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

Capt'n Midnight

Both Saint Valentine and Santa Claus are buried in Ireland.

Biggins

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Both Saint Valentine and Santa Claus are buried in Ireland.

:eek: Jeasus, I didn't know the provo's had been that busy!

Poor Uncle Tom

Biggins wrote: »

1. The penalty for masturbation in Indonesia is decapitation.

Which head do they cut off..?

Biggins wrote: »

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.”

and..we have a winner..!:D

Lobelia Overhill

thebullkf wrote: »

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

horses only have two knees (front legs) the corresponding joint on the hind legs is called the hock

ART6

Dubh Geannain wrote: »

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

That's the basis of refrigerators. Rapidly expanding gases cool.

me-skywalker

Man does not create, he discovers.

Locomotion

Chuck Norris's tears can cure cancer.

Shame he's never cried

Capt'n Midnight

Biggins wrote: »

:eek: Jeasus, I didn't know the provo's had been that busy!

We still don't know the exact location for Santa, it's somewhere near Jerpoint. Provo's don't always give accurate info as to where people are buried.

Most Irish political parties can trace their roots to the "old" IRA and most splits were over petty issues that became moot later.
PD's left FF over corruption "High standards in high places" and yet did nothing to curb that while in power.
The civil war was over whether we should have signed a treaty, ignoring the reality that the IRA members were now known and the British had quelled other uprising in their empire and could devote far more resources than previously. Also ignored by the anti-treaty side that Michael Collins would most likely have continued in the North regardless and the anti-treaty side were able to easily bypass the supposedly intractable "problems" with the treaty.

Before the fire in the customs house we had pobably the fullest existing civil records in Europe for the second Millenium.

thebullkf

Locomotion wrote: »

Chuck Norris's tears can cure cancer.

Shame he's never cried

chucks the only person who can kick someone in the BACK of the face.

coincidentally chuck lives in a round house

A lot of Biggins facts are bull ****.
Qwert Yiop never existed.
Putting faeces on an open wound is not smart.
Silly putty was made by mixing Boric acid with silicone.
I could go on....

KTRIC

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Both Saint Valentine and Santa Claus are buried in Ireland.

Proof ??

A7X

KTRIC wrote: »

Proof ??

Cause he says so

Dravokivich

Dubh Geannain wrote: »

If you purse your lips and blow out the air
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.

I recon the calender only goes up to 2012 because they though feck it.... some other nutbag can add another 800 years onto the calender then...

Only not to forsee their own demise!!!!!

- Drav!

Buddly

If you run the gas off the electricity and the electricity off the gas, you will save, on average, £50 a year.

Capt'n Midnight

KTRIC wrote: »

Proof ??

http://url.ie/1k8j
http://url.ie/1k8m
Don't expect any more Christmas presents.

Capt'n Midnight

Deleted User wrote:

Qwert Yiop never existed.

こんにちはQwert yiopさん、はじめまして！ウィキペディアへようこそ！

A7X

I can't study with a computer in front of me

Bob Z

Biggins wrote: »

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.

ok i got it wrong. Antonio Meucci invented the telephone first and then he had to wait for Alexander bell to invent the second telephone so that they could have a conversation

Biggins

Bob Z wrote: »

ok i got it wrong. Antonio Meucci invented the telephone first and then he had to wait for Alexander bell to invent the second telephone so that they could have a conversation

If you read any number of documented histories of Antonio Meucci, you will see that he was first to invent the devices but due to his financial state (broke) Bell got there before him later with the patents. This fact has been recognised the world over by many educational institutions, governments and historical recording institutions.

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.";

Hint! - From link above supplied.

nevaeh-2die-4

did you know after you take a barry, u cant help but to look at the sh!t sheet after you have wiped your brown star.

pablomakaveli

Here's one.

If a pig gets rectal prolapse there is a risk of it being cannibalized by other pigs.

Bob Z

Biggins wrote: »

If you read any number of documented histories of Antonio Meucci, you will see that he was first to invent the devices but due to his financial state (broke) Bell got there before him later with the patents. This fact has been recognised the world over by many educational institutions, governments and historical recording institutions. Hint! - From link above supplied.

To be honest i am just joking

Biggins

Bob Z wrote: »

To be honest i am just joking

No worries

Bob Z

did you know: there are more home computers in the home than there are outside in the garden shed

Capt'n Midnight

Creationists may try to convince you that half an eye is of no use.

75% of adults in the USA wear corrective glasses or contact lenses.

Some single celled organisms and some algae have eyespots, these creatures are far less complex than even half an eye.

500 million years ago a trilobite had eyes made of calcite , a transparent mineral. It didn't need to focus because of the way the lens was made, something we've only achieved with image processing and a similar special lens.

Biggins

Why Is the Scoring System in Tennis So Weird?

