Did You Know? ....... Strange Facts

Aodan83

Deleted User wrote: »

But what about the antiquasipseudoRetroneoantimultidisestablishmentarianismists.

Fúck 'em.

Poor Uncle Tom

Deleted User wrote: »

But what about the antiquasipseudoRetroneoantimultidisestablishmentarianismists.

at least they are a little quicker than the postantiquasipseudoretroneoantimultidisestablishmentarianismists.

Bob Z

Deleted User wrote: »

But what about the antiquasipseudoRetroneoantimultidisestablishmentarianismists.

What about them?

Bob Z

Bob Z wrote: »

What about them?

You had better find one and ask them :pac:

Kadie

The Brightest star that can be seen form earth is Sirius.
Its over 4 Light years away.
I find that pretty neat.

Alice1

A duck's quack does not echo

Mmcd

Alice1 wrote:

A duck's quack does not echo

Busted

Mycroft H

Alice1 wrote: »

A duck's quack does not echo

Mythbusters busted that one.

Alice1

*Ali walks away sobbing quietly*

Biggins

Alice1 wrote: »

*Ali walks away sobbing quietly*

Good - it won't echo then... :P

Schism

The dot on an i or j is called a 'tittle'. Fantastic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittle

Bob Z

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

He didn't invent the telephone.

And legend has it that he called his assistant (watson ?) on one of the first calls when he spilt acid on himself. No not the flashback stuff.

hmmmm. if thats all you find wrong with that statement.......

Biggins

Bob Z wrote: »

hmmmm. if thats all you find wrong with that statement.......

See: http://www.telephonetribute.com/telephone_inventors.html

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_telephone

Bell is not highly regarded any more as the original inventor.

Antonio Meucci

An early version of the telephone was invented around 1860 by Antonio Meucci who called it teletrofono (telectrophone).
The first American demonstration of Meucci's invention took place in Staten Island, New York in 1854. In 1860, a description of it was published in New York's Italian language newspaper. Meucci invented a paired electro-magnetic transmitter and receiver, where the motion of a diaphragm modulated a signal in a coil by moving an electromagnet. This resulted in a good fidelity, but a very weak signal. Meucci is also credited with the early invention of inductive loading of telephone wires to increase long-distance signals. Unfortunately, serious burns, lack of English, and poor business abilities resulted in Meucci failing to develop his inventions commercially in America. Meucci demonstrated some sort of instrument in 1849 in Havana, Cuba, but the evidence is unclear if this was an electric telephone or a variant on the string telephone using wires.
(Meucci has been further credited with invention of an anti-sidetone circuit. However, examination shows that his solution to sidetone was to maintain two separate telephone circuits, and thus twice as many transmission wires. The anti-sidetone circuit later introduced by Bell Telephone instead cancelled sidetone with a feedback process.)
Western Union laboratory reportedly lost Meucci's working models, and Meucci, who at this point was living on public assistance, was unable to renew the patent after 1874;
Meucci was recognized for his pioneer work on the telephone by the United States House of Representatives in House Resolution 269 dated 11 June 2002. The resolution states that "if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell." However, this declaration is non-binding and has no legal effect.

benj

we all swallow an average of 8 spiders in our lifetime
while we are asleep :eek:

Schism

benj wrote: »

we all swallow an average of 8 spiders in our lifetime
while we are asleep :eek:

Funny, I thought it was more than that. I guess one is more than enough though.

Lobelia Overhill

Alice1 wrote: »

*Ali walks away sobbing quietly*

It's all right peteen, apparently IIRC the echo isn't audible to human ears ...

Unless someone proves me wrong, Red Rum is the only horse to have won over the minimum distance and the maximum distance that horses race over - he dead heated for first place in a 5 furlong sprint first time out and [of course] won The Grand National over 4 miles 4 furlongs.

Although it might have been a 6 furlong sprint, but either way I don't know of any other horse to have done such a thing.

Cupcake_Crisis

benj wrote: »

we all swallow an average of 8 spiders in our lifetime
while we are asleep :eek:

I heard this was a lie! Something about the hot air we breath out puts them off going anywhere near you mouth.......please tell me its a lie.....:(

Board-in-work

Well - Statistically 6 out of 7 dwarfes are not happy.

