# Conversation and Fun > Just Conversation >  Strange Facts!

## Sean

Any Strange.......But true facts!
Such as,
The only sweat glands cows have are located on their nose.

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## Sean

Blind Chameleons still change color according to their environment.

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## Sean

The damaged parts of Leonardo's "The Last Supper" are caused by Napolean's soldiers having used the painting for target practice.

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## ioconnell

> *Sean said:* 
> The damaged parts of Leonardo's "The Last Supper" are caused by Napolean's soldiers having used the painting for target practice.




Correct me if I am wrong but was the Last Supper painting damaged by monks carving and archway through the wall where it was painted. Other Damage was caused by a new technique used by Da Vinci in which he used a different medium  to paint his picture, I think!
Was it not Leonardo's sculpture of David that was destroyed by the soldiers.

some facts I have come across



The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1!

The electric chair was invented by a dentist!

Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland!


I cannot vouch for that one because I have never seen a windmill in Ireland!

Some interesting facts Sean:cheers: :idea:

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## hcjilson

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. 
   >

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## hcjilson

I'm surprised that Ian didn't tell you all that Palm trees grow in Ireland. He didn't believe me until I pointed one out to him on the way to Galway!

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## Pete Hanlin

Betsy Ross is the only real person ever featured on a Pez dispenser...

Robert Lincoln (Abe Lincoln's son) saved the life of Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth's brother) just weeks before his father's assassination.  Edwin had fallen between two railroad cars and Robert pulled him to safety...

The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.

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## PAkev

A honeybee travels on average twice the distance around the earth to produce one tablespoon of honey.

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## sarahr

> *Pete Hanlin said:* 
>  The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.


Please tell me that one was made up.:finger:  :cry:  This could be the beginning of a life of insomnia.

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## Sean

Only one work by an American Hangs in the Louvre.........."Whistler's Mother"

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## Sean

Rice paper is made from the pitch of a Taiwanese tree........not from rice.

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## ioconnell

If you count the number of Grasshoper chirps in 14 seconds and add 40 to the result, you can determine the outdoor temperature

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## Sean

> *sarahr said:* 
> 
> 
> Please tell me that one was made up.:finger:  This could be the beginning of a life of insomnia.


I hope that's not the reason why im not usually hungry in the a.m.:drop:

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## Sean

A crocodile cannot move it's tongue because it's planted firmly at the base of it's mouth.

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## Pete Hanlin

Cat's urine glows under a black light.

More people are killed annually by donkeys than in plane crashes.

Women blink nearly twice as often as men.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."  <-- This sentence uses every letter in the English alphabet.

On the day that "The Wizard of Oz's" Judy Garland died, a tornado touched down in Kansas.

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## Jackie L

 What is the only bird whose eyes are larger than their brain?  
Ostrich
 What is the only fish that can blink with both eyes?  
Shark
 Are we able to sneeze with our eyes open?  
No
 What sea dweller has the largest eyes in the world?  
Giant Squid

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## hcjilson

Stewardess is the only word in the English language that is typed entirely with the left hand!

Yes.....you quessed it! I'm left handed.

hj

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## Steve Machol

Babies are born without kneecaps.

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## shanbaum

> *hcjilson said:* 
> Stewardess is the only word in the English language that is typed entirely with the left hand!
> 
> Yes.....you quessed it! I'm left handed.
> 
> hj


So, how ought one type "steward", "stew", "ward", "brew", "drew", "Tess", "tresses", "feast",  "west", "Fred", "war", "grade" and "dress" (to type a few)?

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## hcjilson

What I should have said was the longest word in the english language and I also forgot to pluralize it.Should read Stewardesses.Please forgive...I was trying to do 2 things at once!

hj

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## shanbaum

> *hcjilson said:* 
> What I should have said was the longest word in the english language and I also forgot to pluralize it.Should read Stewardesses.Please forgive...I was trying to do 2 things at once!
> 
> hj


Oh.  Never mind.

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## sarahr

My hubby tells me that cat gut is not made of caat gut, but of cow gut! He should know as he spends most of his time with cows.( The real 4 legged type)Mooo.

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## Sean

Until King George IV of England commanded otherwise,shoes were designed to be worn on either foot.

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## Sean

Mark Twain's "TOM SAWYER" was the first novel written on a typewriter.

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## Pete Hanlin

Yes.....you quessed it! I'm left handed.
My condolences, Harry...  If I'm not mistaken, left handed people have an average life span that is 9 years shorter than right handers (a strange but true fact if ever there was one).   :(

Let's hope you're a righty at heart!  :p

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## Sean

> *Pete Hanlin said:* 
> Yes.....you quessed it! I'm left handed.
> My condolences, Harry...  If I'm not mistaken, left handed people have an average life span that is 9 years shorter than right handers (a strange but true fact if ever there was one).   :(
> 
> Let's hope you're a righty at heart!  :p


 Uh Oh!...........9 years gone just like that :cry:  As i'm left handed also :Eek:

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## Sean

The mating call of the fruit fly has the same frequency as the low F# on a harmonica :Eek:

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## MVEYES

Cows have two stomachs?






:D

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## Steve Machol

Canadians eat more macaroni and cheese per capita than any other nation on Earth!  

Is this somehow connected to the national obsession with the sport Curling?  :Confused:

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## chip anderson

Unless I have been misinformed in my youth,  cows have four stomachs.

When being examined for visual acuity, women invaribly want to tell you the line "they can't see" when asked to read the lowest line they can.

Most women don't know right from left without looking for a ring.

Women must alway describe the quality of a line with an adjuctive (cearly,  fuzzy,  ghosty, or something) when asked the to read the lowest line they can on an eye cart.

If you tell women to rinse thier contact lenses in a glass of water as stay away from the laboratory when handling contact lenses.  When questioned about thier habits trying to find the cause of scracthed contacts, they invaribly say: "But I put a towel  down in the sink."

When you tell female soft contact lens weares to use "Only Ivory Bar Soap"  they invaribly ask if they can use a pump soft soap or an anti-bacterial soap.   


:hammer: 

Chip

Boy, am I gonna get flack on this one!

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## MVEYES

No flack from me. I remember the cows stomach from things my grandfather told me.

:D Jerry

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## Cindy Hamlin

> *chip anderson said:* 
> Unless I have been misinformed in my youth,  cows have four stomachs.



Yes, Chip, that is correct.  Here is all you wanted to know about cow digestion and more:

http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20010110.html


BTW, Chip, what's with the female thing??????????:hammer:

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## chip anderson

Cindy:  

I have just gotten old and burned out.  I get so tired of women responding when we put them in front of the eye chart and asking them "What is the lowest line you can read?"  and we get the response:

"Clearly?"  " I can't see line 9."  Or they start at the 20/200 line and work thier way down.    They read the 20/30 line, we ask: "What's the next line?" and with prompting they work thier way down to 20/15 with no mistakes.   Instead of reading the lowest line they can see,  they study the chart, make facial expresssions for five minites while I am standing there with a bad back holding a trial lens.   I don't want to know what they might be able to guess at with a months study.

Usually when I give them an instruction on contact lens insertion, or removal they try to modify it or come back with some alternative.

One shoud retire and change professions every thirty years or so and I wasn't smart enough to do so.

Chip

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## Texas Ranger

Sean, I was quite sure that "whistler's mother" is hanging in the Musee de Orsee, there amonst most of the worlds most famous impressionists works on the 7th floor...it is across the river Seine and up a couple blocks from the Lourve. really quite impressive, used to ba an old train station...

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## MVEYES

Good to know you guys have the facts straight. Sorry about the wrong number.




:D Jerry

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## Cindy Hamlin

> *chip anderson said:* 
> Cindy:  
> 
> I have just gotten old and burned out.  I get so tired of women responding when we put them in front of the eye chart and asking them "What is the lowest line you can read?"  and we get the response:
> 
> "Clearly?"  " I can't see line 9."  Or they start at the 20/200 line and work thier way down.    They read the 20/30 line, we ask: "What's the next line?" and with prompting they work thier way down to 20/15 with no mistakes.   Instead of reading the lowest line they can see,  they study the chart, make facial expresssions for five minites while I am standing there with a bad back holding a trial lens.   I don't want to know what they might be able to guess at with a months study.
> 
> Usually when I give them an instruction on contact lens insertion, or removal they try to modify it or come back with some alternative.
> 
> ...


Chip,
On behalf of all the female patients you either have or will see, I apologize!

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## Sean

> *Texas Ranger said:* 
> Sean, I was quite sure that "whistler's mother" is hanging in the Musee de Orsee, there amonst most of the worlds most famous impressionists works on the 7th floor...it is across the river Seine and up a couple blocks from the Lourve. really quite impressive, used to ba an old train station...


Hmmm.......i'm going to have to check into that one.Is there a chance that it could have been moved at one point or another?

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## Texas Ranger

Sean, it is possible that it could have been moved; I saw it there in October of 2000. It was on the wall adjacent to Van Gogh's self-portrait. Another quite interesting art fact. On the wall opposite the "mona lisa" in the Lourve, is a painting of the coroantion of Napolean, by David(last name), but there is an almost identical painting at Versailles; it is said that the King (Louis?) loved the first one so much that he commissioned a dupicate be made, it took a couple years to paint, I don't know the exact dimensions, but it's maybe 30' x 25', i'd guess, has something like a hundred people. to me, that is an awesome accomplishment!

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## Sean

> *Texas Ranger said:* 
> Sean, it is possible that it could have been moved; I saw it there in October of 2000. It was on the wall adjacent to Van Gogh's self-portrait. Another quite interesting art fact. On the wall opposite the "mona lisa" in the Lourve, is a painting of the coroantion of Napolean, by David(last name), but there is an almost identical painting at Versailles; it is said that the King (Louis?) loved the first one so much that he commissioned a dupicate be made, it took a couple years to paint, I don't know the exact dimensions, but it's maybe 30' x 25', i'd guess, has something like a hundred people. to me, that is an awesome accomplishment!


