Fun facts!

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AnOminous said:
There are a number of even bigger such things, like the single celled alga Caulerpa taxifolia, a single-celled organism that can reach a foot in length.
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As I mentioned, the interesting bit here is Thiomargarita is a bacteria. There are tons of examples of "unicellular gigantism" (a term I made up just now, Googling will probably not yield many relevant results) among eukarya. This being observed in a prokaryote is legitimately a new finding. The bacteria was discovered and misidentified as a fungus in the early 2010's but it was identified as a bacteria just a few months ago.

Oh, and for the sake of contributing to the thread: Mozart almost definitely had a scat fetish.
 
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Evidence of huge land animals predate the fossils of fish that gave rise to land animals.
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ICametoLurk said:
Evidence of huge land animals predate the fossils of fish that gave rise to land animals.
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Cool stuff.
But nobody was actually claiming fossils like Tiktaalik or Panderichthys were actually direct ancestors of the tetrapod lineage. They simply demonstrated a mechanism by which fish could go from fully aquatic to amphibious.
It's weird that you edited your post to remove a relevant scientific study on the matter, though and chose to replace it with an image.
Add the image sure, but don't remove this study from your post or you will get laughed at by autists like me.
 
Penis Drager said:
But nobody was actually claiming fossils like Tiktaalik or Panderichthys were actually direct ancestors of the tetrapod lineage. They simply demonstrated a mechanism by which fish could go from fully aquatic to amphibious.
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This sounds a bit like goalposts are being moved.

The implications of the Polish tracks are so controversial that reactions from other palaeontologists have been, understandably, mixed. Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin, who discovered Tiktaalik, both find the study intriguing, but not definitive.


For Shubin, the deal-breaker would be identifying the animals that made the trackways and establishing where they sit on the evolutionary tree. He says, “The skeletal anatomy, let alone evolutionary relationships, of a trackmaker is hard to interpret from a track or print.” For example, he says that a model of Tiktaalik‘s skeleton would produce a print much like the one in the paper if it’s mushed into sand, and different consistencies or angles would produce an even closer match. He adds, “There is nothing in Tiktaalik’s described anatomy that suggests it didn’t have a stride.”

Daeschler agrees that “trace fossils such as these presumed tracks… are a notoriously difficult class of evidence to interpret with full confidence”. Nonetheless, he’s keeping an open mind and a keen eye on future developments. “Paleontology is a lively field in which new discoveries constantly refine our knowledge of the history of life on earth,” he says.

Jenny Clack, the Cambridge scientist who discovered Acanthostega, has seen the Polish tracks for herself and finds them more convincing. Her only reservation is that the detailed prints don’t have any trackways to show how their maker moved, while the trackways themselves consist of blobs. “But so do lots of previously known tracks,” she says. “If you’d found those in other deposits in the last part of the Devonian, you wouldn’t have any qualms about them.” She’d like to see trackways of the detailed prints but she’s nonetheless excited. “It’s going to change all our ideas about why tetrapods emerged from the water, as well as when and where.”
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“It’s going to change all our ideas about why tetrapods emerged from the water, as well as when and where.”

 
Some slang for masturbation:

Farmer and Henley ["Slang and Its Analogues," 1898] lists among the slang terms for "to masturbate" or "masturbation" frig (which they trace to Latin fricare "to rub") to bob; to box the Jesuit; to chuff, to chuffer; to claw; to digitate (of women); to fight one's turkey (Texan); to handle; to indorse; to milk; to mount a corporal and four; to dash one's doodle; and they note that it was "sometimes known as KEEPING DOWN THE CENSUS."

Lol
 
Kansas City, Missouri has more miles of boulevards than Paris, and more fountains than any city except Rome.
 
Heckler1 said:
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were originally created as a joke, where the two guys who made them up were doing a one off of the dumbest idea they could come up with. Then it became a hit, and they ended up having to do it for realsies.
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They were also sort of a parody of Daredevil.
The accident that spills the chemicals into the sewer that transforms the turtles is portrayed to be the same one that blinded Matt Murdock.
Daredevil fights The Hand, the Turtles fight The Foot.
Daredevil's mentor was Stick, the Turtles' mentor was Splinter.

I'm pretty sure there's other references, but I don't remember right now.
 
The origins of the word "wife" are obscure. Cognates only exist in the Germanic branch and don't always have the same meaning. In German and Dutch wijf/Weib have the meaning "babe, girl" but once meant "woman, lady." The words vrouw/Frau mean "wife" in Modern German and Dutch.

