"Random fact of the day" thread.

[wintercoat]

Strawberries and raspberries aren't berries, but watermelons are.

And now my world is shattered!

Yup, they're called aggregates. The things you call seeds are the actual fruit. The fleshy part is like a nutrient sack for the fruit.

Did you know that potatoes are part of the nightshade family and that it's skin contains a toxin that irritates the bowels, and can cause upset stomach and really, really bad gas.

 

[baconsarnie]

We don't orbit around the sun. We orbit around a common center of gravity with the sun.

Thats wrong to, we do orbit the sun and the sun in turn orbits the galactic core. You need to look up the definition of orbit, we cant orbit both.

Technically it is correct, the same as in a binary star system, but with the sun and earth the centre of rotation is (i think) inside the sun itself, or at least close enough to not make any difference when approximating.

 

[Oly J]

Dyslexia, ironically enough, is quite a hard word to spell,

lol but seriously

in England, it is illegal to die in the house of commons
it is also legal to kill a scottsman in the city of York if he happens to be carrying a bow

 

[Scarecrow]

Zetta is a prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10 to the power of 21 or 1000000000000000000000. It can also be used as an adjective, thanks to one crazy Japaneses video game character.

 

[RubyDragoon]

Cheeble is the cry of the African Bull Hamster. I bought a button that stated "Cry Cheeble! And unleash the hamsters of war!" and the person who sold it to me passed this random bit of information onto me upon doing so.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Both Saint George and Santa Claus were Turkish.

 

[The_Lost_King]

Your saliva has urine in it

 

[Binks]

Women only use one X-chromosome at a time.

The genetic contributions of your mother and father aren't balanced. You get mitochondrial DNA from your mother, and for some genes, you only use one copy from a particular parent. (it's called imprinting!)

 

[DoPo]

Did you know that potatoes are part of the nightshade family and that it's skin contains a toxin that irritates the bowels, and can cause upset stomach and really, really bad gas.

Well, not that exact information but I was generally aware. It's not too obscure since where I come from "Eat a raw potato" means something along the lines of "faking an illness". Mostly used by school kids. Why? Because in the past school kids would eat a raw potato that gave them light and brief symptoms of illness (temperature, feeling unwell. For several hours in total) so they had an excuse to skip school. Random trivia, I suppose.

 

[MetaKnight19]

The town of Doncaster is technically a part of Scotland

 

[dvd_72]

Anitediphobia: The fear that somehow, somewhere, a duck is watching you.

The fun fact that you eat about 8 or so spiders a night is not actually a fact, but a falsehood perpetrated by a scientist for an experiment to see how quickly information travels around the world.

"Magic numbers" is an actual technical term in nuclear physics. These magical numbers are the numbers of nucleons that make up extremely stable nuclei. Nuclei with more or less nucleons are less stable until the next magic number is reached.

Water expands when frozen. This is due to the structure of the H2O molecules that causes them to have intermolecular bonds strong enough to form a sort of crystal structure when the temperature becomes low enough.

Lukewarm water freezes faster than cold water. While apparently a fact I do not know the background behind it, nor do I quite believe it is a fact, but I thought I'd share it.

Start from any page in Wikipedia. Click the (I think) first link in that page, and every subsequent page. You will eventually end up on the philosophy page.

All that I could come up with at this time. I'll see if I can't recall more later

 

[Lunar Templar]

Mega Man 1's Elceman stage theme is a partial remix Journey's 'faithfully', the opening cords to be exact

Spoiler: proof

Mega Man X3's Neon Tiger Stage theme is a remix of Guns and Roses 'My Michelle'

Spoiler: contrast and compare!!

all eight Maverick bosses in X5 are named after band member's in Guns and Roses (i didn't know there was 8 people in the band, but apparently there was ...)
Grizzly Slash - Saul Hudson aka 'Slash'
Squid Adler - Steve Adler
Izzy Glow - Izzy Stradlin
Duff McWhalen - Duff Mckagan
The Skiver - Michel 'high in the sky' Monroe
Axle the Red - Axle Rose, (and the boss is based off a rose no less)
Dark Dizzy - Dizzy Reed
Mattrex - Matt Sorum

and Axle the reds stage is one big G&R reference at the beginning and end with the cannons covered in roses

 

[BlumiereBleck]

Wilhelm II did not start the First World War.