I would say then that you are correct.........It must have been moved. As i heard that fact about 8-10 years ago.Thanks for the update.:bbg:

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## Sean

Napoleon delayed the battle of Waterloo because he was in severe pain from hemorrhoids :Eek:

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## Texas Ranger

Sean, I can relate, when you're so afflicted, you've got all the battle you can handle!

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## harry a saake

:hammer: In New York State, unless its been repealed, there is a law on the books stating it is illegal to have sex with a bird.

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## Texas Ranger

Harry, makes you wonder, most laws are enacted because the community was offended that someone breaking the law that wasn't the law yet!

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## Lee Prewitt

Did you know that a sneeze can have the force of a hurricane??  No wonder my head snaps and back wrenches sometimes.  :D

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## hcjilson

Col.George Armstrong Custer refused to take a Gatling gun on the ill fated expedition that concluded with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, because he was afraid the caisson would slow him up.

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## Sean

In the Middle Ages it was common to try,convict and execute farm animals on the charge of witchcraft.

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## Sean

The heart of a whale beats on the average of only 9 times per minute.

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## Sean

There are enough building materials in the Egyptian pyramids to build a wall 10ft high and 5ft wide from NY to LA.

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## Sean

The air outside a passenger jet at cruising altitude is about 80 degrees below zero :Eek:

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## Sean

There is a Welsh town called.............Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllll  antysiliogogogoch :Eek:   :Eek:   :Eek:

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## Sean

Until the 1920's it was common for babies in Finland to be delivered in saunas.

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## JennyP

> *Sean said:* 
> Until the 1920's it was common for babies in Finland to be delivered in saunas.


:D So, nowdays  they aren't "saunatized"?  jP

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## Sean

> *JennyP said:* 
> 
> :D So, nowdays  they aren't "saunatized"?  jP


LOL!:bbg: :D :bbg:

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## Sean

Alligators "sing" as part of their courtship ritual.

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## Sean

The thigh bone is stronger than a similary shaped rod made of steel.

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## Sean

Bricks were invented in Egypt over 7,000 years ago.

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## Sean

The brittlebrush plant drops poisonous leaves to kill seedlings that threaten it's space.

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## Sean

Grapefruit...................so - called because it grows in grape like clusters.

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## Sean

> *Texas Ranger said:* 
> Sean, I can relate, when you're so afflicted, you've got all the battle you can handle!


I wonder if anything ever happend to the guy who told him  " I think you should sit this one out":drop:

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## Pete Hanlin

I wonder if anything ever happend to the guy who told him " I think you should sit this one out"
Can't recall a more "sensitive" subject ever being discussed on the Board...
;)
Actually, it does make me recall the strange but true fact that George Brett "sat out" one of the games of the 1980 World Series with a bout of the big H (happily, Pete Rose and the Phillies won that year).

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## Sean

The right lung takes in more air than the left.

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## Sean

Though she was raised in Egypt,Cleopatra was actually of Greek descent.

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## JennyP

> *Sean said:* 
> The thigh bone is stronger than a similary shaped rod made of steel.


That statement kept making me wonder, Sean, and I asked my son about it.  He is a recent grad from a program in Biomedical Engineering (with concentration in Orthopedics, as he puts it)...and this is what he told me.

"The strongest bone is called cortical bone and it has a modulus of up to 20 GPa and stainless steel has a modulus of 200 GPa .    Modulus is:  a unit of strength.
GPa means giga Pascal  which means 1,000,000 Pascals.  And a Pascal is a Newton of force spread over one square meter... so when we say 200 GPa  that means that a one meter square section of steel  could stand up to 200,000,000  (200 million) newtons spread evenly over its surface.
Here's an example:  A one inch cube of steel could hold 29 million pounds
 but an imaginary one inch cube of cortical bone could hold about 2.9 million pounds.  And that's not really the true meaning of modulus  but it's the best way I can explain it. "

So now I am wondering, IF the original statement is true,  then it is not the composition of the femur  which makes it stronger than the steel, but the geometry (shape) of the steel rod which makes it weaker than the bone  model (and I assume we are talking about strength under equal stress.)  

Now, mind you, it is after 1 a.m. as I write this, so my reasoning may be a little fuzzy.  Anyone care to comment?

(by the way, I am enjoying these tidbits of trivia, Sean!) 

 :D   jP

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## mullo

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose 
and ears never stop growing.

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## shanbaum

> *Sean said:* 
> Grapefruit...................so - called because it grows in grape like clusters.


You've obviously never seen a grapefruit tree.

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## harry a saake

:cry:  despite what some of the male counterparts may think, the most flexible part of the body is the eye.

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## mullo

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch 
every year  because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight  of all the books that would occupy the building.

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## Sean

> *shanbaum said:* 
> 
> 
> You've obviously never seen a grapefruit tree.


Well then excuse me...................i only put these up for a bit of fun. I do not deem them to be 100 percent accurate nor scientifically proven.:( So in short.............So what if i have never seen a grapfruit tree!:finger:

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## Cindy Hamlin

> *Sean said:* 
> Grapefruit...................so - called because it grows in grape like clusters.



Shanbaum,
I think you owe Sean an apology.

Check this link:

http://www.dole5aday.com/ReferenceCe...ia/Grapefruit/

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## Steve Machol

Tons of grapefruit grow in the Phoenix area and I have to admit that if it grows in clusters, I've never noticed it.  I'll have to be on the lookout when it starts to ripen.

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## Cindy Hamlin

> *Steve Machol said:* 
> Tons of grapefruit grow in the Phoenix area and I have to admit that if it grows in clusters, I've never noticed it.  I'll have to be on the lookout when it starts to ripen.



Steve, 
You do and let us know and post a pic on the board, too, from the Opticam! :D

Maybe when they are commercially grown they are thinned to make better fruit?

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## Steve Machol

Most of the grapefruit I see are growing on trees in people's yards.  My Mother-in-law has two huge grapefruit trees.

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## Bev Heishman

Maybe grapefruit got its name to fool us into believing the flavor is sweet like grapes.  I remember seeing only single grapefruit on trees at my husband's grandparents home in Florida.

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## Steve Machol

My wife, the family grapefruit expert, says that the grapefruit around here grow individually but that occasionally you'll see a couple of them growing together side-by-side.  Methinks that separate varieties of grapefruit grow differeently, some in clustrer and some individually like oranges.  This would make both Sean and Robert correct up to a point.

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## Cindy Hamlin

> *Steve Machol said:* 
>   This would make both Sean and Robert correct up to a point.


So, it's a draw!

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## harry a saake

:D bananas grow on trees upside down

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## mullo

Women blink nearly twice as much as men .

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## Night Train

We can only hear 20% of an elephants "squeal". The other 80% is at frequencies that cannot be heard by humans.

Cheetahs are the only cats with claws that do NOT retract.

When a dog wants to play, he stretches out his front paws on the ground and sticks his butt in the air. When Pete is trying to tell his wife he wants to play....um...never mind.

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## shanbaum

Well, I've never _seen_ them grow other than singly, but further investigation (including photographic evidence) suggests that grapefruit may indeed grow in clusters as well as singly.

I learned something else I didn't know, which is that grapefruit is a hybrid of the pummelo and the orange; and that a tangelo is a hybrid of the grapefruit and the tangerine.

I wonder if pummeloes grow in clusters...

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## Steve Machol

> *shanbaum said:* 
> I wonder if pummeloes grow in clusters...


Well then they'd be called _grapepummels_, wouldn't they?  ;)

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## mullo

Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches .

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## Cindy Hamlin

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance. 

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. 

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes. 

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. 

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. 

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite. 

Two-thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in New Jersey. 

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

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## chip anderson

The first school for blacks in the U.S. was started by 
Robert E. Lee, the second was started by Stonewall Jackson.  
Both were illegal at the time.

Chip

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## Sean

The Statue Of Liberty's mouth is Three feet wide.

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## Sean

A snail has over 14,000 teeth.................................all on it's tounge.

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## Sean

Humans can detect  the scent of "Musk" in concentrations as low as 1:32 parts per billion.

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## Sean

Opium was introduced to China by English traders.

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## Sean

The Australian Red Kangaroo can leap 27 feet in a single bound.:drop:

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## Sean

A King Cobra's venom is so deadly that one gram can kill over 100 poeple. :Eek:

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## mullo

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain

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## mullo

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the 
letters only on one row of the keyboard.

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## Sean

Crocodiles do not chew their food...................They swallow it whole.

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## Sean

The human brain contains a higher percentage of water than human blood.

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## Sean

The "Great White" shark never gets cancer.......................

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## mullo

Butterflies taste with their feet.

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## mullo

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

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## mullo

In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all of 
the world's nuclear weapons combined.

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## Sean

The electric eel puts out enough power to light a small lightbulb.:idea:

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## Sean

A Bottle-nosed whale can dive 3,000 ft in under 2 minutes.

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## mullo

On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens 
everyyear.

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## mullo

On average people fear spiders more than they do death.

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## mullo

Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for 
dating are already married.

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## Shwing

55% of all statistics are made up;-}

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## Suzy W

I know never to play trival pursuit with anyone in this thread.  
And I thought my uncle had alot of "interesting" facts stored in his head.   At least I can say that I'm learning something new everyday reading this thread. :Eek:  

Suzy

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## Sean

Glad you like'em.........even though they seem a bit off the wall now and then. If you have any...........please share.:)

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## mullo

> *Shwing said:* 
> 55% of all statistics are made up;-}



Easy punk..................................or else. 
;)

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## Cindy Hamlin

Sharks can sense a drop of blood in 25 gallons of water. 

