Teach me stuff!

[Kd]

I like scaring people with the amount of random information I know. People generally get freaked out by being told how many dimples a golf ball has (over 60, apparently). Trouble is, I'm running out of stuff to tell them. So that's where you lovely people come in. Anything remotely random or interesting you happen to know, post it right here, so I may terrify a new generation of unsuspecting college students.
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Guess who's back, back again, Kd's back, tell a friend.

[Celt]

There's an owl sitting on the border around the top-right one of a dollar bill.


As far as I know it's supposed to be Minerva's owl and relates to free-masonry.
There's probably much more info available about the symbolism on this bill on the net.
There's a lot relating to Free-Masonry and can be spooky if correlated with bible prophesies.


BTW. There are 119 grooves on the edge of a quarter.

[The Cruciverbalist]

Well, you could wow folks with your extensive knowledge of facts about US Presidents.

Or, heck, replace Presidents with Prime Ministers, if you're feeling Fritish.
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"Who slipped th'surly bonds an' kinged you the linguary?"

[Doc Borodog]

I always teach my kids to take square roots and logarithms of large numbers in their heads, and then tell them to amaze their friends at parties.

To approximate the square root of a number, use the root of next lowest perfect square plus the difference between the number and the perfect square divided by twice the perfect root. For example, the square root of 85 is 9 (85-81)/(2x9) = 9 4/18, or 9 2/9, or 9.22.

To take base 10 logarithms in your head, just remember the numbers 0, .3, .5, .6, .7, .8, .85, .9, .95, and 1. These are the base 10 logarithms of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, respectively (or near enough). To take the logarithm of any large number, think of it in scientific notation, like 70 trillion is 7x10^13. Since log(7x10^13) = log(10^13) + log(7) = 13 + log(7) = 13.85. In other words, the whole number is the exponent and you just add the logarithm of the coefficient, which you've memorized from the list.

People seem really impressed when you can tell them the logarithm of 40,000 is 4.6, or tell them the square root of 68 is 8.25, without using a calculator.

[extropalopakettle]

[Celt]

[zorT Kitty]

oh, now I see it.

[extropalopakettle]

It's part of the repeating background pattern, and appears on other parts of the bill, except that in that one part it's clipped in such a way as to look vaguely like a badly drawn owl, or spider, or moth, or Darth Vader. If, whatever it is, it is intentional, then my bets are on Darth Vader. If they wanted to draw an owl, it wouldn't look so much like Darth Vader.

[extropalopakettle]

I'd sooner believe the devil appeared in the smoke and flames of the burning World Trade Center: http://www.detnews.com/2001/nation/0109/19/a05-297999.htm

[extropalopakettle]

How Many Dimples on a Golf Ball

[wordcross]

Yellowstone National Park is actually mostly the caldera of a dormant super-volcano. Hence all the gysers and such. If past eruptions are any indication, it's set to erupt sometime soon (within the next couple of centuries, most likely). They've already detected a bulge in the ground near one of the lakes, indicating pressure from Magma buildup.

The eruption would destory much of Wyoming (not that anyone lives there), and the ash cloud would enter the jetstream and block out the sun enough to drop the world temperature by several degrees for nearly a decade. The ash itself would blanket the ground feet thick even hundreds of miles away.

The moral of this story is: Yellowstone is gonna kill you.
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[Agamemnon]

You have to know the 'Kings and Queens of England' song.....

Willie, Willie, Henry, Steve,
Henry, Dick, John, Henry Three,
Edward One, Two, Three, Dick Two,
Henry Four, Five, Six, then who?
Edward Four, Five, Dick the Bad,
Harrys twain and Ned, the lad.
Mary, Lizzie, James the Vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again.
William and Mary, Anne o'Gloria,
Four Georges, William and Victoria.
Edward Seven, Georgie Five,
Edward, George and Liz (alive)


I know it misses out the early ones, such as.......

Egbert (802-39)
Aethelwulf (839-55)
Aethelbald (855-60)
Aethelbert (860-66)
Aethelred (866-71)
Alfred, the Great (871-99)
Edward, the Elder (899-925)
Athelstan (925-40)
Edmund, the Magnificent (940-46)
Eadred (946-55)
Eadwig (Edwy), All-Fair (955-59)
Edgar, the Peaceable (959-75)
Edward, the Martyr (975-78)
Aethelred, the Unready (978-1016)
Edmund, Ironside (1016)
Svein, Forkbeard (1014)
Canute, the Great (1016-35)
Harald, Harefoot (1035-40)
Hardicanute (1040-42)
Edward, the Confessor (1042-66)
Harold II (1066)

.....and the not so famous ones like......

Empress Matilda (1141)
Lady Jane Grey (1553)

.......nor the Protectorates......

Oliver Cromwell (1649-58)
Richard Cromwell (1658-59)

........and we shall not go into the early County Kingdoms as that would take up the whole thread but it's good to bring up these every now and again.
Plus it keeps the Blighty history going since it's being downgraded in schools nowadays.

[Courk]

Wordy - Naked Science?

You can mention that there are 83 kakapos in the world after 3 died last year, but that's an improvement from the 1995 number of 51. And, chicks are expected for the first time in 3 years.

[Agamemnon]

Sheffield F.C. is the oldest football club in the world, being formed on the 24th Oct 1857.

The oldest continually published newspaper in the World, 'THE BERROW’S
WORCESTER JOURNAL', has appeared each week with unfailing regularity since 1709.

Adolf Hitler had 3 brothers and 2 sisters.

