• rainrain@sh.itjust.works
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    7 hours ago

    Yes and no.

    I explain because it’s useful to do so. But no explanation ever really fits anything.

    It’s like fitting a shoe to the Pacific Ocean. I mean you can toss it in and say “look, it fits”. And to a degree it does. But not really.

  • onehundred@lemm.ee
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    13 hours ago

    Two stand out. While under the influence.

    The experience of time stopping or freezing after bumping into someone at a music festival, it was only for a perceived 5-7 seconds. As I swung off this dude and began to lose my footing everything stopped. Sounds, people moving, the trees swaying, everything. The external physical world stood still as did my physical form but my brain and thoughts was still moving at regular speed, able to understand the outside world had stopped but do nothing about it. The closest I’ve found to explain it is a guy having a seizure in the shower and perceiving that the water had frozen, I simply cannot explain this one.

    On a separate occasion, fish made of little black dots, almost like flies, swimming around my living room. They were perfect in form and movement, like being inside a fish tank. It was the strangest thing because they were full external visual hallucinations that I seemed to have no control over but could perceive as real. They appeared as real as the room around me.

  • LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz
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    17 hours ago

    A few weeks after my mom passed, I was reading a book winding down for the night. I set the book down in the middle of a very large coffee table and went to bed. Maybe 20 mins after laying down I heard a loud bang in the living room. I shot outta bed and grabbed a bat and went to investigate. In the living room, on the floor about 5 feet from the table, was the book I was reading. There were no animals or other people in the house and all the doors and windows were locked. This was a heavy hardcover book, so I don’t think wind or something like that picked it up and threw it. Im skeptical by nature but I still can’t come up with an explanation for that one.

  • Yermaw@lemm.ee
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    17 hours ago

    As kids we had a few “must have been ghosts” experiences.

    Me and my brother both woke up at the same time because we heard our mom shout on us from downstairs. We got up to see what she wanted but she wasn’t there. Went back upstairs into her bedroom and she was asleep.

    Our bedroom TV once turned itself on in the night, loud static channel. It was unplugged before we went to bed and didn’t have a remote control.

    “Must have been aliens” one. Was watching an airplanes blinking light in the sky flying along. It stopped moving and kept blinking for about 5 seconds. Then shone really bright and shot towards the horizon in about a second. This was about 15 years ago and nobody believes me. I still don’t have an explanation for it. I assumed it was brand new military tech but I still haven’t heard of anything that can move that fast.

  • Yeah. This fantastic woman married me. I have no idea why.

    Also, I really don’t understand rockets at more than a superficial level, but I saw one launch once.

    I’m quite uncertain about jet airplanes, especially when you’re, like, driving in the same direction and there’s a strong headwind, and it almost looks like you’re going faster than them? They’re just hanging there, god knows how many tons of metal and 300 people. It’s creepy.

    And I really think economics is proof that we’re in the Matrix, because the more I think about it, the less (functional, not ethical) sense capitalism makes, and everybody who talks like they know about it just sounds like stringing together a bunch of buzzwords. Also, there’s that truism that if you ask four economists a question, you’ll get five opinions. Plus nobody can reliably predict the stock market; weather - a highly chaotic system - is more predictable than the stock market. It’s like the programmers put it in, but when it got to the point where they had to make it explainable, they couldn’t without introducing recursive conflicting rules, so it’s just hand-waving, and people pretending or misleading themselves that they know how it all works.

    • Skua@kbin.earth
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      24 hours ago

      Do you want explanations for the jets and rockets, and if so what is your current understanding?

      • Rockets are: put a bunch of flammables in a giant tube and light it on fire. That’s my understanding. Well, Ok. I know there are nozzles on gimbals, but… here’s a joke that represents what I’m talking about:

        A brain surgeon goes to a party, and the host is introducing him to people.
        Host: “John, this is Jack. He’s a software engineer.”
        John: “Oh, that’s nice, but it isn’t brain surgery.”
        Host: “This is Mary; she worked in industrial inorganic chemistry.”
        John: “Oh that’s nice, but it isn’t brain surgery.”
        Host (annoyed): “Maude, this is John. He’s a brain surgeon.”
        Maude: “Oh, that’s nice, but it isn’t rocket science.”

