Fun facts!

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Your liver is not a filter. That's the job of your spleen and kidneys.
Your liver is a reactor and storage hub. It does essentially the same job as an oil refinery which uses fluid catalytic cracking. Blood gets pumped into it, catalysts are applied to separate out and condense various useful products which are then stored and/or shipped as needed.
A simplified diagram of such a refinery below:
fluid catalitic cracking.png

The liver is responsible for the conversion of substances from one form to another (glucose to glycogen, hormone production, breakdown of toxins, etc.) and metering out the flow of product in an efficient manner.
Notable failure modes are overstorage of lipids and carbohydrates as well as toxication where benign inputs are converted into toxic outputs that are then released back into the bloodstream.
 
Penis Drager said:
Your liver is not a filter. That's the job of your spleen and kidneys.
Your liver is a reactor and storage hub. It does essentially the same job as an oil refinery which uses fluid catalytic cracking. Blood gets pumped into it, catalysts are applied to separate out and condense various useful products which are then stored and/or shipped as needed.
A simplified diagram of such a refinery below:
View attachment 3630467

The liver is responsible for the conversion of substances from one form to another (glucose to glycogen, hormone production, breakdown of toxins, etc.) and metering out the flow of product in an efficient manner.
Notable failure modes are overstorage of lipids and carbohydrates as well as toxication where benign inputs are converted into toxic outputs that are then released back into the bloodstream.
Click to expand...
I guess "it's a filter" is just easier for smoothbrained sixth graders to process.

In Hungarian and other Balkan languages like Serbian, you express location within the language's origin country by using "on" and anywhere else by using "in". So you are "in London" but "on Sofia". Places that use to be under Serbia or Hungary's control like Kosovo are still "on" those countries as far as the language is concerned. There's no precise English equivalent, but we can use "at" as the poetic form of "in" - "The Americans had their capital at Washington for three centuries."
 
More ant lore:

Marauder ants will create roads ("trunk trails") and reinforce them with earthen ramparts. Their movements are mostly confined to these trails. Because it is more energy-efficient (and thus more food efficient) for larger objects to move, the marauder ants micro caste will ride on the backs of its macro caste, which is 50 times its size; the macro basically serves as a mixture of bulldozer for construction, tank for warfare and hunting, and bus for transportation.

On the move, marauder ants make fan-like patterns where the frontline has overlapping lines of communication and supply running back to their trunk trail. The reason for lines of communications is that since ants are largely dependent on pheromone signals (they have basically no ability to "think," just to automatically react to signals), if communications are cut they have no ability to plan or coordinate, isolated ants die.

In other ant species, "scouts" (more like generals) will patrol the battlefield and issue pheromone signals either calling in reinforcements or ordering a retreat. Some ant species will scrape their abdomens with their legs to produce a sound (audible to humans if you listen real carefully) calling reinforcements to battle.

In siege warfare, some ants will seal up their tunnels to prevent entry, and some dig false tunnels to misdirect attackers. Certain ants in Africa prey on termites, which reside in massive mounds that are, to them, the scale of skyscrapers; these ants are used by humans for pest control, and their raids are like massive sieges/urban warfare. Wounded ants will be carried off back to the colony, where most of them recover and go on to serve again.

Samson Pumpkin Jr. said:
I agree with the sentiment of this post - that expanding the United States' territory through war or purchase is not always a good thing. The Gadsden Purchase, in particular, has not been profitable for the country over its 200 year history. Additionally, Mexico was unable to stop Indian attacks until relatively recently (the 1930s), which suggests that it would have been an even bigger challenge for the United States had we attempted to take control of that area back in the 1800s. Plus, as you mention, guerrilla groups thrive in difficult landscapes such as those found along our southern border; attempting to quell them would likely have resulted in significant loss of life on both sides. Finally, given how divided our nation was at that time (with plantation owners siding against abolitionists and vice versa), I don't think adding more territory would have helped matters - it probably would've made things worse.
Click to expand...
The Mexicans would have been a quarter of the USA population after total annexation, equivalent to adding an entirely new region of the country and much larger than the Black population. A vast population of Spanish speakers and Catholics and many (most?) of them considered subhumans. It would have been a complete disaster bringing in that vast an area and trying to hold it, and either you make the Mexicans citizens and have to deal with a huge very distinct and hostile voting bloc or a huge very distinct bloc of revolutionaries. Was a retarded idea.
 
The rude dialogue from villagers in the GameCube version of Animal Crossing is a result from the localization team.

It doesn't exist in the original Japanese, and it's why it only appears in that one game.
 
a grecophile by the name john of basingstoke introduced the order of cistercian monks to a numeric system in the 13th century. this system was then developed by those monks from single glyphs that represented single and double digit numbers, to single glyphs that represent numbers up to four digits. this system, however, was not used for mathmatics, but rather for things like dates, inventories, musical notation, and recordkeeping. i honestly think it's ingenious.

