Ask Lemmy

27240 readers

2804 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

189

What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

215 comments fedilink hide all child comments

You ever see a dog that's got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it's never going to make the connection.

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.

Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can I ask what year that was? We've known that greenhoused cuttings need an oscillating fan in order be able to hold themselves upright once they start to gain height for the 30 years that I've been growing that way. It's like a little work out for them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It would have been something like 2005 or so. It may have been a known fact at the time, but they mentioned specifically that they were caught by surprise by the phenomenon. I didn’t fault them for it - the whole project was kind of a mess. I’m a biologist and I wasn’t aware of that, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me, either.

That’s weird though. You’d think they would have had multiple botanists on the design team who could have pointed that out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm sure it was just that no one realized it would scale to trees, since that hadn't been done before. As far as I know you don't have to do anything special in that regard with small seed-grown plants in a green house, only cuttings that root from stems, and so have weaker roots at first and stalks that were previously branches. I'm sorry I sounded critical, I was just curious.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Also there's that documentary where the group that organized it was kind of cult adjacent. They weren't scientists first. Still very interesting and impressive they did what they did.