        I think the big picture is deceptively simple. The practice of getting into orbit is far, far more complicated.

        As for airplanes, yeah. I understand them well enough; I think with the right equipment and practice I could build something that flies. It’s just, sometimes seeing a behemoth in the air it’s just a bit astonishing, and unintuitive.

        • Skua@kbin.earth
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          8 hours ago

          To be honest most of the basic physics behind rocketry actually isn’t too difficult. The matter of engineering it into reality definitely is very difficult, finding fuels that burn hard enough and figuring out how to contain them while they burn and the like. The nature of going so far and so fast also means that tiny errors add up to very big problems.

          All rockets function on the fact that if you push something in one direction, you also go in the opposite direction by a proportionate amount. Lighting fuel on fire while it’s in a tube that only has one way out just happens to be a great way to push the burning fuel really, really hard and therefore get a really hard push back. The forces involved always have to cancel out the total momentum of everything involved; you chuck X kilograms of burning fuel out of the back at Y metres per second, you accelerate forward by however much you need to to make your momentum match that in the opposite direction. This is Newton’s third law of motion, the “for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction” one

          Nozzles and the like can adjust which direction the way out is pointing. If the way out points left a bit, the momentum of the fuel is also going left a bit, so the reaction momentum you get goes a bit to the right, and now you have steering

          I think the biggest conceptual block people usually have about orbits is that they’re not about going up fast, they’re about going around the Earth fast. If you point your rocket straight up and just keep going straight up, you won’t go into orbit around the Earth. Either you’ll crash straight back down when you run out of fuel, or you have a rocket with enough power and fuel to reach Earth’s escape velocity, in which case you’ll just continue travelling away from Earth forever until you find something else’s gravity. You know the kind of arc that a ball has when you throw it? Imagine that you’re superhumanly strong and can throw a ball literally however hard you want. You could throw it beyond the horizon without breaking a sweat. Once you’re throwing it that hard, the curvature of the Earth starts to become relevant, right? The ground is effectively dropping away underneath the ball as it travels forward, letting it fly farther before it hits the ground. Eventually if you throw hard enough, the curvature of the Earth turns away from the ball at the same rate as the ball is falling. The ball is now in orbit. The ISS (and anything else that wants to orbit at the same altitude) goes around the Earth so fast that it does 15 entire laps around the planet every day

          Unfortunately for our rockets, the Earth’s atmosphere is very bad to actually move through that fast, so they go up first to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere and then gradually turn sideways to achieve orbit

          Once you start getting into things like how to get from Earth to other planets you’ve got to worry about some other stuff, but this comment is probably getting long enough by now and not many of our rockets do that yet

          I totally get what you mean about planes not looking like they should work. The size of them and the fact that we’ve got basically nothing to reference them against for scale and motion when they’re in the air is really confusing

      • RobotZap10000@feddit.nl
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        23 hours ago

        Damn, you got here first! OP, if you don’t find their explanation satisfactory, reply to my comment and I’ll be sure to help.

    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz
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      22 hours ago

      The stock market is chaos, driven by bias and a bunch of unknown and unknowable variables.

      A simple example with 3 players.

      • P1 thinks stock A is a good buy (for whatever reason) at $1/unit. P1 decides to buy putting upward pressure on the price.
      • P2 has been holding a bunch of A for a while and has a number ($1) in mind to sell at, P1 can’t know this information. This sale puts downward pressure on the price.
      • If P1 & P2 have the same number of shares, the pressures are equal, and the price doesn’t move. If they don’t the price moves either up or down.
      • P3 has been watching A, sees that it moves and decides that this is a good time to buy, (going down its a bargain, going up its on the rise get in early), putting further upward pressure on the stock.

      Each action by the different players causes something to happen to the price, no-one can know all the internal thought patterns of all the other interested parties, and thus can never have perfect information. And even with perfect information, it may not be possible to predict, as some stocks interact in non-predictable ways.

      e.g. Nvidia goes up, TSMC usually goes up, but not always. TSMC going down can be caused by Nvidia, but also thousands of other things also.

      Conclusion: can the stock market be predicted? General trends - Yes, specific stock movements - No!