A weddell seal can hold its breath for 7 hours. 

Mosquitoes are attracted to people who have just eaten bananas. 

A cockroach can live for several weeks without its head. It 
only dies of starvation. 

Chimps live in groups that each have their own culture. 

Killer Whales capture fish by slapping them. 

A male moth can smell a female from 7 miles away.

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## Sean

Zip Codes in the United States were not implemented until 1963.

The Zip in Zip Code stands for Zone Improvement Plan.

The highest postal Zip Code in the United States is 99950.......for Ketchikan, Alaska.

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## Sean

The number 1 followed by 100 zeros is called a ""googol." The number 1 followed by a googol of zeros is called a "googolplex."
:drop:

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## chip anderson

Strange fact:   In Jackson, MS they appearently don't use or know what Zip Codes are for!  My address is 4800 I-55 N,  Box 11, Jackson, MS 39211.   My box is a shopping center box.   My insurance agent's address is:   P.O.Box   11,    Jackson, MS  39101.

Send me anything and show the Box number with the correct ZIP code and , you guessed it , He gets it.   I have to have my mail shipped not showing any box number.

Chip

By the way does anywhere (Washington, D.C., perhaps) have a ZIP code or area code that either begins or ends in 666?

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## mullo

Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

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## Sean

The Japanese Archerfish squirts a stream of water as far as 6 feet in order to knock insects into the water.

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## mullo

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

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## Sean

The Post-It note was invented by accident.The creator was trying to make a much stronger adhesive.

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## Cindy Hamlin

> *mullo said:* 
> 
> 
> 
> Easy punk..................................or else. 
> ;)



Love the pic, Mullo!:D   LOL!

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## mullo

Thanks Cindy!!!! Guess which one Shwing is......hahahaha

(sorry buddy) :D

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## Sean

There is a town in Michigan that is known only as Y.

P.S. Mullo..........Did you get the Mouse drivers i sent?:shiner:

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## mullo

A snail can sleep for three years. 



Yes Sean......seen it before.........very nice!!!!!

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## Sean

An eagle can kill and carry a small deer.

A swollen underground river in the former Soviet Union caused a mountain to move 1 mile in 8 days.

As research for his book PAPER LION, author George Plimpton actually played in a Detroit Lions football exhibition game.

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## shimsham

[QUOTE]*ioconnell said:* 





Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland!


I cannot vouch for that one because I have never seen a windmill in Ireland!

there's a whole farm of them in Gweedore in Donegal! (so it's still the forgotten county) and as far as i remember (its been a few months since i was there) they do indeed go clockwise. do you know why?

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## Sean

The longest baseball game on record went 26 innings and ended in a 1-1 tie between Brooklyn and Boston.

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## Diane

[QUOTE]*shimsham said:* 



> *ioconnell said:* 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland!
> 
> 
> ...


OK,

I'm only going to guess it would be because of the angle of the spokes (don't know what they are called).  Perhaps in Ireland, it is customary for them to be build in an opposite fashion, thereby causing them to turn different.

Diane

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## Sean

In the Italian version of the movie Star Wars,the robot R2-D2 is renamed C1-P8.

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## Sean

The tounge of the South American giant anteater is almost two feet long.

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## chip anderson

Sean:   Can we import some?   Do they like fire ants?

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## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> Sean:   Can we import some?   Do they like fire ants?


I'll look into it. ;) Are fire ant's a problem in your neck of the woods?

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## chip anderson

Very big problem, more so since the Northern Government of Occupation deemed we couldn't use Myrex.

Chip

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## Cindy Hamlin

When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second!

An earthquake on Dec. 16, 1811 caused parts of the Mississippi River to flow backwards!

_(I had to check out the Mississippi River fact and found this link:
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science111404.html )_

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## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> Very big problem, more so since the Northern Government of Occupation deemed we couldn't use Myrex.
> 
> Chip


Sorry to hear that.........those things are nasty. :(

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## shimsham

who are the northern goverment of occupation?

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## Cindy Hamlin

> *shimsham said:* 
> who are the northern goverment of occupation?



Shimsham,
There was once a great war in the US called the civil war.  It put brother against brother and separated families.  Chip lives in the South and he is referring to the US Government in Washington, DC (in the north).

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## shimsham

i thought it was a reference to george w.
we had our own civil war in ireland after gaining independence from england with similar results

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## Sean

There are actually 132 islands in the archipelago.

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## JennyP

As of this evening...693 "opticians" found in their advanced search! 
Wonder if any other opticians didn't think it important to list their profession on the profile?

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## Steve Machol

Off Topic:  I've noticed that most of the people who register don't put in anything for Occupation.  Based on a suggestion from John R, I've now made this a required field during registration.  We'll see what happens now.

----------


## Sean

F.B.I. agents were not allowed to carry guns until 1934.

----------


## shimsham

just so you know steve, hokey pokey is called hokey kokey in ireland, probably in england too. or is is hokey cokey?

----------


## mullo

All polar bears are left-handed.

----------


## Sean

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning by almost 10 percent off the vertical line.

----------


## Sean

Actor Jimmy Stewart was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force Reserve.

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

Found this fact interesting:

Over 2500 left handed people a year are killed from using products made for right handed people!

----------


## Sean

> *Cindy Hamlin said:* 
> Found this fact interesting:
> 
> Over 2500 left handed people a year are killed from using products made for right handed people!


Eeek!  :Eek:  Maybe i'll take heed the next time i use one of those right handed products.:D

----------


## Sean

The first Starbucks in Iowa opened this September. Now there are only 6 more states that are Starbucks-free.

----------


## shimsham

is that u.s. wide or world wide?

----------


## Sean

> *shimsham said:* 
> is that u.s. wide or world wide?


U.S.A..............Are there  many of them on your side of the pond?

----------


## Sean

Julia Child worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency,during World War II.

----------


## shimsham

in big towns, i have heard of some streets with only two.

----------


## Sean

Cochineal is the name of a red dye made from the bodies of cactus beetles.

----------


## Sean

Even the ancient Egyptians played board games.One of their games was called Senet and had players race around the board.

----------


## Sean

Bees store nectar for honey in a specialized "Honey Stomach."

----------


## Sean

Bureaucracy is the wonderful process that enables ten men to do the work of one.:shiner:

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

> *Sean said:* 
> Eeek!  Maybe i'll take heed the next time i use one of those right handed products.:D



How many products are expressly for lefties that you can think of.

I can think of only two:

Spiral notebooks (the spiral is on the other side)
Scissors

So, now we must picture how the deaths occurred with spiral notebooks and scissors!

----------


## chip anderson

Cindy:  More products for lefties.

1) All surgical tools.
2) Fishing reels
3) Golf Clubs
4) Guns
5) Most automotive tools are not dexter or sinister selective.

----------


## yzf-r1

i wonder if it is possible for us lefties to gang together and get the lawmakers to make it illegal to make something leftie-ist, or for failing to make a leftie friendly equivalent to right-handed products

Yahya "lets sue them" Vali

----------


## Sean

Cindy,
How about guitars and baseball gloves.

----------


## Sean

The first US Super Bowl game between the Packers and Chiefs wasn't even sold out.

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

> *Cindy Hamlin said:* 
> How many products are expressly for lefties that you can think of.
> 
> I can think of only two:
> 
> Spiral notebooks (the spiral is on the other side)
> Scissors
> 
> So, now we must picture how the deaths occurred with spiral notebooks and scissors!



I stand corrected!  I am sure the gun one is a BIG part of it!  And the auto tools could be dicey, too.

----------


## Sean

The island country of Madagascar produces most of the world's vanilla.

----------


## Sean

Bart Simpson's voice on THE SIMPSONS isn't that of a little boy. It's actually a 42-year-old woman named Nancy Cartwright. DOH!

----------


## Sean

There is no specified number of dimples on a golf ball;they range in number from 300 to 500.

----------


## Sean

Both Tom Selleck and Nick Nolte were originally picked to play Indiana Jones in the movie RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  :Confused:

----------


## Sean

The first English colony in the US,began in 1587 with 117 settlers.But it was lost with hardly a trace by 1590.

----------


## Pete Hanlin

The first English colony in the US,began in 1587 with 117 settlers.But it was lost with hardly a trace by 1590.
Is that the colony that left one mysterious word (I want to say it was "Roanoke," but that's a city in Virginia- it sounded something like that, though) carved on a tree?

----------


## Sean

American baseball pitching great Sandy Koufax went to college on a basketball scholarship.

----------


## Sean

Vice-President Charles Dawes (under Coolidge) wrote the music for IT'S ALL IN THE GAME,recorded by THE FOUR TOPS and others...............

----------


## chip anderson

Captain Kangaroo turned 75 recently, which is odd, because he's
 never looked a day under 75.  (Birthday 6/27/27)  It reminded me of the following story.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Some people have been a bit offended that Lee Marvin is buried in a grave alongside 3 and 4 star generals at Arlington National Cemetery.
 His marker gives his name, rank (PVT) and service (USMC).  Nothing  else.
Here's a guy who was only a famous movie star who served his time,. 
Why the heck does he rate burial with these guys?Well, following is the amazing answer:
I always liked Lee Marvin, but did not know the extent of his Corps experiences.  In a time when many Hollywood stars served their country  in the Armed forces, often in rear-echelon posts where they were carefully protected, only to be trotted out to perform for the cameras in war bond promotions, Lee Marvin was a genuine hero.  He won the Navy Cross, at  Iwo Jima. 
There is only one higher Naval award...  the Medal Of Honor.
If that is a surprising comment on the true character of the man,
he  credits his sergeant with an even greater show of bravery.
Dialog From The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson: His guest was Lee Marvin.
Johnny said, "Lee, I'll bet a lot of people are unaware that you
were a Marine in the initial landing at Iwo Jima...and that during the  course  of  that action you earned the Navy Cross and were severely wounded."
"Yeah, yeah...  I got shot square in the *** and they gave me the
 Cross  for securing a hot spot about halfway up Suribachi...  bad thing  about getting shot up on a mountain is guys gettin' shot hauling you down.  
But Johnny, at Iwo I served under the bravest man I ever knew...  We  both  got the Cross the same day, but what he did for his Cross made mine  look cheap in comparison.  The dumb ******* actually stood up on Red Beach and directed his troops to move forward and get the hell off the beach.

