Fun facts!

[Haffhart]

I haven't sperged in this thread for some time, so to make up for it here's a burst of language trivia:

In Dutch there are two plurals, -s and -en, which have equal currency in the language. But it's pretty much random as to what word takes on which ending. There are many rules yet many exceptions.

Danish is somewhat like English. Both have a weirdly high number of vowels (fourteen in Danish, twelve/thirteen in English) which gives each tongue a distinct sound, and both have many irregular forms in their core vocabulary as a relic from earlier times. Danish is the only language with common/neuter gender instead of masculine/feminine or animate/inanimate (the difference is in name only, it works like gender anywhere else). English is the only Proto-Indo-European language to lack gender (though Dutch is losing gender).

How are new words made in Chinese? They compound short words like we do in the West, but in a very haphazard way with fewer rules. For example, the Mandarin word for "bus" translates to "public-shared-gas-car". Keep that in mind next time you're fumbling with a badly translated listing on AliExpress.

"Second" is the only Latin borrowing into the cardinal numbers of English. The native equivalent would be "twain" - first, twain, third. So in another timeline batters run to twain base and people bitch endlessly about the Twain Amendment. Also, the German cognate of first is "Furst" and it's the word for prince, as in first in line for the throne.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Archeo-astronomy can be a bit... weird sometimes. And not in a good way. There's an (in)famous case regarding the site of Pumapunku where such a researcher inflated the age of the site by over 10 thousand years based on the presumtion that the alignment of the solstices must have matched certain stones placed at the site with a high degree of accuracy when they were built.
I'm not saying you're wrong in this particular matter. But archeo-astronomers are pretty notorious for adhering to the Law of the Instrument: "when all you have is a hammer..."

I'm not sure that theory is correct. The Earth's axial drift makes constellation alignment imperfect at best.
Also, the pyramids were covered with a white limestone facia - which would have covered the holes. This white limestone was scavenged eons ago...

I think the holes were used to secure the facia to the stone structure.

I'm just repeating what The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt claims.


Egyptians had cut mummies. And many other mummies. They actually had temples that, due to their belief that you needed mummification to get things to the afterlife, and we needed animals in the afterlife, there was a need to breed animals on an industrial scale to make mummies. There was a priest whose job was professional kitten neck-snapper.

The Choctaw (Indians of Mississippi) had a practice that they would leave a corpse out for a sort of sky burial. When it got good and mushy, the bone picker (mortician with long fingernails) would go out and scrape the flesh from the bones with his bare hands until it was completely clean. Then they'd bury the bones on the spot where the person died, even if that was the floor in the middle of the house.

 

[Dumb Bitch Smoothie]

If you want to go down a rabbit hole of interesting history, look up all the parallels shared between the Celtic druids and the indigenous Siberians (as well as other smaller populations like Japan's Ainu people) when it comes to culture, history, and language.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If you want to go down a rabbit hole of interesting history, look up all the parallels shared between the Celtic druids and the indigenous Siberians (as well as other smaller populations like Japan's Ainu people) when it comes to culture, history, and language.

I’m pretty sure Ainu are close relatives of Aryans. They’re hairy and pale like Aryan people are, not at all like the Orientals they live around.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

You all ever hear of the oyster pirates?

I'm drawn to the sea, and to the idea of aquaculture, so it delighted me when I learned about this. Apparently oysters are actually farmed. The beds occur naturally, but when oyster levels got too low in some places, they'd start to seed them with shells, take care of the beds, basically for all purposes ranch these animals but being oysters it's more like growing a crop since they can't move. People buy the beds, just like any land-based property.

In old (like, 1800s through mid-1900s) America oysters were a huge part of the coastal diet, cheap, eaten at lunchtime, with the heaviest exploitation around the Chesapeake Bay, which always had a very fine seafood culture going back to Indian days. The problems came when the overharvesting required dividing up the land, making it private. Much like range wars out West, not everyone wanted to be constrained by the new rules. In particular, Yankees from New England would come down in boats at night and raid the Chesapeake beds. These seaborne oyster rustlers, called oyster pirates, would frequently get into shootouts with Virginia and Maryland coast guard and private owners in a conflict as bloody and hilarious as the moonshiner wars or range wars going on simultaneously.

TFW too early to explore the stars, too late to rustle oysters from the deck of my schooner, and now i am hungry for an oyster po boy.