Spear

Cupcake_Crisis wrote: »

I heard this was a lie! Something about the hot air we breath out puts them off going anywhere near you mouth.......please tell me its a lie.....:(

It's a lie.

http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.asp

Flatzie_poo

If you throw washing up liquid on a lawn all the worms come up and start to mate! who doesn't like worm porn???

thebullkf

after 6 months half the weight of your pillow is comprised of dead skin cells.....

thebullkf

elephants can't jump.....

thebullkf

also the only mammls with 4 knees......allegedly.... (horses??)

Quazzie

thebullkf wrote: »

after 6 months half the weight of your pillow is comprised of dead skin cells.....

I've the same pillow for the lat 24 years :eek:

Ciaran500

thebullkf wrote: »

after 6 months half the weight of your pillow is comprised of dead skin cells.....

bull.

KTRIC

Quazzie wrote: »

I've the same pillow for the lat 24 years :eek:

Ewwwwwww :eek:

Capt'n Midnight

Poor Uncle Tom wrote: »

at least they are a little quicker than the postantiquasipseudoretroneoantimultidisestablishmentarianismists.

but not as quick as the Mutant Zombie flesh eating Hyperturbopostantiuasipseudoretroneoantimultidisestablishmentarianismists from mars.

Capt'n Midnight

Washing powder contains a grey dye so when you are doing a hand wash it looks like you are getting the dirt out.

benj

Cupcake_Crisis wrote: »

I heard this was a lie! Something about the hot air we breath out puts them off going anywhere near you mouth.......please tell me its a lie.....:(

i hope it's not true but only last week i was having a nap before
work in daylght and woke up to one crawling on my face :eek:
....more effective than any alarm clock though

Capt'n Midnight

If all the worlds economists were laid end to end they wouldn't reach a conclusion.

mobius42

Caoimhín wrote: »

It is indeed a liquid, although more modern glass is stronger, if you look at glass in an old building like a church, you may notice the glass at bottom is a little thicker due to the gravitational pull of the earth's mass. It never truly settles into a solid.

It's not a liquid. The deformation in old glass windows was caused by the method used to make the glass in the Middle Ages not any type of flow. Roman windows do not show this deformation despite them being much older.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html

demail

Caoimhín wrote: »

It is indeed a liquid, although more modern glass is stronger, if you look at glass in an old building like a church, you may notice the glass at bottom is a little thicker due to the gravitational pull of the earth's mass. It never truly settles into a solid.

No it is not a liquid never was never will be. The glass is thicker on one side cos it was made by hand and was mounted heaviest side down for stability.

It is a myth that it's a liquid.

thebullkf

Ciaran500 wrote: »

bull.

apparently not

ART6

thebullkf wrote: »

after 6 months half the weight of your pillow is comprised of dead skin cells.....

Ciaran500 wrote: »

bull.

Wrong Ciaran. That's the other half:D

Professey Chin

Cupcake_Crisis wrote: »

I heard this was a lie! Something about the hot air we breath out puts them off going anywhere near you mouth.......please tell me its a lie.....:(

Om nom nom nom:pac:

Poor Uncle Tom

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

but not as quick as the Mutant Zombie flesh eating Hyperturbopostantiuasipseudoretroneoantimultidisestablishmentarianismists from mars.

Yes, we have a winner..!

A phrase, by the way, first used by a carnival stall holder in Maryland USA in June 1851.

Cuddlesworth

kwestfan08 wrote: »

It is impossible to lick your elbow

*runs away*

magenta73 wrote: »

you can't lick your elbow...............and yes, I have tryed:p

I can lick my elbow. In fact I can lick a good deal further down my arm.

whodoo

RossFixxxed wrote: »

St John's Wood is the only tube station that does not contain a letter from the word Makerel!

YES, YES, YES I GOT TO USE IT. THE stupidest fact I've ever seen!

thats the best fact EVER!! i love it!

Biggins

King Henry VIII slept with a gigantic axe.

Catfish are the only animals that naturally have an ODD number of whiskers.

Replying more than 100 times to the same piece of spam e-mail will overwhelm the sender's system and interfere with their ability to send any more spam.

The skin needed for elbow transplants must be taken from the scrotum of a cadaver.