      • Blurntout@lemmy.ca
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        21 hours ago

        Wait until you learn about passive indexes where the logic is you give me money = buy and then factor in the volume of assets under management in that cycle. Then take a look at retirement age and global average age trending closer towards retirement age lol do the math on that one

        • See‽ It’s a glitch in the matrix. They added the feature, but failed to work it out in advance and coded themselves into a corner.

          I think what happened is that they spent all the budget up front, really nailing stuff like Physics and Evolution, and then came to a crunch and Management said, “just throw something in there! We’ll polish it later,” only it’s so self contradicting, they can’t.

  • RBWells@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Yeah. Precognitive dreams mostly. Nothing I expect anyone else to believe, but I myself know because I documented them when I dreamed them, then the events occurred and it was such random, little detailed things that I could not possibly have predicted based on knowledge. Maybe everyone dreams the future and just forgets their dreams?

    Some synchronicity things too, stepping into exactly the right place at the right time, wishing for something then having it immediately drop into my lap. Those I am minded to chalk up to random chance, but some are so comically obvious, things just appearing where they were not, right when I need them.

    • Libra00@lemmy.ml
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      22 hours ago

      Yup, same. I would get this sense of deja vu except instead of feeling like I’ve been somewhere before it was feeling like I had previously dreamed the events that were about to happen. And yeah it was always minor stuff, a conversation, mom coming home angry about having dropped something expensive at work, the solution to some coding problem a friend was about to tell me, etc. I tried playing with it, and if I changed anything (‘Oh, I know what you’re about to say’, etc) it would disrupt it and not happen, but otherwise it happened the way I dreamed it every time. Sadly it got more and more uncommon as I got older, and now it’s been probably 10-15 years since the last time I remember.

      • RBWells@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        The dumbest one that absolutely convinced me it was precog, was:

        I was in line at the bank behind 3 women. They had a scale, one of those big Toledo No Springs ones. I stepped on the scale, but the dial went backwards. I turned around and saw this girl Joann, who I hadn’t seen since middle school.

        I wrote all this down in the dream journal, and then didn’t think about it.

        Couple weeks later, I’m at that bank. 3 women ahead of me in line. I get on the scale, but it says I weigh 30lb, it’s broken. I turn around and who do the see? Joann, that girl I had not seen since middle school.

        What the fuck? It kinda pissed me off because I really don’t want to think the future is set to that extent. Like, seeing some big event that might echo back in time, sure. But a broken scale at some bank? Joann? I haven seen her since, either, we were not close, why would I dream her true?

        • Grimy@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          Very interesting. I’ve never had anything paranormal happen to me but I like to believe in it and it’s always fun hearing accounts like these. I imagine it is a bit stressful having nightmares haha.

          I would write them somewhere more public (like a blog) or with witnesses. If something that could never ever be a coincidence and becomes public knowledge happens (like a major disaster), people will doubt you wrote about it before hand. I’m sure proving yourself isn’t something you really care about, but every event that becomes accepted helps others come forward and removes some of the stigma imo.

        • Luke@lemmy.ml
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          16 hours ago

          I’ve read this a few times, and I can’t figure out what you’re referring to with a “scale” at the bank. What does that mean?

          • RBWells@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            They had a big analog scale you could stand on, and a dial would go around the markings like a clock- there are still some of these same scales at grocery stores here. People use them to weigh themselves, or I see people weighing luggage on them. In the dream the dial went backwards but IRL it was just wrong, very wrong.

            Google “Toledo No Springs Scale” and you will see them.

            • Luke@lemmy.ml
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              2 hours ago

              Right, but why is there a scale at a bank? I’ve been to many banks, and there’s been a scale for weighing humans at zero of them. That’s why I’m confused here. I know what a scale is.

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    23 hours ago

    The hot water tap in my shower turned itself completely off one day.

    The whole gender thing? And I say that as a trans person. It’s real, but I can’t explain it…

  • turtle [he/him]@lemm.ee
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    2 hours ago

    A long time ago I was riding in a subway train. The subway car was mostly or very likely completely empty because it was late at night, likely the last one of the day. There was a paper clip laying on the floor between my feet and then I noticed that it had started to stand up on its own. One of the ends of the paperclip was still touching the floor inside the train, but the other end was pointed up and it wobbled around softly for a while.