In the town of Maaloula, Syria the official language is Aramaic, which was the language spoken by Jesus. https://youtube.com/watch?v=e50qiS-IjJM

I had a religious studies professor (who I really wanted to bang, but that's besides the point) that spoke Syriac, and she tried to pass it off as like she spoke a dead language.

In a similar vein, there are still ethnic Assyrians, that self-identify as Assyrians, in existence. They speak Aramaic too and are Nestorian Christians (which is how their identity survived against Arabic). It blew my mind when I found out one of the most ancient peoples on Earth still exists up to this day.


EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS FUN FACT
The word "drive," it means to move some things to a market. You probably knew that... what's the fun fact is that there are more drives than just the obvious cattle drive. Cattle drive, we know, is when the cowboys have to bring the cattle from their pastures to a railroad hub for export to the slaughtering plants. You'd drive them to a place

Well, another kind of drive was the log drive. Lumberjacks needed a way to move wood, which is problematic as wood is heavy as hell and doesn't have legs to move it like a cow does. How are you going to deal with that? Do your logging near a river (you were probably going to anyways), then float those logs down the river. but logs are uncooperative, they often like to get stuck on shores. You need a man, a log driver, to stand out in the water, or on a barge or whatever, and make sure to keep those things moving with a push of a stick. Beware, though, should your logs bunch up in one spot, for then you have a logjam (see the original of that word?), an accidental dam which can pose a major health hazard.

Slave driver comes from the same meaning as cattle drive and log drive, and its use as an insult - meaning a hardass - indicates the cruelty associated with a slave driver. We all hear a lot about slave ships, less about how they'd move slaves to market over land. Some of it was done by train, but the Old South had very little rail infrastructure so that was not the best solution. Mostly they'd just chain them up and walk them from town to town.

 

[Haffhart]

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Kava is illegal for human consumption in the UK. It's legal if sold as a supplement for pets.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

LOOK AT THIS.
That thing we call there is a whale fall. Whales don't always beach themselves, they do often die and land at the bottom of the sea. These then become ideal cover for little ecosystems to develop.

I first became aware of these when passively watching some submarine footage on YouTube and I see this shit, whale skeleton with cephalopods crawling all over it. Crawling like spiders, but so much larger than a spider, probably as large as a man? I love cephalopods, but that just ain't right.

BTW, sailing ships get their own equivaelnt of termites called shipworms.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If you've had much exposure to science fiction you've heard of Lagrange points at some point. I had no clue what these were until I specifically went out and looked them up, and they're fascinating. Many of you will already know about these but most laymen, out on the street, wouldn't.

A Lagrange point is a stable orbit, around nothing, caused by the interaction of two celestial bodies. See, what are the basic principles of how space works? Big things suck in little things, and if you get sucked in but are moving at the proper speed and angle your forward motion and the falling in (gravity) will more or less cancel and you get an orbit (a stable loop around it).

But in space you're always being worked on by the gravity of all other objects in space, it's just that generally if you're an object close to a big object, that big object will be so much closer that its gravitation pull will be so large as to negate anything else.

Sometimes this isn't true, though. Suppose you have two bodies, one small and one large (as is the case with a planet and a star, or a moon and a planet). When near the planet, it is close enough that its gravity will be stronger than the star and so you will orbit the planet. But, when the orbit takes you close enough to the star, the star's gravity will be stronger and you'll orbit the star.

If the object is moving between the two properly, it can wind up in a stable flip-flop of changing orbits, orbit one then orbit the other, over and over again. The net effect of these is to make it look as though the object is orbiting nothing, as it traces out its loops around empty space. The idea that an object - an asteroid (the Mars trojans, for instance) or a probe, generally - can sit out there, moving about with no forcing acting upon it in something that resembles (though it isn't) "natural motion" - is wonderful to me.

 

[Local Fed]

If you don't care about hockey or sports in general then this post is probably worth skipping, although it's not as if this post is something that you won't be able to understand if you're not into those aforementioned things. It's more about one specific guy who had an under the radar career... also the number 4 comes up a lot.

There is a Canadian former professional hockey defenseman named Brad Fast that I'm going to write about. It's an odd coincidence that yesterday just happened to be his 43rd birthday. Even those who are hockey fanatics likely have no idea who he is; in fact he only played 1 game in the NHL, but I find his career to be oddly satisfying.

