Fun facts!

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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
It's always blown my mind that Filipinos and Chinese existed in the New World before Englishmen did.

You could also argue that, in some fashion, the Philippines was a Mexican colony (if you accept New Spain as being Mexico+).
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Bit of a PL, but my Filipino friend calls himself a "Sea Mexican".
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
It's always blown my mind that Filipinos and Chinese existed in the New World before Englishmen did.

You could also argue that, in some fashion, the Philippines was a Mexican colony (if you accept New Spain as being Mexico+).
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I accept that, yeah. I mean, if you think about it, in historical politics terms, the Philippines has been Spanish, Mexican, Japanese, American, and finally Filipino, when the Americans decided to bugger off, and let the territory go officially in 1946 (probably because they couldn't be arsed/had more important matters, towards the end of the Second World War, and or, they didn't want to risk contending with the Japanese again). I know there's often more to it than that, but you get the gist.

Here's a couple of (leaning towards possible, regarding the second one) facts I found, because, somehow, you tangentially reminded me of them:

1.) This article: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6621319.stm

2.) And this one: https://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/01/24/news/guyana/sir-walter-raleigh-may-have-adopted-native-boy-from-guiana-–-report/
 
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Despite being touted as a cliche, there's actually not a lot of times where the butler really did it-at least in literature. In fact, we don't even really know where the trope, or phrase itself (if it was ever actually said) originally comes from.

The majority of the examples of it are from long after it was supposedly created, and even then, most of these examples are parodies, or just don't play it straight in general, and both works that are frequently cited as being the origin of it (1930's The Door, and 1928's Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories, respectively) don't actually say the line, and in the case of the latter, explicitly state for the butler to not be the culprit because that would be too obvious.

The most likely theory is that the exact origin doesn't come from books, but instead from movies because while the butler doing it isn't common in literature, it was common in silent films for a time as there's a quite a few where it, or something very similar to it happens.

Notably, the majority of these movies were all made within the same ten years (specifically from 1915-1925), and considering how the trope was already considered a cliche by the early 1920s, this could very well be the answer.

However, another interesting thing worth mentioning is that a good chunk of those films that are said to have it are now considered lost, so it is entirely possible that one of them actually has the line word-for-word, and we just can't verify it because it's now next to impossible to do so.
 
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Constantine XI, the last Eastern Roman Emperor, lived closer to our time than he did to the Western Roman Empire, the Principate, the Pax Romana, Augustus, Julius Caesar, or the Roman Republic.

For that matter, Cleopatra VII lived closer to our time than she did to the Pharaohs who built the Great Pyramids.
 
Ninjas had a very strict, plain, basic diet. This was because their families or teachers, both, believed that sugary and spicy foods would give them a strong odour, and give away their hiding spot to their target. To achieve true stealth, they had to seem "invisible" to the nose, as it were. I learned that from this programme I found on the Smithsonian Channel, which is available in GB, as well. Not sure if the same applies virtually everywhere else: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2647710/
 
Fun fact: recently the biggest supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy was found, 33 billion times the mass of our Sun, in the galaxy cluster Abell 1201.

Even more fun fact: it was discovered by gravitational lensing caused by a smaller supermassive black hole of a mere 13 billion Solar masses, revealing a galaxy in the same cluster behind the first galaxy, and containing the even more supermassive black hole.

(Gravitational lensing is when the gravity of a massive object causes light to bend around it, effectively creating a giant magnifying telescope and revealing what is behind it.)
 
The term "blood groove," denoting the small groove located on the flat part of the blade, comes from a misconception that it allows the blood to flow out of the blade easier or that it prevents a blade being stuck in someone's gut. The actual proper term for it is "fuller" and its purpose is to lighten the blade without affecting its strength or integrity and thus allows the smith to make the blade longer and makes it easier to give it a proper balance, which is especially important in long blades like swords.
 
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Joseph Pujol was a flatuist(professional farter, basically) that was quite popular in France for a bit. Here's a recording of one of his performances.
Yes, that is a century old recording of a guy farting.
 
The Black Death has never been truly eradicated. There's at least three locations that keeps a strain of it locked up, as it were, in laboratories in these institutes:

There are several institutions that have samples of the Black Death, including:


  • Museum of London: Scientists have extracted DNA from bones and teeth from the East Smithfield plague pits to reconstruct the genome of the Black Death bacterium.






  • University of Louisville: Microbiologists study the bacteria that causes the Black Death, Yersinia pestis, to learn how to defeat it and other bacteria.






