Fun facts!

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Take any integer.

If it's even, divide it in half.

If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1.

No matter what number you pick, the end result is always 1.

Or is it? You'd think it would be easy to prove something like this, but it's called the Collatz Conjecture after its originator.

So far every number tried with this ends up exactly this way, up to enormously large numbers.

Yet there is no proof that there is no exception. Even Paul Erdős described it as all but insoluble considering the current state of mathematics.

This is such a simple seeming and yet insanely difficult problem that young mathematicians are often warned to stay away from it, because like The King In Yellow, it will drive you out of your mind and you will have no career.

Apparently someone has made some progress on it, despite the lunacy of even trying to:
www.quantamagazine.org

Mathematician Proves Huge Result on ‘Dangerous’ Problem

Mathematicians regard the Collatz conjecture as a quagmire and warn each other to stay away. But now Terence Tao has made more progress than anyone in decades.
www.quantamagazine.org www.quantamagazine.org
 
Harriet Tubman once accompanied a commando raid.
They like to say she "lead" it, I doubt she "lead" anything except as a scout or a figurehead, but she accompanied the US Colored Troops on a slave freeing raid into the Lowcountry, called the Combahee Ferry Raid.

Bees understand how to cook food. This is often overlooked when people describe their production processes, but it is literally cooking, if a human did it we'd call it cooking. The two main dishes are honey, produced by repeatedly fanning nectar with their wings so that it thickens into a syrup, and bee bread/ambrosia, made from mixing pollen (indigestible) with yeast from their saliva so that it ferments. The fermented pollen ball is drizzled with honey and consumed in that way.
The Curmudgeon said:
Only 50% of Haredi Jewish men in Israel are employed. The other 50% are going to yeshiva to become rabbis.

Meanwhile, up to 83% of Haredi women are in the workforce. This raises an interesting question: Why do so many Haredi men need to be rabbis? Especially when the Haredi are known to self-segregate from other Jewish communities.

Just in case you don't know, here's a quick link about the Haredi Jews aka Ultra-Orthodox.
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There is actually a very interesting reason for the yeshiva enrollment. Haredim are allowed exemption from conscription, but they have to be studying to be a good Haredi. However, this makes it more attractive for normalfags to pretend to be Haredi, so the community has to raise its standards. Wound up with the horrifying situation of men studying in yeshiva all the way up into their 40s.
 
It barely qualifies as a fun fact, but I've developed a slightly better understanding of how flight works and it's interesting.
The same problem of not being able to brake in space (without firing off rockets in the other direction) applies to airplanes. How do you slow down in the air? Well, lower the throttle of course, but is that actually going to make you brake? No. That's just the equivalent of letting off the gas on a car, the plane still has to slow down through the resistance of the air, it takes a while. This could be quite a problem if you wanted to land but didn't get that speed down in time.

There are ways to manipulate your speed using altitude, however. I don't really know the physics behind it, but if you yaw up on that plane, the plane will slow down (I mean, you can't just shoot straight up like a rocket; there's no air to lift). If you yaw down, you speed up.

This wouldn't really allow you to break in preparation for landing, but it is important in a lot of basic fighter maneuvers in aerial combat, as you would need to get your speed up or down to match the target you're pursuing.
 
Screenshot_20230613_162238_Brave.jpg
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
It barely qualifies as a fun fact, but I've developed a slightly better understanding of how flight works and it's interesting.
The same problem of not being able to brake in space (without firing off rockets in the other direction) applies to airplanes. How do you slow down in the air? Well, lower the throttle of course, but is that actually going to make you brake? No. That's just the equivalent of letting off the gas on a car, the plane still has to slow down through the resistance of the air, it takes a while. This could be quite a problem if you wanted to land but didn't get that speed down in time.

There are ways to manipulate your speed using altitude, however. I don't really know the physics behind it, but if you yaw up on that plane, the plane will slow down (I mean, you can't just shoot straight up like a rocket; there's no air to lift). If you yaw down, you speed up.

This wouldn't really allow you to break in preparation for landing, but it is important in a lot of basic fighter maneuvers in aerial combat, as you would need to get your speed up or down to match the target you're pursuing.
Click to expand...
1.Yaw is left/right. Pitch is up/down.
2. Planes have more drag as they go faster, but also as they go slower(there is a speed in the middle where drag is minimized) On landing they reduce power until below that speed and then attempt to hold the nose up and speed decreases and drag increases until the plane stops flying.
(Physics explanations may be simplified.)
 
davids877 said:
On landing they reduce power until below that speed and then attempt to hold the nose up and speed decreases and drag increases until the plane stops flying
Click to expand...
Also, on final you progressively increase the flaps setting (most commercial airliners land with 30-40 degrees of extension) to increase drag. The landing gear also really helps to slow you down.
 
