Fun facts!

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OK I have a few -

1) Nobody can explain how Glue works, we have a good knowledge about what compounds work best to make a Glue for certain materials but the science behind being sticky is still really unknown.

2) Until recently it was thought Steel may have originated in India, but there is a growing and improving school of thought that the Romans might have been first, it wasn't as bountiful as Indian efforts that where largly made from a accedent of geology and a variation of a Iron process but it was of higher quality the problem in proving it is it was a real high status material and was mostly a family secret, they suspect though that England and Southern Germany where the hearts of the Roman iron industry and Steel production didn't die out in those regions but got turned into a a HIGHLY secretive and low yeild trade only done by families of master an grand master style smiths.

2) Blacksmiths guilds where the most powerful guilds historically as they where the only trade that was able to be fully self sufficient, they where also the most educated people on average about Chemistry, Geology, and other sciences and where also likely to have extremely detailed and long winded trade deals stretching across continents.

3) The lathe is the most poorly defined Machine tool, the most versatile and is the only tool that is capable of building it's self and larger or smaller copies of it's self, it's also the only tool that can do anything another tool can do.

4) There is little to no wrought iron production on a large scale today, when you pay extra for a "Wrought Iron" gate, garden furniture, etc it's just a really bad grade of Mild Steel, there are some small scale places making it today but they are expensive, after that the other two main sources are smiths making there own (i.e. me) or people buying recycled boat chain that is dreaged up from harbours and alike where it was used as the main metallic component in anchor chains till just after WW1.

5) Nails are responsible for metalic currency - Nails are time consuming to make and today give you little in return for a hand driven process, as such they became a hot ticket item, so much so retreating army's and settlers would burn a building down to recover the nails - the families who made nails where a specialist form of smith, and the family often traded nails for essentials and could make or break a project depending on what they where paid for work.

6) During the industrial revoloution once a more automated means of producing nails was invented, a lot of the families that made nails moved into producing knitting needels, sewing needels and pishing hooks.

7) Your average tradesman before 1960 knew more practical and basic chemistry than a school leaver has today, they often had to make there own materials and finishes and where also partly responsible for "Open Source" information as they freely shared and compared notes in trade periodicals and in guild meetings.

8) The Carpenters brace was likely a English Invention, and we likely have some that where made by people related or educated by the people who discovered it from the Mary Rose, before that Augers where driven by a wooden dowel placed in the centre of a Ring Eye, there are also only two commercial manufactures of ring eye augers today one is the the Chez republic and the other is in Japan. Some people buy a auger bit and weld a pipe on the end but they are not considered Ring Eye augers.

9) Most anvils in history where smaller than 6" often more round 4" with a dedicated Horn anvil and other swages, the "Anvil" that comes to mind today is called a London Pattern and was a late 16th or early 17th century innovation, there was smaller older anvils with a lot of the same features all found in the North of England but they didn't have all the features to call them a London Patern and nobody is sure why the name London Patern stuck the closest we can find of it is from the 1770's calling a small 30lb Anvil a Improved London paten, it's suspected that it was a name given to it to lend some gravitas.

10) The most efficient and useful thread form in the world is the "Whitworth" thread form, Sir Joseph Whitworth did his homework for 20+ years before announcing his standard, America and France chose 60 degers rather than 55 because the French decided math rather than math and practical experiment wins (metric threads strip and are always anaemic for the task, that's why Imperial standards win in all serious machines), and it will bit and stick in all materials no mater it's strength, optimises efficiency in terms of inertring and removing by about %15 and has a Gas, Water and Solid seal by default by on average having a %75 engagement without adulteraion for Air.
Sir Joseph Whitworth also invented the Whitworth Rifle and the Surface Plate, and the accompanying maths, that most modern tech relies on, at the time the French where developing the metric system and struggling to find a definition for weight in there new and retarded system.


The Hunley also has the distinction of having been sunk three times, killing 21 of its personnel in the process, and of being (IIRC) the only submarine in history sunk by small-arms fire.