The Boeing 747 is capable of flying upside-down if it weren't for the fact that the wings would shear off when trying to roll it over.

The trucking company Elvis Presley worked at as a young man was owned by Frank Sinatra.

The only golf course on the island of Tonga has 15 holes, and there's no penalty if a monkey steals your golf ball.

Calvin, of the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip, was patterned after President Calvin Coolidge, who had a pet tiger as a boy.

SCUBA divers cannot pass gas at depths of 33 feet or below.

Because printed materials are being replaced by CD-ROM, microfiche and the Internet, libraries that previously sank into their foundations under the weight of their books are now in danger of collapsing in extremely high winds.

In 1843, a Parisian street mime got stuck in his imaginary box and consequently died of starvation.

The sport of jai alai originated from a game played by Incan priests who held cats by their tails and swung at leather balls. The cats would instinctively grab at the ball with their claws, thus enabling players to catch them.

The idea for "tribbles" in "Star Trek" came from gerbils, since some gerbils are actually born pregnant.

Male rhesus monkeys often hang from tree branches by their amazing prehensile penises.

Polar bears can eat as many as 86 penguins in a single sitting.

A cat's purr has the same romance-enhancing frequency as the voice of singer Barry White.

The typewriter was invented by Hungarian immigrant Qwert Yuiop, who left his "signature" on the keyboard.

The volume of water that the Giant Sequoia tree consumes in a 24-hour period contains enough suspended minerals to pave 17.3 feet of a 4-lane concrete freeway.

In the weightlessness of space a frozen pea will explode if it comes in contact with Pepsi.

Smearing a small amount of dog feces on an insect bite will relieve the itching and swelling.

Centuries ago, purchasing real estate often required having one or more limbs amputated in order to prevent the purchaser from running away to avoid repayment of the loan. Hence an expensive purchase was said to cost "an arm and a leg."

When Mahatma Gandhi died, an autopsy revealed five gold Krugerrands in his small intestine.

At the first World Cup championship in Uruguay, 1930, the soccer balls were actually monkey skulls wrapped in paper and leather.

Silly Putty was "discovered" as the residue left behind after the first latex condoms were produced. It's not widely publicized for obvious reasons.

When immersed in liquid, a dead sparrow will make a sound like a crying baby.

In WWII the US military planned to airdrop over France propaganda in the form of Playboy magazine, with coded messages hidden in the models' turn-ons and turn-offs. The plan was scrapped because of a staple shortage due to rationing of metal.

Although difficult, it's possible to start a fire by rapidly rubbing together two Cool Ranch Doritos.



How companies got their name:

Apple Computers

It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 O’clock.

CISCO

It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.

Compaq

This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Corel

The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr.Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

Google

The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.After founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’

Hotmail

Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world.When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

Hewlett Packard

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes)

Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft

Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.

Motorola

Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE

Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.

Sony

It originated from the Latin word ’sonus’ meaning sound, and ’sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN

Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.

Yahoo!

The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos

Dubh Geannain

If you purse your lips and blow out the air flows out cooler than if you just breathed out.

And for a scary one. The Mayan calandar only goes up to 2012 when according to their beliefs the world will end. There is also a 13th (unlucky number) star sign, Ophiuchus, which is supposed to be in between Scorpio and Sagittarius. The meeting point of these three signs (the stinger of Scorpip the tip sagittarius's arrow and the foot of Ophichus meet at a point recognised as the centre of our galaxy. The sun is due to pass through this point in 2012. The last time this happened was something like 3,000 to 7,000BC, I can't remember exactly.

Biggins

Dubh Geannain wrote: »

...I can't remember exactly.

I'd be surprised if you did, it would be an amazing fact if you did considering you might be that old to remember the previous time around!

me-skywalker

Futurism wrote: »

One can make all kinds of explosives, using simple household items, if one were so inclined.

stargate quote!

Dubh Geannain

You're right, alots happened since then. And there were a few millennia where not alot happened so they kind of just morphed into one.

"Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste
Ive been around for a long, long year Stole many a mans soul and faith"

Noelleieos

The elephant is the only animal with 4 knees.

Biggins

1. The penalty for masturbation in Indonesia is decapitation.

2. In Lebanon, men are legally allowed to have sex with animals, but the animals must be female. Having sexual relations with a male animal is punishable by death.

