Here’s another! The degree Celsius and degree Centigrade are technically two distinct temperature scales; the difference just only becomes noticeable at the resolution of thousandths!
Eggs have a protective layer of wax that protects them from bacteria. However, in the US, this layer is removed, which means eggs need to be refrigerated there, while in most other countries they can be kept at room temperature for long periods of time without spoiling.
In ancient times, one of the timekeeping devices used in some places was the water clock, where a hole was put into the side of a water container, where the water dripped into another container, and the water level of the second container corresponded to certain times!
Whales have their own form of language. Scientists have identified a number of patterns in whale calls that seem to suggest they have a similar system of communication to our own. Their calls have certain sequences called codas that seem to repeat reliably in their speech, and show similar properties to our human vowels.
These aren’t just instinct either, they must be learned, and so baby whales will start out only being able to make incoherent sounds, until eventually they are taught to use the same codas their parents do.
Not only that, but they are different for each pod, so two separate groups of whales can’t communicate with eachother because their languages are differerent.
Scientists are currently trying to decipher whale language with the help of AI language models.
The Celsius scale was originally the reverse of what it currently is, with 100° being at the bottom and 0° being at the top! Eventually, it was changed and it stuck!
The most preserved dinosaur fossil ever is of a Psittacosaurus. This fossil is so well preserved in fact, that scientists were able see what it’s cloaca looked like.
For decades, the kilogram all around the world was calibrated to the Prototype Kilogram, a 1 kg physical cylinder housed in France. Over time, despite being kept in a vacuum-sealed case in a climate-controlled secure vault, it was found to actually be steadily losing mass due to normal degradation just from existing.
Nowadays, it’s no longer as much a concern due to the kilogram being formally defined relative to universal physical constants.
Some species of flatworm practice what is known as “penis fencing” to reproduce. All of them are hermafrodite and in order to mate they must duel with their sharp penises and try to stab eachother to inject sperm inside, impregnating the loser, but often also killing it.
Something to realise when starting with Linux is that everything is a ‘file’. Sockets, processes, input, output etc. That’s very different from Windows and part of why scripting on Linux is so powerful. You can interact with anything.
So some directories are filled with things that aren’t necessarily files but look like it. Someone else posted a whole list, just realise that under those directories/paths shouldn’t be messed with unless you know what it’s for.
Generally when you’re getting used to Linux, /home/$user (aka ~) is where you put personal things. The rest is managed by OS and applications, don’t worry about it.
Edit: spelling
@joeldebruijn the /run/user/1000 directory is an in-memory file system of a fairly small size. The operating system creates it for you to store certain things that are for your user account only. The permission settings on this directory forbid any other user on the system (except for “root”) to see what is inside. This makes it safe to store secret information that only you should know.
One typical example of something stored in this directory would be your plain text (unencrypted) password database if you use a password manager. No other user but you (and “root”) can see it, and it is in-memory only so it is not accidentally copied to your persistent memory (HDD or SSD disk drive) where it might be removed and read by hackers if someone steals your computer from you. At the same time, any program running on the system that was launched by you and only you has access to your passwords so you don’t need to remember passwords for everything. (Actually it is a socket to a server containing your unencrypted password database in memory, it is probably not actually a file in that directory.)
Other things that go in this /run/user/1000 directory are socket connections to the desktop bus (allows for things like copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop to work between programs), socket connections to your audio mixer (allows you do things like to listen to music and do video chat at the same time), and a record of what external media devices you have connected to the computer which you are using via GVFS, and so on.
Also, the number 1000 is your user ID number assigned to you by the operating system. If you create other accounts, they will have ID 1001, 1002, and so on, and each of them will have a directory with that number created in the /run/user directory for them when they login.
When I let fsearch index from root, it counted 1.9 million files, which baffled me a lot. Before knowing the things in this thread. A typical windows install can have 50k ~ 100k files, but … 2 million I thought it was insane.
But in this context its something like if LibreOffice Calc had an API and upon start it registers a filesystem with a ‘folder’ for every worksheet and a ‘file’ named A1, A2, B1 … for every cell. Not real I know but a novice way of understanding.
Something like that indeed.
Every active network connection, every process, every piece of hardware and others are in your file system.
Then there’s also the possibility for linking to a file and links take up no space, but can show up like files.
You can use a command like ‘stat’ to get more information about a file (or directory).
In Mac OS System 7, error type 41, also known as a “MemFullErr,” indicated that there was not enough memory to complete an operation. This error could occur when the system or an application attempted to use more memory than was available, leading to a situation where the operation could not proceed due to insufficient memory resources. This type of error was more common in older operating systems like System 7, where memory management was more manual and systems had significantly less RAM than modern computers.
Technically, that was all the way up to 9, if you can believe it. “Classic” never had dynamic memory allocation. It was also cooperative multitasking, which is why if an app locked up, the entire system would often require a reboot.
When I was in school, my school board had a contract with Apple so almost every computer I used from kindergarten until damn near the end of high school was an apple II or some flavour of Mac. Needless to say, this error is a core memory for me.
lemmy.ml
Active