I'll spoiler the rest so that I don't shit up the page too much.

Spoiler

In 1999, in the final NHL draft of the twentieth century, Hunt was drafted in the 3rd round with the 84th overall pick by the Carolina Hurricanes. As it is in most cases with players who aren't taken with one of the first few picks in a draft he didn't go to the NHL right away. Instead of playing in Canada which would be the most common move for someone in his position he opted to head to the United States to play college hockey for Michigan State University.

During the 2001-2002 college hockey season Hunt was able to participate in a somewhat famous outdoor game known as "The Cold War" with took place against the rival University of Michigan. At the time it had set a world record hockey game attendance of 74,544 people. The game would end in a 3-3 tie with all six goals being scored by future NHLers of whom two would become Olympians later in their careers. During the 2002-2003 season, in his final year in college, Hunt was named as the best defensive defenseman (this may sound nonsensical and redundant if you're not into hockey) in his league. The player who preceded him was future NHL player Mike Komisarek who would actually play his final season with the Hurricanes a decade after the season in which Hunt played his single NHL game.

The next year Hunt would turn pro officially and played with Carolina's top minor league team where he put up respectable numbers in 79 games. On the final day of the 2003-2004 NHL season (April 4th, 2004, or 04-04-04) he would be called up to make his NHL debut against the Florida Panthers. With just under two and a half minutes remaining in the game and with his team trailing 6-5, Hunt would score his first and only NHL goal; one of the two players to record an assist on it was long time standout player Rod Brind'Amour who himself just happens to be a Canadian who had played college hockey at Michigan State University before turning pro.

Not only was Hunt's goal his only point in the NHL it was also the final goal in NHL history that resulted in a game ending in a tie as the league changed the rules after that season to a format which eliminated the ability of a game to result in a tie. In this game Hunt record 4 shots on goal and saw 21 minutes and 24 seconds of time on the ice.

Hunt then spent a few years in North America playing in the minors before embarking on a career in Europe where he played in Switzerland and Austria. He then went over and played three seasons for a team based out of South Korea which plays in the "Asia League Ice Hockey" (ALIH.) In his first season there he would become the first import player in his team's history to be named an assistant captain. Before retiring he would play two more seasons for them in which he helped them win the league championship both times.

 

[Pissmaster]

If you're like me and you want to take a piss while on land in every single time zone, the most challenging time zone will be GMT -12. You have the choice between Baker Island and Howland Island, two uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean. They're so remote, their appearance on Google Maps is just geometry:



and anything on the same latitude is part of a different time zone, for economic purposes. It is the only time zone with zero permanent residents. They look like weird water mountains on Google Earth:


and they're owned by America because of poop and there is nothing there but poop so we claimed it with the poop islands act of 1856.

The nickname of this time zone is, oddly, "Anywhere on Earth", because it's the last place on Earth where a given date is observed. Christmas isn't over until it's over on these two extremely remote islands.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If you're like me and you want to take a piss while on land in every single time zone, the most challenging time zone will be GMT -12. You have the choice between Baker Island and Howland Island, two uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean. They're so remote, their appearance on Google Maps is just geometry:

View attachment 4678594View attachment 4678597

and anything on the same latitude is part of a different time zone, for economic purposes. It is the only time zone with zero permanent residents. They look like weird water mountains on Google Earth:
View attachment 4678752

and they're owned by America because of poop and there is nothing there but poop so we claimed it with the poop islands act of 1856.

The nickname of this time zone is, oddly, "Anywhere on Earth", because it's the last place on Earth where a given date is observed. Christmas isn't over until it's over on these two extremely remote islands.

To expand on this a bit, because this is one of my little pet things,

Guano was, prior to the development of synthetic fertilizers, one of the best naturally-occuring fertilizers out there and had become critical for agriculture. The United States wanted to secure that strategic resource. These islands, which are basically just caked in thick layers of compacted shit due to the seabirds that have nowhere else to rest, were mined, by pickax, by gangs of workers in what was one of the worst possible jobs imaginable. A bleak, vast empty wasteland of nothing but salt water and bird shit.

