You learn something new every post.

[Phasmal]

Christian Bale was in Disney's Pocahontas (So was Mel Gibson, but people probably know that).

I went through a period of not being able to sleep so I watched all the Disney movies again recently. I'm quite good at recognising voices so I was like `...Batman?`, and looked it up. Yup.

(Also, the guy who voiced Captain Anderson from Mass Effect was also the bad guy in the Princess and The Frog)

Yup, that's him singing.

 

[The Funslinger]

snip

I'm going to put mine in the same vein:

It is actually legal to keep wolves. A wolf raised from cub to adult around humans, properly socialized can turn out just fine. They're incredibly loyal companions and very even tempered creatures in general.

 

[dvd_72]

There is an LED out there that has an efficiency of over 200%. You power it with a very small amount of energy (in the range of picowatts), and it produces more watts of light than what you put in! (Still in the range of picowatts though)

Don't worry, physics isn't broken. The LED just takes the energy from the heat of its surroundings, cooling the air around it in order to provide that extra power!

Isn't physics fun?!

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/09/230-percent-efficient-leds

 

[TwiZtah]

Some facts about cats! =^-^=

Cats have evolved to mimic a babies cry to get humans to pay attention to them.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17455-hungry-cats-trick-owners-with-baby-cry-mimicry.html

An American who votes democrat is more likely to own a cat than a dog.
Cats respond better to women than they do to men.
Cats are more likely to respond to a name that ends with an 'ee' sound.

Hmm, my cats have almost liked me and my brother most, but that might just be because our cats have been a little bit on the crazy side.
About the name, I have always heard that it's good to have atleast one S in the name, seriously, I don't think cats care, they go "fuck the world" anyway

 

[SckizoBoy]

The people that knows Japanese most often know this and the people that dose not know this often has no intrest in Japan,so it's just a simpel spelling misstake.

But then there are those 'wapanese' people who reckon they know Japanese just because they watch fansubs...

OT: According to Rabelais (in Gargantua), the most pleasurable way of wiping your arse is with the neck of a live goose...

 

[Arnoxthe1]

A wolf raised from cub to adult around humans, properly socialized can turn out just fine. They're incredibly loyal companions and very even tempered creatures in general.

I also heard that socialized wolves can randomly flip out for seemingly no reason at all.

Did you know the oracle is awake again? I'd never thought I'd live to see it!

Sorry, I had to make that joke.

Did you know that a rage type virus will probably never exist? For one, the amount of time between contact and showing symptoms is just stupidly fast. Extremely stupidly fast. Awesome, yes. But stupid. Another thing is that causing such extreme behavior would be a very crappy way for a virus to live off its host. It needs its host alive, not dead, and running blindly into gun fire or a dogs mouth will not exactly help that.

The reason the Rabies virus causes violent actions is actually out of insanity caused by extreme thirst, not from some inborn motive to murder everything that moves.

 

[Screamarie]

I don't know if this is really obscure or not, but many people think the language of Shakespearian plays is old English. It is not. It's actually the beginnings of modern English.

 

[mrhappy1489]

The Mountain Goat is not the same as other goats, the mountain goat is a separate species entirely from the normal goat, the name is just based on the similar appearance to the middle eastern wild goat. In a similar vein, Hyenas are actually more closely related to large cats than they are to dogs and mark their scent more similarly to weasels than any of those animals.

 

[DrRockor]

I read this book about Japan for geijin (none japanese people) so I know a lot of stuff about Japan.

Quoted a handful of times and no-one's picked up on the spelling mistake (even though it is transliterated so it hardly matters), but it's romanised as gaijin.

damn. I knew it was an a or an e. I just couldn't remember which one

 

[Shinsei-J]

EDIT: oh and I also read somhwere that the thing of "agoraphobic shut in" is actually a real issue in japan (they have a word for it I cant remember) specifically because of the culture that doesnt really help somone like that.

I think you're thinking of the word "otaku", which in japan means someone with an unhealthy obsession with anime/manga etc, leading them to become an agoraphobic shut in, but in the west is used by people (like me) who simply have an interest in japanese pop culture.

"hikikomori" (I did have to google for spelling) is the word you were looking for. Otaku means pretty much the same thing in japan, just with a bad social stigma But it does seem there is some connection between the two in recent years.

Fact time The Keyblade from Kingdom Hearts was going to be a chain saw at some point in the planning phase.

 

[The Diabolical Biz]

Gee Wizz, that is darn splendiferous[footnote]Yes, I just used splendiferous in a sentence. Yes, splendiferous is a word. Mwuahahahaa, all your footnotes are belong to us now.[/footnote]

I see your splendiferous, and raise you one floccinaucinihilipilification. A word I often use in casual conversation.

