Random Fact thread--come on, show us what you got

[alakhiyar]

Keep going after me.

the speed of Catsup is .0001 MPH ----you never know when a random fact can come in handy

[shatteredsoul]

Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories per hour.

[westin]

in Ireland or the US, it is spelled Whiskey
in Canada or Scotland it is spelled Whisky

Crown Royal is only 20% Canadian Whisky, the rest of the product is made up of neutral spirits.

George Lucas' dog was named Indiana, hence Indiana Jones...

[alakhiyar]

These things I have learnt recently during a series of brain enhancement games on my WM5 phone.

1. A whale's heart beats only 9 times a minute.
2. An octopus has rectangular pupils.
3. Snakes can sleep about 3 years running without any food.
4. There is a theory that the origins of the term 'honeymoon' date back to the time of Ancient Babylon. In Babylonian culture, the father of the bride would provide his son in law with all the mead (a honey based drink) he could drink during the first month of marriage. And because the calendar was lunar based, this period was called moon. It was believed that drinking mead would increase the likelihood of producing a son.
5. The material with the highest thermal conductivity is not a metal like silver or copper, but diamond (about 6 times that of silver). If someone were to make a diamond tea-spoon, they would be burnt just after it was put in hot tea.
6. The cigarette lighter was invented before the friction match. Early matches were so dangerous, there was enough phosphorus in one packet to kill a person.
7.The most common element on Earth is oxygen, mainly because of the SiO2 in the earth's crust.
8.In a group of 40 people the chances of two people sharing a birthday is around 90%.
9.Hippos kill more people each year than crocodiles.
10. If a line of all the 18 year old men from China walked past you, it would take forever to end, as people would be added to the end faster than they could pass you.

That's it for now, my brain hurts.

[morganlefay]

Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.
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Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children -- last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it--hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."
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Houses had thatched roofs--thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice rats, and
bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery, and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof--hence the saying, "It's raining cats and dogs."
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There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
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The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more, thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway --hence, a "thresh hold."
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They cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while--hence the rhyme, "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."
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Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."
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Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leak onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
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Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale pays and bread which was so old and hard that they could use them for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood and old bread. After eating off wormy, moldy trenchers, one would get "trench mouth."
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Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."
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Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up--hence, the custom of holding a "wake."
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England is old and small and they started out running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When re-opening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer".

MLF

[westin]

Very interesting stuff MLF ...

Here is one for you... in the old days, Newspapers were called Gazettes, Periodicals, or tabloids. These publications carried mainly local stories. With the invention of the teletype machine, these papers could get stories from the North, East, West, and South... Hence NEWSpaper...

[Aardpsymon]

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England is old and small and they started out running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When re-opening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer".

MLF

That one is a myth I'm afraid. Not the bells part, but the fact that people were being buried alive. The "scratch marks" were part of the decomposition.

8.In a group of 40 people the chances of two people sharing a birthday is around 90%.

That doesn't add up either.

[dalek]

That one is a myth I'm afraid. Not the bells part, but the fact that people were being buried alive. The "scratch marks" were part of the decomposition.

Actually the bells are also a myth.... http://historymedren.about.com/od/da...a/bod_dead.htm

At no time during the Middle Ages was there a prevalent fear that people were getting buried alive, and in no known instance did anyone rig up a bell-pull to notify the living. Most medieval people were smart enough to distinguish a living person from a dead one.

[Negative]

8.In a group of 40 people the chances of two people sharing a birthday is around 90%.

That doesn't add up either.

It does add up; it's a basic concept in probability theory known as the birthday paradox.

- in a group of only 23 people, the probability that two of them have the same birthday is around 50%

- in a group of around 40 people, the probability is around 90%

- in a group of 50 people, the probability is around 97%

[alakhiyar]

If an earthquake were to occur which measured 10 on the richter scale, the tremors would be equivalent to those created if a 20km wide meteorite hit the earth at 56,000mph. The blast caused by such a strike would be equivelant to one Teraton of TNT (1,000,000,000,000 metric tons). To put that into perspective. The "Little Boy" dropped on hiroshima was roughly 15 kilotons (15,000 metric tons of TNT). The largest atomic weapon ever detonated was the Russian "Tsar Bomba" which was about 50 megatons (50,000,000 tons of TNT). For a size comparison of the mushroom clouds, check this out:

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne...9291829&size=o


Its interesting but also quite frightening.