    A day or two later I mentioned this to my electricity teacher at the time, an electrical engineer who just happened to work for the subway agency. I expected him to say that it was some kind of magnetic effect due to the proximity of the high-voltage supply lines used to power the subway, but he instead said that it was impossible and I must have been hallucinating. I’ve never hallucinated in my life. I still wonder what could have caused that phenomenon. I’m sure that there’s a scientific explanation for it, but I haven’t found it yet.

    Edit: Hmmm, I just realized… maybe I was witnessing the real clippy coming to life?

    • kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      19 hours ago

      Hmmmmm… My intuition tells me something like this could be possible with a vertical alternating magnetic field. If the paperclip formed a closed loop, eddy currents would produce an opposing magnetic field to hold it up. Sorta like in this video: https://youtu.be/5HnihTg1rso

      Unfortunately I can’t find anything online showing this off, and I’m not really sure what could generate a field like that on the subway anyways.

      • turtle [he/him]@lemm.ee
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        2 hours ago

        Thank you for attempting to link a theory to explain it! The video you linked doesn’t look too different from what I saw, except that the whole coil seemed to levitate rather than just one end of it like the paperclip did. Still seems like a plausible potential explanation. Thanks again.

  • Una@europe.pub
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    1 day ago

    My whole life, also it is hard for me to explain my emotions and feelings.

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.ml
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    16 hours ago

    One time on a summer day as a teenager I went to the grocery store with my Mom.

    We parallel parked the car a ways away from other cars. We secured the car as normal and went on a short shopping trip.

    When we came back out after maybe 15 minutes, all of the cars windows were rolled down completely.

    We both know for a fact all the windows were rolled up when we left, and even if we had them down, there would have been no reason to have the back windows down.

    Nothing was stolen, no one was around, everything appeared untouched.

    This was a Nissan Murano if I recall correctly - it did have power windows, but at the time there was no fancy stuff to remote control car features outside of having a remote starter installed, which we did not have.

    There was only one set of keys.

    We still have absolutely no explanation for this to this day.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      16 hours ago

      Even back then some door lock remotes had the option to hold down unlock to roll down all windows. Not super useful feature and remember using it.

    • sqgl@beehaw.org
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      14 hours ago

      Seems you are looking for “supernatural” experiences however the following probably sounds supernatural to some:

      Contentment in the serenity of what appears to outsiders to be a boring situation.

      • golden_zealot@lemmy.ml
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        7 hours ago

        I’m not looking for anything, I was describing an experience I can’t explain per the thread which was probably mechanical or electrical in nature. Unsure how you got that impression.

  • blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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    21 hours ago

    My grandfather came to me in a trip in the shower and told me I’m wasting my life. I puked up steams. Quit my “finance bro” job moved to New Mexico and became a farmer. He’s been dead 20+ years.

  • calabast@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Totally, I was at the beach, and this guy walked up…well, I say “walked” but he didn’t really use his legs all the way. And as she, wait did I say it was a guy?, well anyways they turned the thing on and it was SO LOUD and I swear, all the waiters dropped their watchamacallits. Wait, maybe it was at a restaurant? Hmmm…

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Can you explain how you recognize someone’s face? Can you explain how you balance your body and move your feet correctly as you walk? Can you explain how you speak in grammatically correct sentences without consciously thinking about the rules of grammar?

    The vast majority of our experiences are fundamentally inexplicable—basically, everything that isn’t part of our internal narrative.

      • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        How generative natural language works has been highly debated for over 60 years—there’s certainly no consensus most linguists would agree with. And while we have a pretty good idea how the process of facial recognition works, we know that process isn’t conducive to extracting a conventional explanation of how to recognize a particular face. (The best you could do is to make a list of features that would allow someone to eliminate all but one candidate from a small group, but that’s distinct from the process of actually recognizing someone.)

        • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          23 hours ago

          That feels off somehow, or at least, the unsolved problem part isn’t as narrow as that makes it seem.

          I can recognise a place, just like a face. I don’t eliminate options, I just recognise it. I can recognise voices the same way.

          I don’t understand how faces are different in this context?