this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I always thought it was crazy to wonder what the qualia of colors we can't see but other animals can is. It's sort of like being a cat or some other animal with limited color vision and trying to imagine what humans see. How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
I've wondered the same about dogs' sensitive sense of smell. What's that like?
Colors don’t actually exist physically. They are a creation of the mind.
Colors are physical wavelengths of light within a spectrum between UV and IR. WTF are you talking about.
I’m a physicist and no, color is not a physical property of light. Color is a subjective experience created by our mind in response to electrical signals from our eyes.
Colors don't exist in the physical world. Yellow is just how our brain intreprets a certain wavelenght of light. The qualia of it exists only in your consciousness.
There's a great old Vsauce video that goes over something like this but even crazier to think about: "is your red the same as my red?". How can you know if your red is the same color as what someone else calls red? We could both be looking at different colors, but we both call it red. Even crazier, how do you explain colors to someone born blind?
A spectrum test.
Show a human red fading to infrared, or purple fading to ultraviolet, next to cameras that can detect them in false color. Those are colors we can't see, yet you can see they're there.
Theoretically, it'd be the same for a cat or dog.
Maybe that's why animals don't seem very interested in TV. They don't have the same cones as us