Mesh Gear Fox said:
Also, on final you progressively increase the flaps setting (most commercial airliners land with 30-40 degrees of extension) to increase drag. The landing gear also really helps to slow you down.
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Look at Mr. Fancy here with his adjustable flaps and retractable landing gear.
 
The man who wrote the book that the Disney movie The Fox and the Hound would be based on also wrote the book that the Ridley Scott movie Gladiator would be based on.
 
Did you know Justice Clarence Thomas is a Gullah?

Firstly, you may not know what a Gullah is. Gullahs are an African people of the Lowcountry (Georgia/South Carolina coast) who speak their own pidgin language, like an English version of Louisiana Creole. They are kind of unique in that they are the only native African nationality that I know of, in the United States, besides "foundational" Blacks. They resemble Caribbean people way more than they do other Americans.

Thomas was raised in a primary Gullah-speaking house as a child. That makes his rise to the Supreme Court all the more impressive, as he clawed his way up, through his own work, from the very bottom of American society. It makes my blood boil when libtards who wouldn't know the first thing about his home insult him.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Thomas was raised in a primary Gullah-speaking house as a child. That makes his rise to the Supreme Court all the more impressive, as he clawed his way up, through his own work, from the very bottom of American society. It makes my blood boil when libtards who wouldn't know the first thing about his home insult him.
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I am not sure if he was the first, but he is one of two current sitting Supreme Court Justices with English as a second language. Sonia Sotomayor is the other.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Thomas was raised in a primary Gullah-speaking house as a child. That makes his rise to the Supreme Court all the more impressive, as he clawed his way up, through his own work, from the very bottom of American society. It makes my blood boil when libtards who wouldn't know the first thing about his home insult him.
Click to expand...
He would often go fishing at the local river as a kid. Not for fun, but just to have something to eat.


Charlemagne Palestine’s Godbear, a 1987 solo piano recording originally scheduled to sit alongside Sonic Youth and Swans in the catalogue of Glenn Branca’s Neutral Records but eventually released on CD by the Dutch Barooni label in 1998.

Coincidence?
 
Did you know that the Thirteen Colonies maintained their own separate state navies during the American Revolution? Still being independent nations at the time, many of them had small fleets of ships for their own coastal defense.

The United States Congress and the individual state legislators also authorized letters of marque for some 1700 privateers, compared to a Navy of just 64. New England was a major shipbuilding center and letters of marque was basically a way of raising a navy for free. They were massively destructive for that brief eight years that they ran amok.

Some other American naval lore:
- Blackbeard once besieged Charleston to extort medicines for his crew
- It was a Virginia officer who later killed Blackbeard off the Outer Banks, the same North Carolina island chain where the Wright Brothers launched their Wright Flyer.
- Baltimore was the main privateering port of the USA in the War of 1812, and was actually the main target of the offensive that burned the White House
- Jean Lafitte was a Louisiana pirate whose host played a role in both the Battle of New Orleans
- Texas did own its own Navy, which defeated the Mexican Navy in an action (Battle of Campeche) supporting Yucatan's war for independence
- Confederates used "cottonclads" that were armored with the only material practical and available, cotton (and it actually worked)
- USS Barb was the only submarine in history to sink a train. They achieved that feat when, upon seeing trains pass over a bridge between two Japanese islands, the sub set some men ashore to go commando rigging up explosives. They detonated it when another train passed overhead.
- USS Archerfish sank an entire aircraft carrier by itself. Its victim, Shinano, was the largest carrier of the time and it was the first kill Archerfish made.
- Naval zeppelins, used for anti-submarine operations in WW1, continued to be used by the United States into WW2 in the Pacific.
 
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has a series of codes (based on ISO country and locale codes) that represent each language, for standardized reference and identification of languages and their variations in documents and websites and such.

For example, while English, French, and Spanish are simply en, fr, and es, there's many local variations to distinguish:
US English is en-us, while UK English is en-GB.
France French is fr-fr, while Canada French is fr-ca
Spain Spanish is es-es, while Mexico Spanish is es-mx, and Latin American Spanish is es-la (or es-xl, or es-419, so much for standardization). And so on.

Israel Hebrew is he-il.

That's a fact.

And it's a fun one.
 
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