Tennis as we know it today is barely over a hundred years old. A Welshman, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, devised the game as a diversion for his guests to play on his lawn before the real purpose for the get-together—a pheasant shoot. Very quickly, however, the members of the Wimbledon Cricket Club adopted Wingfield’s game for use on their own underutilized lawns, empty since croquet had waned in popularity in the late eighteenth century. Long before Wingfield, however, there were other forms of tennis.

The word “tennis” first appeared in a poem by John Gower in 1399, and Chaucer’s characters spoke of playing “rackets” in 1380. Court tennis (also known as “real” tennis) dates back to the Middle Ages. That great athlete, Henry VIII, was a devotee of the game. Court tennis was an indoor game featuring an asymmetrical rectangular cement court with a sloping roof, a hard ball, a lopsided racket, and windows on the walls that came into play. Very much a gentleman’s sport, the game is still played by a few diehards, though only a handful of courts currently exist in the United States.
Lawn tennis’s strange scoring system was clearly borrowed from court tennis. Although court tennis used a fifteen-point system, the scoring system was a little different from modern scoring. Each point in a game was worth fifteen points (while modern tennis progresses 15-30-40-game, court tennis progressed 15-30-45-game). Instead of the current three or five sets of six games each, court tennis matches were six sets of four games each. The most accepted theory for explaining the strange scoring system is that it reflected Europeans’ preoccupation with astronomy, and particularly with the sextant (one-sixth of a circle). One-sixth of a circle is, of course, 60 degrees (the number of points in a game). Because the victor would have to win six sets of four games each, or 24 points, and each point was worth 15 points, the game concluded when the winner had “completed” a circle of 360 degrees (24×15).

Writings by Italian Antonio Scaino indicate that the sextant scoring system was firmly in place as early as 1555. When the score of a game is tied after six points in modern tennis, we call it “deuce”—the Italians already had an equivalent in the sixteenth century, a due (in other words, two points were needed to win).
Somewhere along the line, however, the geometric progression of individual game points was dropped. Instead of the third point scoring 45, it became worth 40. According to the Official Encyclopedia of Tennis, it was most likely dropped to the lower number for the ease of announcing scores out loud, because “forty” could not be confused with any other number. In the early 1700s, the court tennis set was extended to six games, obscuring the astronomical origins of the scoring system.

When lawn tennis began to surpass court tennis in popularity, there was a mad scramble to codify rules and scoring procedures. The first tennis body in this country, the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association, first met in 1881 to establish national standards. Prior to the formation of the USNLTA, each tennis club selected its own scoring system. Many local tennis clubs simply credited a player with one point for each rally won. Silly concept. Luckily, the USNLTA stepped into the breach and immediately adopted the English scoring system, thus ensuring generations of confused and intimidated tennis spectators.

There have been many attempts to simplify the scoring system in order to entice new fans. The World Pro Championship League tried the table-tennis scoring system of twenty-one—point matches, but neither the scoring system nor the League survived.
Perhaps the most profound scoring change in this century has been the tie breaker. The U.S. Tennis Association’s Middle States section, in 1968, experimented with sudden-death play-offs, which for the first time in modern tennis history allowed a player who won all of his regulation service games to lose a set. The professionals adopted the tie breaker in 1970, and it is used in almost every tournament today.

Sean_Ludawg

Bulmers Pear is laxative....

Biggins

Why Do Golfers Yell “Fore” When Warning of an Errant Golf Shot?

This expression, popularized by former President Gerald Ford, actually started as an English military term. When the troops were firing in lines, the command “’ware before” indicated that it might be prudent for the front line to kneel so that the second line wouldn’t blow their heads off. “Fore” is simply a shortened version of the “before” in “’ware before.”

Cringer

I heard somewhere that a baby's eyes are the same size at birth as they are as a fully developed adult.

May or may not be true.

IvyTheTerrible

Men have nipples because the sex determining genes in foetuses aren't switched on til after nipples are formed.

Carsinian Thau

A duck's quack does echo. The echo sounds so much like the original that it's almost impossible to distinguish the two.

Capt'n Midnight

Pope John Paul II was a Harlem Globetrotter.

There was a solar eclipse on the day he was born, and on the day he died.

Capt'n Midnight

This sounds like it was made up - anyone got authoritive info on it ?

Windmills always turn counter-clockwise, except for those in Ireland.

dontcallmecrazy

Hogzy wrote: »

Well considering he makes 10 million per day it would take 6 months for him to repopulate the sperm as it only takes one sperm to make a baby...

it takes all the sperms to make a baby, one sperm alone would never be able to swim far enough to reach the egg, therefore it is the combined effort of all the little spermies.

ever hear of guys that cant make babies because of 'low sperm count'

AMixedBag

Did you know that..

when you flush the toilet, the water in Ireland swirls the opposite way to the water in Austrailia.

Crazy stuff, that is!:D

IvyTheTerrible

AMixedBag wrote: »

Did you know that..

when you flush the toilet, the water in Ireland swirls the opposite way to the water in Austrailia.

Crazy stuff, that is!:D

Coreolis effect ftw!