 

[BadGoy1488]

The higher the RPM's on a Tiger 1 would also increase it's powered turret traversal. Which is incredibly ironic since most accounts of Tiger 1's firing while moving would blow out the suspension. Fury lied to you! not to mention that Americans were not outfitted with Firefly variants of the Sherman.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Despite looking like dogs, hyenas are in the suborder feliformia. In other words, they have more in common with cats than dogs.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Do you want to know why prison ships existed in the Revolution?

The British and the Americans faced completely different situations. The British were generally able to hold a city if they set their mind to it. They got run out of some places, New England was liberated early on, but for much of the War the British, being totally dominant at field battles, could take and hold a city if they cared to.

However, the flip side of that was that the American insurgency was so bad that if the British didn't actively garrison something, it would automatically revert back to Patriot control. Think of the situation of the US military in Afghanistan (but less extreme of a gap in capabilities).

Since real estate was so limited in their cities, but they did have plenty of ships laying around, the British solution was to use the ships as a form of floating prison that could be parked off, pretty dang secure, off the shore. Build it yourself Alcatraz!

Americans, on the other hand, had little capability for building, maintaining, and defending prisons, so they tended to carry their prisoners in their train with them, usually relying on the honor system (and this was effective). Often their captives would be paroled out to do day work for local farmers and they had a generally high quality of life, which must have partially contributed to them having such a high rate of immigration to the US afterwards (Hessians especially tended to just settle in the US).

The idea of trusting people would later play a big role in the Civil War where sides would honor their agreement to parole, release the soldier home on the promise they will not fight again, which was especially important for the Confederacy who had no ability to deal with the logistics of a prison system. Both Northern and Southern prisons were completely neglected, though, regardless of logistical capabilities; that the Andersonville commandant was executed was purely political, as he deserved it but so did many other commandants on both sides. Interestingly, he was a Swiss Confederate, as was, if my recollection is correct, the first Confederate general to be slain in battle (Felix Zollicoffer, who failed to conquer Kentucky in the opening moves of the War).


Edit: By the way, Wikipedia doesn't say a word about that in its explanation. Apparently the British (having gotten to looking it up) were actually doing this for a long time, including in the homeland, due to overcrowding of jails. All the same, it makes sense.)

 

[Orange Rhymer]

Glenn Danzig (yes, that one) is a manlet.
5 foot, 3 inches (on his tippy-toes).

Ex gfs contend that he is blessed with a baby's penis.

 

[demicolon]

Gaius Julius Caesar was the first notable member of the Julii Caesares family. The last male in this line was also named Gaius Julius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula. His death resembled that of Caesar: stabbed 30 times by conspirators led by a man named Cassius. First and last rulers of Rome were both named Romulus.

Several coup attempts were made during Claudius's reign, resulting in the deaths of many senators. One conspiracy involved the consulars Lusiius Saturninus, Cornelius Lupus, and Pompeius Pedo.

It was customary in Rome for freed slaves to adopt the name of their former master, which would lead to a situation where there are hundreds of former farm workers out there, all named Marcus Aurelius.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If you've had much exposure to science fiction you've heard of Lagrange points at some point. I had no clue what these were until I specifically went out and looked them up, and they're fascinating. Many of you will already know about these but most laymen, out on the street, wouldn't.

A Lagrange point is a stable orbit, around nothing, caused by the interaction of two celestial bodies. See, what are the basic principles of how space works? Big things suck in little things, and if you get sucked in but are moving at the proper speed and angle your forward motion and the falling in (gravity) will more or less cancel and you get an orbit (a stable loop around it).

But in space you're always being worked on by the gravity of all other objects in space, it's just that generally if you're an object close to a big object, that big object will be so much closer that its gravitation pull will be so large as to negate anything else.

Sometimes this isn't true, though. Suppose you have two bodies, one small and one large (as is the case with a planet and a star, or a moon and a planet). When near the planet, it is close enough that its gravity will be stronger than the star and so you will orbit the planet. But, when the orbit takes you close enough to the star, the star's gravity will be stronger and you'll orbit the star.

If the object is moving between the two properly, it can wind up in a stable flip-flop of changing orbits, orbit one then orbit the other, over and over again. The net effect of these is to make it look as though the object is orbiting nothing, as it traces out its loops around empty space. The idea that an object - an asteroid (the Mars trojans, for instance) or a probe, generally - can sit out there, moving about with no forcing acting upon it in something that resembles (though it isn't) "natural motion" - is wonderful to me.

