Makes me think of Texas. Only 1/3 of my trip is getting to Texas. 2/3 is trying to get to where my family is at lol

My favourite geography fact is that when traveling along the Panama canal from the Caribbean sea to the Pacific, you're further east when you exit than when you entered.

It's close, though. IIRC, you can't say the same thing about Miami.

For the Alaska one, the Aleutian Islands extend beyond the 180° line of longitude, placing the tip of them within the eastern hemisphere.

It basically just boils down to the earth isn't flat. So something like this

The Alaska one North and West are obvious, but there are some islands that cross the date line, making them technically east.

Someone else posted a graphic, but basically Maine is significantly farther east which cancels out the North/South difference of other states.

The quark flavors were given their names for several reasons. The up and down quarks are named after the up and down components of isospin, which they carry.[60] Strange quarks were given their name because they were discovered to be components of the strange particles discovered in cosmic rays years before the quark model was proposed; these particles were deemed "strange" because they had unusually long lifetimes.[61] Glashow, who co-proposed the charm quark with Bjorken, is quoted as saying, "We called our construct the 'charmed quark', for we were fascinated and pleased by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world."[62] The names "top" and "bottom", coined by Harari, were chosen because they are "logical partners for up and down quarks".[41][42][61] Alternative names for top and bottom quarks are "truth" and "beauty",[nb 4] but these names have somewhat fallen out of use.[66] While "truth" never did catch on, accelerator complexes devoted to massive production of bottom quarks are sometimes called "beauty factories".

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

I bet it was a shitty placeholder name

Yep, quarks are spin-1/2 particles. They also have electric charge and color charge (strong nuclear force).

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

Obviously, if there was a significant atmosphere the moon would experience atmospheric drag and would fall to earth.

Would it?

The Moon is slowly drifting further away because Earth's rotation is significantly faster than the lunar orbit. Some of Earth's rotational energy is bled into the lunar orbit, causing it to increase in height, which in turn lowers its orbital period.

If there was a significant atmosphere for Earth at that height, you'd think it would actually give the Moon a boost

Sharks also predate basically all big recognizable surface geology features on earth. They're way older than the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas. It kind of makes sense once you realize they date back to the Pangea supercontinent.

Also, biologically modern humans are much older than Niagara Falls.

Sharks preceding trees is 🤯

when sharks first evolved Saturn had no rings

Or at least, didn’t have its current rings. I could be wrong but couldn’t it have torn apart other moons to create a different set of rings that then degraded over time?

Trees are 385 million years old. Sharks are 200 million years old. Trees still out-date sharks.

I don't understand the clock one.

Part of the western Florida panhandle (WFP) is on Central time. Part of southeastern Oregon (SEO) is on Mountain time. That puts them one hour apart.

In the fall, when we go back into Standard Time, when the clock hits 2am, you flip the clock back to 1am.

So, during a normal night, WFP would be at 2am and SEO would be 1am. But on the night the time changes, WFP hits 2am and immediately flips their clocks back to 1am - which means that, for one hour a year (until SEO hits 2am and flips their clocks back), part of Florida and part of Oregon's clocks are showing the exact same time.

I kinda struggled over how to word this - they're not in the same time zone, but for this one hour they might as well be.

Well the specifics are the lineage which includes sharks, we found stuff that might be sharks but hard to prove are definitely sharks that's 450 million years old (fossil sharklike scales)

And, this is copypaste from Snopes:

The earliest known fossil evidence of sharks (or their ancestors) are "shark-like scales" that date back to 450 million years ago, according to the National History Museum in London. However, whether these scales adorned "true sharks" or "shark-like animals" is an issue debated by the scientific community.

Nonetheless, scientists largely agree that, according to DNA evidence, living sharks, rays, and deep-sea fish called chimeras likely began evolving around 420 million years ago.

no it's this one named gary and he's a dick. you know, mean shark gary?

Trees are 385 million years old. Sharks are 200 million years old. Trees still out-date sharks.

Although... Trees have evolved multiple times in Earth's history... So sharks are certainly older than certain trees. But not older than the whole tree concept thing.

They're older than the North Star

The oldest fossils known are stromatolite fossils from 3.48 billion years ago. There are living stromatolites today. They predate Earth having significant oxygen in its atmosphere, because the cyanobacteria that formed them created the oxygen gas through photosynthesis from carbon dioxide. They've orbited the galaxy over fifteen times.

thanks for the tip, now im less likely to be poisoned by an assassin.

Is this for real? Any links? Not doubting you but it's always been a dark thought I can't push away about accidentally drinking that stuff.

Could be risky. My dog loves tearing out the squeaker things from anything that has one.

That would be like having sex with Wimp Lo from Kung Pow.

related: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1XXirS_PzTA

We could be the great scourge of this part of the universe. Expanding recklessly through galaxies in the local group, leaving only the dead husks of stars that have been stripped of all usable energy. The exponential nature of scientific discovery means that not only do we have a head start, our head start compounds as time progresses. We become a horrific but very efficient war machine for the sole purpose of controlling and exploiting all available forms of energy for profit. We seem like we're on that path.

To be fair its likely to be the most probable answer.

Whilst intelligent life is probably quite common at specific points in time, it isnt common at the same time, and if it is the distances involved are so vast it means we will never know they exist.

The best we can hope for in all likelihood is that we stumble on the ruins of some other species that died out millions of years ago.

Or we stumble on a bunch of blue monkeys who are as intelligent as dogs, but in 50 million years they will be the ones finding the ruins of our civilisation.

And it's the most likely solution. The universe has been hostile to life until very recently (on a cosmological scale). We know we're rather early in the goldilocks zone of universal habitability.

I just find it odd when some people argue "humans aren't special enough to be that lucky. We're too stupid to achieve more". It's odd because calling humans stupid is actually arguing that humans are exceptional. Meanwhile you don't have to be exceptional to be lucky.

And if you're wondering, it's Lex Friedman that argues this. And no, I don't listen to him anymore. I stopped once over 50% of the people he interviewed were just AI and crypto shills

That's not an answer, because if life is common, then the chance of us being the first is minuscule.

Lets say that life can only form around main sequence G type stars (ie, like our sun). There is no reason to believe this is true, but lets say it is for this example. The universe is 14 billion years old, and the sun is 4.5 billion years old. Lets round it to 4 billion years old when life first formed.

Now, the earliest G type stars formed approximately 1 billion years after the universe formed. Lets say that life can only develop when those stars were at least 4 billion years old. That puts the earliest possible scenario where life formed at 5 billion years after the universe formed, and that was 9 billion years ago. Low balling it, there are approximately 7 billion g type main sequence stars current in our galaxy.

All together, that means the chance of us simply being the first is very low, and if we are the first, then life isn't common, and if life isn't common, the underlying reason for that is the answer to the fermi paradox.

I would, i'd dedicate my life to remembering

Nope. Out in the open ocean

I was thinking about putting a reference to that in, but decided it would be a bit trite.