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There have been some experiments where researchers have looked into the effects of extremely deep dives under isobaric conditions on human physiology, where volunteers were locked into hyperbaric chambers and the air pressure was cranked up to something like 60 atmospheres. At this pressure, the air actually became thick enough that the volunteers reported paper falling noticeably, and disturbingly, more slowly than would be the case on land. They also reported that the are was so thick that they couldn't breathe through their noses - only by mouth breathing could they get enough suction to draw the air into their lungs.

During these experiments, they used gas mixes that had a lower percentage of oxygen than the atmosphere has, keeping the partial pressure constant. This led to the discovery that the human body detects relative rather than absolute oxygen levels in the air, and so many of the volunteers reported feeling short of breath even when, physiologically, they had plenty of oxygen. These gas mixtures also replaced Nitrogen with Helium, in order to forestall cases of the bends, which led to the discovery that really high partial pressures of Helium can cause the human body to experience visual hallucinations.

En fin, the deep sea is an alien environment not only in the obvious ways you'd think of, but also in all kinds of other weird and disconcerting ways.
 
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Null got a .cc domain. Which is just a short flight away from the legendary .cx url from the Christmas Islands, better known as the Goatse Islands.
 
Some Scandinavians are genetically immune to HIV, some Africans to severe malaria and some people are immune to Mad Cow, which severely lowers their dementia risk.
 
in 2013, prior to the release of the fifth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm-v), the american psychiatric association produced a pdf regarding paraphilic disorders.

the pdf reviews the proposed changes between the dsm-iv (released in 1994) and the dsm-v (released in 2013), "based on the latest science and effective clinical practice" as determined by "the collective clinical knowledge of experts in the field". it states that the"paraphilias" of the dsm-iv will henceforth be known as "paraphilic disorders", because apparently there's a need to differentiate between "atypical sexual interests" and "mental disorders".

fun fact: troons have verifiable mental disorders.

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The Empirical Bogey said:
The word "dog" is very mysterious for such a common word.
From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
Click to expand...
It is also a word where two completely separate languages completely isolated by thousands of miles and several oceans came up with the same word to describe the same thing.

The Mbabaram word for "Dog" is "Dúg", in case you don't want to read the article.

On the topic of animals, the word "Bear" means "The Brown One", because it was thought by saying its actual name in most Germanic languages (including English), it would cause one to appear. Had this word not had its superstition attached to it, we would call them something like an "Arctus" nowadays.

The word "worm" is one of the oldest words ever. It is around 15,000 years old. Same with "spit" which is onomatopoeia; the "p-t" sound was deliberately emphasised to mimic the sound of spitting, which is still somewhat preserved to this day.

Northern Europeans were aware of the existence of monkeys for at least 1500 years prior to the colonisation of Africa; every Germanic language has a cognate for the word "ape" dating back to around 100 AD.

The concept of a "housewife" was invented, forgotten, and then re-invented when the original word had been corrupted to the point it meant something totally different, with the speakers of the era unaware that was the word's original meaning. That word is "hussy".

A surprising amount of words in English beginning with the letters "sc", "sh" and "sk" are etymologically related; Science, Shit, Schism, Scythe, Scissor and Skill are all related to a word which meant to cut or separate.
 
Fun fact
The Malagasy, the main ethnic group of Madagascar, are actually Polynesians ethnically. Yes, Madagascar is considered part of the African continent, but the people of Madagascar are actually part of the same family as Hawaiians, Maoris, Samoans, etc.

Similarly, the people of Melanesia (one of the three archipelagos of the Pacific, along with Polynesia and Austronesia) and the Aborigines are both branches off the ancient African race, which is the source of their name (like melanin).


Separate, there is ONE country in the New World that is ethnically South Asian and religiously Hindu: Guyana. The British imported huge numbers of coolies from India. Same thing with Mauritius off the coast of Africa, but Guyana's a little more interesting since it's the forgotten Hindu colony of the New World.
 
Just remembered:

Along with modern words like chocolate, taxi, sugar, and ananas (pineapple), there are two words that are virtually the same in every language.
However, unlike those I just mentioned, very few of them are actually direct cognates. They were independently created by many different languages.

Those words are, as I'm sure you may have guessed, the words for "father" and "mother".

Almost every language, no matter its origin, has words that approximate "mama" and "papa" to describe one's parents. And it is believed it is due to the way languages are first acquired and spoken by infants, repeating syllables in the presence of said parents. These words would still exist in just about any universe where humans do too, regardless of any pre-existing languages. You could completely wipe out every trace of past society and start over, and these words would come back in fairly short order.
 
How about some Donner Party fun facts for the spooky season?

- Souveniers were sold of relics of the encampment. Splinters of wood, nails, everything.
- Over half of the party were under the age of 18
- The Native American relief teamsters refused to eat human meat.
- Other Native American tribes laughed at the pioneer's plight from cliffs and bluffs above. Lol. Yes, the party could hear it.
- At first they drew straws to decide who to eat. They didn't have the heart to kill the man who drew the short straw. He died a few days later and they ate him.
- They labled the human meat as to not eat their kin.
- It took four trips to find and bring back the survivors.
- The entire ordeal from leaving Springfield, IL to exiting the mountains to California took a year.
- 45 of 87 survived
 
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