 That Sergeant and I have been lifelong friends.  When they brought me  off Suribachi we  passed the Sergeant and he lit a smoke and passed it  to  me lying on my belly on the litter and said, 'Where'd they get you Lee?'

"Well Bob...  if you make it home before me, tell Mom to sell the outhouse!"

"Johnny, I'm not lying...  Sergeant Keeshan was the bravest man I  ever  knew.....  Bob Keeshan...  You and the world know him as CaptainKangaroo."

----------


## Sean

It definitely change my view of the Captain.Who would of guessed...............

----------


## Sean

Ian Fleming named his character James Bond after the author of a book on West Indian birds.

----------


## Sean

Snapping turtle eggs will bounce........;)

----------


## Sean

The top of Seattle's Space Needle is actually a rotating restaurant.It makes one complete revolution in an hour.

----------


## chip anderson

Sean:   It used to turn faster and they had to slow it down because people were becoming nausious.

----------


## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> Sean:   It used to turn faster and they had to slow it down because people were becoming nausious.


Do you know how fast it used to spin?? It must have really been moving to give people motion sickness. :Eek:

----------


## Shwing

Oak trees do not have acorns until they are fifty years old or older.

----------


## Sean

The largest great white shark ever caught on rod and reel weighed more than a ton.-----2,664 lbs.:drop:

----------


## Sean

Never once in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories does Holmes say, "Elementary, my dear Watson!"

----------


## Sean

Hummingbirds don't walk,their legs are too weak.

----------


## Sean

Benjamin Franklin originally wanted the national symbol of the United States to be the turkey,not the bald eagle.

----------


## Sean

Alfred Nobel,for whom the Nobel Prize is named,was the inventor of dynamite.

----------


## Sean

The koala bear eats only eucalyptus tree leaves.

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

Some may be repeats:

Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a bellybutton.

A pack-a-day smoker will lose approximately 2 teeth every 10 yrs.

People do not get sick from cold weather; it's from being indoors a lot more.


When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop ...  even your heart!

Only 7% of the population are lefties.

40 people are sent to the hospital for dog bites every minute.

Babies are born without knee caps.  They don't appear until they are 2-6 years old.

The average person over fifty will have spent 5 years waiting in lines.

The toothbrush was invented in 1498.

The average housefly lives for one month.

40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year.

A coat hanger is 44 inches long when straightened.

The average computer user blinks 7 times a minute.

Your feet are bigger in the afternoon than the rest of the day.

Most of us have eaten a spider in our sleep.

The REAL reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to search for water.

The only 2 animals that can see behind itself without turning it's head are the rabbit and the parrot.

John Travolta turned down the starring roles in "An Officer and a Gentleman"
and "Tootsie".

Michael Jackson owns the rights to the South Carolina State anthem.

In most television commercials advertising milk, a mixture of white paint and a little thinner is used in place of the milk.

Prince Charles and Prince William NEVER travel on the same airplane just in case there is a crash.

The first Harley Davidson motorcycle built in 1903 used a tomato can for a carburetor.

Most hospitals make money by selling the umbilical cords cut from women who give birth.  They are reused in vein transplant surgery.

Humphrey Bogart was related to Princess Diana.  They were seventh cousins.

If coloring weren't added to Coca-Cola, it would be green

----------


## Sean

Lucille Ball was kicked out of drama school because she was to shy.

----------


## Diane

Got this site in an e-mail this morning.  It' cute.

Diane

http://www.sunbelt-software.com/stu/eye.htm

----------


## Sean

> *Diane said:* 
> Got this site in an e-mail this morning.  It' cute.
> 
> Diane
> 
> http://www.sunbelt-software.com/stu/eye.htm


Now that's what i call strange............that's great!:D

----------


## Sean

Asbury Park,New Jersey,once had a fly-in movie where patrons would show up in their planes to watch the film. :Rolleyes:

----------


## Sean

A spoonerism.............the act of transposing letters at the beginning of words,is named for the former head of an Oxford college.

----------


## Sean

Madurodam,Netherlands is home to a complete miniature replica of the country of Holland.

----------


## Sean

Thomas Nast is credited with creating our modern image of Santa Claus. He also did the Democratic and Republican Party symbols.

----------


## Sean

Cuban leader Fidel Castro in his younger days was a quality baseball pitcher,and was once given a tryout by the Washington Senators team.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> Rice paper is made from the pitch of a Taiwanese tree........not from rice.



Maybe a new material to clean glasses with.

----------


## Sean

You can go and try to find diamonds in the U.S.  The Murfreesboro Diamond Mine in Arkansas is open to the public.

----------


## Sean

Author Rudyard Kipling was fired from his reporter job at the San Francisco Examiner because his boss thought of him as an amateur.

----------


## Sean

Leo, the MGM movie mascot,has a marked grave and is buried in Gillette, New Jersey.

----------


## chip anderson

I went to most of my elementary, junior high and high school in the state of Texas.  Took Texas history.  Learned all about , Travis, Milam, Santa Anna, Sam Houston,  Deaf Smith, etc.  Even the battles including that at San Jacinto  (that's San Jah Sin Toe, reguardless of how those folks in California think it's pronounced).

No one ever mentioned, taught, or wrote in any of my education of The Yellow Rose of Texas.   No one mentioned that the Texans sucess at the Battle of San Jacinto and theby Texas independence was due to General Santa Anna being distracted by young woman of dubvious morals and mixed ancestry in his tent during the battle.

Chip.

----------


## Sean

"........it was all started by a mouse." Walt Disney.

Mickey Mouse debuted in 1928's  "Steam Boat Willie"

"Kiss Me" Are the only words that have ever been spoken by PLUTO.

"Disney Stars & Motor Cars" Parade features classic American cars from 1929 to 1951.

Mickey's Sorcerer Hat at the the Disney Studios is 122 ft tall.

DOPEY was the only dwarf without a beard.

DONALD DUCK'S middle name is " Fauntleroy."

----------


## chip anderson

At the end of the day in Cinderella's Section Doves were released, they flew around for a while then returned to the cages they were released from.   After a while redwing hawks (a protected species) began to take stock of the situation and began hovering in wait prior to the release time for the doves.  Disney eventually stopped releasing doves as they felt the slaughter was inhumane.   No one in the audience ever complained.

Chip

----------


## Sean

Hhmm.........Never knew they had spectator sport's LOL! that's great Chip!:D :cheers: :D

----------


## Sean

The first female mayor of any U.S. town was Susanna Medora.Elected to the post in Argonia,Kansas,April 4th,1887.

----------


## Sean

The state gem of Washington is petrified wood.

----------


## Sean

Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens' real first name is James.
Jesse is a nickname.

----------


## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> At the end of the day in Cinderella's Section Doves were released, they flew around for a while then returned to the cages they were released from.   After a while redwing hawks (a protected species) began to take stock of the situation and began hovering in wait prior to the release time for the doves.  Disney eventually stopped releasing doves as they felt the slaughter was inhumane.   No one in the audience ever complained.
> 
> Chip


For the bird's:D 

In the 1700's, it was estimated there as  many as 3 billion passenger pigeons in the U.S. The species was extinct by 1914.

----------


## Sean

Spy fiction writer John Le Carre is a pseudonym for author David John Moore Cornwell.

----------


## Sean

Duct tape was invented in 1930. It was originally called Dryback.

----------


## JennyP

> *Sean said:* 
> Spy fiction writer John Le Carre is a pseudonym for author David John Moore Cornwell.


Any relation to Patricia Cornwell, I wonder?

If you haven't discovered her books, you are in for a treat!

----------


## Chris Ryser

sEE aTTACHMENT aND yOU wILL fIND oUT

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

> *JennyP said:* 
> Any relation to Patricia Cornwell, I wonder?
> 
> If you haven't discovered her books, you are in for a treat!



Jenny,
She (Patricia Cornwell) lives here in Richmond and is quite the colorful character.  Did you see the Primetime Special where she is trying to identify Jack the Ripper?  She has sunk a good bit of her money into the investigation.

----------


## Sean

The town of Centralia,Pennsylvania, has been burning since 1961.Underground coal mines caught fire and can't be extinguished.

----------


## Sean

Actress Anne Baxter is the grand daughter of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

----------


## Sean

American auto racers used to avoid green cars, thinking the color unlucky.

----------


## chip anderson

Sean:  They also avoid peanuts in the pits, the race car and people near the racing envionment.   Both the green color and peanuts were associated with disapportante amount of fatal wrecks.

Chip

----------


## JennyP

> *Sean said:* 
> Actress Anne Baxter is the grand daughter of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.


Another Frank Lloyd Wright trivia thing:

He invented Lincoln Logs for his son who wanted to play with building blocks when he visited his dad's design area.  (I hope I have this story right! It was told on a show about the top 100 toys of the  last century... which included slinkys and  Etch -a-Sketch, 2 of my favorites!)

----------


## Sean

The only unmarried U.S. President was James Buchanan,the 15th President,whose term ran from 1857 to 1861.

