this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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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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[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

My dad was an electrical engineer that worked on the Gemini & Apollo programs. He actually worked at Draper Labs in Cambridge, MA which did a lot of work for NASA.

He likes to tell the story of a coworker he shared an office with. This coworker designed a lot of the circuitry used in the rockets, and back then it was all drawn out by hand on huge sheets of paper on drafting tables. This guy was also fairly short, so he’d practically stand on a stool to reach the upper parts of the drafting table. He’d draw up various circuits, have the papers duplicated, and send the duplicates off to NASA. He kept all the originals on his desk. When it was time to draw up a new circuit he just put down a blank sheet of drafting paper over all the other circuit drawings and start drawing the new one.

From time to time this guy would get calls from the NASA teams that were actually building the rockets. They’d say they were calling about a specific circuit, so this guy would start flipping through the corners of all the sheets of drafting paper looking for the right one. When he found the right one he’d duck his head under so he could get a good look at the circuit diagram while discussing it on the phone with the NASA people.

If he had to then he’d actually crawl onto the drafting table during a call. My dad says that more than once he walked into the office to find this guy covered by sheets of drafting paper with only his legs & the telephone cord visible as he talked to the NASA engineers.