I bet you didnt know that

Capt'n Midnight

cdeb wrote: »

The person who wrote and sang the theme tune to the BBC kids' show Rainbow also played Hastings in the Poirot films.

It was an ITN show

And ran until Thames Television lost it's franchise for weekday programming in London to Carlton because of the "Death On The Rock" documentary.

dxhound2005

Sin eaters were employed to absorb the sins of the dead and dying. They were despised by society, although they performed what was regarded as an essential service.

http://omgfacts.com/historys-worst-job-village-sin-eater/

The term has now been applied to internet content moderators, who are also held in very low regard.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/i-felt-like-robot-brutalised-11285691

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b096h775

Greybottle

The most highly decorated unit in the history of the US Army was the 442nd Infantry Regiment. They existed from 1944-46 and as a Reserve unit since then.

In WW2 they had to be replaced twice due to its high casualty rate. 4,000 joined in 1943 but with replacements over 14,000 served in total. 93% were injured at some time and they received over 9,500 Purple Hearts as well as 21 Medals of Honour and 8 Presidential Citations.

They were known as being fearless and were involved in some of the most decisive battles of the war in Italy and France.

What makes them more unusual is that they were formed entirely from Nisei, or Americans of Japanese decent. Many Japanese in the lower 48 were interned, these were soldiers who choose to fight rather than be interned. They were moved to Europe rather than the Pacific Theatre for security reasons, but proved to be the best unit that the US had.

sbsquarepants

dxhound2005 wrote: »

Sin eaters were employed to absorb the sins of the dead and dying. They were despised by society, although they performed what was regarded as an essential service.

I seen a fairly crappy movie about this starring Heath Ledger a few years back - never dawned on me that it was actually a "real" thing!

sbsquarepants

Lorelli! wrote: »

Similarly Queen's Radio Ga Ga was originally Radio Ca Ca. Rodger Taylor's son said it when trying to say the radio was eh bad or ****!

I heard (not sure if it's true or not) that Lady Ga Ga got her name from when she was texting a friend about this song and the predictive text on her phone changed radio ga ga to lady ga ga and she just liked the sound of it.

Tell me how

sbsquarepants wrote: »

I heard (not sure if it's true or not) that Lady Ga Ga got her name from when she was texting a friend about this song and the predictive text on her phone changed radio ga ga to lady ga ga and she just liked the sound of it.

That claim was made by her former producer Rob Fusari (and was partly referenced in a $35m lawsuit in 2010) and that he sent the text.

In an interview with Flybe, she said that she herself thought of it and that while Fusari was calling her GaGa because her voice and style reminded him of the Queen Radio GaGa hit, she added the LAdy part as a more serene counter to the craziness of GaGa.

Further rumours suggest both are lying and that music executives came up with it which, unfortunately, sounds like the most plausible origins.

Greybottle

Mazim Bialik plays the role of Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory. She plays a neuroscientist.

In real like Bialik has a Doctorate in Neuroscience from UCLA which she did during breaks she took from acting. She turned down Yale and Harvard to take the place in UCLA as she was more interested in acting than academic life at the time.

Ipso

dxhound2005 wrote: »

Sin eaters were employed to absorb the sins of the dead and dying. They were despised by society, although they performed what was regarded as an essential service.

http://omgfacts.com/historys-worst-job-village-sin-eater/

The term has now been applied to internet content moderators, who are also held in very low regard.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/i-felt-like-robot-brutalised-11285691

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b096h775

On a similar note. There is a group of people in France and Spain known as Cagots, they have no difference from any of the main population from an ethnic, physical or linguistic point of view but for some reason they were consigned to the slag heap from a social order point of view.

