this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
98 points (97.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
36432 readers
1380 users here now
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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The short story i've heard it explained was that prior to the 1960's when logarithm tables were the only option, if what you were calculating was not in the table, you rounded the measurements up so that the material or whatever was stronger, and you knew it would really hold the weight to be certain. Depending on how much rounding up happened during the design, this created lots of redundancy and strength, but was more expensive since you generally had to use more materials. With CAD, you could more easily model and calculate all the loads and optimize the design and material costs for the expected lifetime of the product, building, or whatever. This saved money and was preferred by bean counters, and resulted in designs lasting just enough, rather than older designs which sometimes seemed indestructible.