Spastafarian

A pound of armadillo meat contains 780 calories.

/V\etalfish

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

This sounds like it was made up - anyone got authoritive info on it ?

Windmills always turn counter-clockwise, except for those in Ireland.

Which side are you looking at the windwill from? :pac:

mobius42

AMixedBag wrote: »

Did you know that..

when you flush the toilet, the water in Ireland swirls the opposite way to the water in Austrailia.

Crazy stuff, that is!:D

That's a myth. the Coriolis effect is not strong enough to influence such a small amount of water. http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp

ray giraffe

AMixedBag wrote: »

Did you know that..

when you flush the toilet, the water in Ireland swirls the opposite way to the water in Austrailia.

Crazy stuff, that is!:D

Did you know that...

this is false. It's an urban myth - despite the Simpsons episode.

From Wikipedia on 'Coriolis Effect':

In reality the Coriolis effect is a few orders of magnitude smaller than various random influences on drain direction, such as the geometry of the container and the direction in which water was initially added to it. Most toilets flush in only one direction, because the toilet water flows into the bowl at an angle.[23] If water shot into the basin from the opposite direction, the water would spin in the opposite direction.[24]

So popular culture is incorrect in stating that water in bathtubs or toilets always drains in one direction in the Northern Hemisphere, and in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere as a consequence of the Coriolis effect. This idea has been perpetuated by several television programs, including an episode of The Simpsons and one of The X-Files.[25] In addition, several science broadcasts and publications (including at least one college-level physics textbook) have made this incorrect statement.[26]

IvyTheTerrible

ray giraffe wrote: »

Did you know that...

this is false. It's an urban myth - despite the Simpsons episode.

From Wikipedia on 'Coriolis Effect':

In reality the Coriolis effect is a few orders of magnitude smaller than various random influences on drain direction, such as the geometry of the container and the direction in which water was initially added to it. Most toilets flush in only one direction, because the toilet water flows into the bowl at an angle.[23] If water shot into the basin from the opposite direction, the water would spin in the opposite direction.[24]

So popular culture is incorrect in stating that water in bathtubs or toilets always drains in one direction in the Northern Hemisphere, and in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere as a consequence of the Coriolis effect. This idea has been perpetuated by several television programs, including an episode of The Simpsons and one of The X-Files.[25] In addition, several science broadcasts and publications (including at least one college-level physics textbook) have made this incorrect statement.[26]

But...the Simpsons.....all my illusions....:( sigh....

A7X

ray giraffe wrote: »

Did you know that...

this is false. It's an urban myth - despite the Simpsons episode.

From Wikipedia on 'Coriolis Effect':

In reality the Coriolis effect is a few orders of magnitude smaller than various random influences on drain direction, such as the geometry of the container and the direction in which water was initially added to it. Most toilets flush in only one direction, because the toilet water flows into the bowl at an angle.[23] If water shot into the basin from the opposite direction, the water would spin in the opposite direction.[24]

So popular culture is incorrect in stating that water in bathtubs or toilets always drains in one direction in the Northern Hemisphere, and in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere as a consequence of the Coriolis effect. This idea has been perpetuated by several television programs, including an episode of The Simpsons and one of The X-Files.[25] In addition, several science broadcasts and publications (including at least one college-level physics textbook) have made this incorrect statement.[26]

But then what is the feckin reason?

IvyTheTerrible

A7X wrote: »

But then what is the feckin reason?

There is no reason, it doesn't happen.

mobius42

A7X wrote: »

But then what is the feckin reason?

There is no connection between what way the water drains and what hemisphere you are in. It can drain both ways in either hemisphere; it depends on the shape and level of the bowl and what side the water comes in from.

A7X

Damn simpsons

Wazdakka

People will believe anything they hear on T.V if it's reinforced by a dysfunctional yellow family.

IvyTheTerrible

Wazdakka wrote: »

People will believe anything they hear on T.V if it's reinforced by a dysfunctional yellow family.

Hell yeah!

Clare_Guy

Cringer wrote: »

I heard somewhere that a baby's eyes are the same size at birth as they are as a fully developed adult.

May or may not be true.

Not true.

My niece had an eye removed soon after being born. She has a glass eye and has to get new larger ones fitted on a regular basis as she grows...

batari

A cat always lands on his feet.
And buttered bread always falls butter side down.

But what would happen if you tied the buttered bread to the cat's back and threw it up in the air??

My personal theory is that when this projectile hit it's highest point, the world would explode. That's pretty much why I've never tried it.

IvyTheTerrible

atariman wrote: »

A cat always lands on his feet.
And buttered bread always falls butter side down.

But what would happen if you tied the buttered bread to the cat's back and threw it up in the air??

My personal theory is that when this projectile hit it's highest point, the world would explode. That's pretty much why I've never tried it.

I've seen a fun theory about this, where a guy tried to work out how many pieces of buttered toast to attach to a cat to make it levitate...I must go search for it...