A bit similar to the Burakuminin Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

pleas advice

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If all the ground water ended up in the oceans then sea level would rise by more than 1000 feet ( 300 meters )

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-sea-groundwater-link-climate-response.html

if all the water vapour fell out of the sky, it would be enough to cover all the land and oceans of the earth to a height of... about an inch

Squall Leonhart

pleas advice wrote:

if all the water vapour fell out of the sky, it would be enough to cover all the land and oceans of the earth to a height of... about an inch

Do you mean it wouldn't find it's own level, it would just cover everything in an inch of water, or that it'd be one inch above Everest?

The former I assume? Latter seems unlikely.

Are Am Eye

Squall Leonhart wrote: »

Do you mean it wouldn't find it's own level, it would just cover everything in an inch of water, or that it'd be one inch above Everest?

The former I assume? Latter seems unlikely.

I go for 2. Surface tension.

Capt'n Midnight

Are Am Eye wrote: »

I go for 2. Surface tension.

remind me again , what's the surface tension of ice ? :P


Venus has roughly the same amount of Nitrogen in the atmosphere as earth. And the atmospheric temperature profile is similar to earth's when you are at the same pressures.

So a balloon floating in the Venusian keeps getting touted as a place to live. But if anything happens to the balloon there'll be tears.


If Venus had keep more hydrogen then a lot of the oxygen now in the carbon dioxide would be water instead. And there'd be oceans. Whopping great big ones like we have.

As recently as 715 million years ago, before massive vulcanisation Venus may still have had oceans and temperate temperatures.

This could well be common knowledge but I never knew these guys existed until recently. One of the ugliest prehistoric murder machines on earth is the Gharial crocodile native to parts of northern India. Critically endangered, they number less than 300 in the wild. The ladies have the long skinny snout that distinguishes them from the rest of the herd but the chaps have the edge in the ugly stakes, possessing a nasal boss on the end of their snouts that develops as they reach adulthood. Combined with in excess of 100 teeth, not a pretty sight.

Another thing I didn't know is that there isn't just the single species of alligator, as I had assumed. The American alligator is found mainly in the States of Florida and Louisiana and they have a cousin in China, the Chinese alligator/Yangtze alligator/alligator sinensis. If it was possible for alligators to be cute, this might be a contender. Reaching an adult size of about five feet/1.5 meters, this creature is also critically endangered with numbers in the wild put at around 120. They're about half the size of the American alligator and apparently less aggressive though that's a theory I wouldn't like to put to the test.

Greybottle

The graveyard from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, also known as Sad Hill Cemetery can still be visited in Spain. Most of the film was made there, the graveyard itself was built by Spanish soldirers and local workers.

It has been restored recently and is about 60 KM SE of Burgos.

It can be seen on Google Earth here: https://www.google.ie/maps/place/Sad+Hill+Cemetery/@41.9907233,-3.4086827,602m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0xd45b7cd9ae0017b:0x3c6fca7cba3c2f1b!8m2!3d41.9910753!4d-3.4087524



You could do a lot worse at work today than spend 15 minutes watching this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuUWq7qGSro

py2006

Greybottle wrote: »

Mazim Bialik plays the role of Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory. She plays a neuroscientist.

In real like Bialik has a Doctorate in Neuroscience from UCLA which she did during breaks she took from acting. She turned down Yale and Harvard to take the place in UCLA as she was more interested in acting than academic life at the time.

She will always be Blossom to me

The US Constitutions fifth amendment protects an accused person from being compelled to give evidence against themselves or otherwise incriminating themselves. Fingerprints are not covered, and peoples fingerprints are routinely taken as a person is charged and processed.

So passwords and pins are constitutionally protected but not fingerprints, and if your phone is central to running your criminal empire you should probably charge up the Nokia 3310 again and make do, as you can't be forced to unlock it via word or PIN but it's perfectly legal to compel you to do so with a print.

Capt'n Midnight

^^^^

In the UK you can be done for withholding your pssword when you arrive into the country.