James Cagney vehemently denied ever saying "You Dirty Rat", it was misinturpreted from a line he said.......""Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I'll give it to you through the door!"

~shrugs~

[Dread Pirate Westley]

I know of the Yellowstone Caldera from QT. It erupts every 640,000 years or so, and last erupted 642,000 years ago. Ash from the eruption could be as deep as 6 feet here in Chicago.

Here's a recent QT "Archive of knowledge":

[extropalopakettle]

[wordcross]

What's QT?

another interesting fact:
When the U.S. government was doing Nuclear bomb testing in the Nevada desert, they realized that an underground explosion produces enough heat to create a completely hermetically sealed glass sphere from all the melted sand. The goverment wants to use it as a nuclear waste dumping site, and keeps hiring geologic teams to tell them it's okay. Unfortunately, the area is prone to earthquakes, and therefore is not a good site to be storing nuclear waste. This is still going on, and every time, the govt. fires the team that tells them no and hires a new one. You'd think they'd learn.

Oh yeah, and this site is within 100 miles of Las Vegas. (To the north a bit.)
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[Dread Pirate Westley]

Newspaper column in the Sun Times, Sunday-Thursday.

http://www.suntimes.com/index/quicktakes.html

[Jedo the Jedi]

[Courk]

We decided it loosely rhymed.

[Chuck]

...Mary, Lizzie, James and then,
Charlie, Charlie, James again.

[sk*]

Elias Howe, the guy who patented the first american sewing machine also invented the zipper.

Georges de Mestral invented velcro.

aglet: plastic ends of shoelaces
ferrule: metal part of a pencil

[wordcross]

The dot above a lowercase 'i' is called a tittle (pronounced ti-tu-lee)
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[Courk]

The fifth sense of taste (I can't think of the right word) is umame. It's described as savory.

[NeocortX]

[apparently]
Australia is the only continent without an active volcano.

It takes 548 peanuts to make a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter.

You won't find peanut butter in a volcano.
[/apparently]

[Celt]

The Late Late Show - The Worlds longest running chat show. Summer 1962 to present day. Had the same presenter up until 1999, "Gaybo" Gay Byrne.

'Coronation Street is the world's longest running soap opera, having made its debut on December 14 1960. It's set in a working class street in Northern England.

[extropalopakettle]

[Vader]

Baseball is the only sport(out of the major 4, baseball, basket ball, hockey & FootBall, in the USA) that the Defence controles the Ball.
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Duct tape is like the force they both have a light side and a dark side and they bind the universe together.

[Samadhi]

[ZutAlors!]

Oh. SK's post reminds me:

Hedy Lamarr was a sexpot actress and pinup girl in the 1930s and 40s -- she was in "Samson and Delilah" and, earlier, performed what was probably the first nude scene in mainstream cinema in "Ecstacy".

She also, in 1940, patented a frequency-hopping scheme for torpedo guidance and control, the ideas from which were later used in anti-jamming missile guidance systems, and were the precursor to systems used today in cell phones.

[Courk]

Less than a hundred people? Knew about manatees? Apparently this writer does not know about me. Put the book down, it's obviously flawed.

[Samadhi]

[Courk]

I figured the setting was the future since manatees are still alive. Trust me, if they all died that might make it into the miserable thread. But, with me around now, I don't see that happening. Hence, the book is flawed.

[Samadhi]

Oh, well it seems I missed a bit.

[Courk]

Tasty, like beef, yet healthy, like fish...

[wordcross]

Okay, so, about 7 million years ago plate tectonics were such that the contintent of africa was rotating slightly clockwise. The result was that the Straight of Gibraltar was pinched off and the Mediterranean had no access to the ocean. The sea then dried up almost completely. The only water around came from the rivers flowing down from African and Europe (which isn't much, comparatively)

So, now that the seafloor was exposed and dried up, animals from Africa and Europe went down in to drink at the lakes and such at the bottom and started to establish themselves in the sea-floor.

Well, a coupla million years later, when Africa rotated back counter-clockwise, the Straight of Gibraltar opened up again. For a while there was a waterfall half a mile high as the ocean tried to refill the Mediterranean. Most of the animals ran back toward the higher ground in Africa and Europe, but some of them ran for high ground in the form of Island in the Mediterranean.

So when the sea level cut them off from the mainland, the animals were in a quandary. The very large animals weren't able to find enough to eat with the limited resources of a small Island, but the smaller versions of a species were more easily able to get enough to eat. The result is a natural selection process that favored smaller animals to larger.

So, after thousands of years of this, you end up with Pygmy Elephants, Pygmy Rhinocerouses, and Pygmy Hippos, among other things. There are still skeletons of such animals that can be found, and many of them measured only 2 feet at the shoulder. The reason that they're mostly extinct today is that people who eventually made it to the islands and settled there thought that these tiny animals were good eatin' and hunted them to extinction.

Anyway, one really cool fact is this:
The Skull of a Pygmy Elephant was structured such that the nasal concavity where the Trunk met the head was located toward the upper portion of the skull. People who found these skulls thought that the hole what appeared to be the forehead was actually for an eye, and thus the Cyclops myth was born! (Or so they theorize, anyway )
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[kevinatilusa]

Olivia Newton John (of Grease fame) was the granddaughter of Max Born, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on Quantum Mechanics.

[Courk]

Ever wonder where the Mutineers from the HMS Bounty went? They went to Pitcairn Island.

[Jedo the Jedi]

Ever wonder where Courk got her name? Well, ask her.

[Dread Pirate Westley]