30+ Fascinating Facts That Are Common Knowledge in Certain Fields, but Unknown to Most

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Mel Dawn
Sep 9, 2023 9:00 AM EDT

When someone works in a specialized field for many years, they'll end up gaining highly specific knowledge and a unique understanding about how certain things work. While most of the population might live most of their lives believing a common misconception about how things get recycled, a garbage collector somewhere out there is probably tearing their hair out about how dumb we all are. There's a lot of instances of this—and while one person might be an expert in archaeology, chances are they don't know a dang thing about the trucking industry. And that's why this recent AskReddit thread is so wonderful—a bunch of people from different industries came together on the internet to share facts that are common knowledge in their respective fields, but mostly unknown to the rest of the population. The thread is super fascinating and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

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  • “What fact is common knowledge in your field, but almost unknown to the rest of the population?” Posted by u/pocketcrackers

  • 01
    Font - ew435890 2d Cement and concrete are not the same thing. Cement is the main ingredient in concrete, but concrete is the whole mixture of cement, sand, aggregate, water, etc. ↑ G 8.2k
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  • 02
    Font - TheFirstCrew 2d Powerful explosives are so insensitive to shock that it usually takes a smaller, more sensitive explosive to set them off. ↑ 14.9k ↓
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  • 03
    Font - WTFwhatthehell 2d Genetics: there's a bunch of stuff we don't report back because they're considered incidental findings. This can include genetic diseases with no treatment/ mitigation. Or non-paternity. If your kid is sick with a genetic disease and you go get genetic testing done for mom, dad and little timmy, we do not automatically report back if dad is no relation or is actually an uncle. At the same time in most places you have the right to request your data. ↑ G ... 1.6k ↓
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  • 04
    Font - nuxshktr 2d An elevator will go up to the top of the hoist instead of crash to the floor in most catastrophic failures due to the counter weights. ↑ 24.2k
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  • 05
    Font - weezypins 2d If you have sad vegetables (carrots celery) or lettuce that look wilted not bad you can make them crunchy by shocking in ice water. ↑ G ↑ 5k ↓
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  • 06
    Font - xballikeswooshx 2d Lab grown diamonds cost $2 per ct. Of electricity to grow. The "value" price has absolutely plummeted on them the last 2 years. Most especially the last 8 months. Don't overpay on them as they all perform. 1 cts currently 6-800. So for the first time in the history of the jewelry world you can officially buy moissanites from "high end" brands that are more expensive than their lab grown diamonds of same quality. The amount of people robbed of value the last 2 years is i
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  • 07
    Font - MissPatricia024 1d Trucker here and we don't want to be anywhere near you either. Go around or stay back don't just ride right beside us. We can't see you very well when you are beside us and if shit happens you're gonna go splat. It is very very very rare that any driver wants to slow you down it's not like we get our rocks off on making you late. We work extremely long hours on very little sleep and we just wanna get where we are going without getting in an accident and killing someone.
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  • 08

    (continued)

