this post was submitted on 21 Jul 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
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- 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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Liquid nitrogen in a pool is "stimulating" and generates an interesting physical effect. However, the point here in relating it to science is that there is some science behind it that gets the attention from people.
My argument is: people are naturally fascinated by this, but they're put away by the strict laws, mainly mathematical laws, put forward by this.
Not that mathematics isn't interesting, but you won't incentivize people to go to a spitting contest by saying how you spit correctly. People want to see the strongest spit.
I think that's all there is to it. If you can incentivize people into partaking on this endeavour (understanding chemical effects, in this case), you can bring much more value to science and people that are interested in it. You can, for example, explain interesting effects to people even though they're looking at a clear liquid (most acids).
I'd agree that people are naturally interested in understanding the world, but the barriers to rigorous science you mention are present in every field that requires practice and dedication to master. Which is every field.
Most people just aren't interested in doing the work to master anything, and that's okay. You can still enjoy playing with a drum, doodling, or tossing a ball around without it being a gateway to the deeper mysteries of those fields.
The biggest difference is that science and science related content is much more capable of being hilariously impactful and dangerous.
As such, it's easy for a moderately proficient person to do an experiment in their backyard that would have been cutting edge 300 years ago, and safely do things that we've all been properly taught are absolutely not safe.
People like novelty and mastery. People doing science video often convey a lot of expertise in addition to showing something new that's also pretty, loud or just "bright colors".
I'm pretty sure there could be a long muse about the intersection of the notion that babies are natural scientists, and calling someone an iPad baby.