Asklemmy

Nothing insane, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a band are older than Guns 'N' Roses.

California was a state longer than Italy was a nation.

There is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.

There was this racehorse named Pot-8-Os who won over 25 races and went on to sire a horse empire of winners. His father was a legend himself named "Eclipse"

I'd have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.

1 - George W Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.

...in the same vein..

2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the 'accounting' of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.

... If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.

And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.

Due to two facts:

1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

2. The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.

It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.

There's no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.

Lots of people know a broken clock is right twice per day, but many are unaware that a clock running backwards is right 4 times per day.

The average person does not have 10 fingers. Maybe the median person, but not the average.

Every eye has a tiny blind spot near the middle. But your brain makes it disappear and you don't realize it's there.

You can verify this. Draw a dot on a bit of paper. Close one eye, stare at a fixed point, now move the paper around the center until the dot disappears...magic

What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation.. realizing that is a real mind blower

by weight, theres more non-human DNA in you than human.

Bees kill invaders in their nest by climbing all over them and shaking their bodies.

James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You're Beautiful. Reality is weird.)

Sharks are older than both trees and the north star

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn't ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

Humans have stripes that are invisible to us. However, cats can see our stripes.

A few of my favorite fun facts are geography related.

The pacific side of the Panama canal is further east than the Atlantic side.

If you head south from Detroit the first foreign country you'll hit is Canada.

Lake Tahoe is further west than Los Angeles