There was a WW1 U boat that was caught on the surface and a patrol boat shot it up with SMLE's willing 5 of the crew and detonating the magazine, and some of the rounds did penetrate the single skin hull. During WW2 most fishing boats whre armed with old SMEL's and inseduary rounds and some LEwis guns (I think 1 per 10 boats) the early U-Boats and mid war ones had problems leaking oil and fuel so the idea was to try and set them on fire and a few small ships did just that.

Dogs allowing their owners to pet their bellies are essentially showing they trust their owners completely.

Also dogs will pat spots they wish to lay down on and walk around in circles on them due to a trait from there ancestors. Who would often do the same thing to dislodge pests like bugs and especially ticks from patches of bedding before laying down.

Dog's are really lovng and they also have a urge to heal you, Dog's saliva is really anti-septic and if they lick a cut they think it's infected and are trying to help you heal, they will also try and stroke you back in a way they think you find pleasing, they dont do this when feral or as wolves they do it because they want to make you happy.

In 1974, the US government experimented with making cents out of aluminum due to the increasing price of copper. Most of the prototypes ended up being melted down and destroyed, but a handful managed to escape. The last time someone said they had one, the Mint chimped out and said it was illegal for them to own.
View attachment 3379468

The US government does that a lot, they tried suing someone for a moon flight worn Omega Moon Watch, they where given as a gift by a astronought who gave up some of his pay for it. Prior to it being flight issue kit, there are only 3 watches with that ability and they where all Old mercury guys 2 of them never flew on moon flights not even as a trial.

For most of it's early life, jar peanut butter was sold as a savory spread meant to be put on things like celery and onions (yes that was a real thing it was for years) so mixing it with something sweet like jelly was seen as ridiculous.

Food history is weird, like really weird - Potatoes where considerd Pig feed or a Aphrodisaic in Germany, the Catholic church tried to tell the italians that Tomatoes where poisen, salt fish was once it's self a currency worth more than gold and people used to fake dried cod with other fish etc.

Tobaco is a spice, and was a really common component in food for the first 20 years after introduction to Europe then smoking took over.

But once Stalin saw that the Republic was on the way to defeat thanks to the many NVDK commissars that were in Spain, he took all the gold payments and left the republic to fend for itself.

The IRA learned that 1st hand and that's why a lot of them where willing to accept Germans escaping WW2, Stalin offerd to suply the IRA and then Ireland with arms a few times and essentially took the gold etc, once he passed the first thing Soviet intellegence did was repair relations with the IRA and give them money,arms and technical assistance to piss off the only power in Europe that could prove a threat to them.

Pillows and mattresses have those tags on them which say "ILLEGAL TO REMOVE EXCEPT BY CONSUMER" because those tags tell you what's inside the item. In the old days manufactures would stuff pillows and mattresses with literally anything that they could - cornhusks, animal hair, random wads of hair and dust swept from the floor, etc. This was to avoid paying for some type of proper stuffing. Laws in various US states stopped this because it was a public health hazard.
Source

There is a growing intrest in Carded Wool matresses, I love them but they are getting around the material listing here in the UK and the EU by saying Carded Material, they are carding synthetic materials mixed with wool and calling them carded style, there are 3 comercial places making them one of them in in the UK, one in Germany and the lasts in Poland.

You pay them £10 a year to come out and restuff and recard it for you, they are heavy as fuck but are amazing to sleep on.

But little is know about the nearly 1000 rural irishmen that were led by general Eon O'Duffy to fight for christendom in Spain. They barely saw combat and were placed in administrative and supply duties and they left back home after 2 years.

Most people in Ireland are related to English, Spanish or Italian people, mostly english as the English Catholics ran there for the most part and then where hired as mercenaries by various Italian and Spanish cathoic rulers, a lot of them where English Catholic and then came back with Italian or Spanish etc wifes if they botherd coming back at all.

King George V changed the name of his royal house from Saxe-Coburg-Gothe to Windsor in 1917 due to anti-German sentiment in the United Kingdom during WWI.

They still use it, as a regional and succession name - the British public are well aware of there backgrouond, a lot of people are not happy with the Monarchy and all the tricks they play to seem relevant or useful, if anything the British Royal family are responsible for WW2 as they didn't want to break Germany up as they viewed a unified Germany as a crowning glory of there family (Wettin are the main branch of Sax-Coburg).

