Things that are really weird when you think about them

[Shitshitshitshit]

Someone said to me today that balloons are like a plastic bag of someone's breath...

I'd never thought of it like that before and to be honest it made me feel a bit nauseous!

Do you have anymore examples of things that are actually really fucking weird when you think about it?

@lovesabadboy I often think that about places we go to. It seems really odd somehow that people do the same things day in and day out that were just a one time thing for us. I'm not explaining it well either but I know exactly what you mean

Milk - drinking the breastmilk from another animal long after we are babies. Impregnating a cow, having it birth a calf then talking the calf away so humans can drink the calves milk.

@Imadehimlikethat nope cant picture it at all. Probably the reason I dont like fiction.

I can tell you this because I see colours differently in each eye. It’s quite cool.

@Julietee not sure if I somehow missed more detail (advanced search suggests not) but pleeeease tell us more! Fascinating.

@imadehimlikethat I cant find the original article I read about it but heres one about blue.
www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-see-the-colour-blue-until-modern-times-evidence-science

I'm sure the fruit orange actually came before the word for the colour as well...

I think that groupings of colours were broader in the past and shades weren't given names and so perhaps not even seen? Some cultures do not distinguish between blue and green still.

Actors
The fact that we will happily pay to watch grown adults play ‘lets pretend’ and that they can make millions and lead amazing lifestyles if enough people like them.

Cakes! Who on earth decided to beat butter and sugar together, then add flour and eggs and bake it? How did they even imagine that would work then sort out the quantities of each ingredient? I love cakes tho! 😉

That some colours did not used to exist. There was no name for them like?

Orange.

As someone else mentioned, the colour is named after the fruit, before then that colour was 'red'. In English anyway.

How does the blind person know where to go? If they're completely blind, just how? It's amazing.

My grandfather had a brother who was blind, he could run up the street and in to his own garden. Some blind people echo locate and have you heard of phone freaking?

I know blind people in London learn the 'sound'of particular underground stations.

I madehimlikethat no, I wouldn't 'see' him at all. I studied English literature, but I think I focus more on the aspects of character than their physical appearance.

A serious one.

How fragile our civil society is and how easily it could descend into war. I was in what was Yugoslavia before war broke out in the 90s. We were on a standard family summer holiday. It's bizarre to think that a short time later the waiter who brought food to our table was probably trying to shoot the pool guy or rape the receptionist. Humans are still pretty tribal and for all the window dressing of civil society it doesn't take much for us to resort back to those tribal behaviours.

That you can never actually see your own face, only through a picture or mirror

Place marking. Enjoying this thread 😁

That you don't actually see anything. Your brain interprets the signs given by your brain.
For example, we actually see the world upside down, but the brain turns it upside down. If you wear glasses that turn the image upside down, eventually the brain turns it around again.

The same for all other senses.
You can feel cold or hot at the same temperature depending on the previous temperature.

That there were a few human species at some point and that some of us still carry genes from them.
That we could easily have been extinct at some point.
That every single one of us descends from a line of people who successfully reproduced. And that at some point in the past there was one person who is the ancestor for all of us, but they didn't know. Ok, strictly, always two. One woman and one man, but they probably never met.

"That some colours did not used to exist. There was no name for them and people didnt mention them... did people even see them? "

That's why we call orange hair 'red' according to QI.
Also, where one colour starts on the spectrum varies by language. In Welsh we used to say that grass was blue, though we've not copied English to say it's green.

"That you can never actually see your own face, only through a picture or mirror"

I can sort of see a bit of my nose. Maybe it's really big!

I can sort of see a bit of my nose. Maybe it's really big!

I heard somewhere that we can all see our nose but our brain doesn't register it.

Let's be honest, tits, we're all fascinated by them. They hang at the front of our bodies but we can't stop judging others. Nice tits, big tits, no tits. We're boobs mad

At the risk of being contrary, that one doesn't work for me, I never notice breasts at all except for how annoying mine are. Do other people really notice/care about them??

@aprarl cant say I do either other than of a woman I was talking to at a party as they looked like they would escape at any moment.

I can honestly say I don’t notice boobs at all!

I don't notice boobs either unless they are shoved up in display case!

I think all the things that fascinate me have been mentioned, but here they are:

1. Sleep. What's the purpose? Why haven't we (or any species) evolved to do without it? Surely there's a massive survival advantage to needing less sleep then other people?

1. Sport. There's a multi-billion pound worldwide industry that millions of people are emotionally invested in, and it's all about which group of people can kick a ball into a net the most times.

1. That every year we pass what will eventually be the anniversary of our death.

1. That the space where my house is has probably been occupied for millions of years by animals, primitive people etc. And now it's just DH, me, the kids and some spiders.

Choral singing. Just been to church. Yes we all have the words, but once we know the tune we can sing acapella and keep in the with each other. And those who don't know the song can join in as if we have a kind of predictive text only for the music.

Mathematical formulas. How many examples must you have to go through to be sure your formula works?

@BlueGlassesFrames "Mathematical formulas. How many examples must you have to go through to be sure your formula works?"

You don't. You start from the basic principles and build up the formula from there. For example, say you want to prove Pythagoras' Theorem (the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides). You could start with loads of triangles and measure them, but you can never be sure that there won't be a special case that you haven't covered.

Instead, you draw a triangle and label the sides a, b and c. You show that a squared = b squared + c squared (using geometry or something). Then you know that it doesn't matter what a, b and c are; the formula always works.