" ... he did wilfully obstructed [sic], or sought to frustrate, an examination or search under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, contrary to paragraph 18(1)(c) of that Schedule,”

Capt'n Midnight

"I see that you have made three spelling mistakes."
— Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras (commenting on his own death warrant)

Capt'n Midnight

Most programming languages use keywords and text to define what to do. And use spaces and returns and tabs to separate the words and numbers.


There is a programming language called Whitespace which ignores the words and numbers and is coded entirely using non-printable characters.

Capt'n Midnight

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest no longer takes entries for the shortest self-replicating program.

The goal was to produce the smallest program that outputs it's own code.




Thanks to loophole abuse on compiler settings the winning team were able to get a file 0 bytes long compiled into a 0 byte executable, that when run would generate an output of exactly 0 bytes.

mzungu

There is a single mega-colony of ants (called Argentine ants) that spans three continents, covering much of Europe, the west coast of the U.S., and the west coast of Japan. Once native to South America, these ants have now spread across the globe (everywhere except Antartica). Even though each colony is quite distinct, because these Argentine ants all belong to the same inter related colony they will not fight each other (they are extremely territorial), even the ones that live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. To give an example of the colony sizes, one is believed to stretch 6,000 miles along the European mediterranean coast and another in California stretches over 550 miles.

Fourier

In Genesis 6:19-20, Noah takes two of every clean animal (animals fit for sacrifice to God) onto the ark (ignoring unclean animals in this), however in Genesis 7:2 it says he takes seven of each clean animal.

The reason for this is that Genesis 6-8 contains two versions of the flood myth. One version is the original oral tale and the other is the version proscribed by the Priests of the main temple in Jerusalem. The priests wouldn't have wanted anybody to be depicted sacrificing animals prior to the foundation of their order with Aaron, brother of Moses, so in their version there is only two of each animal, because then sacrificing would make the animal extinct and thus impossible to sacrifice.

This "deleting" of priestly duties being performed by non-priests occurs in their versions of every story in the first five books of the Bible, where the corresponding oral version has this occur.

if you stretch out the interstate highway in the USA (main roads basically) it can go twice round the world and that's before byeways and backroads.

You can do the same with unravelled twine so to speak within your brain... twice round the world almost.

I've red posters on boards that wouldn't have enough to go twice round the back yard!!;)

Fourier

Fourier wrote: »

In Genesis 6:19-20, Noah takes two of every clean animal (animals fit for sacrifice to God) onto the ark (ignoring unclean animals in this), however in Genesis 7:2 it says he takes seven of each clean animal.

The reason for this is that Genesis 6-8 contains two versions of the flood myth. One version is the original oral tale and the other is the version proscribed by the Priests of the main temple in Jerusalem. The priests wouldn't have wanted anybody to be depicted sacrificing animals prior to the foundation of their order with Aaron, brother of Moses, so in their version there is only two of each animal, because then sacrificing would make the animal extinct and thus impossible to sacrifice.

This "deleting" of priestly duties being performed by non-priests occurs in their versions of every story in the first five books of the Bible, where the corresponding oral version has this occur.

and it's just a retelling of the epic of gilgamesh apparently they say too.

New Home

rusty cole wrote: »

if you stretch out the interstate highway in the USA (main roads basically) it can go twice round the world and that's before byeways and backroads.

You can do the same with unravelled twine so to speak within your brain... twice round the world almost.

I've red posters on boards that wouldn't have enough to go twice round the back yard!!;)

But it's not their fault... what if they don't have a back yard?

Fourier

rusty cole wrote: »

and it's just a retelling of the epic of gilgamesh apparently they say too.

Sort of, again the below is just "cool info", not to correct you, there's nothing wrong with not knowing obscure details of Mesopotmian myth.

The oral version of the creation and flood myths is a parallel of the creation myths from Mesopotamia and the story of Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian flood survivor.

Parallel in the sense that they both come from the same set of original stories.

The story of the flood is retold in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the rest of the Epic is just about the king Gilgamesh and isn't really related to anything in the Bible.

