Fun facts!

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
following on from Lincoln: did you know that he, Elvis Presley, and Benjamin Harrison are all from the same family? I didn’t until a few days ago and it blew my mind
 
Bunny Tracks said:
Late, but speaking of Abe Lincoln, he's in the wrestling hall of fame, and him chokeslamming a guy might be the earliest written account we have of someone ever doing so.
Click to expand...
Lincoln also tricked a man into an unfair duel, by agreeing to duel the fellow under Lincolns rules.

They were to use sabers and be in a pit. The guy agrees but upon arrival to the little island the duel was to take place on, the guy realized he was fucked. The pit was so small, and Lincoln a towering Chad with a reach advantage, the guy would have had zero chance. So he forfeited.

Then on the way back, Lincoln laid in the boat pretending to be dead. Once they hit shore, and Mary started flipping shit, he pops up all "lolz just a prank".

Fucker was a troll
 
Gonorrhea can infect your eyes.
Picture1.png
 
According to Flavius Josephus, sometime around the beginning of the First Jewish-Roman War (48-52 AD), a riot broke out in Jerusalem after a Roman soldier allegedly mooned Jewish pilgrims traveling to the Temple for Passover.
 
The Heartthrob said:
You can't hold your nose and hum at the same time.

Which makes sense but it's easy to forget.
Click to expand...
You kind of can, it just sounds more like you’re choking than you’re actually humming. Would have to pinch your nostrils really hard to be completely unable to do it.

Slightly related: you can’t properly yawn without closing your eyes. Every time I’ve tried, at least, the stupid thing has just come back later until I did it with my eyes closed.
 
Birdposting compels me: Did you know that gannets have nostrils inside of their beaks so they don't get their breathing passages filled with water when they dive. Pretty damn cool. I love birds, that's all :heart-full:
 
German WW II soldier and artist Jakob Nacken was 2.2m tall and the first photographed instance of the famous hover hand:
Jakob_Nacken_age16.jpg
 
Rick The Stick said:
They were to use sabers and be in a pit. The guy agrees but upon arrival to the little island the duel was to take place on, the guy realized he was fucked. The pit was so small, and Lincoln a towering Chad with a reach advantage, the guy would have had zero chance. So he forfeited.
Click to expand...
Seemed to work out to me. Nobody got killed. Shields later went on to become a Major General after beating Stonewall Jackson (for the only time). Other minor fun fact: the article that pissed off Shields was written by Lincoln under the pseudonym "Rebecca."
 
People like to brag about their heritage and they may exaggerate to do so better. One way an American may do this is by claiming descent from a Cherokee princess. But that's impossible as Cherokee princesses never existed. Cherokee chiefs weren't kings - the tribe would pick several war and peace chiefs at a time to lead them. A chief's daughter was more like a mayor's daughter than a princess. But someone may really have a native forebear and a family legend saying they were a princess, which may have started for many reasons. "Chief's daughter" or "prominent man's daughter" may have been mistranslated as "princess" which may also be a mistranslation for "female politician" - the Cherokee Beloved Woman or female peace chief. The Beloved Woman was honored by the tribal council for courage in war. These positions may have been misunderstood or romanticized. On that subject, "princess" was a popular term of endearment early in the 20th century. A nickname may have been mistaken for a title over the years. This actually happened often. For example many Cherokee women listed with the name "Rose" weren't truly named such - that's just the nickname their White husbands or fathers gave them. Likewise an Indian forebear may have been Black. There have been cases where the Southern dialect terms "Indian princess" and "Cherokee princess" (meaning "light-skinned mixed woman") were taken literally by Yankees and passed down in family lore. Lastly a White grandfather may have told his family his Indian wife was a Cherokee princess to get his family to accept her, as some tribes like the Cherokee and Iroquois were seen as more civilized than other tribes by White Americans. This tribal rebranding was common in the past.
 
The word "sincere" comes from the Latin phrase "without wax".

In Roman times, marble would often get damaged whilst being dug out of quarries. As some of these blocks were quite large and it was hard work to dig the marble out by hand, some quarry owners would melt plain wax into the holes and level it off to cover the damage, due to the colour being a very close match to marble.

Obviously, a sculptor's day would be ruined if he happened to chisel into one of these soft patches whilst creating his masterpiece.

Eventually, quarries started to call genuine marble blocks "sine cera", which is how we ended up with "sincere" as a synonym for genuine or true.
 
Think of a positive whole number, say 20.

Write the number as the sum of powers of 2: 20=16+4=2⁴+2² (for an odd number, reminder that 2⁰=1)
Turn the exponents into the sums of powers of 2 as well
1.png

Let's call it the Hereditary Representation of the number 20 in base 2. Then comes the fun part.

Replace all the 2s on the right side of the equation by 3s
1.png

Then minus one from this number.
1.png


This is obviously a much larger number than 20; it is actually the number 7625597485013. Let's call this number G₁(20)
(This is a good time to remind you that nested exponents are to be read downwards)
1.png


Then write that number as the Hereditary Representation in base 3.
3.png


Change all the 3s into 4s of this expression, then minus one, in order to get the next number of the sequence G₂(20)
turtle.png

You know the drill: turn this gigantic number into the Hereditary Representation in base 4, change all occurrences of 4 into 5, enumerate and then minus one to get the next number G₃(20). I guess you know the number G₃(20) is much, much larger than G₂(20). Indeed one can easily be convinced that the sequence, known as the Goodstein Sequence, will fly off without limits. Amazingly this is NOT TRUE. No matter which positive number you start with, its Goodstein Sequence will eventually reach a plateau, stay there for a long time, then slowly climb down, until finally it becomes 2, then 1, then 0.

The fact that all Goodstein Sequences will eventually reach zero is a fact that cannot be proved by ordinary (Peano) arithmetic, even though it is fully expressed in terms of ordinary arithmetic operations. In other words, it is one of the "theorems in elementary arithmetic that is neither provable nor disprovable with elementary arithmetic" alluded in Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem. To prove this one must appeal to transfinite ordinals, which lies outside "elementary arithmetic".
 
If the sum of the digits of a number are divisible by 3, the number itself is divisible by 3.

Positron said:
The fact that all Goodstein Sequences will eventually reach zero is a fact that cannot be proved by ordinary (Peano) arithmetic, even though it is fully expressed in terms of ordinary arithmetic operations.
Click to expand...
This sounds like a variant of the Collatz Conjecture. Start with any integer. If it's even, divide it by two. If it isn't, multiply it by three and add one. Repeat.

All numbers tested with this end up at 1.

Nobody has ever been able to prove this is actually the case for all relevant numbers. Promising mathematicians have been told to ignore this problem because they will literally go insane if they contemplate it too much.
 
Here's a maths fun fact.

Consider the following situation:
In a room there is a circle of chairs numbered 1 through 51 in counterclockwise order. You and 50 other people are told to sit in any chair you please. Starting with you, each living person kills the person to their right. Eventually only one person remains.
Which chair do you choose such that you will that last survivor?

This is known as the Josephus Problem, which originates from Jewish history in a story problem about Jewish soldiers facing Roman capture.

For the case I described above, there is a very neat trick to find the winning chair number. Take 51 in binary, which is 110011. Now take the bit in front and put it in the back, giving: 100111 in binary which is 39. This is your winning number.
In fact, for any number of chairs, so long as each living person kills the person immediately to their right, this is how you find the winning number.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom