if you have 10 fingers, you have an above average number of fingers

while an average person will have 10 fingers, the global average for number of fingers is probably in the realm of 9.9999999… on account of more people having lost fingers than folks with extras (thanks, fireworks), which means that anybody with a full set is a teeny tiny fraction above the average

a lot of people think that it’s not possible for more than half of people to be above average:

it’s not intuitive

but if you have 10 people take a test, and 9 of them get an A, and 1 of them gets an F, then the average is just a little below an A and everybody who got an A is above average: 90% of people scored above average, 10% of people scored below average.

you have a median number of fingers.

somebody at scientific american needs to take a cold shower

watching flat-earth debunking content (it’s fun, even if I think they’re unnecessarily smug about it, as if they’re actually going to succeed at changing unchangeable minds) has actually forced me to develop a mental model for both seasons and tides which I didn’t really have before

before judging me: can you describe why it’s cold in winter and hot in summer without googling it?

if you said “because the earth is… further from the sun… in winter” then… how is it possible that winter in one hemisphere happens while summer happens in the other? If it was a distance from the sun thing, the whole world would go into winter at the same time, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it’s a tilt thing! When the top half of the Earth tilts closer to the sun, the whole “top” half of the planet gets more sun, and also there are bits on the very tip top that just stay lit all the time, and the whole “bottom” half of the planet gets less sun, and also there are bits on the very end that get no sun all the time, and then it swaps.

Why does tides? “Uh, gravitational pull from the moon, right?”

Okay, why does… TWO TIDES A DAY?

thinks about it

oh shit , there’s a tide on the side opposite from the moon, and it’s not as strong as the tide on the side directly facing the moon, that’s bananas

How is this not way more fun than insane theories about giant ice walls?

When I was a kid we had a to-scale rug of the solar system

there was a little yellow splotch for the sun, and then you couldn’t see any other planets because they were too small

….

….

wait a minute

in retrospect that might have just been a rug that my dad spilled some mustard on