this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
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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
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- 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
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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, this phrase was really only plausibly used for about 33 years - the time between the first fully electronic calculator and the first smartphone.
I almost wrote "calculator/sliderule/abacus" for that reason
Maybe I'm not remembering how they work correctly, but I thought sliderules and abacus...es...abacuses? abacii?... just helped you repeat operations and keep track of the work you'd done, rather than executing mathematical functions for you
Sliderules definitely do operations for you. The basic multiplication sliderule uses logarithmic scales to do multiplication by addition. Abaci (it is in fact a Latin word that takes the -i plural, but "abacuses" is generally acceptable) do just help you keep track, but I believe you can use clever tricks to mechanically simplify complex operations.
Upvoted for 'abacii', it's a very pleasing word and I'm going to be saying it all day now.
There are a lot of really fun maths videos on youtube about abacii and slide rules and all the cool things that can be done with them. (I was going to link you one or two but falling into the youtube distraction hole trying to find them is going to massively derail my day.)
Nope, even the earliest mobile phones have had calculators built in (talking about commercially available mobile phones here, nor the suitcase sized monstrosities of the 80s).
I did a little bit of homework on an old mobile phone (had downtime). How hard could it be? It was bad.
Mechanical calculators have been around since the 1700’s and widespread since the 1920’s, though. And before that we had the abacus and slide rule. Mental math has never been a flex, lol
Not even that long.
I went to middle school during the 80s, when calculator watches were a major hype (had one myself at some point).
Even back then, 40 years ago, none of my teachers would have used that phrase.
It was just too clear already, that technology was already overtaking the assumptions made by that phrase.
Maybe I lived in a poorer area, but growing up the only people that had calculator watches were the people who probably would have gotten beaten up and had them stolen. There was a long period of time that kids would say why do I have to memorize that, there is a calculator for it. By the time I was in college, it was already rapidly progressing to, why do I have to write down my steps, Wolfram Alpha can do that for me. For me, it quickly got to the point in math that a calculator wasn't really useful for tests to begin with.
Even dumb phones had a calculator. Maybe around 1999 you should have stopped talking about calculators.