What is the most obscure fact you know?
What is the most obscure fact you know?
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Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.
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You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.
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You can tell by the way it is!
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They do it for efficiency, like ducklings after their mother. Have you ever seen a large boat from above? The wake spreads out behind it, in this v-shape. It's like a wave following the boat, and the ducklings can "surf" on the v-shaped wave, after their mother, and they don't have to paddle as hard.
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And the name of that shape is a chevron.
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Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 9664, but only 9563 pixels are used for graphing.
However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up "between" pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.
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The Ti-83 Plus Silver Edition and early models of the Ti-84 Plus Silver Edition had 128K of RAM, upgraded from the typical 28 or 48 that the 83 Plus or 84 Plus had. But the additional RAM was impossible to use as the OS had not been altered to address it.
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This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.
That's how it got its name. People would say "X,Y,Z, and, per se, And". (And "sort of" an and). Thus, "And per se And" became Ampersand.
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I love the corruption of the saying to give us the name. Reminds me of "Goodbye" being a corruption of "God be with ye".
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I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.
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But I'll give you one of my favourite obscure-ish fact instead: baby sloths are so inept, they sometimes mistake their own limbs for tree branches, grab hold of them with one limb, let go of the actual branch, and fall out of the tree
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Naw. Steve, the FBI agent assigned to you, and Dave, my roomie, were just discussing it.
I think Steve kinda likes you...
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That is the most obscure fact in this thread so far.
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If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called 'tonic immobility'.
Here is a photo from Wikipedia:
OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.
I found a paper from 1928 titled "On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates" written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).
In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:
OK, but, that's still not it.... The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:
Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them... Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.
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Excellent fact, and bonus points because the fact is only recorded in a footnote of a writeup about an already moderately obscure fact.
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Like you'd see crazy evangelical pactors do to people on tv?
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Ha, maybe! I don't remember if I ever saw a 180 flip. This is the closest I could find from a quick search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpIglVnYuY
If you have a video with the 180 degree flip I would really like to see it. This context seems like a plausible place to see such a move in modern days. I would imagine that in some martial arts this effect would be well known.
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That reminds me of a "game" kids would (try) to play when I was young at school. The kids would say to do just that "bend over, take a deep breath" and the other one would try to lift them up really quickly. I never saw it work. I guess you were supposed to pass out. Idk
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Some of these 'games' do trigger real physiological mechanisms. A well-documented example is the Valsalva maneuver, where forcefully exhaling against a closed mouth and nose affects heart rate and blood pressure.
In some games, this maneuver (or similar) is combined with a second action that normally increases blood flow demand to the brain. The mismatch between reduced blood pressure and sudden demand can cause dizziness or brief loss of consciousness due to insufficient oxygen reaching the brain.
Actually, there is a similar effect sometimes seen during heavy deadlifts, suddenly releasing can sometimes make people pass out. There are many “deadlift passing out” videos online.
So, those 'games' can work. I have known of kids breaking their teeth after face-planting against the floor while playing those games. Not a very smart thing to do.
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Yup did that as a kid. Totally passed out. Later found out it's kind of dangerous.
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You can also do this with rabbits.
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Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.
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I was about to say that it's usually the right paw I see my cat slowly inching towards my face to slap me for not getting food ready yet while I pretend to be asleep but then realized that you specified male and that she is not.
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the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 3⁄32 in railway in the world.
...honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as "obscure".
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For a minute I thought that meant the railway was ~3ft long
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The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.
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The things at the end of shoelaces are called aglets
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The thing at the back of your throat is called the. "Hangy downy thingy"
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Opossums have 13 nipples
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Additional fun fact about nipples:
In mammals, a species' typical litter size is one less than their normal number of nipples.
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So do tri-nipped women have twins more often? Inquiring minds want to know!
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Ancient Egypt was ancient before it ended. The time when Cleopatra ruled is about as close to today as it was to the first pyramids.
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It's actually even wilder than that.
The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it's name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that's pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.
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Cleopatra had a kid with Julius Caesar lmao. When you think of it like that it makes more sense.