 

[rebelscum]

From the retirement of Richard Cromwell in 1658 to the recalling of the Long Parliament in early 1659, England was technically a military dictatorship.

The Artist is the first silent film to win Best Picture since 1927. The first Oscars had two Best Picture winners, one for the best "audience" film, and one for artistic achievement. Why we still don't have this remains a mystery.

In Resident Evil 4, Salazar's two bodyguards, one of which you fight in the sewers with nitrogen tanks, were his butlers.

To date, James Bond has been played by a Scotsman, a Welshman, two Englishmen, an Irishman, and an Australian.

 

[FURY_007]

Ian Fleming, the creator of Bond, is the cousin to Christopher Lee, who was cast as Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun.

India was originally ruled by The British East Indie Company, until the British government took over in 1858

 

[Tucker154]

Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is no longer the official name for this mental disorder. It is now called Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID). What's more, the way to tell whether someone is actually suffering from this condition is the number of personalities they exhibit. If they exhibit only two, they are probably lying, as the vast majority of cases exhibit at least three personalities (one being the 'host'). One of the most extreme cases had a person with over fifty personalities in their head, some as mentally young as five and others as old as sixty.

Usually, the 'host' will be unaware of the other personalities, but the others can be fully aware of the host and even have opinions about them. A good example of DID is the Three faces of Eve, which is based on a real person.

*Looks at avatar*
*Reads post*
They fit so well together, its not funny...

OT: In the state of Pennsylvania, its illegal to sleep on top of a refrigerator in your front lawn.

 

[Eddie the head]

We don't orbit around the sun. We orbit around a common center of gravity with the sun.

Thats wrong to, we do orbit the sun and the sun in turn orbits the galactic core. You need to look up the definition of orbit, we cant orbit both.

Technically it is correct, the same as in a binary star system, but with the sun and earth the centre of rotation is (i think) inside the sun itself, or at least close enough to not make any difference when approximating.

Yeah that's what I was getting at but I was wrong when I said center of gravity it is canter of mass. But you are right the center of mass is somewhere inside the sun.

Damn I made a lot of typo's on that.

 

[Panorama]

In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.

 

[DoPo]

Water expands when frozen. This is due to the structure of the H2O molecules that causes them to have intermolecular bonds strong enough to form a sort of crystal structure when the temperature becomes low enough.

Correct, and easily provable if you put a full bottle of water in the freezer. Also related - do not put a full bottle of water in the freezer because it would burst and you'll lose both. =/

"Magic numbers" is an actual technical term in nuclear physics. These magical numbers are the numbers of nucleons that make up extremely stable nuclei. Nuclei with more or less nucleons are less stable until the next magic number is reached.

"Magic numbers" are used in computer science, too. Not exactly a technical term but close enough - "magic numbers" would be some constant that just works, usually just by looking at it one wouldn't know why. For example in order to get the inverse square root of a number (useful in graphics) one can, well, calculate the inverse square root, or for better performance multiply the number by a magic constant [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root].

 

[dvd_72]

"Magic numbers" is an actual technical term in nuclear physics. These magical numbers are the numbers of nucleons that make up extremely stable nuclei. Nuclei with more or less nucleons are less stable until the next magic number is reached.

"Magic numbers" are used in computer science, too. Not exactly a technical term but close enough - "magic numbers" would be some constant that just works, usually just by looking at it one wouldn't know why. For example in order to get the inverse square root of a number (useful in graphics) one can, well, calculate the inverse square root, or for better performance multiply the number by a magic constant [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root].

Couldn't you... classify that as maths rather than computer science? ... then again computer science is basically maths and logic isn't it?

Hmm... so magic exists in maths and physics! .... and it isn't magic! This ought to piss off those bronies. (for whom I would like to state that I hold no ill feelings towards! You know, just as a disclaimer)