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What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true? (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 10 months ago (19 children)

Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...

Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It gets better. The size of the SD card isn't the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit 'thicker' than the rest; that's the actual chip, that tiny bump!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

SD cards make sense to me. Hard Drives... Now there is some spooky technology.

The reader head on a hard drive changes direction so fast, that it experiences accelerations like that of a bullet being fired, hundreds of times a second.

The "Fly height" or distance a reader floats above the platter is so tiny, that it would crash into a thumbprint.

The actual magnetic media that stores your data is a layer of iron a few atoms thick deposited on to a ceramic or glass platter, with a single atom layer of a protective metal coating (typically rhodium) in top of it.

Despite these incredible tolerances, they damn things are dirt cheap, and surprisingly reliable.

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