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One of my favorite facts is that while the first pyramids were being built, there were still Mammoth roaming some northern European regions (never checked whether this is true or not but I've heard it so many times that I want to believe it is true)
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Chinese scientists worked to create the "humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.
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This sounds like a bunch of b***shit so I had to look it up. Seems like you're actually right... 😳
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Seriously find a source. a three month pregnant chimpanzee, pregnant with a humanzee, died of neglect? Sure, Humanzee experiments were attempted but because of how biology works, two species as different as a chimpanzee and a human cannot make children.
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Peking (KNT) -Chinese at one time experimented with fertilizing a chimpanzee with human sperm in an attempt to create a "near -human ape," and they may try it again. The chimp was three months pregnant before the first experiment was halted, one of the original researchers claims. Western science long has scoffed at such an experiment as medically impossible, but Dr. Ji Yongxiang says the research, if it ever resumes, has the potential to develop creatures with higher animal intelligence who could speak and perform simple tasks. A second researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science said there were plans to resume testing.
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Living at high altitude for long periods of time can cause a disease that is otherwise most associated with cocaine and meth.
Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension has some weird causes, but it seems that high altitude and having to work for enough oxygen can cause the body to revolt.
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Did Sherpas develop a defense against this? Or are they more susceptible because of their exposure to higher altitudes?
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Honestly I wish I knew. The disease is relatively unknown, so I doubt there's been studies like that.
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If I remember correctly they do. The haemoglobin is better in holding oxygen
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A lot of people know of the April Fools 418 I’m a Teapot error code, but did you know there’s a full Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol from the same RFC for running a coffee pot server? It even includes an HTCPCP method named “WHEN” to let the pot know it has poured enough cream.
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There are no extant recordings of George Orwell's voice
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Also, the word doublespeak isn't from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.
Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.
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The tiniest park in the USA is located on a city street corner in Portland, Oregon. Mill Ends Park
Edit: I fell down a rabbit hole. Corrected myself having posted it originally as “world’s smallest park” which is how I knew it - apparently it carried that distinction until Feb this year when a tiny space on a Japanese street (which was created in 1988) formally applied for, and was awarded the Guinness book of records title of World’s Smallest Park.
Also this one just popped into my head - the Guinness Book of Records was originally conceived as a means of settling arguments by compiling factual “records”. The original argument related to a shooting trip in England in which the Managing Director of Guinness Breweries partook, where a missed shot led to a disagreement about the fastest game bird. The realisation that arguments such as this would be commonplace, and that no resource existed to settle such matters - the niche for capturing these types of facts was identified and the book was born.
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The older editions are lot more encyclopaedia like too, some super detailed descriptions of things like cars - right down to the gear ratios.
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When a drug company in the 80s scaled up production they accidentally created seed crystals that spread around the entire Earth's atmosphere that prevented other companies from manufacturing a generic drug without it attaching to the seeds and converting to the patented drug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph#Paroxetine_hydrochloride
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Of course it was GSK with paroxetine
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Ok, that's absolutely bonkers
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And it's merely a hypothesis, there is no proof. Also we can assume that chemical plants are aware and have taken precautions, but it still happens. Back in the day it was speculated that chemists caried microcrystals around in their beards. This problem has been around for a while. One of the coolest hypothesis has been put forward by Rupert Sheldrake. He thinks that there is something in nature akin to memory. A force of nature as you will.
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2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)
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Because of universe expansion. (I guess industrialisation also works)
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Much as a 12oz steak won’t weigh exactly twelve ounces when served to you after cooking them a 2x4 piece of wood was nominally that measurement prior to the kiln drying process.
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It’s more that they used to be shipped 2x4 unfinished, and would be planed smooth on site. Once the equipment and distribution was able to do the planing before it got to the customer, they had so much established practice that the installed timber would be smaller, they had to keep to what people were used to.
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xkcd?
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The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via "traumatic insemination". The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over -- all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.
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Imagine if that were us, eh. MeToo would be a different movement I bet.
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HD-DVD and Blu-ray weren't the only HD video disc formats competing for dominance in the '00s. HD VMD which was basically a DVD containing more layers unsuccessfully tried to compete with the two. The company who produced it dissolved in 2008 and only a few titles were ever released on the format.