----------


## Sean

Golfer Sam Snead won 81 PGA tournaments,but he never managed to win the US open.

----------


## Sean

Swanson Foods introduced the worlds first frozen TV dinner (it was a turkey meal), in 1954.:idea:

----------


## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> Sean:  They also avoid peanuts in the pits, the race car and people near the racing envionment.   Both the green color and peanuts were associated with disapportante amount of fatal wrecks.
> 
> Chip


 In the 1949 first season of NASCAR auto racing, Sara Christian finished 13th in points. No woman has finished higher since.

----------


## Sean

Water boils at 212 degrees F at sea level. For every 540 feet of altitude, that number decreases by about 1 degree.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> Water boils at 212 degrees F at sea level. For every 540 feet of altitude, that number decreases by about 1 degree.



Giving it to us in metric.............?

----------


## Sean

> *Chris Ryser said:* 
> Giving it to us in metric.............?


Water boils at 100 degrees celsius. For every 164.592 meters of altitude that number decreases by about -17.22 degrees celsius.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> Water boils at 100 degrees celsius. For every 164.592 meters of altitude that number decreases by about -17.22 degrees celsius.


That would mean that at an altitude of 1316 meters water would boil at -37.76 ???

----------


## Sean

> *Chris Ryser said:* 
> That would mean that at an altitude of 1316 meters water would boil at -37.76 ???


 A typo on my part ....should not have put - in front of the 17.22 centigrade.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> A typo on my part ....should not have put - in front of the 17.22 centigrade.


Thank you..........................

At least I can now have a warm coffee when going up the hills.

----------


## Sean

> *Chris Ryser said:* 
> Thank you..........................
> 
> At least I can now have a warm coffee when going up the hills.


That will teach me to use a pencil and a piece of paper instead of the good o'l noggin when trying to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius.Good thing i didn't have to try to change the numbers into Kelvin or Rankine.................... :Eek:

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> That will teach me to use a pencil and a piece of paper instead of the good o'l noggin when trying to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius.Good thing i didn't have to try to change the numbers into Kelvin or Rankine....................


Fahrenheit, Celsius and the old Rheomur temperature calculations and conversions were part of the courses we had to take back in Switzerland during the opticians apprentiship.
Also had to learn to adjust barometers for different altitudes, depending where the buyers lived, big difference when somebody lived on the hill or down in the valley or in between.

I wonder if anybody cares about that these days ?

:hammer:

----------


## Sean

This is all that i remember............Rankine is a temperature scale that,like Kelvin,set's zero at  absolute zero,but uses Fahrenheit degrees. And in order to convert Fahrenheit to Rankine you need to add 459............point somethin somethin. Does that sound right? Or am i way off base?

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> This is all that i remember............Rankine is a temperature scale that,like Kelvin,set's zero at  absolute zero,but uses Fahrenheit degrees. And in order to convert Fahrenheit to Rankine you need to add 459............point somethin somethin. Does that sound right? Or am i way off base?



Actually.......................I dont remember.......thats bad because it  is long term memory. 

Would have to look it up, but what the heck, Napoleon introduced the metric system which is the easiest of all of them

----------


## Sean

Chris,
Just a word of thank's for helping me remember things that i thought i forgot...........or forgot that i thought for that matter.Now on with the show.

:cheers: :cheers: :cheers:

----------


## Sean

Identical twins do not have identical fingerprints.

----------


## Sean

Alfred Hitchcock's film ROPE was shot in 10-minute takes. Actors had to be perfect throughout or start the segment over. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

Plato is said to have rewritten the opening sentence of  THE REPUBLIC at least fifty times.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> Plato is said to have rewritten the opening sentence of  THE REPUBLIC at least fifty times.



Just figure if every Optiboard posting is re-written 50 times, but I dont think we'r all Platos

----------


## Sean

> *Chris Ryser said:* 
> Just figure if every Optiboard posting is re-written 50 times, but I dont think we'r all Platos


Well i for for one am not. Just trying to have some fun here. Hopefully make some  OB members smile and give them something to think about for the rest of the the day........besides work.

----------


## Night Train

The odd fact that Ostriches eyes are bigger than there brains was repeated 3 times in this thread. Hmmm...what does that say about the brain of the optiboarder?

----------


## Sean

> *Night Train said:* 
> The odd fact that Ostriches eyes are bigger than there brains was repeated 3 times in this thread. Hmmm...what does that say about the brain of the optiboarder?

----------


## Sean

Boxer Jersey Joe Walcott's real name was Arnold Raymond Cream.

Dartmouth was the last Ivy League university to go co-ed, in 1972.

In World War II , US Marines used a code based on the Navajo language in every Pacific battle from 1942 to 1945.

The English word with the most consecutive vowels is ....................queueing, which means .........in the act of lining up.


In ancient Egypt, citizens could pay their taxes in honey.

----------


## Sean

Our skin is constantly dying and flaking off. Over an average
lifetime,a person sheds 45 pounds of skin.

During World War II, the Oscar award for achievement in 
moviemaking was made of plaster.

The African goliath frog is the largest frog in the world. Just it's 
body,not including the legs,can be up to a foot long.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> 
> The African goliath frog is the largest frog in the world. Just it's 
> body,not including the legs,can be up to a foot long.



Eat one live toad the first thing in the morning.........................


nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.


:hammer:

----------


## Sean

Lahnaphobia.........................is the fear of vegetables.  :Eek:  

Antofagasta, Chile is the driest place on earth, with annual rainfall ranging from zero to one-tenth of a millimeter.

The most common element in the earth's soil is aluminum.

----------


## Sean

Thomas Watson,one-time chairman of IBM,said in 1943........." I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
:drop:

----------


## Sean

There is actually a Crayola crayon called
Macaroni & Cheese. ;)

----------


## Sean

Ferdinand Porsche designed the original Volkswagen in 1936. He later went on to make his own cars.

Kathleen Lindsay (1903-1973) wrote 904 novels under six different pen names.

James Crichton (1560-1582) could speak 22 different languages by the time he was 15 years old.

----------


## Sean

Milton Hershey,the founder of Hershey's Chocolate,only had a fouth grade education.

Due to a paper shortage,Latvia once printed postage stamps on the backs of german war maps.

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

A newborn baby reindeer at one day of age can out run the fastest person on earth.

----------


## Sean

Lightning has a temperature of about 50,000 degrees F, while the surface of the sun is only 10,000 degrees F.

----------


## Sean

The world-famous Barbie (R) doll has a full name.........
Barbara Millicent Roberts.

----------


## Sean

Boris Karloff narrated the 1966 animated TV special HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS.:)

----------


## Sean

English has the largest vocabulary of any language,with over 800,000 words available for use.

----------


## Jim G

The average bottle of champagne has 56,000,000 bubbles!

Happy (hic) New Year (hic) to everyone!

----------


## Sean

> *Jim G said:* 
> The average bottle of champagne has 56,000,000 bubbles!
> 
> Happy (hic) New Year (hic) to everyone!



:D :cheers: :D

----------


## Sean

A  "Jiffy" is a scientific term for 1/100 of a second. It has also been used to describe one AC cycle,or 1/60 of a second.

----------


## Jedi

PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS

On Feb. 23, 1935, the New York Herald-Tribune reported on page 3: 

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers' League at the opening session of the organization's 103d semi-annual meeting held yesterday at the Hotel New Yorker. 
The puzzlers explained that the forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of siliceous volcanic dust.

Spell check anyone?

----------


## Jedi

The third Star Wars movie was originally titled Revenge of the Jedi
It was changed before the movie came out, because revenge was not a Jedi trait.

----------


## Chris Ryser

Did You Know?
You might think that New Zealand has the most sheep per capita in the world, but here's a fact to turn every antipodean farmer green with envy.
While New Zealand only boasts 20 sheep per person, the lucky lads on the Falkland Isles, with over 700,000 sheep to 2,000 people get 350 each!

----------


## Sean

> *Chris Ryser said:* 
> Did You Know?
> You might think that New Zealand has the most sheep per capita in the world, but here's a fact to turn every antipodean farmer green with envy.
> While New Zealand only boasts 20 sheep per person, the lucky lads on the Falkland Isles, with over 700,000 sheep to 2,000 people get 350 each!


:)

----------


## Sean

Lumber 2x4's really measure 1-1/2 inches by 3-1/2 inches.

----------


## optispares

> Jedi said,
>                             PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS 
>  is the longest english word


 actually,
       Methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylleucylphen-
ylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylgluta-
mylglysylalanylphenylalanylvalylprolylphenylalanylyalylthre-
onylleucylglcycylaspartylprolylglicylisoleucyglutamylgluta-
minlserylleucyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucylisoleu-
cylglutamylalanylglyclyalanylaspartylalanylleucyglutamylle-
ucylgluycylisoleucylproluylphenylalanyserylaspartyprolylleu-
celalanylaspartylglycylprolylthreonylisolleucyglutaminylaspa-
raginylalanythreonylleucylarginylalanylphenylalanylalanylal-
anylglycylvalylthreonylprolylalanylglutaminylcysteinylphen-
ylalanylglglutamylmethionylleucyalanylleucylisoleucylarginyl-
glutaminyllysylhistidylprolyuthreonylisoleucylprolylisoleuc-
ylglycylleucylleucylmethionyltyrosylalanylasbaraginylleucyl-
valylphenylalanylsparaginyyllysylglycylisoleucylaspartylglut-
amylphenylalanylyltyrosylalanylglutaminylcysteinylglutamyll-
ysylvalylglycylvalylspartylserylvalylleucylvallalanylaspart-
ylvalylprolylvalvlglutaminylglutamylserylalanylprolylpheny-
lalalrginylglutaminylalanylalanylleucylarginylhistidylasp-
araginylvalylalalprolylisoleucylphenylalanylisoleucylcystei-
nylprolyprolylaspartylalanylaspartylaspartyspartyleucylle-
ucylarginylglutaminylisoleucylalanylseryltyroslglycylargin-
ylglycyltyrosylthreonyltyrosylleucylleucylserylarginlalanyl-
glycylvalylthreonylglycylalanylglutamylasparaginylarginyla-
nylalanylleucylprolylleucylaspaaginylhistidylleucylvalylalan-
yllysylleucyllysylglutamyltyrosylasparagimylalanylalanypro-
lylprolylleucylglutaminylglycylphenlalanylglycylisoleyucyls-
erylalanylprolylaspartylglutaminylvalyllysylalanylalanylisol-
eucylalspartylalanylglycylalanylalanylglycylalanylasoleucyls  e-
rylglycylserylalanylisoleucylbalyllysylisoleucylisoleucylglu  ta-
mylglutaminylhistidylasparaginylisoleucylglutamylpronylglu-0
tamyllysylmethionylluecylalanylalanyoeucyllysylvalylpheny-
lalanylvalylglutamilylprolylmethionyllysylalanylalanylthreo-
nylarginylserine.

