Post some useless trivia.
- Thread starter thick doona
- Start date
Recommended Videos
The longest word you can write using just the top line of the keyboard (QWERTY etc), is typewriter.
Edit: Must learn to think before posting!
OT: Glass is not a liquid but an amorphous solid
You do not eat that many spiders in your lifetime
The Great Wall of China can't be seen with the naked eye from space
The largest manmade structure is Fresh Kills Landfill (NYC Rubbish Dump)
OT: Glass is not a liquid but an amorphous solid
You do not eat that many spiders in your lifetime
The Great Wall of China can't be seen with the naked eye from space
The largest manmade structure is Fresh Kills Landfill (NYC Rubbish Dump)
"(...) John Freeman got quiet, then dropped wepon and said 'I need to kill fast, and bullets too slow and started killing combines with bear hands. John Freeman was killing combines and barking necks (...)"
Have a lot of Presidential ones:
Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO.
Theodore Roosevelt once murdered a man with his bare hands and called it great fun, comparing it to killing a jack rabbit.
George Washington used to spend 7% of his income (about $25,000 in modern currency) on alcohol.
Woodrow Wilson's favorite movie was "The Birth of a Nation."
JFK is known to have said "I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every morning." He was also interested in hanging pictures of himself in various sexual positions with various women throughout the White House.
And here is a video game one: Andrew Ryan's name is an anagram for "We r Ayn Rand." Ayn Rand was the author of Atlas Shrugged, the book Bioshock takes its philosophy from.
Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO.
Theodore Roosevelt once murdered a man with his bare hands and called it great fun, comparing it to killing a jack rabbit.
George Washington used to spend 7% of his income (about $25,000 in modern currency) on alcohol.
Woodrow Wilson's favorite movie was "The Birth of a Nation."
JFK is known to have said "I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every morning." He was also interested in hanging pictures of himself in various sexual positions with various women throughout the White House.
And here is a video game one: Andrew Ryan's name is an anagram for "We r Ayn Rand." Ayn Rand was the author of Atlas Shrugged, the book Bioshock takes its philosophy from.
Gallium is one of the only metals that is safe to hold in your hand, and it will melt in your hand
Radium-atomic number 88, is over one million times more radioactive then the same mass, in Uranium.
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.
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.
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".
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".