Fun facts!

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With just 13 ships, Admiral Yi defeated over 300 Japanese ships without losing any of his in the Battle of Myeongnyang.
 
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A few language facts:
'C' used to be pronounced like 'K' in Latin (and a bunch of other languages). Caesar pronounced his name like Kaiser. Related, both Kaiser and Tsar/Czar are derived from Caesar.
The Celtic languages are most closely related to the Italic languages (think Latin), and were once spoken all across Europe from the Atlantic coast along Iberia to the shores of the Black Sea; it's now only spoken as a minority language in the UK and Ireland.
Polysynthetic langauges (most of the Native American ones, and a few in the Caucasus mountains) "stack together" words, meaning you can have a single super long word that means the same thing as a complex sentence in English.
Basque, spoken in parts of Spain and France, is the only language in Europe that isn't related to any other languages. Linguists think it directly developed from a language(s) spoken before the Europeans conquered Europe, of which it's the only remnant left.
Chinese is actually a cluster of dialects (they can't understand each other) descended from Middle Chinese; the exception is the Minnan languages which are descended directly from Old Chinese, and were preserved because they live in mountainous areas that made it harder for later Chinese migrants to take over and have contact with them with later stages of the language.
There are various theories (mostly discredited, but one can still hope :optimistic:) that Japanese is related to Turkish and Mongolian. Take note weeaboos.
The Semitic languages (Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, Egyptian, Hebrew, etc), have a unique structure of three-consonant "stems", where the meaning of the word is filled in with vowels. KTB means, vaguely, writing. Kitab means "book", kataba means "he wrote", kātib means "writer", etc.
 
If you run Aphex Twin's Windowlicker through a spectrogram, right at the end of the song when it devolves into clanging and booming bass the sound will initially form a spiral pattern and will then become a picture of Richard James' grinning face. Richard created this effect by using a reverse spectrogram program to scan the pattern and his own picture and placed the resulting insane noise into the end of the song, simply in the off chance that some autist with a spectrogram decided to use it on the song.

Also his song Flim, which is know for being one of his more mellow and pleasant-sounding tracks, is named such because it's milf spelled backwards.

Great guy, that Richard James.
 
Count groudon said:
If you run Aphex Twin's Windowlicker through a spectrogram, right at the end of the song when it devolves into clanging and booming bass the sound will initially form a spiral pattern and will then become a picture of Richard James' grinning face. Richard created this effect by using a reverse spectrogram program to scan the pattern and his own picture and placed the resulting insane noise into the end of the song, simply in the off chance that some autist with a spectrogram decided to use it on the song.

Also his song Flim, which is know for being one of his more mellow and pleasant-sounding tracks, is named such because it's milf spelled backwards.

Great guy, that Richard James.
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BRB getting spectrogram.

When Gene Roddenberry pitched the pilot for Star Trek the Original Series, the studio wanted him to change the character of the first officer to a man because they felt no one would believe a woman could be in charge. He stuck to his guns though. He had to butt heads with the execs more than once over his vision for the show vs. what the studio thought would fly with the censors.
 
DrJonesHat said:
BRB getting spectrogram.

When Gene Roddenberry pitched the pilot for Star Trek the Original Series, the studio wanted him to change the character of the first officer to a man because they felt no one would believe a woman could be in charge. He stuck to his guns though. He had to butt heads with the execs more than once over his vision for the show vs. what the studio thought would fly with the censors.
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Unless Roddenberry has a few corpses in his basement that I'm unaware of, I have to say, he's an inspiring Progressive. Nowadays, ST TOS is just a campy, harmless little show from yesteryears, but when you consider what time it aired in, it's insane how many things that are completely normal and standard to us where literally cutting edge political statements.
The multitude of nationalities on the ship (where even a russian was present).
Uhura and the first trans-racial kiss.
A strong pacifist message and a positive outlook for the future.

A few aspects, such as Kirk's womanizing, didn't age well with todays idiotic PC attitude, but hey: You might call Kirk a womanizer, but dude did not discriminate by skin color.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
Unless Roddenberry has a few corpses in his basement that I'm unaware of, I have to say, he's an inspiring Progressive. Nowadays, ST TOS is just a campy, harmless little show from yesteryears, but when you consider what time it aired in, it's insane how many things that are completely normal and standard to us where literally cutting edge political statements.
The multitude of nationalities on the ship (where even a russian was present).
Uhura and the first trans-racial kiss.
A strong pacifist message and a positive outlook for the future.

