Post some useless trivia.

Sebster 105

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Feb 27, 2011
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Gallium is one of the only metals that is safe to hold in your hand, and it will melt in your hand
 

ABLb0y

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Aug 27, 2010
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'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog' is the only sentence to contain all the letters of the English alphabet
 

Sikratua

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Apr 11, 2011
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Angry Camel said:
If your eyes didn't close when you sneeze, your eyes would fly out.
That myth was busted 2 seasons ago. Adam's eyes didn't fly out, and he forcably held his eyes open during multiple sneezes.
 

rhodriharris

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Aug 24, 2010
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Lord Wellington intended his last words to be "I have done my duty to Queen and Country, now I may leave". However on his deathbed a servant asked him if he would like a cup of tea he replied "Yes but make it quick" and died before the servant left the room.

Also on the topic of last words when Voltaire was asked to renounce the devil by a priest he replied "Now my good man this is no time to be making enemies.
 

Davey Woo

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Jan 9, 2009
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Random interesting maths things.

37 x 3 = 111
37 x 6 = 222
37 x 9 = 333
37 x 12 = 444

You probably get the idea.

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
 

Naeo

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Dec 31, 2008
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Finnish deals with definitiveness (whether something is "a thing" or "the thing") by syntax, rather than with a unique word (a la Germanic and most modern Romance languages), an enclitic (suffix)(a la Nordic languages, e.g. Norwegian and Icelandic), or purely context-based (a la Latin).

English has a lot more cases than you think it does. Observe, using the word "to verb":

I verb (present)
I do verb (pres. emphatic)
I am verbing (pres. progressive)
I will verb (future)
I shall verb (fut.)
I shall be verbing (fut. prog.)
I verbed (simple past)
I did verb (simp. past emphatic)
I have verbed (simp. past, subtly different use from "I verbed")
I was verbing (past prog.)
I had verbed (pluperfect)
I had been verbing (pluperfect progressive? Uncommon, but it gets said from time to time)
I will have verbed (fut. perf.)(it's vanishingly rare to see "I shall have verbed" in any context)

And some more that I can't think of off the top of my head. English, ergo, has at least a dozen tenses all said and done. And because English makes its tenses entirely via periphrastics, you can conceivably have some pretty ridiculous tenses: I will have had been about to be verbing (come a certain point in the future, I will have already completed the act of being about to be verbing, prior to some other event that will at that time be in the past. As of now, though, none of this has happened). But anyone who actually uses that kind of tense for anything other than "lookie what I can do, ma" should probably be hanged.

"You" is the outlier among almost all European languages, phonologically, for the second person singular nominative pronoun. Cf. German "du," Latin/Spanish/French "tu", Russian "ты" (pronounced ~"tee"), Greek "εσύ" (pronounced ~"esoo," short "e" as in "bed"), Old English/Icelandic "þu" ("thoo," "th" pronounced as in "there"). But Modern English, "you". Even looking at an etymology of "you" I can't say I'm sure where this comes from. Maybe it's because the British Isles were split from the mainland of Europe by the English Channel for...well, forever, as far as we humans are concerned.

English once had three letters that have since disappeared: yogh (ȝ), which represented a consonant y sound (as in "you," "yes," etc); thorn (þ), which represented a "th" as in "there," "that," etc; eth (ð), which represents "th" as in "three," "father," etc. Both the thorn and the eth were ultimately replaced with "th" because basically no early printing presses had those characters on them. Same deal for yogh.

Shakespeare is modern English. This isn't so much trivia as it is a correction for all the people who persist in the belief that Shakespeare is Old English past about elementary, maybe middle school. Shakespeare is Modern English, Chaucer is Middle English, and Beowulf is Old English.

Perhaps until you get into really advanced and theoretical calculus, the field of calculus really only encompasses four things: limits, infinite series, differentiation (derivatives), and integration (integrals).

A "sexy prime" is a pair of two prime numbers whose difference is exactly 6. E.G. 5 and 11, 11, and 17, 17 and 23, 23 and 29, etc. Somewhere there's an article awesomely titled "Giant sexy prime discovered".
 

tankgunner92

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Jun 5, 2009
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The molotov Cocktail got its name from soviet incindiary bombs dropped on finland during the winter war. as the soviet minister of foreign affairs Vjatjeslav Michajlovitj Molotov claimed they were simply food rations for starving finns they got the nickname "Molotovs bread baskets"
The Molotov Coctail was a response, as the finns wanted to give the invading soviets "a drink to go with the food"

The swedish Metal band Sabaton mainly known for their songs about modern wars, has won a culture award for "awakening historical interests in people"

and some game trivia.
The Ejection ports for spent shell casings were intentionally left on the wrong side on guns in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games as the game developers thought it looked cooler.

Thee character Axel From Kingdom Hearts is actually based of the minor character Reno from Final fantasy VII

While on the topic:
The Pilot Character Cid Highwind from the same game is depicted as a chain smoker, but in his appeareance in kingdom hearts he chews a toothpicks, as that game was geared at a lower target audience.
 

The Funslinger

Corporate Splooge
Sep 12, 2010
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Mrrrgggrlllrrrg said:
Dogs cant look up


I joke

Thorium is a more efficient fuel than that silly silly uranium.
Yes, however to use it, requires a very corrosive salt solution. Nobody has actually yet looked into developing something capable of sustaining that while using it as a power source. Silly scientists!

They find out so much unnecessary crap, too. It's like that Frankie Boyle joke:

"Think we should have a go at curing cancer today?"

"Nah, I'm going to see how many Roundtree's fruit pastels it takes to choke a kestrel!"
 

RamirezDoEverything

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Jan 31, 2010
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Mrrrgggrlllrrrg said:
Dogs cant look up


I joke

Thorium is a more efficient fuel than that silly silly uranium.
The winchester rifle isn't real.

Pocahontas appeared on the back of the $20 bill in 1875.
 

EHKOS

Madness to my Methods
Feb 28, 2010
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Hyperrhombus said:
katsumoto03 said:
The sun's poles are reversed every 11 years.
The Earths poles switch every 500 years or so, and we`re expecting one about now.

...
That would explain the odd weather I've been observing.


OT:Turkeys will look up at rain and drown.

EDIT: President Taft got stuck in his bathtub when he was supposed to be at his inauguration.
 

aei_haruko

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Jun 12, 2011
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thick doona said:
Hi guys, I'd love to see some useless trivia!

Did you know that there is no mathematical function to gain the exact square root of all real numbers?
the glomerulus leaks filtrate into the capsule, where it is sent to the ditial tubule, where the nutrients are leaked into the bloodstream, the rest is sent to the loop of henle where it salinates the medulla of the kidney, then it is sent to the proximial tubule where aldesterone measures salt balance controll, then sent to the collecting ducts, which adh targets to make you retain water and thus have to go pee.
BAM