• shroomato@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That West Berlin was an enclave deep within GDR, completely encircled by the Berlin wall. For some reason I thought that Berlin was right at the border between FRG and GDR with the wall splitting it in half.

  • AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I found out that I could disassemble my vacuum’s dirt container further so I can clear it out easier. The container has a big plastic tube that runs through it and I’ve been squeezing my hand around it to grab clumps of pet hair that get stuck. The other day while I was trying to clear the container, the plastic tube fell out. Turns out I just needed to twist and pull the tube. I’ve had this vacuum for 8 years.

  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I just learned that in the sky there are things called contrails, and they are made by machines that fly high above us called aeroplanes.

  • PissinSelfNdriveway@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    If you are a dude sit down to pee when you are home… feels weird for like a day but it is fantastic. No more trying to aim on the middle of the night while trying to close your eyes, no more rouge pee stream, just a like moment to sit and relax.

  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When using Google Maps for driving directions, you can swipe left and it will show/speak the next upcoming step. I had no idea about this and I’ve been using Google maps for ages.

    • hactar42@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Holy crap, this could be a game changer for me. I live in an area with a ton of highway interchanges, so it not uncommon to get directs that say in 5 mile stay left on road XYZ, then right after that, it like exit right in .0001 miles. So, I’m always scrolling up on the map to see what’s really coming up.

  • radix@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Don’t mess around with partitions on your disk when it’s past midnight, you’re extremely stressed, and you don’t have (easily accessible) backups.

  • Harpsist@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My wife just informed me a few days ago that most dicks do not curve up to point at the ceiling… mine does.

    I’m 40. How did I not ever know this?

  • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. One of the things he talks about is how snap decisions (quick emotional reactions to stimuli) are so fast because they skip over certain parts of your central nervous system. This is why these decisions are often unwise/unreasonable; they skip the part of your brain that does logical reasoning. This is necessary for fight/flight decisions but not great for emotionally-charged conversations.

    In retrospect, this seems obvious.

  • ccunning@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “Conifers” comes from “Cone” as in Pine Cone

    “Mammals” as in Mammary glands

    Those are the two that come to mind but there have been several more in the same vein of these as I rapidly approach the conclusion of my fifth decade…

  • Codename_goose@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I realized too late in my life that friendships of any kind or flavor all have a lifespan. This can mean anything, five minutes in line at the movies, childhood into high school, a semester of college, or your whole life.

    Context: the friends I’ve (m35) had since childhood and into my adulthood have slowly and silently withered away due a multitude of reasons but mostly because we each have things going on in our life and those had taken precedence over cultivating and caring for our friendships. Sure we text for holidays or birthdays, but it all feels hollow compared to what we had together for literal decades.

  • Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The actual rules of Scattergories. I had no idea that the rules I grew up with were not the actual rules, and the actual rules make the game much easier.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeM
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    1 year ago

    Economics. I never understood it that well having taken two years of high school classes for law and government, then watched a single Economics Explained video and understood so much that I hadn’t understood before.

      • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeM
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        1 year ago

        I skimmed through the channel and believe it’s this one based on the fact it had Japan in it and was recent, but I might be missing something. Titles and thumbnails change often as a form of clickbait and that gets confusing when going back to something.

  • TheActualDevil@sffa.community
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    1 year ago

    At 4 AM this morning I learned there was a smoke alarm in my office. Also that the beep it makes when the battery is dead is loud as fuck. Loud enough to wake me from a dead sleep in another room.

  • Jerb322@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “Making ends meet” i use to think it was, “Making ends meat” like all you can afford is the cut of bits off of undesirable meat. I never saw it written down before, and now I feel dumb.

    • ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      That’s a wonderful eggcorn.

      I was watching a video talking about how eggcorns are an unusual category of error because they require intelligence and creativity to make. The argument was that the process goes like this:

      A new word or phrase is heard, but not understood. The brain makes sense of it using existing vocabulary that has sounds that are close enough. This is accompanied an explanation for why those specific words make sense in this new context.

      For example: the original eggcorn was a mishearing of acorn. Egg because it’s roughly egg shaped, and corn is sometimes used to describe small objects similar to how grain can be.

      All this to say, it’s maybe not something to feel dumb about. Your brain did something neat.

    • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It actually refers to tying a napkin around your neck before eating. You had to “make the ends meet” before you could eat

    • lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I had only ever see trebuchet written, i had never heard it spoken. So young me thought it was pronounced tray-bucket. I was in my 40s before i finally heard someone discussing catapult vs trebuchet and realized it was french.

      • fubo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        First, you get an ogre to bend a tree down to the ground. Then you fasten a bucket to the top of the tree, and put a rock in the bucket. Then you tell the ogre to let the tree loose, and the rock flies out and smashes your enemy’s castle.

        This is the invention of the tree-bucket.