this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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I did not! Do not drag me into this entire mess.
Thank you Mittwochsfrosch!
Pfff nah, it's because yesterday was Tuesday obviously
You could honestly say this about most of reality.
If you want to dive into that sort of thing i recomend looking into social constructivist theory, nuts to realise just how much of everything we live our lives by is really a product of people agreeing to do so rather than any struct objective measure.
Money and time are two big ones. They both mean so much to humans but we're the only ones that have ascribed that value to them.
Exactly, like crypto for example, it has no real world value (in fact it has negative real world value) and the only thing that makes it valuable is that enough people believe it has value.
Imagine if Europe decided there was 6 week days and America decided there was 7
for some time soviet union decided they'll have 5 day week and then 6 day week https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar#Five-day_weeks
The reason vast majority of cultures has 7 day week is that lunar month has 28 days, so that it can be neatly divided into four seven day weeks. It was important for timekeeping and because hunter-gatherers could forage more easily during full moon nights
My gamer brain read "frag" instead of "forage". Now I imagine primitive Quake players bunnyhopping through the forest on full moon nights to hunt for food. Help.
i mean this is not a massive stretch. i heard an account of (ww2?) soldiers using mortar for fishing: one team would shell river, and another team would collect stunned/dead fish safe distance downstream. sometimes civilians got too close but they weren't particularly concerned about it
.. and they probably weren't particularly tasty either
Shortly after the revolution the French attempted a 10-day calendar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Ten_days_of_the_week
I disagree. Today is saturday.
It’s Wednesday my dudes.
So how about we all agree it’s Saturday.
You have my sword.
And my bow
Agreed, but let's wait till tomorrow
Can we do this tomorrow? I have stuff to do on Wednesday but I feel a bit ill so... Can we make this twosday?
No, it's goddamn Tuesday now.
Hmm.. Thursday for me. Are we on the same planet?
Evidently not.
I reject your reality and substitute my own
Picard: "There are four lights!"
The only reason the sequence of symbols you wrote say what you wanted to say is because we all agree on what it says.
Depends on how we're framing it. We agreed on names of days and lengths of weeks based on our culture and tradition, but that's not really what today "is", though. What it "is" is the 171st rotation in the current revolution around the sun. No need to agree on anything there. That just is what it is.
Where the rotations started (new years for example) is also of course arbitrary, as is the starting point for each rotation ("midnight")
Or the starting point in general. Maybe we've been running 15 minutes late for everything, since forever.
The only reason you're talking, is that we all agree what each word means.
It is neat seeing our agreement on these words change over time. And seeing a few people complaining about words not being used in its original meaning, thinking language is static. And cursewords going from taboo to common usage.
Did you know shark (most likely) comes from the dutch word schurk (meaning bad guy/villain/scoundrel)? Which is where Loan Shark comes from, not from the fish. And the fish was called Haye or Dogfish? At some point the english speaking people decided that the fish should be called "bad guys". Meanwhile, here in Norway we kept both the words "skurk" and "hai" from the dutch, in its original meaning.
I wish I found this so fascinating back when I was still in school and could have taken that path.