A few aspects, such as Kirk's womanizing, didn't age well with todays idiotic PC attitude, but hey: You might call Kirk a womanizer, but dude did not discriminate by skin color.
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He got death threats over the interracial kiss. Oddly he also got threats over the warp drive by people insisting FTL was impossible, and his response was "it's a television show, and who knows what we'll discover in 300 years."
 
The French and Indian War is won by the British/colonists almost entirely because the Iroquois side with the Brits over the French. Nearly every other significant tribe sided with the French. That was because years before the war, a group of Iroquois were trapped by a large warparty of Algonquin Indians, but because of the naturally fortified position the Iro had, they were able to defend forever.
Tired of this shit, the Algonquin sent word to Commander Champlain (Frenchie) asking for their new ally to help them out. He sent 5 dudes in plate armor, with Blunderbusses and swords. Those 5 doods killed EVERYTHING on that hill. Humiliated, the Iroquois remembered this, and acted against them during the war years later.
 
Heckler1 said:
The French and Indian War is won by the British/colonists almost entirely because the Iroquois side with the Brits over the French. Nearly every other significant tribe sided with the French. That was because years before the war, a group of Iroquois were trapped by a large warparty of Algonquin Indians, but because of the naturally fortified position the Iro had, they were able to defend forever.
Tired of this shit, the Algonquin sent word to Commander Champlain (Frenchie) asking for their new ally to help them out. He sent 5 dudes in plate armor, with Blunderbusses and swords. Those 5 doods killed EVERYTHING on that hill. Humiliated, the Iroquois remembered this, and acted against them during the war years later.
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This is the early modern version of super-advanced aliens landing on earth and blowing everything up with laser-weapons while shrugging off with ease everything earth can throw at them.

I mean, just imagine, there you are, your entire tribe, all the best warriors assembled, some of which are pretty much living legends, you managed to hold out for what feels like weeks and have given those attacking tribes a good beating and then there come 5 guys, just five, in strange looking armor and they have weird things in their hands that makes a thunderous roar and a few of your fellow warriors just drop dead with wounds, the likes of which you could never have imagined beforehand. So all your warriors gather their courage, throw rocks, spears, whatever ranged weapon they can find... and it just bounces off harmlessly, while these five guys just causally fiddle around until they unleash another such salvoe.
 
wylfım said:
'C' used to be pronounced like 'K' in Latin (and a bunch of other languages).
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The only Romance language to retain this feature (not in spelling, but pronunciation - the words are spelled differently now but the etymology remains) is Sardinian, which is probably the closest living relative to classical Latin today (still not entirely because it drifted away with some other features on the other hand).
 
Related to being able to catch leprosy from armadillos, armadillos and humans are the only mammals that can catch leprosy.
 
George H.W Bush tried to pass an amendment that'd make flag-burning illegal after Texas V. Johnson.
 
German car manifacturer VW not only produces cars and spare parts, they also have an almost half-century long history of producing a food item called "Currywurst" and in fact sell more units of that then they are selling cars.
Since it's considered an official "part" with its own serial number (199 398 500 A, in case you'ree wondering), every VW branch office or officially licensed VW store can order them.

789px-DEU_VW-Currywurst_23_MSZ111114.jpg

The plastic wrapping they come with even declares them a "Volkswagen original part".

Originally, they only wanted to produce it for their own cantina, but it has become sort of a cult-item and is now sold in several nations.
 
In the original script for the new Stephen King's It movie, back when it was being written by some other guy, there was supposed to be a scene where Henry Bowers the bully raped a sheep and another scene where he jerked off onto some kid's birthday cake. Since this was a character who's supposed to be like 15 you can see why this didn't go through and they hired some other guy to rewrite the whole thing.
 
Count groudon said:
In the original script for the new Stephen King's It movie, back when it was being written by some other guy, there was supposed to be a scene where Henry Bowers the bully raped a sheep and another scene where he jerked off onto some kid's birthday cake. Since this was a character who's supposed to be like 15 you can see why this didn't go through and they hired some other guy to rewrite the whole thing.
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Sounds like someone was probably a big fan of that scene in the book. You know the one.
 
The first two DVDs to ever be released were Twister and the Director's Cut of Blade Runner, Blade Runner was specifically picked to take advantage of scene selection so you can go back and look at the scenes and make your own interpretation on what happpened.

Twister was also the last movie ever produced for HD DVD in the North American market (the last one in general was, ironically enough, a german version of Death Proof)

I've got millions of stupid facts about movies if you give enough of a shit.
 
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