  • Wellcome Sanger Institute: Scientists sequenced the bacterium that causes the Black Death.



Subfact: The Plague of Justinian and the Black Death were supposedly caused by the same pathogen. The Plague of Justinian simply preceeded the Black Death by 805 years.



 
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Wot Zit Too Yah0996 said:
The Black Death has never been truly eradicated. There's at least three locations that keeps a strain of it locked up, as it were, in laboratories in these institutes:

There are several institutions that have samples of the Black Death, including:


  • Museum of London: Scientists have extracted DNA from bones and teeth from the East Smithfield plague pits to reconstruct the genome of the Black Death bacterium.






  • University of Louisville: Microbiologists study the bacteria that causes the Black Death, Yersinia pestis, to learn how to defeat it and other bacteria.






  • Wellcome Sanger Institute: Scientists sequenced the bacterium that causes the Black Death.



Subfact: The Plague of Justinian and the Black Death were supposedly caused by the same pathogen. The Plague of Justinian simply preceeded the Black Death by 805 years.



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You can catch that shit from squirrels at the park, we just know how to treat it now.
 
Wot Zit Too Yah0996 said:
The Black Death has never been truly eradicated. There's at least three locations that keeps a strain of it locked up, as it were, in laboratories in these institutes:
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I don't think the strain endemic in California that you can mostly get from ground squirrels (nasty little fuckers) is the same strain as the original Black Death, but a milder version.

That said, there's still the Black Death strain out in the wild, or at least strains almost identical to the particularly ugly strain that caused the pandemic with that name.

There was an outbreak of one of them about 10 years ago in Madagascar.

It's barely worth worrying about at this point, though.
 
AnOminous said:
I don't think the strain endemic in California that you can mostly get from ground squirrels (nasty little fuckers) is the same strain as the original Black Death, but a milder version.

That said, there's still the Black Death strain out in the wild, or at least strains almost identical to the particularly ugly strain that caused the pandemic with that name.

There was an outbreak of one of them about 10 years ago in Madagascar.

It's barely worth worrying about at this point, though.
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Are there marshes/swamps in parts of Madagascar? 'Cos getting rid of those geographical features is what alleviated a lot of the outbreak/epidemic, at least in the south of England. Specifically, people drained the fen marshes. As for the ground squirrels in Hippiefornia, cull 'em, or work out a way to treat them, like what zookeepers are doing in Australia with Tasmanian Devils and their Devil Face Tumour Disease thing.
 
Wot Zit Too Yah0996 said:
As for the ground squirrels in Hippiefornia, cull 'em, or work out a way to treat them, like what zookeepers are doing in Australia with Tasmanian Devils and their Devil Face Tumour Disease thing.
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Fun fact: Tasmanian Devils are so genetically similar that the so-called Facial Tumour Disease is actually just cancer that gets transmitted from Devil to Devil because they're such insanely stupid animals they constantly bite each other in the face. And because the cancer is so similar, it's actually transmissible and threatens the entire species.

tl;dr transmissible cancer is a thing. At least with some species.
 
AnOminous said:
Fun fact: Tasmanian Devils are so genetically similar that the so-called Facial Tumour Disease is actually just cancer that gets transmitted from Devil to Devil because they're such insanely stupid animals they constantly bite each other in the face. And because the cancer is so similar, it's actually transmissible and threatens the entire species.

tl;dr transmissible cancer is a thing. At least with some species.
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Transmittable cancer makes sense. So, if you think on it, Tasmanian Devils are spreading their own strain of "HIV/AIDS" amongst each other.
 
AnOminous said:
Fun fact: Tasmanian Devils are so genetically similar that the so-called Facial Tumour Disease is actually just cancer that gets transmitted from Devil to Devil because they're such insanely stupid animals they constantly bite each other in the face. And because the cancer is so similar, it's actually transmissible and threatens the entire species.

tl;dr transmissible cancer is a thing. At least with some species.
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Yeah, makes sense, considering women can get cervical cancer from being infected with a certain strain of HPV.
 
cactus said:
Yeah, makes sense, considering women can get cervical cancer from being infected with a certain strain of HPV.
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That's not really the same because it's the damage to the tissue that causes cancer. I mean genetically identical cancer directly transmitted from one animal to another. Usually a human kills a foreign cancer easily, which is why transmitted cancer is incredibly rare (a couple surgeons have got it but it is pretty easy to get rid of).
 
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