The most useless knowledge you possess
- Thread starter lechat
- Start date
No you got it right. In the case of ducks it's an adaptation to make them better at raping female ducks. Why? Because female ducks have mazelike vaginas to make raping them less likely to produce offspring. Sexual competition in action.sky14kemea said:
In cats, the barbs actually trigger ovulation in the female.
For my entry, the 8086 CPU supports a command that no other x86 series CPU supports, and you can write code that will attempt that instruction and behave differently and predictably depending on whether it's an 8086 or any other CPU in the line.
The instruction? POP CS. It pulls the top value off the stack, and places it in the register that instructs the system which memory segment the CPU should look in for the next instruction. It's literally half of a GOTO, and not the more useful half. Which is why it isn't supported in any of the others.
I can also code in Ada and MIPS assembly.
A common misconception - the first Coca Cola BOTTLES used to be green. Otherwise, you're spot on!Abbyka said:
On topic (and on the subject): The first Fanta bottles had a swastika stamp molded into the bottom.
Yeah. Fanta was invented in Nazi Germany. No joke. See, due to the worldwide popularity of their flagship product, the Coca Cola Company had established several factories around the world prior to the outbreak of the second world war. Thanks to the embargoes and logistic issues caused by said war, Coca Cola Deutschland was unable to obtain the required ingredients for successful Coca Cola production. However, thanks to occupied territories in tropical climates, oranges were available in great abundance...
As for the name: The head of the factory asked his employees to help come up with a name for the new product, and told them to use their imagination (German: 'Fantasie') - whereupon someone in the back of the crowd immediately shouted, 'Fanta!'
(Incidentally, these proceedings gave rise to the misconception that the Coca Cola company had invented Fanta specifically in order to cash in on the ever-expanding Axis market - without the risk of Hitler being seen drinking Coke!)
Harry, Ron and Hermione are all named characters who either have speaking roles (except for Hermione, who is mentioned) in the 2000 Discworld book, The Truth. This was likely a reference to some indie fantasy book published in the UK in June of 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Scott Cawthon was frustrated by the fact that his Christian-themed games weren't selling well. What really stung him and, made him consider giving up game development all together was the critique that his animal mascot characters were considered "creepy". He decided to make a final game to show the critics that he could make truly scary animal mascots. To date, he's made 3 which are so wildly popular that Warner Bros is already making a movie based off of them. Five Nights at Freddy's has been his most successful project by far.
Scott Cawthon was frustrated by the fact that his Christian-themed games weren't selling well. What really stung him and, made him consider giving up game development all together was the critique that his animal mascot characters were considered "creepy". He decided to make a final game to show the critics that he could make truly scary animal mascots. To date, he's made 3 which are so wildly popular that Warner Bros is already making a movie based off of them. Five Nights at Freddy's has been his most successful project by far.
Matt Groening gave multiple characters the middle name (or just initial) J such as Homer Jay Simpson, Phillip J. Fry, Bartholomew J. Simpson and, Hubert J. Farnsworth. He does this as a tribute to his favorite animator Jay Ward, the creator of Rocky the Squirrel and, Bullwinkle J. Moose.Barbas said:
You can never forget something like that... Now, what was it again?necromanzer52 said:
OT: I have enough pointless facts about Cartoon Network in general that it could fit a few good "Did You Know Cable Channels"-like videos on YouTube...
Other than that...We are the martians
The butt-ugly martians
If you take the DNA structure of a lemon and create a mirror image of it, you get the DNA structure of an orange.lechat said:
The name of the unit of measurement for shoe sizes in the UK is called a barleycorn.
Sewer rats will sleep in great piles in their nests and often become covered in their own waste and the trash around them, getting permanently stuck together into something which is then called a "rat king." The same thing can happen to baby squirrels if they are raised in a sappy tree, getting stuck together into a "squirrel king" and then dying because they can't forage and do squirrel stuff.
Cows are so dumb they will not dig under even a small layer of snow to find the grass beneath like horses will, which means they have to be fed hay or corn when it snows.
If you blindfold a person and put them in a large empty field and tell them to walk in a straight line, on average they end up walking into a sort of spiral shape. It's unknown why this happens, but it's thought that perhaps this is a survival mechanism to lead a person not too far from where they started so they don't get lost.
The Renaissance artist Donatello had a nickname: gattamelata, which means honey-cat. It is unknown why he was called this.
There is a region in England known as the "rhubarb triangle" which is comprised of three towns where 90% of the world's winter rhubarb is grown. They "force grow" it, which means they leave it out in the sun for a long time, and then take it into a completely dark room which forces the plant to expend all of its energy very quickly and produce a lot of rhubarb really quickly. It grows so fast you can literally hear the plants creaking as they grow.