3. In Bahrain, a male doctor may legally examine a woman’s genitals, but is forbidden from looking directly at them during the examination. He may only see their reflection in a mirror.

4. Muslims are banned from looking at the genitals of a corpse. This also applies to undertakers; the sex organs of the deceased must be covered with a brick or piece of wood at all times.

5. Most Middle Eastern countries recognize the following Islamic law: “After having sexual relations with a lamb, it is a mortal sin to eat its flesh.”

6. There are men in Guam whose full-time job is to travel the countryside and deflower young virgins, who pay them for the privilege of having sex for the first time. Reason: under Guam law, it is expressly forbidden for virgins to marry.

7. In Cali, Colombia, a woman may only have sex with her husband, and the first time this happens her mother must be in the room to witness the act. :eek: YIKES!!!

8. In Santa Cruz, Bolivia it is illegal for a man to have sex with a woman and her daughter at the same time.

9. In Maryland, it is illegal to sell condoms from vending machines with one exception: prophylactics may be dispensed from a vending machine only “in places where alcoholic beverages are sold for on the premises.”

10. In Hong Kong, a betrayed wife is legally allowed to kill her adulterous husband, but may only do so with her bare hands. (The husband’s lover, on the other hand, may be killed in any manner desired.)

antodeco

Ronseal wood stain varnish does exactly what it says on the tin.

marcsignal

everyone associated with 'Xpose' on TV3 is a fucking retard :pac:

Biggins

marcsignal wrote: »

everyone associated with 'Xpose' on TV3 is a fucking retard :pac:

Thats not a strange fact - that's just a certainty.

ynotdu

antodeco wrote: »

Ronseal wood stain varnish does exactly what it says on the tin.

antodeco,what do you mean? It Costs 3 times as much here than anywere else?:D

Biggins

Valentine’s Day used to be celebrated on February 15th, not 14th

Valentine’s Day originates from the ancient Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, which was celebrated on 15 February in honour of the gods Lupercus and Faunus, as well as the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. During the festival, young men would draw the names of women from a box, and each couple would be paired until next year’s celebration. Often they would fall in love and marry.

At around 270AD Rome was facing battles and civil uprising. The men were not keen to join the army. Emperor Claudius II believed that the men did not want to leave their loved ones and summarily cancelled all marriages and engagements. Two priests, Valentine and Marius, disobeyed the decree and secretly performed marriage ceremonies. Valentine was caught on 14 February and dragged to jail. Later in the day he was clubbed to death and beheaded. It is said that, before his execution, Valentine himself had fallen in love with the jailer’s daughter. He signed his final note to her, “From your Valentine.”

Valentine’s Day
In 391AD, Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity as the official religion of the Rome. The fertility festival was celebrated until 496AD when Pope Gelasius replaced it with a similar celebration. For patron saint of the celebration, he chose the “lovers” saint, St Valentine. He also moved the date of the celebration from the 15 February to the date of St Valentine’s death, 14 February. Through the centuries, Valentines Day became to be remembered more as the festival of love instead of a religious day. In 1969 it was dropped from the Roman Catholic calendar as a designated feast day.

Cupid
Cupid has always played a role in the celebrations of love. Those whose hearts are pierced by his arrows fall deeply in love. In Greek mythology he was known as Eros, the young son of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. To the Romans, he was Cupid, son of Venus. But where there’s love, there often is jealousy. Venus was jealous of the beauty of Psyche, a mere mortal, and ordered Cupid to punish her (for being so beautiful). Instead, Cupid fell deeply in love and took her as his wife.

As a mortal Psyche was forbidden to look at him. Eventually, her sisters convinced her to look at the handsome Cupid. As punishment, Venus demanded that she perform three difficult tasks, the last of which caused Psyche’s death. Cupid found her lifeless on the ground and removed the eternal sleep from her body. The gods, moved by their love, then granted Psyche immortality.

The symbol of Cupid became part of Valentines Day only recently. Cupid is still around shooting his arrows. Psyche represents the struggles of the human soul.

Happy Valentine’s!
Esther Howland, the woman who produced the first commercial American valentines in the 1840s, sold a then mind-boggling $5,000 in cards her first year of business. Today, over 1 billion valentine cards are sent in the US - second in number only to Christmas cards.