That knowing things with the mind is as limiting as it is empowering. In other words, your mind can be blown and you'd still be alright.
What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
81–90 of 159 posts
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#82That 50% of step daughters will have some sort of unwanted sexual relationship with their step fathers. I don't know if this means actual sex or just unwanted advances. Either way is just mind boggling. It's so gross on so many levels. I don't recall where I read it, and I hope it's false.
Sounds like one of those "college feminist club" kinds of statistics that get tossed around. Sounds way too high.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#83Erazing faith in the verb "to be" by reading up on Alfred Korzybski and the philosophy of when abstractions fail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#84A computer and an innovative mind were the only tools necessary to sustain myself economically and make the world a better place. I'm still working on the mind, but the MBP was a good investment towards that end :)
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#85That we have all evolved from some very simple single-cellular ancestor that lived billions years ago and everything that happens to us on a biological level is encoded in the DNA.
Have you heard of epigenetics? This blew my mind recently.
"study of inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence"
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#86I've no idea if this is true or not (probably not due to where i heard it) but a poll was taken in the US about foreign aid.
68% said that too much was spent on foreign aid, 59% said they thought it should be cut.
Thus 9% think foreign aid is too high but shouldn't be cut. It isnt so much this specific example, but i bet pollsters get this kind of thing all the time, which i find fascinating.
Bonus points if you know where its from.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#87When I was nine I was playing with BASIC and wrote a simple program that would enumerate all colors of all pixels on the screen. I wanted to see all possible images "fly by" so to speak. First I got frustrated because it was running so slowly, only then I started to think... If I can display a picture of a car on this monitor, then that picture would eventually also show up 'by chance' with my program! Mind blown. Th…
Wow, you too, I came across this while meditating at 22. But I was thinking about how there can't be a new color of light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum_algorithm
Other implications:
1. Knowledge is finite(a big number but finite, only 10^100 atoms in the universe so even if your screen was big as the universe there is only so much it could show)
2. Solving a problem can be interpreted as a search through linear space of all possible permutation. So, lets say that the drug to cure cancer could be in the form of an equation, it would show up on the screen eventually.
3. Oh, if there is a God, his pic will eventually come up on your computer.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#88that most people in the world do not use bidets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidet
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#89I'm Italian, born and raise there. I moved here in Florida 5 years ago. My ex-girlfriend is American, born and raise here. One day I met her best friend from college (he lives here in Florida as well), and he told me that his father was Italian. When he told me his lastname, I told him that I know people with the same last name from my grandfather's hometown, so I asked him to ask his father where he is from. We ende…
Along those lines:
* I bumped into a girl that I went to South Eugene High School with at the train station here in Padova, Italy. We were even on the same train. I was quite literally speechless for a moment or two.
* I worked with a person in San Francisco whose dad had known my dad and uncle in the same small town in Montana.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#90Euler's identity blew me away when I first learned it a year ago: e^iπ + 1 = 0
This is mine too. How is it possible that
* the ratio between the a circle's circumference and diameter
* the number such that the derivative of e^x = e^x
* the square root of negative 1
Mind. Blown. The universe is one crazy place.