    Font - Edit: A reoccurring comment is that most of you get it and are very cool but you hate when a truck driver hops in the hammer lane when you're trying to pass them at a reasonable speed. I'm with you on that and Im here to tell you most truck drivers are not assholes like that and the real truckers hate the ones that are. Every profession has a group of assholes that ruin it for the good ones. Edit Edit: This has gotten an unexpectedly high response and I really appreciate all of you joinin
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  • 09
    Font - LosPetty1992 2d Bed bugs don't make you a nasty person with a nasty home. An infestation isn't due to a sanitation issue. They're an imported pest, which means they hitched a ride on something you brought into the house. Usually luggage or furniture ↑ ... 3.4k ↓
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  • 10
    Font - unassumingtoaster 2d When a person "flat lines" you cannot shock them out of it. ... ↑ 7.9k
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  • 11
    Font - BootsyRootsy 2d In any given nature documentary, the protagonist animal you're rooting for is 'played' by several different 'actors' - i.e. that one brown bear's story is patched together from footage of a bunch of different bears. And in about 90% of the 'animal reacting' shots they're reacting to the camera crew. Nature documentaries are heavily constructed. ↑ ... 4.9k ↓
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  • 12
    Font - tommyshitstain 2d When you go out to clubs or any place with some sort of "strip" (aka Broadway in nashville) the volume is 11 times out of ten too loud. I work at barstool occasionally as AV and at night it's gotten up to 110-115 DB. For reference, the threshold of pain is 120 db. Wear hearing protection people. You can't get that shit back. ↑ 2.5k
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  • 13
    Font - DrScienceDaddy 2d Volumetricly, most rocks are made of mostly oxygen. Most of the entire Earth (crust and mantle) is also nearly half oxygen (by mass). If you've ever read "OxYgeN DisCoVeReD on moon!" It's rocks. It means they've discovered rocks. ... ↑ 3.7k ↓
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  • 14
    Font - 110 CatNamedSiena 2d A hysterectomy is removal of the uterus only, not the ovaries. ... ↑ 6.7k
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  • 15
    Font - Telos_88 2d The opposite sides of a die should always add up to seven. On a craps table, you'll see the "stick" dealer bring the dice to the middle of the table and separate them corner to corner. This is so the person sitting down (box supervisor) can verify with the mirror opposite of them that the opposite sides total seven. 2/5 1/6 3/4 Source: 14+ years of dealing table games. Edit: Apologies. I should've included "sides of a six- sided die". ↑ G 1.3k
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  • 16
    Font - toadjones79 1d Trains are so long we don't know if we are still blocking the crossing you are waiting at. We have measuring devices (counter) that tell us how far the head end has traveled, but they may have worn out enough to give us a bad reading. We try to avoid blocking crossings way, way more than you will ever know. But if I'm squeezing between 2 crossings because the dispatcher put me there, and my counter is off by 30 ft every mile (5280ft), and my train is 2 miles long (US max is
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  • 17
    Font - rocopotomus74 2d People (users) are the weakest link in most technology systems. 99% of the time. ... 7.4k
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  • 18
    Font - Sandoriah 2d In Archaeology, it's super awesome and great that you brought stuff to an archaeologist at a local dig site near you of things you found in your backyard or nearby asking us appraise it - but the thing is, we're actually more interested in the context the item(s) are found. We need/want to see the bigger picture. Arrowheads, flintknaps, trade beads, etc are super cool but they are worth so much more when we can tell if they are part of a hoard, burials site, ceremonial site,
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  • 19
    Font - Completely Flammable 2d Generally speaking, if you add the percentage of the body covered in 3rd degree burns and the persons age together you get the likelihood of it being a fatal burn. 32 and 40% burn coverage? about 70% of people in that condition will die. Source: Firey, working closely with several doctors from burns units. Edit: I love the 100 year old people comments and the people with 0% burns but in thier 30s lamenting the 40% death chance. P sliferra 2d ,↑₁ ... 100 years old a
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  • 20

    (continued)

    Font - toomanycats21 People are always shocked when I look them in the eye and tell them I would rather lose a limb than experience full body burns. If the burn itself didn't kill you, the infection that follows almost certainly will, even in the most sterile hospital environment possible. 2d 97 Blues GuitarMart 2d ... How often are you telling people this? ↑ ↑ ... 2.2k ↓ 2.2k ↓ thricetheory 2d Right? Like bro, I just asked for the salt ↑ G 2.3k ↓
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  • 21
    Font - miss_queeferson 2d When I worked as a barista: how much fucking syrup is in flavored drinks. At the cafe I worked at, we measured flavoring by grams. If you got a large mocha, that motherfucker would have like 110 grams of chocolate sauce in it. If you want a little bit of flavor, I suggest only 1 pump. 2 max. ... ↑↑ 4.7k ↓
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  • 22
    Font - Gridsmack 2d Most public defenders are competent actually. ↑ G BastardInTheNorth 2d ... But extremely overloaded. ↑ 5.1k ↓ 2.7k ↓
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  • 23
    Font - revs201 2d Those "high end" or "expensive" neighborhoods they slap up really fast... Usually, gated communities and other semi-exclusive suburbs full of McMansions are built with the absolute cheapest materials and poorest quality/ untrained labor. Never buy a "spec" home without some serious research into what you're actually buying. All that "luxury" is barely surface deep. ↑ ... 7.6k
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  • 24
    Font - 01 Orange-Enough 2d Your calf muscles act as a pump for your lymph fluid, which is basically the garbage pick-up and immunity doordash of your body. Without flexing your calf, the fluid has no way of moving against gravity. Each time we walk, the muscles contract, squeezing the fluid back up towards the core for processing.That's why sitting for long periods causes swelling in the legs. LPT: Sitting for long periods? Move your ankles up and down to pump the calf
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  • 25

    (continued)