This word is a Tryptophan synthetase A protein, an enzyme that has 267 amino acids, and makes a record of 1,909 letters. It is the term for the formula C1289H2051N343O375S8. 

The longest word in English dictionaries is: PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS 
 don't ask me how to pronounce it :drop:  try spell check on it?? :Confused:  :bbg: :bbg:

----------


## Jedi

Optispares, I stand corrected.

Actually what I meant was longest english word that I use on a regular basis. ;)

----------


## Jedi

The fear of eyes is Ommetaphobia or Ommatophobia.

Hey, quit looking at me!

----------


## Sean

Camels have three set's of eyelids. The third is transparent .............

----------


## Sean

Some species of hummingbirds can flap their wings over 200
times a second. But for most the average is 50 per second.

----------


## Sean

A polar bear's fur is not white. It's hollow and transparent but it reflects light extremely well.

----------


## Sean

Koala bears and humans have very similar fingerprint patterns.

----------


## chm2023

> *ioconnell said:* 
> Correct me if I am wrong but was the Last Supper painting damaged by monks carving and archway through the wall where it was painted. Other Damage was caused by a new technique used by Da Vinci in which he used a different medium  to paint his picture, I think!
> Was it not Leonardo's sculpture of David that was destroyed by the soldiers.
> 
> some facts I have come across
> 
> 
> 
> The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1!
> ...

----------


## Sean

A dime has 118 ridges around it's edge,but a quarter only has 119.

In proportion,if the planet Jupiter were a basketball,then the sun would be the size of the 
Lousianna Super Dome.

----------


## Sean

Who invented the SCUBA tank?.............................Believe it or not
it was Jacques Cousteau.

----------


## Optical Plumber

> *hcjilson said:* 
> Stewardess is the only word in the English language that is typed entirely with the left hand! ...


On my typewriter ALL the words are typed with the index finger of the right hand!

Terry

----------


## Sean

> *Optical Plumber said:* 
> On my typewriter ALL the words are typed with the index finger of the right hand!
> 
> Terry


:bbg: :cheers: :bbg:

----------


## Sean

The 1959 movie BEN-HUR and the 1997 movie TITANIC are the only films to win 11 Academy Awards each.

----------


## Optical Plumber

I don't know if this falls under the category of strange or not, but polls have shown it to be a little known fact, especially south of the 49th parallel:

   Who is the USA's largest trading partner in terms of the dollar value of the goods sold?

*CANADA!*

Terry :D 
(one of the strangest of the lot!)

----------


## Sean

> *Optical Plumber said:* 
> I don't know if this falls under the category of strange or not, but polls have shown it to be a little known fact, especially south of the 49th parallel:
> 
>    Who is the USA's largest trading partner in terms of the dollar value of the goods sold?
> 
> *CANADA!*
> 
> Terry :D 
> (one of the strangest of the lot!)


If ya have more......please share.:D 

WD-40 got it's name because there ended up being 40 attempts
before the creation of the "Water Displacing" substance.

----------


## Sean

Austria was the very first country to use postcards starting in 1869.

----------


## Sean

Milton Bradley originally wanted to name the game Twister...........
Pretzel. But he could not since the name was copyrighted.

----------


## Sean

Mount Whitney is the highest mountain in the continental US. And Zabriskie Point (in Death Valley) is the lowest point. And what makes this strange is................They are less than eighty miles apart.

----------


## Sean

The YKK that is stamped on the zippers of Levis stands for
Yoshida Koyo Kabushibibaisha,the worlds largest zipper manufacturer.

----------


## Sean

You are born with 300 bones,but as an adult only possess 206.
Bones fuse together with age.

----------


## Sean

Tuna can swim over 100 miles in a day...................

----------


## Sean

House mice live for roughly one year, but in their lifespan they
produce up to 8 litters, or about 56 offspring.

----------


## Sean

Coca-Cola was first served in Atlanta.
In 1886 a place called Jacob's Pharmacy started serving it. The formula was created by a pharmacist named John Pemberton.

----------


## Sean

Leo Hirshfield introduced the "Tootsie Roll" candy in 1896.
The idea for the name of the candy came from Hirshfield's daughter's nickname Tootsie.:)

----------


## Sean

Blocks of tea were used as money in 18th Century Siberia.

----------


## Sean

Is the fear of marshmallows.
:drop:

----------


## Sean

A modern violin is made up of over 70 different pieces.

----------


## sarahr

Just had to visit this thread as I was afraid Groundhog day had really happened.  :Confused:  Every day for the last few weeks, it seems that I have had an information e-mail letting me know that sean has posted in strange facts. IT'S TRUE? Sean, how many strange facts can one person know?  


Here's a strange fact while I'm here..

In the 'olden days' doctors would test for diabetes by sipping the urine of the patient to taste it's sweetness. (uurgghh) Bet Diabetes was pretty rare then huh!:cheers:

----------


## Sean

> *sarahr said:* 
> Just had to visit this thread as I was afraid Groundhog day had really happened.  Every day for the last few weeks, it seems that I have had an information e-mail letting me know that sean has posted in strange facts.


Sorry about the abundant emails.........you can turn them off by not subscribing to the thread. Hope you don't though.....rather see the post's enjoyed from time to time. :D





> Sean, how many strange facts can one person know?


Don't know but i still have a few more up my sleeve.;)







> Here's a strange fact while I'm here..
> 
> In the 'olden days' doctors would test for diabetes by sipping the urine of the patient to taste it's sweetness. (uurgghh) Bet Diabetes was pretty rare then huh!:cheers:


:drop:

----------


## Sean

The first product to have a bar-code was Wrigley's gum.

----------


## hcjilson

This is a slice of golf history I thought you might enjoy. I never knew
why there were 18 holes on a golf course. Why do full-length golf
courses have 18 holes, and not 20, or 10 or an even dozen? Very few
golfers know the answer to this one -- but the following is true.

During a discussion among the club's membership board at St. Andrews in
1858, one of the members pointed out that it takes exactly 18 shots to
polish off a fifth of Scotch. By limiting himself to only one shot of
Scotch per hole, the Scot figured a round of golf was finished when the
Scotch ran out. And this is how the decision was made to build St.
Andrews
as the world's first 18 hole golf course.

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

> *hcjilson said:* 
> This is a slice of golf history I thought you might enjoy. I never knew
> why there were 18 holes on a golf course. Why do full-length golf
> courses have 18 holes, and not 20, or 10 or an even dozen? Very few
> golfers know the answer to this one -- but the following is true.
> 
> During a discussion among the club's membership board at St. Andrews in
> 1858, one of the members pointed out that it takes exactly 18 shots to
> polish off a fifth of Scotch. By limiting himself to only one shot of
> ...


Leave it to the Scottish!  Sounds more suited for my Irish ancestors, though!

----------


## Sean

More about golf.

There are three golf balls sitting on the moon.  In case you ask.......the astronaut Alan Shepard was the one "playing" golf.

There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.

The odds of making two holes-in-one during a round of golf are one in 67 million.

----------


## Sean

The total number of unique Animal Cracker "animal" shapes.........................18

----------


## Sean

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma.

----------


## Sean

Ratio of Las Vegas slot machines to city residents: 1 for every 8 persons.

----------


## Sean

The plastic pieces on the end of shoelaces are called Aglets.

----------


## chip anderson

I just learned today that if you leave the house with any Rx drugs in anything other than the origional container.  It's a FELONY you can get jail time and lose your right to vote!   Think of all the little old ladies with drugs in those little daily dose pill boxes.   All us diabetic types that carry only the drugs for the day with them.

Someone must shoot BIG BROTHER!

Chip

----------


## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> I just learned today that if you leave the house with any Rx drugs in anything other than the origional container.  It's a FELONY you can get jail time and lose your right to vote!   Think of all the little old ladies with drugs in those little daily dose pill boxes.   All us diabetic types that carry only the drugs for the day with them.
> 
> Someone must shoot BIG BROTHER!
> 
> Chip


Then it's no wonder why sometimes voter turn outs are so low from time to time ..................more than half of us are in jail or have lost are our right to vote because of this...........
Good one.:cheers:

----------


## Sean

Glass breaks at a speed of more than 3,000 miles per hour.

Glass takes over a million years to decompose.

----------


## Sean

The human body creates and destroys over 15 million red blood cells per second.

----------


## nuno

If the Sun stopped producing energy today, we wouldn't know about it for ten million years. :D

----------


## Sean

A Boeing 747 can carry 60,000 gallons of fuel.

