Interesting Facts thread part 2

[small_world]

Ha... I sort of meant... GET SOME!!!!
Or something like that.


Shit, I should have put a fact in.. Er...
A mole can dig a 300 foot tunnel in just one night.
But then mole feet are pretty small... so...

When looking through fact/trivia lists. Reading "A goldfish has a memory span of x seconds" makes all other facts null and void.

[Small Man Big Horse]

When looking through fact/trivia lists. Reading "A goldfish has a memory span of x seconds" makes all other facts null and void.

I don't know why but I found myself looking that up just the other night. It's three months, apparently, and they can count to four. But not five. I know not why.

[rudi]

I don't know why but I found myself looking that up just the other night. It's three months, apparently, and they can count to four. But not five. I know not why.

No thumbs.

[Famous Mortimer]

Snopes is full of shit, who gives them the right to decide what's true anyway?[nb]My personal opinion, Snopes are just a couple of gits, they aren't some omnipotent judge[/nb]

They do their research, though, so their personal opinions don't really come into it. If you could point to some examples of them being wrong?

[Santa's Boyfriend]

There's a theory that the Earth originally had two moons, one significantly smaller than the other, which orbited the earth at different speeds.  Eventually they collided, but because one was significantly smaller it didn't make them both molten, the smaller one simply spread itself over the larger one - which is why the crust of the dark side of the moon is significantly thicker than the nearside.

[danyulx]

All astronomy-based facts I can't get enough of, particularly anything involving the sheer vastness of the universe, I love all that. I'm especially fond of the old "there's more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the deserts and beaches on earth!" fact. Mind-blowing.

Another classic: It takes a modern passenger jet about five hours to cross the United States. It would take the same jet going at the same speed about eighteen days to reach the moon; about twenty years to reach the sun; and about 750 years to reach pluto, at the edge of our solar system.  But what about the nearest star to our sun, Alpha Centauri, how long would that take to get to, from earth, in a passenger jet?.... The answer is five million years!
...And that's just the nearest star in our galaxy, the Milky Way! Galaxies, there's roughly fucking 100 billion of them out there; each one alone containing roughly 100 billion stars, each star alone separated by roughly the aforementioned five million year passenger jet flight (25 trillion miles; 4.3 light years).

The mind boggles.

[Nik Drou]

The police don't draw chalk outlines around dead bodies and rarely ever did, as it can contaminate the crime scene. Occasionally there are times when it's necessary, such as if the person is alive and needs to be moved asap. Generally though, it's an invention of hacky screenwriters.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2300/do-crime-scene-investigators-really-draw-a-chalk-line-around-the-body

[alcoholic messiah]

Between them, the 8 planets[nb]Fuck Pluto, fuck it right in the ear.[/nb] in our solar sytem have at least 176 moons. The bestest moon/planet combination for a solar eclipse[nb]i.e. the one that comes closest to just blocking out the sun.[/nb] happens to be the one we experience, due to the sun being approximately 401 times bigger than the moon, and 389 times further away.

[babyshambler]

All astronomy-based facts I can't get enough of, particularly anything involving the sheer vastness of the universe, I love all that. I'm especially fond of the old "there's more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the deserts and beaches on earth!" fact. Mind-blowing.

Another classic: It takes a modern passenger jet about five hours to cross the United States. It would take the same jet going at the same speed about eighteen days to reach the moon; about twenty years to reach the sun; and about 750 years to reach pluto, at the edge of our solar system.  But what about the nearest star to our sun, Alpha Centauri, how long would that take to get to, from earth, in a passenger jet?.... The answer is five million years!
...And that's just the nearest star in our galaxy, the Milky Way! Galaxies, there's roughly fucking 100 billion of them out there; each one alone containing roughly 100 billion stars, each star alone separated by roughly the aforementioned five million year passenger jet flight (25 trillion miles; 4.3 light years).

The mind boggles.

It really emphasises the preposterous nature of solipsism, doesn't it.  Love it, thanks!

[Neville Chamberlain]

If you were to lay fourteen double-decker buses and eight blue whales the size of Wales and Belgium respectively end to end, they'd reach half-way around the River Wye and up to the moon and back four-and-a-half times, which is enough to cover three Isle of Wights the size of Newport and Belgium as well as an area of the Amazon rainforest the size of London and half of Cumbria combined, three times the size of Jupiter's Red Spot.

[doppelkorn]

Can anyone confirm whether of not peanuts are nuts or not or if they indeed might be (or not) legumes?

[Howj Begg]

The easternmost tip of Scotland is further west than Liverpool.

[sirhenry]

Can anyone confirm whether of not peanuts are nuts or not or if they indeed might be (or not) legumes?

Definitely, which is why they were called Goober peas in the southern USA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBOxw6vbDyo

[shiftwork2]

The easternmost tip of Scotland is further west than Liverpool.

You're joking?  Liverpool's longitude is -3.0 degrees while 'that bit North of Aberdeen' is -1.9 degrees.

http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html

You can watch the sun set over the sea at Hunstanton beach in Norfolk, despite being on the East coast.

