Fun facts!

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AnOminous said:
I don't think the strain endemic in California that you can mostly get from ground squirrels (nasty little fuckers) is the same strain as the original Black Death, but a milder version.

That said, there's still the Black Death strain out in the wild, or at least strains almost identical to the particularly ugly strain that caused the pandemic with that name.

There was an outbreak of one of them about 10 years ago in Madagascar.

It's barely worth worrying about at this point, though.
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I heard India has a constant struggle with Black Death.
Probably new face-melting strains that antibiotics can't touch.
 
Fun fact: the radio telescope in Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, was responsible for receiving and then re-broadcasting the moon landing. Nowadays it is in contact with far flung space probes like Voyager. The dish is in a designated radio quiet zone, where you can’t even have a microwave, or a petrol powered car (because of the ignition system causing sparks, which creates a load of electrical noise.)

The funnest fact, though, is that the dish is so sensitive, if a mobile phone rang on the moon, it would be the loudest signal in the sky.

Here’s a pic of the dish in question. This photo was taken while those boys were up there on the moon. It’s also my iPad’s wallpaper.

1729325852011.jpeg
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
The word "alphabet" comes from "alpha beta", first 2 letters of Greek alphabet.

Αα Ββ
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Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
The formal name for the runic alphabet are the Futhark for the same reason. f u þ a r k g w; h n i j ï p z s; t b e m l ŋ o d
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Same with the Cyrillic alphabet, it's called азбука (azbuka), where a is read as аз (az) and б (b) is read as бука (buka).
 
ToroidalBoat said:
That evolved from Greek alphabet?
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It did. St. Cyril made the Glagolitic script whose alphabet was also called azbuka and if you look at it it's not as obviously derivative from the Greek alphabet as the Cyrillic script is. The Cyrillic script was made by St. Cyril's students and named after him in his honor.
 
Big Brown Schlub said:
It did. St. Cyril made the Glagolitic script whose alphabet was also called azbuka and if you look at it it's not as obviously derivative from the Greek alphabet as the Cyrillic script is. The Cyrillic script was made by St. Cyril's students and named after him in his honor.
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Shit looks even weirder than Cherokee:
glagolitic-alphabet-1078099606.png

Glagolitic

cherokee.png
Cherokee

Also note the fucking Stargate Earth symbol:
stargate.png
 
Doggo said:
Being in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere helps a lot.
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To give an idea of exactly how butt-fuck nowhere it is:
Screenshot 2024-10-19 170647.png
However that wouldn't stop the kind of people we have in the U.S. which is why places like Area 51 have lots of signs saying fuck around in here and we shoot you. Then they shoot you and you're never seen again.
 
AnOminous said:
To give an idea of exactly how butt-fuck nowhere it is:
View attachment 6540442
However that wouldn't stop the kind of people we have in the U.S. which is why places like Area 51 have lots of signs saying fuck around in here and we shoot you. Then they shoot you and you're never seen again.
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I’ve driven through Parkes on a road trip, but unfortunately this was at night, so I didn’t get to see the dish. One day I’ll go there in the daytime and see if I can snap a pic of it.

I might even get the ham radio stuff out, see what far-flung radio stations I can listen to, since electrical noise from human activity has a huge impact on these lower frequencies, and being in the middle of nowhere nets you awesome coverage.

But yeah, thank the CSIRO for beaming the Apollo 11 mission to the whole world. You can also thank the CSIRO for wifi.

Edit: I’m reminded of a funny incident that happened. Scientists were baffled at signals they were receiving for years, thinking it was lightning strikes, until they determined that the interference was coming from the microwave in the kitchen. Here’s the article on that.
 
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People in this thread seem to be conflating two separate Australian radio-telescopes.

"The Dish" in Parkes, New South Wales, is the one which received broadcasts during Apollo 11. It's not exactly remote, though, nor in a radio-quiet zone. There are towns within a few kilometers, and the site includes a visitor's center.

The other, remote radio-telescope is the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia (the other side of the country.) This is the site with the designated radio quiet zone.

telescopes.jpg
 
There was a time cannonballs got loose from storage and Napoleon along with his officers ran away from them. One officer did stay, tried to stop a ball with his leg and got it crushed lol.
 
demicolon said:
There was a time cannonballs got loose from storage and Napoleon along with his officers ran away from them. One officer did stay, tried to stop a ball with his leg and got it crushed lol.
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Another fun fact about Napoleon: his horsemanship was terrible. He could only ride small horses and those which weren't stubborn even a little bit, he could only handle timid horses. He took many bad falls from horses and one time almost accidentally killed himself when he hit a tree headfirst while riding, if he hadn't gotten the horse to slow down in time he would've probably been a goner.
 
Other Napoleon tidbit: tried to score with some aristocrat on a party, asked her if she doesn't like Corsicans, her reply was not all of them, but buena parte.

Claudius fact: tried to win the people's favour by drying one of the biggest swamps around Rome. Preparations took around a decade, huge crowd gathered around Claudius' podium for the grand opening but infrastructure couldn't handle all that water and it started flooding everything, including the podium. All including Claudius in his royal garb had to run for their lives and as he had a limp he must have looked like a complete idiot.

Random Roman fact: a whale got stuck in Tiber once. Even the emperor came to witness that; in typical Roman fashion he ordered soldiers to climb the whale and hack it to pieces for fun.
 
Clockwork said:
People in this thread seem to be conflating two separate Australian radio-telescopes.

"The Dish" in Parkes, New South Wales, is the one which received broadcasts during Apollo 11. It's not exactly remote, though, nor in a radio-quiet zone. There are towns within a few kilometers, and the site includes a visitor's center.

The other, remote radio-telescope is the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia (the other side of the country.) This is the site with the designated radio quiet zone.

View attachment 6542117
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Today I learned. You think I’d know this being a radio fag and all.

But I’m pretty sure I’m right about the mobile phone on the moon thing. I was also wrong about Parkes being in contact with Voyager, it’s not. That is the Deep Space Network, which comprises of three receiving stations, one of them is in Canberra, and I believe this may be in a radio quiet zone, but I’m not sure. The other two stations are in California and Spain, but I think Canberra has been doing the heavy lifting lately as the other two are being upgraded. Or it could be the other way round, but there have been upgrades going on in recent times.
 
The larvae of most bees, wasps, and ants (Hymenoptera) keep eating but cannot shit out; their guts are blind-ended. Just before pupation, however, the larvae would discard the whole package of waste product, accumulated during the whole larval stage, out of their body.
 
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