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There was actually a tape format called VCR. Made by Phillips, I believe it was the first video tape system that recorded a high quality signal in color available to consumers. It was test marketed in the PAL regions, proving to have reliability issues, and then JVC launched VHS later that year and Phillips gave up.
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Not obscure but apparently a lot of people aren't aware that sheep don't have top teeth in front.
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TIL. I've looked gift horses in the mouth but never gift sheep /s
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Fun fact, you can, in fact, make sourdough with the yeast from a yeast infection, and bake with it.
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:(
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Wasn't a fan. Gave it a bit of a fishy taste
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Oh. Oh no.
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Darwin drank tortoise piss and, according to his documentation, didn’t hate it.
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Freaky guy.
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Barnacles, relative to body size, have the longest penises in the world
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The tsetse fly has the longest sperm, regardless of body size.
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The Leatherman Skeletool is currently available in several varieties, including the long-running standard model with an unfinished stainless steel body, a chunk of aluminum in the handle, and a 420HC semi-serrated blade, and the Skeletool CX variant with...whatever the black coating is made of, a carbon fiber chunk in the handle, and a 154CM plain blade.
When the model was first introduced, the base model had a plain blade, and the CX had a semi-serrated blade. This was swapped, as they realized first time knife buyers were more likely to see the semi-serration as a value-add, while more serious knife guys would prefer a plain blade. So you might find a very old Skeletool with a plain 420HC blade, or an old CX with a semi-serrated 154CM blade.
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The Latin meaning of the color ultramarine is "over the sea" Also, they once made a pigment called mummy, which was literally made out of finely grinded mummy.
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in the same vein, cerulean (blue) comes from caelum, the sky
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A large amount of visual inspections on the inside of nuclear reactors is done literally with a camera duct taped to either a really really long pole assembled in sections or a rope. Operators "swim" the cameras to various locations and camera handling is basically an occupation in that field. You also need camera shots for any work being done on the inside of the flooded reactor with, again, really really long poles that end up acting more like pool noodles at such a length. It is silly and difficult work. Also you basically are wearing a trash bag sitting above a hot tub while doing this work. So it is a wild experience.
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There is a dust layer in the ice at the South Pole about 2km under the surface that interferes with about 5000 photomultiplier tubes spread out over a cubic kilometer in the ice that are watching for light created from high energy muons moving faster than the speed of light in the ice that were in turn the result of the very rare chance of a high energy neutrino interacting with the nucleus of a single atom in the ice.
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Just want to make sure I am understanding this correctly: Faster than the speed of light, within the medium, right? So the neutrinos are a bit like Cherenkov radiation. But not actually faster than the speed of light, since if that was happening, my world view was just revised rather abruptly :)
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I thought dust was human skin cells? What is this dust layer
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There's, uh, lots of different kinds of dust.
Also that one is mostly a myth.
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mineral aerosols.
here is a recent paper trying to figure out the composition from ice core samples for a given age range and location
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The most common error code in Bus displays is 0x01
It is a property of GPS systems used returning a timeout
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The smallest extant flightless bird in the world is the Inaccessible Rail.
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Not that obscure, but most orange cats are male since the orange gene is tied to the x-chromosom, so male cats only need one copy to appear orange. Female cats have to have the orange gene on both x-chromosom to be fully orange.
And usually only female cats can be calico/tortoise since the orange gene is co-dominant, so if they only have one copy of the orange gene both the orange and black will be visible.
A seemingly male calico/tortoise cat is usually intersex and sterile.
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Marx did actually consider human nature
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Fish mate inside of a sea cucumber's anus.
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Most military simulation databases have a classified and unclassified version. In the unclassified database a spefic russian apc is usually set to be indestructable.
It's used for a quick test when setting up a federated sim. Drop one in the sim and trigger a detonation at the location. It should either be destroyed or not in all the instances.
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Could do with a bit more explanation on this one.
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So military simulation for actual militaries is used for training. There are programs like OneSAF a training and stimulation RTS or VBS2 a first person shooter.
They can all be networked together using a federated system. Similar to Lemmy there is no master instance. Each program is trusted and manages it's entities like tanks and soldiers.
