this post was submitted on 13 Feb 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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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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[–] MrGabr@ttrpg.network 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

That's because human perception exists on a logarithmic scale! It's called the Weber-Fechner law, and it was one of the first studied psychological phenomena, before psychology as a field was even defined.

Interestingly, our sense of the "bigness" of numbers is also logarithmic. This is why there have to be explicit explanations of the massive difference between a million and a billion - our brains instinctively and erroneously think "eh, it's like double."

~edit I can't type~

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"What's the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars."

It's .1% of a billion, that is a rounding error

[–] MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

My favourite way to comprehend it is by time:

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Or 1 million minutes ago was March 22, 2024.

1 billion minutes ago was the height of the Roman empire.

1 trillion minutes ago is a little bit before (about 100,000 years) the earliest homo erectus fossils we found

[–] MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works 2 points 18 hours ago

That's amazing, thanks!