The Priestly version of the creation and the flood is actually written as a direct refutation of both the earlier Hebrew oral stories of these events and the Mesopotamian stories of same. Especially the early story of creation is a send up of Marduk's battle with Tiamat from Babylonian myth.

Not surprising that they would send it up, having only been released from Babylonian captivity and determined to show how their god was superior.

I'll quote a post I made in another subforum:

Firstly Ancient Near East cultures considered "primordial chaos" more frightening and untameable than "mere nothing", so to submit the primordial waters to one's will and shape it, was the highest feat of power.

However in other Near East myths, such as Marduk defeating Tiamat, one god wins over the other due to possessing more of the power of the elements. Marduk's new and dynamic wind/air defeats Tiamat's eternal waters. In this sense the elements are what Yehezkel Kaufmann called "the metadivine realm", a power above the gods.

The inversion in Genesis is that there is no power above Yahweh. He moves over the depersonalized waters (no longer sentient as with Babylon's Tiamat) and the wind blasting over the waters (as Marduk did over Tiamat) comes from Yahweh.

In this sense the start of Genesis is now understood in academia as a conscious echoing of Marduk's battle with Tiamat, designed to show that there is nothing above Yahweh in power and that he is capable of the greatest accomplishment: taming chaos.

Note the following however:
1. That Yahweh, although the most powerful being, is not understood in Genesis as all powerful or omniscient.
2. There are two creation stories in Genesis side by side. 1:1 - 2:3, the priestly creation story written in poetic meter, probably to be chanted at rituals, echoing the Marduk/Tiamat story. The other, 2:4 - 3:23, comes from older oral material and Yahweh is less powerful in it, he even has a physical body.

Bar Kappara had an argument with other Rabbis in the 3rd Century about explaining to lay people how Yahweh did not create the world. The other Rabbis feared this would reduce Yahweh in the mind of the average person. They all acknowledged it as the text's content however.

SimonTemplar

There is a deleted scene from Terminator 2 where Sarah and John Connor remove a chip from the Terminator's head. There is a shot that starts like this:



And then the camera pans around the Terminator's head to reveal this:



That is done in a single unbroken shot so it appears as if there is a large hole in Schwarzenegger's head. It was done like this:

- There is no mirror. Linda Hamilton is working on a model of Arnold's head.
- Arnold is looking through a hole in the wall
- There is a random stand-in for John Connor - we never see his face in the "reflection"
- Linda Hamilton has an identical twin sister and it is actually her who is beside Arnold in the "reflection", matching Linda's movements.

I guess it was cut from the movie for time reasons but it is such an ingenious use of movie magic it is a shame it was cut. It was included in later DVD releases though.

You can see that shot here
https://youtu.be/yeL0xdVTy_g?t=23s

I love how creative movie makers had to be prior to the proliferation of CGI. Other examples from Aliens:

- There is a shot where a facehugger rapidly wraps its tail around Ripley's neck. That was done by first wrapping the model's tail around Sigourney Weaver and then filming the model being pulled away. The shot was then reversed which looked like the tail was wrapping around the neck instead of the opposite.

- The battle scene between the marines and the aliens simply involved the stunt men dressed as aliens running and jumping on small trampolines which were not on camera. This gave the effect that the aliens where pouncing.

joeguevara

rusty cole wrote: »

if you stretch out the interstate highway in the USA (main roads basically) it can go twice round the world and that's before byeways and backroads.

You can do the same with unravelled twine so to speak within your brain... twice round the world almost.

I've red posters on boards that wouldn't have enough to go twice round the back yard!!;)

It is not a great idea slagging people's brain power on here whilst at the same time misspelling the word read!

lmimmfn

joeguevara wrote: »

It is not a great idea slagging people's brain power on here whilst at the same time misspelling the word read!

And "around"

evolving_doors

Mirror touch synthesia
When you can feel other people's sensations... to a very high degree.
This guy is a doctor and has it!
https://joelsalinasmd.com/press