• @Aeao@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    I read this once before and it’s one of those facts I find endlessly fascinating. It’s simple and obvious why it wasn’t normal before recent times…

    It just scratches my nerd fact itch I guess.

    It’s right up there with

    • social security numbers were promised to never be used as essentially your “human number” for things and would only be used for ss benefits

    And

    • minimum wage WAS designed and WAS intended to be a livable wage. It very specifically was proposed and made law with the point being it’s the lowest wage which a person can support themselves. People saying “minimum wage isn’t supposed to be livable wage!” Are wrong.

    Oh and

    -we see the color that is not absorbed by an object. So essentially we see every color the object ISNT.

    • @MTK@lemmy.world
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      1422 days ago

      Your last point is more of a philosophical / semantical one. What does it even mean that something is a specific color?

      It’s like how blue butterflies actually don’t have any blue pigments but rather have a nanostructure that interferes with light in a way that favors blue.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Ts7CsJDpg

      • HobbitFoot
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        222 days ago

        There are these butterflies in Central America. They’re blue and orange and yellow and have poison in their wings, just enough to stop a bird heart. But the birds know this somehow, so they don’t eat them. But there are other ones, butterflies, they’re orange, blue and yellow too but no poison wings. They’re just flying around, looking dangerous, getting by on their looks.

        • @FelixCress@lemmy.world
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          422 days ago

          But the birds know this somehow, so they don’t eat them.

          They know this because all birds who tried to eat them, died.

    • HobbitFoot
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      1022 days ago

      It probably wasn’t written to the quantity it is today, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t used.

      Mass literacy wasn’t a thing until the past 100 years, so a lot of people didn’t even write anything down about their lives.

      Even once mass literacy was adopted, the written word was generally sent to specific places. Outside of combat messengers, letters generally went to specific places where people would pick them up. If you were able to read the written message, you were probably in a known location to the sender.

      It isn’t until cellular text messaging or Internet chat where it became common to not know where a person was when you were talking to them.