----------


## Sean

It was common for female residents of Florence during the Renaissance to shave their eyebrows. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

Fingernails grow 4 times faster than toenails...........

----------


## Sean

In Iceland,tipping at a restaurant is considered rude.

Speaking of going out or staying home to eat..........the original use of a tablecloth was what we now use napkins for today.

----------


## chip anderson

The Continetal Congress met for 27* days and was unable to commit one word to paper for the U.S. Contitiution until 
Ben Frankin instituted starting each session with a prayer.


Chip






*Not sure of the exact number of days but it was quite a long time.

----------


## Sean

The Sequoia National Park in California contains a tree that is over 3 thousand years old.

----------


## Night Train

The Human Female Brain is smaller than that of the male's.
:p

----------


## chip anderson

All of our taste buds will die in ten days.   

Is this why most of us have no taste?

Chip:drop:

----------


## Sean

Gorillas are vegetarians...........

----------


## Night Train

1/4  (25%) of all Auto accidents in America involve someone who was trying to drive and do something else. (Change radio station, use cell phone, eat)

----------


## Sean

French Fries were actually invented in Belgium.

----------


## Chris Ryser

On this Day February 28.....................................

In 1066, Westminster Abbey opens. 

In 1618, Filips Willem, Prince of Orange, dies at 63. 

In 1692, the infamous Salem witch hunt begins. No witches are burned; they are all hanged. 

In 1759, Pope Clement XIII allows the Bible to be translated into various languages. 

In 1784, John Wesley charters the Methodist Church. 

In 1803, the U.S. Congress authorises and funds the expedition to the Pacific by the Corps of Discovery, which will be led by Lewis and Clark. 

In 1820, English illustrator John Tenniel is born. His illustrations for the Alice in Wonderland books are his most famous work. 

In 1912, the first parachute jump is made in Missouri. 

In 1928, Smokey the anti-forest-fire Bear makes his first appearance. 

In 1935, Nylon is discovered by Dr Wallace H Carothers.

----------


## Sean

Steam is completely invisible. What we think of as steam is actually water mist..

----------


## Sean

Scientist have recently discovered that lightening bolts generate
x-rays.

----------


## Sean

Black-eyed peas aren't peas,they are beans.

----------


## Sean

Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together. :Cool:

----------


## Sean

Crocodiles will sometimes swallow stones/rocks.......allowing them to swim deeper.

----------


## Sean

A light-year measures distance,not time.

----------


## Pete Hanlin

_Bullet-proof_ was a term coined by craftsmen who made suits of armor.  To test the strength of the armor, the maker would fire a gun at the breastplate (this was before even muskets, so the guns were not nearly as powerful as they are today).  Nobles who purchased armor would look for the small indentation on the breastplate to ensure that, yes, the armor was indeed "bullet-proofed" (or proofed by bullet).

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

> *Night Train said:* 
> The Human Female Brain is smaller than that of the male's.
> :p



Okay, Night Train I want proof of this fact (I think not!).:o

Here is the rebuttal:




> However, in individual cases, a person with a low brain weight around 1017g was highly gifted while another with a brain of 1800g was extremely mentally handicapped. In addition, one of the highest recorded human brain weights, mentions Kuhlenbeck, is said to have reached 2850g and this person was reported to be "an epileptic affected with idiocy" (Kuhlenbeck, 1973, 732). How does this affect our use of absolute magnitude of brain size to correlate with intelligence?


So there!  Let's hear it for the girls!;)

----------


## Sean

Catgut comes from the intestines of sheep......not cats.

----------


## Sean

Goats eat almost everything,but they refuse to eat tin cans.

P.S. now thats a no brainer.......i just found it funny that this would be considered a fact that was strange(so i posted it) :Rolleyes:

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

> *Sean said:* 
> Goats eat almost everything,but they refuse to eat tin cans.
> 
> P.S. now thats a no brainer.......i just found it funny that this would be considered a fact that was strange(so i posted it)



Sean,
We used to raise goats and let me tell you what they ate.  My dad had just finished installing fiberglass insulation on our basement door.  It was the slanted kind that went out from the side of the house.  Well I was in the basement cleaning something out for my mom.  The house was a monster and the basement huge.  The goats proceeded to eat every last piece of fiberglass insulation that dad put on the door.

Another time my dad had taken off the oil pan on the car and was getting ready to put it back and reapply the old gasket as it was fine.  Well, you guessed it, he turned around as my goat was swallowing the last of the nasty, dirty, old oil-covered gasket!

And they do eat tin cans, but the rusty old ones that "chew" better!

----------


## Sean

Fiberglass...........now that has to beat tin cans hands down.:D It's amazing what these guys will eat. Just wondering....did you ever come across anything that they turned their nose up at and refuse to eat?

----------


## Cindy Hamlin

> *Sean said:* 
> Fiberglass...........now that has to beat tin cans hands down.:D It's amazing what these guys will eat. Just wondering....did you ever come across anything that they turned their nose up at and refuse to eat?


Nothing!  They especially loved my mom's flowers and trees.  She planted a willow tree and they stripped it clean!  Not even bark!  She about ended my life!

There isn't a fence known to modern man that can contain them!  And ever since I had a stray dog kill a goat we had chained on an embankment we didn't chain them either.

Mom finally said, "either build a fence to stop them or get rid of them!".  Needless to say, I got rid of them!

----------


## Sean

Expected lifespan of a human tastebud?.......10 days.

P.S. Cindy,in light of some of the above post's i am now convinced that this could not be determined in goat's, as they obviously do not posses them.:D

----------


## chip anderson

The French word for applying make-up is Farding.   At least according to Mr. Limbaugh. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

Cockroaches roamed the earth before dinosaurs.

----------


## Sean

White pepper is simply the black peppercorn without its skin.

----------


## Sean

Rats can go without water longer than camels.

----------


## chip anderson

Camels are the only mamals that can drink salt water.;)

----------


## Sean

The two longest English words without vowels are "rhythm" and "syzygy."

----------


## Sean

Crocodiles are very dangerous,but alligators rarely kill people. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

Nine pennies weigh one ounce.

----------


## Sean

Non-dairy creamer is flammable. :Eek:

----------


## Pete Hanlin

The man who invented the "Slinky" was actually trying to create a better mattress coil...

In the original Celsius scale for measuring temperature, water boiled at 0 degrees Celsius and froze at 100 degrees.  Out of respect for Dr. Celsius, his colleagues waited until after his death to reverse the scale to its current form...

----------


## Sean

A lions roar is powerful enough to be heard five miles away.

----------


## Sean

Daddy longlegs aren't spiders,although they do have eight legs.

----------


## Sean

Top-40 presenter Casey Kasem was the voice of Shaggy in the original cartoons of "Scooby-Doo."  :bbg:

----------


## Sean

The bat on a Bacardi rum bottle is to honor the guano from the bat, which is used to fertilize the sugar cane, in order to produce the drink. :bbg:

----------


## Sean

The three wise monkeys actually have names............
Mizaru (see no evil),Mazaru (speak no evil) and Mikazaru (hear no
evil).

----------


## Sean

Earth is the only planet in our solar system not named after a god.

----------


## chip anderson

That is because it was created by a God who has no name.

Our God is God.

Chip

----------


## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> That is because it was created by a God who has no name.
> 
> Our God is God.
> 
> Chip


That's the point ......:D :bbg: :D

----------


## Sean

There is a city or town named Rome on every continent.

----------


## Sean

The invention of the screwdriver came before the invention of the screw.

----------


## Sean

Here are just a few......................

racecar

kayak

level

----------


## optispares

:bbg: Sex at noon taxes:bbg:


an interesting bit of relevant trivia:
There is a town in California named Yreka and it had a bakery called, Yreka Bakery. Hmm... food for thought.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> The invention of the screwdriver came before the invention of the screw.


I wonder which screwdriver was first .................the left handed .................or the right handed one ????

----------


## Sean

> *optispares said:* 
> :bbg: Sex at noon taxes:bbg:
> 
> 
> an interesting bit of relevant trivia:
> There is a town in California named Yreka and it had a bakery called, Yreka Bakery. Hmm... food for thought.



:bbg: Aibohphobia:bbg: .............(fear of palindromes) :Eek:

----------


## Sean

There is no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Vitamins............. :cry:

----------


## Sean

A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle.  A group of geese in the air is a skein.

----------


## chm2023

A group of larks is called an exhaltation.  (They clearly got first choice!!!!)

----------


## Sean

> *Chris Ryser said:* 
> I wonder which screwdriver was first .................the left handed .................or the right handed one ????


It definitely was the right handed one without a doubt..............some of us lefty's are still waiting for one. Hopefully it will work better than the left handed scissors.:bbg:

----------


## Sean

Anteaters like to eat termites more than ants.

----------


## Sean

A snail can sleep for over three years without eating.

----------


## chip anderson

People started useing canopy beds because they used to have thatch roofs that allowed bugs to fall from the roof.  The canopy kept the bugs from falling on the bed.

The threshold was because only the very poor (dirt poor) had dirt roofs.  Those better off had slate floors which were slippery.  Hense threshing was spred on the floor.  When the door was opened the thresh would blow out, hense the appearance of the threshold.

The expression: "It's raining cats and dogs." came from the thatch roof also.  Cats and dogs would sleep on (in) the thatched roof to keep warm and stay out of the rain.  If it rained hard enough the thatch roof would prove not to be up to the task and colapse into the dwelling, the dogs and cats would fall in with same.  Hense, "It would be raining cats and dogs."

Chip

----------


## hcjilson

It appears that not everything was burned up during the ill fated reentry to earth.

Go here for the story....these worms qualify for 'strange facts' on their own!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...627EDT0755.DTL

hj

----------


## Sean

There is an earthworm in Australia that can grow up to 10ft long.

