Asklemmy

you are loved and deserve happiness

Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826

Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.

Edit: idk if it's actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that's what I've heard. I looked it up and it seems like it's your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.

General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.

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

Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.

Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521

Oh, I have two good ones:

1. Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)

2. You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn't been there.

To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.

Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it's been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it's productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)

A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.

Russia is actually pretty small and it almost fits inside Africa. Try it out: https://www.thetruesize.com/

EDIT: Ok I expressed myself in the wrong way. What I meant was, Russia is not as big as I thought it was. Of course, it's still really huge.

The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.

The world is running out of sand.

It's one of the most used materials in the world for construction but islands are disappearing because of its limited supply.

Gary Numan is two weeks older than Gary Oldman.

Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of cellphones than the building of the pyramids

All the planets in the solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon

The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.

On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.

Maine is the closest US state to Africa.

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.

If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.

1 day = time to rotate on it's axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun

For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.

However, because Venus' axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.

Hence, a year is shorter than a day

For those interested:

1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days

if you scramble a rubiks cube up there is a good chance that it is the first cube to be in that state. there are 43,252,003,247,489,856,000 possible states that a cube(3x3) can be scrambled up in to.

Most people have more than the average number of legs.

Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.

Tiffany was a really common name in Ancient Rome.

An elephant is the only mammal with 4 forward facing knees.

Moose kill more people than bears every year.

Also Donald Trump was the president of the United States.