this post was submitted on 10 Dec 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:
- 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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Interestingly I've heard Japan called "the land of the rising sun" due to being one of the farthest east on the Mercator projection which despite its few features and many flaws is often considered the standard of map projections.
The characters for Japan literally mean sun and origin. And has been in use since the 8th century. So the Mercator projection has nothing to do with that. The origin of "land of the rising sun" is because Japan is East of China and the sun rises in the east.
For sure, and the Pacific Ocean is vast. So you go East and find Japan, and then for a long time it's understood that there's nothing off Japan's east coast, and they're the eastern edge of the world. So they're the land of the rising sun. Seems fair!
We do call it that in German as well, I mean, not colloquially, but it's used in literature or poetry.
There are Mercator projection maps with the Americas in the center and Japan on the left edge of the map.
Most maps, regardless of projection used, cut the world through the pacific because there’s barely any land. World maps centering the Americas cut through Central Asia, making them less practical for many applications.
All map projections try to flatten a curved surface. That only works with cuts and distortions. They are all trade-offs between conserving area, angles, shapes, distances. It’s impossible to to all of that.
Better than "dipshit".