this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 50 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

Another one is levelling.

A lot of people can see a picture frame is about 0.5° out of level and their fucking eye twitches until they fix it

Me included

That's nuts when you think about it

[–] Senseless@feddit.org 4 points 27 minutes ago

See, I live in an old apartment. The corners aren't 90°, the wall a picture is hanging on is convex. When I'm lying in bed and look at the picture it looks like it's crooked but I used a level several times on it and it's as straight as can be. It's driving me insane.

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

I purposefully slightly tilt most my wall hangings. I like watching guests squirm when they mention it and I do nothing

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 4 points 30 minutes ago
[–] superkret@feddit.org 6 points 1 hour ago

Sorry cousin, unfortunately I will get the flu this Christmas and won't be able to come visit.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (4 children)

Our bodies n brains are so cool. Think about what goes into locating a sound in space.

Edit: there's more to it but at the most basic level your brain calculates the fraction of a second difference between when one ear picks up a sound and when the other does creating a reference point based on that.

[–] GraniteM@lemmy.world 4 points 53 minutes ago

Put on some halfway decent headphones and try out the virtual barbershop.

[–] qupada@fedia.io 6 points 1 hour ago

I got into an argument with someone once about this, when they told me (paraphrasing) "it's safe to drive listening to music through headphones, because they let outside sound in".

Yes they indeed might, but - even ignoring delay introduced from digital electronics - you've now lost all sense of where that sound is coming from, because you're listening to the sound of one microphone being played through one speaker.

The human ear really is an incredible thing.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 9 points 2 hours ago

That’s boring. Two ears only allow you to put the sound somewhere on a plane (the vertical one that cuts your body in half lengthwise). How do you know the ‘height’ of the sound on that plane? By utilizing the different distortions the sound goes through while being funneled through your auricle.

[–] dukatos@lemm.ee 2 points 1 hour ago

You can also detect is the source up or down thanks to ear shape which delays sound for couple of ms.

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 10 points 2 hours ago

If you're about to walk into a bar with you head, or like the top of a doorpost or smt. You'll instinctively pull back and avoid the obstacle, inches before it hurts, because your brain notice the hairs on your head moved. That's why men who have recently gone bald, often have bumps and bruises on their head. My bald colleague told me that for him, that was the hardest thing about going bald.

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 21 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

Throwing and catching always amaze me. And it's not something that everyone is always great at, for sure, but anyone can try to toss a wad of paper into the waste basket. Whether or not you make it, the calculations under the hood, happening so quickly, always astound me to think about.

[–] remotedev@lemmy.ca 2 points 15 minutes ago

I remember when I was younger and would lay on my back throwing a baseball up in the air and catching it, that I could watch it go up and not follow it with my eyes as it goes down and still have my hand in the right spot to catch it

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 11 points 2 hours ago

Read somewhere that catching is actually dead simple, just "move towards the image of the incoming target" (I'm not talking about the arm kinematics).

There were a robot paper bin that zoomed under stuff you threw up in the air using no complicated algorithms for example.

Funnily many algos are calked on physical and chemical effects in the real workld, like splines for example were made with a thin metal bar and lead weight bending it to get the lines used in boat hull construction.

[–] Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz 40 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

When sharpening knives, with practice you can tell when you are done by sliding your fingertips along (not across) the sharpened bevel. It's possible to feel imperfections measured in micrometers this way.

[–] pearsaltchocolatebar 26 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

If the earth were shrank down to the size of a golf ball, you could feel houses.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 55 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That seems wildly unnecessary. I can already feel houses.

[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

I'm sure there's some actual science thing they're referencing here, but I don't understand it. Who can't feel houses?

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 points 33 minutes ago

Both a house and a golf ball are unbelievably tiny compared to the size of the Earth. The idea that you can shrink the Earth many thousands of times over and be able to feel a house parallels with our ability to feel micro imperfections on knife blades.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

People without fingers, I guess

[–] danekrae@lemmy.world 10 points 3 hours ago

We have equipment to measure down to microns, and my students often test how fine details they can feel.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 16 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, most people do it across, rather than along the blade, what with the necessity of detecting a burr, which can't usually be felt length wise. You slide along the blade, and it is sharp, if you screw up you get cut.

That doesn't take away from what you're saying, it's very true, no matter which direction you're feeling. Just normal, average fingertips can pick up stuff like that, that you'd need a microscope to see. It's a trip!

[–] Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz 5 points 3 hours ago

The burr is also detectable lengthwise. When starting with a dull blade it feels smooth while sliding fingers lenghtwise. When the burr is formed, it starts to feel rough. When it feels like it's digging into skin, it's sharp. It's a very subjective thing though, everybody has different fingers.

[–] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 0 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

A lot of it is the difference between learning practically and learning theoretically. You don't have to understand the underlying mechanics in practice to know how to keep getting the same result. Your brain doesn't have to be doing any math, it just has to have shaken a bottle enough times to have a good comparative basis formed.

Learning to calculate the current remaining volume in a container when observing someone else shake it.... that would use all that theoretical knowledge and math.

It's like knowing how hard you have to throw an egg at a wall for it to break instead of bounce off. You do it 100 times, you just get a good feel for it. Doing all the math, and then trying to learn it practically is barely gonna affect how quickly you learn it in practice. But if you wanted to make a robot that throws it exactly hard enough without wasting any energy, practical knowledge will have almost no value, and theory and math will be incredibly valuable.

This is coming from someone who does indeed have the whole "passive trajectory analysis of every moving object around me" thing. I can't do crowds or drive at busy times. But, for moving through a minor crowd while reading a book, or pulling into a tight parking space while other cars are moving around near me, it's very helpful. I have good spatial awareness in general, like parking in my garage with only an inch of clearance on the far side of my car has never been an issue in 14 years so far. Or when doing it with someone else's borrowed car every now and then too. When I shrug off the difficulty of doing something like that, people seem to be amazed. Otherwise, I would have assumed it was normal, feels normal to me.