There is a argument growing the QE2 should be the last monarch, and there should be either a serious curtailing or total removal Royal power and most people don't realise that the RF still has an absurd amount of power.
 
The dog saliva thing is real. In Spain there is a Saint (commonly known as San Roque) that is portrayed as a man with a cut in his knee and a dog licking it. Story says that his wound healed miraculously after the dog licked it.

Also, originally potatoes were brought from America because the flowers were very pretty and they thought they would make for amazing plants for the houses of the nobility. If you have never seen one, here you go.
potato-flowers.jpg
 
Because the song was licensed for the shows opening and because its really popular in syndication, Mike Altman earned more money from that song than his dad did for directing the film.
Which is funny because they actually took out the words for the show, maybe not wanting to have people singing about suicide in prime time. The music is by Johnny Mandel.
 
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@Phalanges Mycologist
There was a WW1 U boat that was caught on the surface and a patrol boat shot it up with SMLE's willing 5 of the crew and detonating the magazine, and some of the rounds did penetrate the single skin hull. During WW2 most fishing boats whre armed with old SMEL's and inseduary rounds and some LEwis guns (I think 1 per 10 boats) the early U-Boats and mid war ones had problems leaking oil and fuel so the idea was to try and set them on fire and a few small ships did just that.

There was the HMS C19 who killed a U-boat captain with small arms fire but did not sink the sub, and the Q-ship Inverlyon which did sink a sub, but which had three-pounder guns as well as small arms. Would be very interested to hear of specific incidents if you can find them.
 
A common ingredient for all chewing gum brands is a mild laxative. So if you're constipated, pop some chewing gum and give it one or two hours.
 
A common ingredient for all chewing gum brands is a mild laxative. So if you're constipated, pop some chewing gum and give it one or two hours.
Look for anything ending in -tol like xylitol, mannitol, etc. Lots of sugar free chewing gums have sugar alcohols that all have those endings, and are mild laxatives (like the notorious sugar free gummies that cause explosive diarrhea but obviously don't eat that much).
 
Look for anything ending in -tol like xylitol, mannitol, etc. Lots of sugar free chewing gums have sugar alcohols that all have those endings, and are mild laxatives (like the notorious sugar free gummies that cause explosive diarrhea but obviously don't eat that much).
The matter of the ingredients of a lot of things is another thing. And one that can make you paranoid. One thing a friend of mine told me some time ago about one of the ingredients of Kit Kat. Apparently it was like oil mixed with lemon juice but i do not remember the name. The function of this mixture was to make the product taste much sweeter without the need for sugar. The problem is that since it was harder for the body to process the bloody thing, it increased your chances of getting diabetes.

I know about the sugar tax and how a lot of companies try to dodge it by making their own concoctions that fuck up your body, and i probably need to learn more.
 
The story behind tomatoes being thought poisonous was a combination of them being relatives of nightshade and, when served on pewter, sometimes it can become poisonous. Pewter was commonly used by the aristocrats eating those imports, so a few high profile tomato poisonings gave the impression that the plant was dangerous in general.


General Santa Ana (Mexican dictator of the Texan Revolution, Mexican-American War) was partially responsible for the invention of chewing gum.
 
Two trivia facts about the Hungarian language:

The Hungarian words for the cardinal directions are directly derived from the position of the Sun during the day in the Northern Hemisphere.

North = észak from "éj(szaka)", 'night', as the Sun never shines from the north.
South = dél 'noon', as the Sun shines from the south at noon.
East = kelet 'rising', as the Sun rises in the east.
West = nyugat 'setting', as the Sun sets in the west.

Hungarian has two words for the color red: piros meaning "red" and vörös meaning "scarlet". But they're not just a pair of synonyms, there's a convention about their use. The first word refers to inanimate, artificial, cheerful, or neutral things. The second word refers to animate, natural, somber, or passionate things. So paprika or a subway line or a clown's nose is piros - while roses or a fox or the Red Army are vörös. It probably stems from a taboo surrounding blood, which is of course red.
 
