One of Sir Issac Newton’s famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:
About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven to instead be about an Emu.
For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.
Upvoted bc i want someone to find and share it.
Good luck. It wasn’t a post, it was a top level comment and I have a dim memory of it only being slightly related to the post topic.
Oh great. First, the Emus won a war against Australia, greatly boosting their egos. And later on, they started censoring their mention online.
In other news… there seems to be a bird in my backyard that keeps taping on my backdoor window.
This is a great thread
The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell’s body for a posthumous execution. It’s just insane on so many levels
Did they not just dig it up so they could put his head on a spike for all to see?
Ask anyone from Ireland or Scotland at that time if it was justified and your head would be on a feckin spike for even questioning it 😂
No it was by trial and meant as punishment. Quite common even, but I first heard of it in relation to Cromwell c.s.
The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.
Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!
As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.
Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times. Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.
There was a roman emperor named Pupienus which is pronounced poopy anus
Biggus Dickus
“Well it’s a joke name sir!”
What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behavior like that.
Well, at least that brisket was good enough for jehovah.
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight
who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster 
. These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.Teacher has threw it on the trash. 😂
Imagine how his teacher feels. The little shit doodles all through his class, and who do we build a statue of? The kid‽
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
These don’t look too dissimilar to things I’d doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
It’s fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The “head with arms and legs” stage seems universal, and amusing.
“Mad” Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.
And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!
The only confirmed bow and arrow kill of WW2!
And still survived. Legend
Allegedly German soldiers said that they didn’t shoot him because they assumed he’d lost his mind, and took pity on him
The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn’t understand it and was “beaten to death” by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
Wasn’t he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.
Yes, they did that for all those experiments back then.
I’m skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
Okay, so it was actually unmanned, and it was a hydrogen balloon, but it does seem to be a pretty widely repeated story from a contemporary newspaper. This was shortly after the first hot air balloon flight and might have had less fanfare, so it seems a bit more reasonable that peasants 21 km away wouldn’t have heard anything about it until the large levitating blob was coming at them.
Wait, I said manned? D’Oh!
A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said “if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country”…
…and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.
Later, some dude was like “screw your catholicism, I don’t like my wife any more, I’ll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife,” and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.
I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that’s about it.
Your version makes more sense 😃
Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.
I find it fascinating that electricity is fast enough that this is a thing. You would never get this wrong with water, and if you did things wouldn’t work right, but electricity is basically instant.
Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).
Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was going in a circle. Tough luck, Benny. (Specifically, he was the one that figured out charge is conserved)
Now we all have to deal with circuit diagrams that don’t match what’s actually happening inside the components, which confuses at least me when I have to think about electrochemical reactions, semiconductors and/or induction.
Can you eli5? Or like I’m a dumb dumb idiot? Please.
Electricity is one of those things I so badly want to understand and just seem to not be able to.
Okay, so I see someone else already did an effortpost, so I’ll just add on.
Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it’s the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it.
Well, I’m sure he knew it was a guess. He was a smart man. He picked glass as the thing that picks up “electric fluid” in static electricity experiments, becoming “positively charged”, in other words a positive excess of fluid, when in fact it loses electrons. Until someone invented vacuum tubes a century or so later nobody could tell the difference.
Positive-to-negative is called “conventional current”, and circuit diagrams are still drawn that way. Unfortunately, the charge and direction of the particles moving (rather than just that they are moving) can become important if you want to understand electrochemistry, for example. Metal ions are positively charged (missing an electron), and so they’re going to come off of the electrode where electrons being removed, and plate on to the electrode where they’re being added. You have to remember the conventional current is opposite to the actual current to picture a battery running a circuit, and if it’s connected to a bunch of digital chips in a complicated way, I, at least, can get lost.
If that’s still unclear, any further questions are welcome.
On diagrams you’d use + as the “source” of elecricity, i.e. you assume electricity flows from + to - (poaitive to negative). Electricity as far as physics goes is an effect created by electrons, which are defined as negative in charge.
DC is electricity where the literal flow of electrons from point A to point B make the current (so it flows from negative to positive, since it’s the flow of “negative” electrons that carries electricity). Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it’s the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it. So today, whenever you’re dealing with electrical diagrams current/electricity is assumed to flow from + to - while in the physical domain it’s the negatively charged electrons that create what we call electricity.
AC is a bit different - here electrons aren’t flowing directly from point A to point B, but rather wiggling about or “alternating” in place and it’s this alternating movement that carries the (still negative) charge. But even for AC it still holds true that electrical charge is the “negative” charge of electrons and that this movement of electrons alternating in place enables them to move this “negative” charge of theirs from one place to another.
I assume you know about the saying “opposites attract” - for electricity and charge it’s literally true, so you can view power consumption as the “positive” charge of protons (which is immovable because protons are bound to the cores of their atom), while it’s the “negative” charge of electrons which are located in the outer shells of metal atoms that can leave their atoms and move their charge that are viewed as the source/carrier of electricsl energy.
I put negative and positive in quotes because to get back to your question about defining why Franklin was wrong:
As it stands, there are two conventions on electricity. One is used in diagrams and often attributed to Franklin, the one that says that electricity flows from the positive (+) to the negative (-) pole. The other is the physics convention that protons hold positive charge while electrons hold negative charge, and this is where the disparity comes from. I don’t know which convention was chronologically earlier, but I assume it’s the physics one since Franklin is the one cited as “wrong”.
Obligatory I’m not an electrical engineer - this is only what I remember from my physics classes. Please assume it mostly correct but maybe not technically for every minute detail (the only use of “power” is technically very wrong among other things, but that’s the gist of it).
Electricity is the flow of electrons, who move from negative to positive, the opposite of what you would normally expect.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m a welder, but it always made more sense to me that electricity flows from the negative. Like , if the positive moved, wouldn’t you change the element of the wire after a while? It also helps that you can tell the difference if an arc is positive or negative relative to the stinger depending on how the metal reacts, at least to a welder. I know that doesn’t make any sense at all but it does to another welder lol
So, when Ben Franklin named them, it was in terms of something like “excess of electricity”. A positive excess of charge, like in the glass he used to define the term, is actually a deficit (negative excess) of electrons, which are the real fluid.
Later on Crooks (I think?) figured out that if he cleared all the air out of a tube with mercury, he could force electrons out of the metal into open space, at the negative cathode end, and at that point they realised it was backwards.
The Emu War
Tell ya what, you go fight a herd of dinosaurs and see who wins
~Everyone thinks it’s funny until they face off on an emu~
looking forward to the movie!
The Alberta Rat Wars
Uh oh I’ve not heard about those!
… Whyyyyy?!
W H A T
Risky click but worth it.
Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn’t fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we’d all be speaking some Australian language or something.
I read about it once. I think it was up to medieval times where sahara had lots of green batches and oasis? Though thats in the range of natural climate change.
Btw. most Alpine passes were unpassable from 900 to 1300, we had a mini ice age then.
Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don’t think that’s in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what’s happening now.
There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being “accidentally” run over by the colonial-era French.
Harvard University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than Harvard University.