View attachment 4584142

I will expand this a bit to ad a detail I've since learned, and some other space stuff.

I described Lagrange as being like flip-flopping between orbits in a stable pattern, but that describes L5 and L4 I guess, but not L1, L2, and L3.

In space, if you are closer to an object its gravity is stronger on you, so you have to move faster in order to remain in orbit (to cancel out that downward motion). In general, something closer to the Sun than Earth should move faster than Earth. However, Earth exerts its own pull on the object. If at the right spot, the net effect (Sun plus Earth) will make the gravity effectively weaker so that it orbits the Sun in such a way as to maintain its position relative the Earth. That's L1.

Equivalently, if an object is behind the Earth, it should be moving slower that far out there, but the combined tug of Earth and Sun pulls it harder and so it must move faster, thereby getting it up to the right speed to do the same thing. That's L2.

At L3, the Sun and Earth are both pulling forward, so it's like, L2 again.

Space pretty much works on the principle that there are two velocities, one velocity below which gravity will suck you back in, and one (escape) that you must exceed to get away from the object. Within that range, you are always in SOME kind of orbit. So you don't really enter an orbit, it's just that your orbit could be weird and distended. Recall, if you get further away gravity is lessened, closer, its intensified. If you fire off thrusters on a rocket you make it so your speed is now outweighing the gravity, so the rocket will go further away, but it does eventually still curve back. The orbit becomes more elliptical. Do this at the same point, opposite side, and you'll have smoothed it out on the other end and so created a circular orbit, but at a higher altitude. This is how navigation works, you're not constantly gunning the engine, you're not pointing in a direction and shooting, you just have to choose which orbit you want to be on and if it;s possible (thinking things like gas constraints) to get to it, and the minimum number of thrusts/maneuvers to do that orbit.

This crazy shit is a horseshoe orbit (like Lagrange) of an asteroid. It's a year-by-year timelapse, so understanding all of these things are moving around the Sun, but the interaction of the three bodies is shifting the relative position, from year to year, of the asteroid to Earth in this regular, remarkable pattern.

 

[HarblMcDavid]

Understanding jumping spider psychology, at least as far as where to find them.

Jumping spiders are actually quite predictable little things, and in my observations of Phid Audax they like 2 things: sunlight, and overhangs.

Sunlight since most of them are warm weather critters and like most insects require some external energy such as ambient temps or solar radiation to warm up their fluid filled asses, so if you're looking for them, look in areas with direct sunlight during the times the sun is out.

The other thing they covet is overhangs, specifically 90 to 70ish degree overhangs.

This is actually a fairly simple one: if they're under an overhang, birds are less likely to see and thus attempt to eat them, and given that a lot of the bigger varieties tend to be uh...posterior heavy, they provide quite the desirable juicy meal. As such, houses with horizontally oriented siding are favorite hangouts since that overhang rich environment allows them a lot of cover, and they use it: they can see birds more quickly than you or I, and at equal or greater distances, so looking for dark spots on siding overhangs that move the moment you see them (and probably before, they can see your ass from at least 100ft away assuming no obstacles quite easily) is a good indication there's a fuzzy buddy on the wall.

Also if you see a dot on the wall drop another dot that falls to the ground: that means it saw you, dropped what it was eating, and went into defensive mode.

All these factors make them surprisingly adaptable to city living, so if you see a fuzzy buddy let them be, they'll respect you since they interact with the world very visually like you and I, and they'll clean up a lot of pests other spiders refuse to touch with a 10 foot pole.

E: Brown Marmorated StinkBugs are a great example, a Audax will take one twice or 3 times its own diameter and suck that massive meal down for over 2 hours. Massive orb weavers and the wolf-spiders around where I am won't even touch those things.

 

[Orange Rhymer]

dental amalgam - ( mercury (50%), silver (~22–32%), tin (~14%), zinc (~8%) and other trace metals ) is actually stable, and does not absorb into the body over time.
However, the removal of the 'old style' filings exposes the patient to high levels of airborne mercury dust and fumes.

Using the premise of 'patient safety' dentists have been replacing old filings with new dental epoxies (which have another set of warnings...).
This was a 90s-2000s cash grab, and the health effects were never discussed or investigated.

Some dentists did provide fume extraction/fume hood during removal, However, this was rare.