what's outside it?

DavyD_83

jimgoose wrote: »

That isn't quite what's meant - when it's said that Pi never repeats itself, what's meant is that it never gets into a pattern that repeats forever. If it did, it would be a rational number, and it isn't. That's the real point, and it's why 22/7 is only an approximation - Pi can never accurately be expressed as a fraction.

I understand what it actually means, it just still didn't make any logical sense to me. If truly infinite the has to be a point where the first x numbers is the same as the next x numbers.
I think one of us may have misunderstood the point of the thread.

con___manx1

Saint patrick isn't irish

SEPT 23 1989

the universe is expanding into nothing

That people prefer physical torture than to be bored.

But seemingly it is true. If you leave people in a totally plain room with nothing in it but a big red button that will painfully electrocute them - sheer boredom will lead them to periodically press it just for something to do. Because physical pain is preferable to ongoing boredom.

Oh and the observer effect. Seemingly also true but hard to believe.

That the chances someone will step in and help someone - or stop a crime - go _down_ as the number of other people around goes _up_ - meaning you are less likely to get help if there is more people around.

jimgoose

DavyD_83 wrote: »

I understand what it actually means, it just still didn't make any logical sense to me. If truly infinite the has to be a point where the first x numbers is the same as the next x numbers.
I think one of us may have misunderstood the point of the thread.

Possibly. I take comfort that Hippasus got thrown into the sea over it - you wouldn't be the first to be wary of such things. :pac::pac::pac:

osarusan

That three cup shuffle thing where you guess one from A, B, and C, (say you guess and the person turns over another cup to show it's not holding anything (say C) and then asks you if you want to switch your original guess-apparently it is better in terms of probability to switch. Maths says so, but I have no idea why and am intuitively against it.

Captain Chaos

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

the universe is expanding into nothing

No it's not, it's expanding just everything is getting farther apart from each other. In 100s of billions of years time and the earth and sun somehow still exist (they wont after 5-7 billion years), if you looked into the night sky you will see no stars as they have will have moved beyond the distance light can reach us as expansion is still accelerating and it's not constant. It's the space between starts and galaxies that's getting bigger not the boundary of the universe expanding into nothing.

Birneybau

NIMAN wrote: »

That everything is made up of tiny particles that have other tiny particles floating around them.

Anytime I try to look at things in life, just plain old normal things, like making tea with a tea bag, or me typing this on a PC, looking at the characters on the screen, the person sitting opposite me, my hands etc......thats its all made up of atoms, molecules, protons, electrons etc etc.

Baffling.

To go along with this, everything is mostly nothing at an atomic level, so, everything is mostly empty space. You can never truly touch anything.

Glenster

Captain Chaos wrote: »

No it's not, it's expanding just everything is getting farther apart from each other. In 100s of billions of years time and the earth and sun somehow still exist (they wont after 5-7 billion years), if you looked into the night sky you will see no stars as they have will have moved beyond the distance light can reach us as expansion is still accelerating and it's not constant. It's the space between starts and galaxies that's getting bigger not the boundary of the universe expanding into nothing.

Thats a good way of thinking about it but is wrong on almost every point of fact.

Four Phucs Ache

That people in this country with multiple convictions some 300 + are still fooking out and about.

jiltloop

The Monty Hall problem. I've studied it, thought it through, came to understand it and then forgot why it's true again and I'm not starting all over again! :mad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

filbert the fox

The Siphon

the square root of a minus number*

how things go bad when you're in a hurry - all the aoul' wans come out in their slow cars knowing you're rushing to get somewhere

strawberries in the supermarket in January

an invisible God

that we still have civil war politics on this tiny portion of land.

That the most northerly point on this island is in the South!

*the rule is if you multiply a number by itself (+ or -) you get a positive. Minus multiplied by minus gives a plus.- if you multiply any number by itself it's the square. so the square root of a negative number is - well I haven't an iota.