    Font - A few things to add: -Source: I am a lymphedema specialist -Veins of the lower leg also heavily rely on the calf muscle pump, so blood pools along with lymph from prolonged immobility. -Elevating your legs is helpful, using gravity to help move fluid. Also, using compression socks to help push the fluid back up- especially if you stand still for long periods. -Our lymph nodes are located at joint spaces, such as knees, hips, armpits, etc so that movement compresses them and moves the flui
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  • 26
    Font - yubathetuba 2d There is no "fractured" vs "broken" there are only different types of fractures. It's really a semantic problem but patients get heated about it. ↑ 11k ↓
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  • 27
    Rectangle - 01 Boulavogue 2d The world runs on MS Excel Edit: thanks for popping my gold cherry! Obligatory "You can have my excel, after you ripped it from my cold, dead hands." - WSJ (paywalled) ↑ G ... stateofyou 2d Do you have a macro for that? ↑ ono 53 more replies 11.1k 2cunty4you 1d How many times did numbers turning into dates cause a company wide meltdown for you this year? ↑ G 2.1k 2k ↓ shinypenny01 1d They had to rename the fucking human genome because excel kept turning it into dates
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  • 28
    Font - Meta_My_Data 2d The sensors in digital cameras (including phones) are monochromatic (they don't "see" color) and have a tiny color filter on each sensor element so it can detect one of three colors (red, green, blue). Then the image is created by calculating what the other two colors might be based on one color value and the values of the nearest sensors around it. tldr; 2/3 of the color in a digital photo is calculated from the 1/3 that is actual data. ↑ ... 6.7k ↓
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  • 29
    Rectangle - Mobiluel 2d Mushrooms are genetically closer related to Humans than to Plants ... ↑ 3k ↓
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  • 30
    Font - Husky 2d If a website is slow there's a big change it's not because the developers did a bad job but because marketing insisted on putting dozens of trackers and ads on it. ↑ G 2.8k
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  • 31
    Font - Few-Dance-7157 2d Water is destructive, we just want to make it all drain at a reasonable velocity along largely historical flow lines to the closest inlet. 7ofalltrades 2d ↑₁ 1.1k ↓ I'm a geotechnical engineer, doing my best to keep creeks and streams and rivers and landslides from destroying infrastructure. My boss' boss, an engineer nearing retirement overseeing IDK how many other engineers, was raising a question about why we couldn't design a permanent repair to prevent erosion over
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  • 32
    Font - detabudash 2d Laywers can fix almost any mistake / fuckup/blown deadline in State Court and almost never in Federal Court. pzschrek1 2d Why is that? ... ↑ G ... 3k ↓ 563 ↓ big_sugi 2d I wouldn't go as far as the OP here, but state courts tend to be far more lenient about rules and deadlines. Federal courts tend to be far stricter. There are exceptions in both directions. ↑ 1.2k ↓
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  • 33
    Font - indiGowootwoot 2d Pain is effectively a psychological phenomenon and a terrible indicator of physical injury. Far too many people think the human body is a simple cause and effect model (it hurts therefore something where the pain is located must be 'wrong'). Instead it is much more like a set of wildly complex, interdependent systems like climate or stock markets. A lot of medical diagnosis is educated guessing with an overreliance on singular labels for the benefit of explaining the sit
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  • 34

    (continued)

    Font - National Delivery1438 2d A physio told me this years ago - it was hugely helpful. He said sometimes pain is just pain, and it doesn't necessarily mean (in my instance) there's something wrong or I'm doing damage to keep running. Edit: I hope I'm not misleading anyone - please get your pain investigated for the cause/source - sometimes pain is absolutely valid and has causes which need treatment. In my instance, the advice from my physio was about a running injury I had for 18 months - it
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  • 35
    Font - 01 ooglieguy0211 2d We have cameras that can see what is in your trash as we dump it. Some companies even take snap shots of every can's contents to catch hazmat items. They bill the city, with the address it came from, and the city could follow up with the homeowner for reimbursement if they choose. How crappy, in general, people are at making sure they are recycling the right items and properly cleaning some of their items before putting them in the recycling bin. We remember the houses
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  • 36
    Font - 01 Spiritual_Worth 1d People almost always try to exit through the same door they entered. In a crowded venue ALWAYS take a second to find your exit and then find a second exit. Mark them in your brain just in case. In an emergency most of the crowd is going to go for the main door they came in through. Knowing where another exit is can save your life. ↑ G M ... 4.6k ↓
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  • 37
    Font - Mikes005 2d Urban heat kills way more people in Australia than bushfires. In the 2009 Black Saturday bishfires in Victoria, 173 people died in the fires, but over 300 died of the heat prior to that. Also, most of those deaths occur at night, not during th day. 4.1k ↓
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  • 38
    Font - 01 silly-billy-goat 2d UTIS will often cause confusion in people over 70. Eta: UTI is Urinary Tract Infection and some people can get confused to the point of hallucinations and delirium. It can cause increased weakness which also leads to falls. Second edit: According to this study, the confusion and delirium is brought on by the inflammation and immune response involved. TIL! https://www.cedars- sinai.org/newsroom/unlocking-the-cause-of-uti- induced-delirium/ ↑ G 6.1k ↓
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  • 39
    Rectangle - C Ney monkelus 2d It's not the CIA or the government that's tracking your every move. It's marketing agencies. ↑ ... 2.1k
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  • 40
    Font - 01 Reslibell 2d People make most decisions based on emotion, then rummage around for logic to back up what they've already decided ↑ G ... 7.4k ↓ Neat-Possibility6504 2d Except on reddit... everyone on here is extremely logical and always right. ... 2.5k
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