 

[Bobic]

4. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle, if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

I'm sorry, but that's just a common misconception.

http://www.snopes.com/military/statue.asp

My facts: The wonderful Arnie film 'The Running Man' is actually based upon a book by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

Die Hard is also based on a book, though not one by Stephen King.

Speaking of Die Hard

Spoiler

The reaction of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) when being dropped from the tower was quite real. Alan was told he would be dropped on a count to 3, when actually he was dropped early, causing a genuine look of surprise and fear on Alan's face.

 

[TheEndlessSleep]

The existence of an abstract higher being, about whom there are no reports of intervention, is actually impossible to disprove.

I.e: If I make the claim that I beleive in a God, but give no further information about it or any of its actions, there is no way to prove me wrong.

(Debate can, however, occur when claims are made about the behaviour of said God in terms of its interactions with the world... At this point, the claims are a lot easier to refute than to prove, based on the nature of most religions' 'evidence').

 

[freaper]

*cough* New *cough*

1: the Meiji Rostoration happend in 1868 and basically ended their fuedal system and the self imposed isolation
2: during Japans isolation only 3 countries were allowed to trade with them. China, Holland and Portugal

Reminds me of another fact. Commodore (maybe an Admiral at the time) Matthew C. Perry -- who was not the same Commodore Perry who won the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, that was Oliver Hazard Perry -- essentially extorted the Japanese to sign the Treaty of (I believe) Kanagawa, which gave the US the ability to trade and use two different Japanese ports without fear of oppression or causing conflict. When the Japanese leaders saw the size of Commodore/Admiral Perry's fleet, they realized they might get swallowed up in the wave of rising powers, and started the Meiji era.

And less than 50 years later, in 1905, Japan defeated Russia in a naval battle thus being the first country to evolve from a feudal country into a non-white industrial power in the quickest time at that time.

OT: In "the Middle Ages" people's beds were shorter because lying down fully stretched was seen as too reminiscent of death, while curled up would remind them of the safety of the womb.

 

[artanis_neravar]

The existence of an abstract higher being, about whom there are no reports of intervention, is actually impossible to disprove.

I.e: If I make the claim that I beleive in a God, but give no further information about it or any of its actions, there is no way to prove me wrong.

(Debate can, however, occur when claims are made about the behaviour of said God in terms of its interactions with the world... At this point, the claims are a lot easier to refute than to prove, based on the nature of most religions' 'evidence').

It is also impossible to eliminate poverty in this society as it is now.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

People say 'bless you' when someone sneezes because they used to think it was the body's way of expelling demons from within oneself. 0_0

 

[A Satanic Panda]

Radio waves (used in radio communication) don't travel at the speed of sound as you would think.
They travel at the speed of light, because they are part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Did you know that after about 2 or 3 light-years, man made radio waves carrying information will dissipate and turn into background radiation? That's not even to our closest star.

 

[Aerodyamic]

The reason that the lights in the red light district are actually red is because blemishes and imperfections are harder to spot under a red light, i.e. you look prettier under a red light.
True story.

You may look prettier under a red light, but I'm DAMN fine in every kind of light.

According to George Carlin, a cat will blink when struck in the head with a hammer. According to me, it's pretty funny to have one of those tiny keychain-charm-sized hammers and tap your cat in the middle of the forehead and listen to it purr like some kind of complete simpleton.

My cat is such a happy little twerp; now, if only I could get him to stop molesting my other boot so I can go grocery shopping, I'd be set!

 

[The Funslinger]

snip

I'm going to put mine in the same vein:

It is actually legal to keep wolves. A wolf raised from cub to adult around humans, properly socialized can turn out just fine. They're incredibly loyal companions and very even tempered creatures in general.

So what does snip mean? Every once in awhile someone writes that underneath your name. Always wondered. Now if it is a common thing in threads then I apologize. Basically like the first account I have set up with threads in it.

Well, to prevent clutter, you delete the excess irrelevant contents of a quoted post. If you delete the entire post, as the point you reference is fairly obvious, it's essentially become customary to put snip in its place, to show you have "snipped" the post's content.

 

[WoW Killer]

Well the whole point of an IQ test is to rank ones IQ relative to that of the whole world. So, theoretically, a score of 100 is average and the extremes (0, 200) barely stay off of the X-axis of the graph of all IQs at 1. Standard Deviation, it is. The reason IQ tests don't work (well, there several reasons, but the one relevant to this fact..) is that there is no conceivable way to create a test where the average will certainly be 100 and 200 and 0 will only be hit by 1 person each.

Slight nitpick. IQ ranks you relative to other people of the same age. A child can have an IQ higher than yours while achieving a lower score on the test.