One Proto-Indo-European root might be *weip- "to twist, turn, wrap" meaning "veiled person." However, cool people believe it comes from *ghwibh- which would've meant "pussy (vulva), shame" tho evidence of this root is only found in Germanic and in Tocharian kwipe ("vulva, shame"). Tocharian is a dead language of Central Asia btw.
 
In 2008 Atlus released a flash game to promote Persona 4 in Japan. The point of the game is to catch a peek at Chie while she is on the thermal bath, to do this you have to poke a hole in the wall to the rhythm of the music. The fun fact is not about the existence of this game, but it is the fact that there is an image of Chie and Yukiko on a bath towel like they use in the game, alongside an official render (albeit unfinished) of Chie topless. This image is only accessible if you decompile the game and is not used anywhere as far as I am aware of.

chie.png
 
During tsarewitch Nikolai II's coming-of-age round-the-world excursion, he was sliced across the head with a katana and almost killed by a Japanese policeman.
 
"Butterfly" has been mostly unchanged from Old English (buttorfleoge) to Modern English. It could come from one or more of three etymologies: the old tale that butterflies (or according to Grimm, witches disguised as them) consume butter or milk that's left uncovered; the pale yellow color of many species' wings being similar to butter's color; or less poetically, that they were named after their yellow excrement. The Dutch cognate is boterschijte, literally "buttershit". It's kind of unlikely that anyone would pay close attention to the color of insect shit, especially in a time before fetish sites.
 
this was originally going to be a fun little factoid about which language has the most grammatical cases, but apparently there's a massive scholarly debate about the one with the most cases. That language is Tsez, a Dagestanian language, which according to a 1998 paper has 64 grammatical cases (by comparison, English and Chinese have 1, German has 4, and Russian has 6). Obviously having such a ridiculously high number of cases for a language spoken by a group of sand nigger hillbillies would be treated with skepticism, so I'm just going to posit that the European language with the most grammatical cases is Hungarian with 18.
 
I'm sure some of you know who Reese Witherspoon is.

One of her pictures was used in an old Dance Dance Revolution game as a background for the song AFRONOVA... but not for long, as Konami quickly decided to change it to something else.

This was the picture they used
Reese_Witherspoon.jpg


This was the image they made from it
AFRONOVA_background_%28old%29.jpg


This is the image they quickly changed it to and it is their current one
AFRONOVA-bg.png
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
This isn't a fun fact really but it's something I wanted to share.

A lot of people repeat this myth that because life expectancies were 35 or whatever back in the day, that meant that there was a shortage of old people, or middle-aged people would be considered old, or other such. It's complete nonsense, and you can find tons of very old people from ancient history. But the reason for it is because something like half of everybody would die as babies, from illness/weakness. By using some figures out of a book, I calculated then that the life expectancy of a normal country before industrialization would have been at least in the 60s for those who didn't die as babies/toddlers, which is not far off from the modern day. What happened was people had less chronic illnesses coming from unhealthy modern lives, but were more likely to die in disasters and accidents.

I've used an actuarial table and made some graphs to demonstrate how this works, for modern men. See, the life expectancy as we know is the average of everybody's death age. That means, however, that your own life expectancy is not the same, because your potential age to people who died before your current age, you're comparing your potential age to people at least as old as you. That is, if you want to know how much time a person reasonably has, what you want (and this is what online calculators do) is a CONDITIONAL life expectancy, conditional at least on age and preferably on other factors as well.

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At 75 years old, for example, the conditional life expectancy is about 85, or about 10 years remaining. So you see that even somebody who reaches the life expectancy has a chunk of time remaining, on average, because we're excluding all the unfortunates who died by accident or illness rather than old age. However, the human body is designed to die around 120, so the limit of your life expectancy approaches 120 as your age approaches 120 and the limit of your years remaining approaches 0.
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Change in life expectancy from year to year is never positive (there's no point at which if you live a year, you're actually likely to live more than a year longer), but it never burns off by more than a year either (if you live through a year you had at least a year). You see that even in the modern world, babies have a noticeably higher mortality rate than others. As you near old age, though, the life expectancy change starts to get really low; that is, when you burn a year, it gets unlikely that you're going to make it another year. Put another way, people start dying faster.

There's an obvious spike in deaths from retarded teenage shenanigans, and then the rest of it looks like a logistic curve: an exponential take off followed by a logarithmic slowdown. Up faster and faster, then up slower and slower. In general people are going to keel over really fast around their 60s - 80s, but in the 90s and past if somebody makes it that far they're generally a very healthy body who can linger on quite a while.
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Time Done.png

Expressing this concept another way is, instead of years remaining, what percent of your life expectancy you have lived at a given age, obviously converging to 100% as you near 120 years.

As someone with older parents and passing a third of life lived it's something that bothers me a lot.
 
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