They each have their own database that can be classified or not. The classified database has very accurate stats and the nonclassified has general simple stats. Think people leaking classified documents on War Thunder to get their tank better stats in the game.
Because each system is using it's own database you don't want some system using classified data and some not. So in the unclassified databases a spefic unit type is set to invulnerable.
So if it's supposed to be an unclassified stimulation you fire up the sims and create one of the special units. You then trigger a detonation like an airstrike at the location of the unit.
The unit should be fine as it's invulnerable. You then go and check each stimulation and if it's been destroyed that one is using a classified database and you need to change it out before letting people use the system.
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It sounds like inception. Is this a way that generals being tested can tell if it's a real test or not?
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I don't exist. I had a meeting and voted. It was unanimous.
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I undiagnosed myself. I'm okay. This is fine.
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We just had a follow up meeting here and decided the previous findings were incorrect and that you do exist. I don't know if this is a relief to you or not.
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The origin of the name 'Amerigo' Vespucci is 'Emmerich' in German. So the namesake of a contintent is a very demure provincial city close to the German/Dutch border.
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licking doorknobs is illegal on other planets
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what planet? I never heard of this. Wait. Its orion isn't it.
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The first iteration of the baptist church was a militaristic commie org. That took over a small town.
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The correct spelling of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
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it's so easy to break into an apartment in south korea, any basement dweller can do this.
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The word "America" does not come from Amerigo Vespucci, but is likely an amalgamation of
the Mayan word "Amerristiquiqque" for "land where the wind blows constantly", which is the name of a mountain range in Nicaragua, and the Spanish word "Rica" for rich, like in "Costa Rica" (Rich Coast) as Spanish sailors would ask Carib Amerindians where their gold came from.The smallpox blankets event where a couple of blankets laced with smallpox were knowingly gifted to Native Americans happened before germ theory existed. The plan was based on miasma theory.
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"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
"The truth is always stronger than the lie."One is a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
the other is a paraphrase of a paraphrase
of a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
with the "In British culture" part missing.Guess which one is which.
(P.S. I disavow German fascism.
It's just the more I learn about the US or UK,
the more I'm surprised that fascism took hold in Germany... (first.)) -
What follows is a guide on how to hurt your hand. No not do it. Do not "do it just a little bit". I actually strained my hand when I first discoverd this and honestly dont want anyone hurt because of my comment:
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There have been 3 observed interstellar objects that passed through our solar system: Oumuamua, Borisov and ATLAS.
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Eric Blair was a Trotskyist who wrote
Animal Farm and 1984 to spite Stalin,
as Stalin turned on Trotsky,
as Trotsky was a one-world-government proponent,
(with Moscow as its capital),
with the argument that capitalist nations would do anything
to isolate and destroy socialist nations,
whereas Stalin thought that socialism would bring the
Soviet Union enough success to defend itself.
This had far-reaching consequences for
Eric Blair who was participating in the
Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939,
having joined the Trotskyist resistance group
and saw the Stalinists resistance group turn on them
and outright attacked them. -
Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, testified in defense of evolution at a trial in Arkansas then was on the same plane as Bill Clinton during Clinton's interregnum between governorships. Clinton said he "would have vetoed that bill", meaning the bill mandating equal time for creationism.
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You can speeddrift on the top of the tube on Purple, a classic Trackmania fullspeed map, and continuing the SD from the top to the next section without cutting it but with a little overdrift alows you to set World Record if done correctly
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Joe
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Dogs can't look up
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That's sheep
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just because Big Al says so...
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the reason you fart and shit at the same time is because shit and air is coming out of your ass
Diamonds aren't stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon's more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.
Oh, here's another good gemstone related one!
Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.
You know, I think I've heard something about hexagons on the internet before ...
So if i bake a piece of amethyst in my oven i get cutrin, or we are talking about much greater temperatures?
NGL I'm not very familiar with the technical details, but I know quartz is pretty temperature sensitive and starts to get damaged about 400F iirc
It's possible special conditions are needed to really succeed, like low/no oxygen or a long duration at a lower temperature.
But theoretically, the answer to your question is "yes"