[Howj Begg]

You're joking?  Liverpool's longitude is -3.0 degrees while 'that bit North of Aberdeen' is -1.9 degrees.

http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html

You can watch the sun set over the sea at Hunstanton beach in Norfolk, despite being on the East coast.

Yes I totally cocked that up, thanks for the correction. This was told me some time ago but I can't remember the first part of the fact, but it involved the east coast of Scotland. Kircaldy and Edinburgh are both further west though...that's still mildly interesting.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

The pier in Southend is so long that, when you walk along it, for a good twenty minutes or so the land appears to stop getting any further away but the end doesn't get any closer, making you feel like you're in a mysterious and futile limbo.  (Although simply being in Southend can give you much the same feeling.)

[steve98]

All astronomy-based facts I can't get enough of, particularly anything involving the sheer vastness of the universe, I love all that. I'm especially fond of the old "there's more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the deserts and beaches on earth!" fact. Mind-blowing.

Another classic: It takes a modern passenger jet about five hours to cross the United States. It would take the same jet going at the same speed about eighteen days to reach the moon; about twenty years to reach the sun; and about 750 years to reach pluto, at the edge of our solar system.  But what about the nearest star to our sun, Alpha Centauri, how long would that take to get to, from earth, in a passenger jet?.... The answer is five million years!
...And that's just the nearest star in our galaxy, the Milky Way! Galaxies, there's roughly fucking 100 billion of them out there; each one alone containing roughly 100 billion stars, each star alone separated by roughly the aforementioned five million year passenger jet flight (25 trillion miles; 4.3 light years).

The mind boggles.

I think you're way out with that 5 million years figure, I think it's a lot less.
The SaturnV rocket if it maintained its maximum speed would take 35,000 years to reach the nearest star and I'm sure the SaturnV doesn't travel approx 100 times faster than a jumbo.

If you found yourself naked in space and could somehow breath and avoid exploding it would take you about an hour to freeze to death and not a few seconds as you might suppose.
This is because there is nothing to conduct the heat away from your body.

[Uncle TechTip]

I think you're way out with that 5 million years figure, I think it's a lot less.
The SaturnV rocket if it maintained its maximum speed would take 35,000 years to reach the nearest star and I'm sure the SaturnV doesn't travel approx 100 times faster than a jumbo.

With some very quick calculations on Google Calc, the distance to a Cent is given as 23 trillion miles, and the average jet travels at 400mph - this comes out at 57 billion hours or 6,559,574.28 years.

Top speed of Saturn V listed as 12km/s which comes to 95,091 years. Saturn V was evidently very very fast - but that's a Saturn V with all stages ejected and little fuel.

[momatt]

If you found yourself naked in space and could somehow breath and avoid exploding it would take you about an hour to freeze to death and not a few seconds as you might suppose.
This is because there is nothing to conduct the heat away from your body.

Wow.  Mind = blown.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

This is why vacuum flasks work so well.

[mook]

would a vacuum flask in space keep a large cans worth of heinz tomato soup hot forever?

[phes]

Edit - sorry, didn't notice it had already been corrected

[Neville Chamberlain]

If you were to lay 12 vacuum flasks end to end, they would stretch over a distance of probably just under 12' or so (depending on the size of the vacuum flasks, of course).

[Treguard of Dunshelm]

would a vacuum flask in space keep a large cans worth of heinz tomato soup hot forever?

No, they would still lose heat through thermal radiation.

[katzenjammer]

See also: "Glass is a liquid!" (it's not)

That's interesting, in A level physics (admittedly it was over 20 years ago) we were taught that it was a super cooled liquid.  I suspect that it's a semantic argument rather than anything with any significance.  It's always looked pretty solid to me.

[mook]

No, they would still lose heat through thermal radiation.

ah right, thank you. although that has scuppered my plans of solving world hunger via the use of geo-orbiting hot soup space stations somewhat.

[Smeraldina Rima]

Edgar Degas said that Ballet dancers had 'sewn up his heart in a bag of pink satin... a bit worn like their slippers'.
In his life he made a whopping 1500 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings of dancers.
If you lay them all down end to end, they can reach the Louvre.

The man with the longest tongue in the world discovered he could lick his forehead while seeing if he could lick his nose.

Indian yellow pigment, as used in the great paintings of Vermeer, is made with the urine of cows fed on mango leaves.

If you lay James "End-To-End" Benton down end to end he prays that you will hold him dear.

[Serge]

You can watch the sun set over the sea at Hunstanton beach in Norfolk, despite being on the East coast.

That has reminded me that there is a churchyard in Leek, Staffordshire where, because of the lie of the land, once a year you can watch the sun set, reappear and then set again. I've always meant to go and check that out.

[jutl]

(a) The name Wendy was almost unknown until being used by J M Barrie for the play Peter Pan.

(b) The word 'apple' used to be 'napple' and 'newt' used to be 'ewt'. Both words changed through their frequently following 'a' or 'an' in a process known as 'juncture loss'.

(c) Conan The Barbarian author Robert E Howard was an enormous racist.

[Neville Chamberlain]

If completely flattened, the plucky Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan would be the world's biggest country.