Napoleon was not actually short, he was actually a bit above average height for his time. However, the French inch was slightly larger than the English inch at the time, which led to a misunderstanding about his height which may or may not have been deliberate.
If several women live together in close quarters for a long period of time, their menstrual cycles will often synchronize.
These useless facts and more can be found on the amazing and hilarious BBC show hosted by Stephen Fry, QI:
WTF? Really? That's utterly baffling. Why margarine but not say butter?Zhukov said:
Same, although acknowledging certain other celebrities as well is pretty useless.Fappy said:
Isn't he also the only president with that kind of achievement as well? Oh, he's also the tallest prez so far (6'4'').Bizzaro Stormy said:
Knight Captain Kerr said:
Not many gamers have played Another World (also known as Out Of This World here in the States). In the intro cinematic, the player character, Lester Knight Chaykin, enters an underground laboratory, inputting a code on a keypad to gain access.
That code is 4511932.
That code is 4511932.
Zombie_Fish said:
Yuuuuup. There's an interview from Inside the Actor's Theater with him where he says they got probably 16 hours of readings from him. The entire film is 90 minutes. And of course quite a bit of it couldn't be used in a rated G filmSkatologist said:
Also, on the subject of fun facts from films, in the scene in Lord of the Rings when Aragorn thinks Merry and Pippin are dead and kicks an Orc helm and falls to his knees in anguish, Viggo Mortensen actually broke a couple of his toes when that happened. They had done several takes of the shot and he kept kicking it in the wrong direction, so finally he just goes at it and falls to his knees with that guttural scream with more power than ever before. Peter Jackson thought that would do it so they cut, and apparently the reason he screamed so loud that time was because he broke his toes. But he channeled that pain into his performance and stayed in character to complete the shot, which was ultimately used in the film.
ALSO, when Ian McKellan was filming the scene with all the dwarves in Bilbo's house for The Hobbit, for several shots they had to shoot him on a green screen all alone so they could add all of the dwarves around him in post-production. He literally had to act as though there were 13 dwarves and a Hobbit around him on an empty green set, and it broke his heart to not have that energy and inspiration from having the cast around him. At one point during a scene he got so frustrated he began to cry on set, saying "This isn't why I began acting." He had done quite a bit of green screen in LotR too, but he never had to act with the entire cast missing.
The fact that I know the Mayan ruins English names, few knowledge of the rain god and the sun god and the brutal sport they played. Yeah it is my Social Study class alright.
Gaming : Every single stage transformation, and the actions needed to perform them, in DOA 2
Non-gaming : I spent serious time and effort into being sherlock holmes. The main symptom of which would be approximately recognising the hobby or job sector someone has by their hands. While this sounds cool and semi useful, if only as party trick, there are so many medical reaons and conditions that make up exceptions that it's only correct about half of the time. For instance, I know a gardener that is also a piano virtuoso, so it's very hard to tell that accurately.
From this spawns the knowledge that : You can recognize someone who is severly hung over by their fingers. If you know what shape and size they are normally, you'll notice that they're swollen. This is due to dehydration from alcohol.
Edit : just remembered I know how to do a kick flip... With a techdeck. *cough*
Non-gaming : I spent serious time and effort into being sherlock holmes. The main symptom of which would be approximately recognising the hobby or job sector someone has by their hands. While this sounds cool and semi useful, if only as party trick, there are so many medical reaons and conditions that make up exceptions that it's only correct about half of the time. For instance, I know a gardener that is also a piano virtuoso, so it's very hard to tell that accurately.
From this spawns the knowledge that : You can recognize someone who is severly hung over by their fingers. If you know what shape and size they are normally, you'll notice that they're swollen. This is due to dehydration from alcohol.
Edit : just remembered I know how to do a kick flip... With a techdeck. *cough*
I know how to do my taxes.
*Rimshot*
Actually, I'm not sure WHAT'S useless. I have Trivial Pursuit, you see...
*Rimshot*
Actually, I'm not sure WHAT'S useless. I have Trivial Pursuit, you see...
I have no idea if he's the only inventor president but I do find it interesting how many inventors there were in the 19th century. It's a far more interesting time than it's given credit for.Skatologist said:
The wife of Thomas Jefferson was not fond of the instigators and participators in the Whiskey Rebellion.
Want to know how I know this? Because it was on a test and I got it wrong.
Granted, that makes it useful in that one context, but it's useless in literally every other context.
Want to know how I know this? Because it was on a test and I got it wrong.
Granted, that makes it useful in that one context, but it's useless in literally every other context.