Video games can be edu-ma-cational. Because of the old arcade game Caliber /50, these facts about Vietnam can be understood by many:
1. Tanks will willingly self destruct if you touch a K symbol on screen. How polite of them. XP
2. Chickens can be indestructible.
3. A combine harvester used against you can take more punishment than a tank.
4. There are giant monkeys underground that can throw human skulls fast enough to kill a man, and also curve the throw like a beyond expert pitcher in baseball.
5. An F-14 pilot that crashed in 1972 and in a POW camp has enough endurance through sheer rage after 20 years of imprisonment to take on multiple battalions of tanks, helicopters, Mig jets, a combine harvester, giant monkeys and hundreds of men and keep going. That old 70s air force training was a bitch.


Joking aside a real set of facts is study the history of the old 1970s movie Alien. If you sniff around to what HR Giger said about the design of the eggs, mix that information with some old information with what Ridley Scott said about the initial plans for the back story for the aliens, and then look through the aliens franchise and pick up on things, the xenos represent some people that HR Giger and (((some people))) really hate with an absolute passion.
There are other little hidden things in the series as well. Jonesy the cat had to be an orange cat. If you know the little in-joke about who dies in the Godfather movies, and look through a lot of jewish cinema and television shows, and even there's video games that does this, an orange cat was the only possible choice.
 
Columbia Pictures was extremely reluctant to release Stand by Me. They thought it was going to be a flop so they refused to produce it. So Rob Reiner's former boss from back when he was working on All in the Family, Norman Lear, financed the film himself. Columbia Pictures was also just about to acquire the company Lear produced the film with, and the film would have been shelved indefinitely, had the head of Columbia's daughters not seen it and loved it. Because of their response, they gave it a proper release.
 
If you sniff around to what HR Giger said about the design of the eggs, mix that information with some old information with what Ridley Scott said about the initial plans for the back story for the aliens, and then look through the aliens franchise and pick up on things, the xenos represent some people that HR Giger and (((some people))) really hate with an absolute passion.

Regarding the eggs, I remember something along the lines of "I made the opening on the eggs look like a vagina, but it seems some people complained about looking at that. So I turned it into a cross, which these people seemed to like looking at."

Tax: the musk ox is more closely related to sheep than to cattle.
 
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.

Conditional Life Expectancy - Life Expectancy.PNG

Conditional Life Expectancy - Remaining Years.PNG

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.
Conditional Life Expectancy - Yearly Change.PNG

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.
 
@Phalanges Mycologist "3) The lathe is the most poorly defined Machine tool, the most versatile and is the only tool that is capable of building it's self and larger or smaller copies of it's self, it's also the only tool that can do anything another tool can do."

How/why is it self replicating? And can it make a square chair with square legs from a solid block of wood?
 
When Dylan Klebold shot himself in the temple with his TEC-DC9 Mini at the end of the Columbine High School massacre, he didn't die immediately. He apparently drowned in his own blood (blood was found in his lungs during the autopsy). Several people that were still inside the library reported hearing "gurgling" noises around that time.

img.jpg
 
How/why is it self replicating?

All the parts needed to make a fully functional modern lathe and the preprocesses used to make it can be performed by it's self, you can boot strap your way from a bow lathe to a full functional modern lathe in a period of time. A lathe is a Lathe, Mill, drill press, gear hobbing (and indexing) machine.

And can it make a square chair with square legs from a solid block of wood?

Yes lathes make things round and you can make thing's square on them as well - the only limitation is the work holding capabilities of the machine but with creative work holding and cutting yes it is possible,
 
All the parts needed to make a fully functional modern lathe and the preprocesses used to make it can be performed by it's self, you can boot strap your way from a bow lathe to a full functional modern lathe in a period of time. A lathe is a Lathe, Mill, drill press, gear hobbing (and indexing) machine.



Yes lathes make things round and you can make thing's square on them as well - the only limitation is the work holding capabilities of the machine but with creative work holding and cutting yes it is possible,
So you're saying that a lathe and a CNC router is the same thing but the mechanisms are different? Just curious.
 
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