----------


## Sean

AEGILOPS..............the longest word in the English language where the letters are arranged in alphabetical order.

----------


## chip anderson

O.K. Sean,  what does it mean?

----------


## Steve Machol

> *chip anderson said:* 
> O.K. Sean,  what does it mean?


http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=AEGILOPS

:D

----------


## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> O.K. Sean,  what does it mean?


Chip,
In all honesty, i did not know. But thanks to Steve...........now we all know.:shiner:

----------


## chm2023

In colonial America, certain lands were deemed public lands and therefore the trees could not be cut down by private citizens unless they were blow down by a storm or wind, in which case they could be claimed by anyone... hence, a windfall.

A question for this group of useless info cognescenti:  in Barcelona there is a main boulevard called the Rombaus (or something like that).  It is a beautiful wide street with a median that serves as a pedestrian walkway cum marketplace.  There are news stands, tobacco stands, flower stands etc along with park benches.  There are also bird stands--kiosks that sell birds.  All of them are in pairs and run the gambit from doves to parrots to chickens.  There are at least 3 of these stands along the length of the boulevard with hundreds of birds for sale.  What's this all about?????

----------


## Sean

> *chm2023 said:* 
> A question for this group of useless info cognescenti:


"Group of useless info"..........please explain.
B.T.W...........it's cognoscenti.

----------


## chm2023

Sean, i.e. trivia.

----------


## Sean

> *chm2023 said:* 
> Sean, i.e. trivia.


:bbg:

----------


## Sean

There are more beetles than any other kind of creature in the world.

----------


## Sean

Comedian Bob Hope once excelled as an amateur boxer. He fought under the name "Packy East."

----------


## chip anderson

In the late 1700s many houses consisted of a large room with only one chair. 
Commonly, a long wide board was folded down from the wall and used for 
dining. The "head of the household" always sat in the chair while everyone 
else ate sitting on the floor. Once in a while an invited guest would be 
offered to sit in this chair during a meal (who was almost always a man). To 
sit in the chair meant you were important and in charge. Sitting in the 
chair, one was called the "chair man." Today in business we use the 
expression/title "Chairman..or Chairman of the Board"

----------


## chm2023

Shaking hands originated as a way to show that you weren't holding a weapon.

----------


## Steve Machol

> *chm2023 said:* 
> Shaking hands originated as a way to show that you weren't holding a weapon.


Which of course gave Left-Handers a distinct advantage! :D  

Strange that there's not more of us.  ;)

----------


## chip anderson

Needless to say, personal hygiene left much room for improvement. As a 
result, many women and men had developed acne scars by adulthood. The women 
would spread bee's wax over their facial skin to smooth out their 
complexions. When they were speaking to each other, if a woman began to 
stare at another woman's face she was told "mind your own bee's wax." 
Should the woman smile, the wax would crack, hence the term "crack a smile." 
Also, when they sat too close to the fire, the wax would melt and 
therefore the expression "losing face."

----------


## Sean

The first toilet ever to be shown on television was on "Leave It To Beaver" :p

----------


## chip anderson

Ladies wore corsets which would lace up in the front. A tightly tied lace 
was worn by a proper and dignified lady as in "straight laced."

----------


## JennyP

> *Sean said:* 
> The first toilet ever to be shown on television was on "Leave It To Beaver" :p


;) But one of the most famous has to have been Archie Bunker's on "All in the Family" and it was never shown!

----------


## Sean

> *JennyP said:* 
> ;) But one of the most famous has to have been Archie Bunker's on "All in the Family" and it was never shown!


So true ! One of the best T.V. sitcoms of all time. :D

----------


## chip anderson

Common entertainment included playing cards. However, there was a tax 
levied when purchasing playing cards but only applicable to the "ace of 
spades." To avoid paying the tax, people would purchase 51 cards instead. 
Yet, since most games require 52 cards, these people were thought to be stupid or dumb because they weren't "playing with a full deck."

----------


## JennyP

Chip, I don't know if you indulge, but I think you would be a great drinking buddy sometime! I can just imagine you flinging out some of these "historical" pronouncements while I have a couple of Long Island Teas....:D ~~ So Funny!!

----------


## Sean

Spam is raw when placed in the can. It is cooked during the can's sterilization process.

----------


## chip anderson

Early politicians required feedback from the public to determine what was 
considered important to the people. Since there were no telephones, TV's or 
radios, the politicians sent their assistants to local taverns, pubs and 
bars who were told to "go sip some ale" and listen to people's conversations 
and political concerns. Many assistants were dispatched at different times. 
"You go sip here" and "You go sip there." The two words "go sip" were 
eventually combined when referring to the local opinion and thus, we have 
the term "gossip."

----------


## chip anderson

I promise this is the last of the 1700's


At local taverns, pubs and bars, people drank from pint and quart sized 
containers. A bar maid's job was to keep an eye on the customers and keep 
the drinks coming. She had to pay close attention and remember who was 
drinking in "pints" and who was drinking in "quarts." Hence the term 
"minding your "'P's and Q's

----------


## Sean

> *chip anderson said:* 
> I promise this is the last of the 1700's


 Don't say that........ The 1700's have got to be some of the best post's to this thread. If indeed that is the end of them........then all i have to say is that i really enjoyed them. :)

----------


## Sean

Oil from the ground isn't black,it's dark green.

----------


## chm2023

Another theory is that this was a tip for pressmen when setting type, not to reverse the 2 letters. Yet another is it was an admonisment to children to remember to say please and thank you!

----------


## Sean

The life expectancy of a guitar is about 15 years. Violins,however improve with age and sound better at 100 years than day one.

----------


## Sean

Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting during his entire lifetime.

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting during his entire lifetime.


* Would be interesting to know how much he would be worth today if he would have kept all the paintings*

----------


## Shutterbug

[QUOTE]*hcjilson said:* 
Stewardess is the only word in the English language that is typed entirely with the left hand!

Yes.....you quessed it! I'm left handed.

No, it is the LONGEST word typed entirely with the left hand.  There are many others.  Ewe,dad,swat,sweet, etc, etc.  LOL

----------


## Sean

The tug-of-war was once an official competitive event in the Olympics (from 1900-1920)

----------


## Sean

The oldest musical instrument  in the world is the flute. Cave dwellers made flutes out of the hollow leg bones of birds.

----------


## Sean

Lions,the Kings of the Jungle,don't even live in jungles. They live in savannas.

----------


## Sean

July is National Hot Dog Month.On average....... Americans eat 70 hot dogs per person every year.

----------


## Sean

Worms don't have eyes..................

----------


## myodisk

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

----------


## myodisk

A group of unicorns is called a blessing.
Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink."
A group of frogs is called an army.
A group of rhinos is called a crash.
A group of kangaroos is called a mob.
A group of whales is called a pod.
A group of geese is called a gaggle.
A group of ravens is called a murder.
A group of officers is called a mess.
A group of larks is called an exaltation.
A group of owls is called a parliament.


:cheers:

----------


## myodisk

Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself

----------


## myodisk

Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck.

----------


## myodisk

Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.

----------


## myodisk

Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he declined.

The glossy look to lipstick comes from fish scales, which are iridescent.

The Tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end.

Celery has negative calories- it takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.

There is now an ATM at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which has a winter population of 200 people.

Because of the rotation of the earth, an object can be thrown farther if it is thrown west.

The strorage capacity of human brain exceeds four Terrabytes.

Two-thirds of the people in the world have not made a phone call.

It has been calculated that in the last 3,500 years, there have only been 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world.

----------


## Sean

Eskimos use walrus whiskers for toothpicks.

----------


## Sean

Heroin was the brand name of morphine once marketed by Bayer.

----------


## Shutterbug

> *Pete Hanlin said:* 
> Yes.....you quessed it! I'm left handed.
> My condolences, Harry...  If I'm not mistaken, left handed people have an average life span that is 9 years shorter than right handers (a strange but true fact if ever there was one).   :(
> 
> Let's hope you're a righty at heart!  :p


They no doubt kill themselves off trying to function in a world that makes few items specifically for lefty's!  It's dangerous out there folks!  :0)

shutterbug

----------


## Sean

> *Shutterbug said:* 
> They no doubt kill themselves off trying to function in a world that makes few items specifically for lefty's!  It's dangerous out there folks!  :0)
> 
> shutterbug





 :Eek:

----------


## Sean

Some people are more flexible than others, but no one is double jointed.

----------


## Sean

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 after the fighting was over.

If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

----------


## Sean

It is impossible to lick your elbow..............:p

----------


## Sean

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history.

Spades - King David

Hearts -  Charlemagne

Clubs -  Alexander, the Great

Diamonds - Julius Caesar

----------


## optispares

> It is impossible to lick your elbow..............


 or as my gran used to say the only thing you should  stick in your ear is your elbow :Rolleyes:

----------


## Sean

> *optispares said:* 
> or as my gran used to say the only thing you should  stick in your ear is your elbow


Ok, now you have me convinced.......elbows are completely useless.  :bbg: :cheers: :bbg:

----------


## Sean

The highest waterfall in the world is Venezuela's Angel Falls..........dropping 3,212 feet.  :Eek:  Niagara Falls checks in at 167 feet high.

----------


## Sean

President Millard Fillmore installed the first bathtub in the US White House.

----------


## Steve Machol

> *Sean said:* 
> President Millard Fillmore installed the first bathtub in the US White House.


And the first flushing toilet as well.  In fact, you could say he was the first President to actively try and reduce the amount of **** in the White House.  :Rolleyes:

----------


## Sean

Mel Blanc, noted voice actor and the voice of Warner Brothers cartoon Bugs Bunny,had an allergy to carrots.

----------


## Sean

Hydrangeas produce different color flowers, ranging from white to pink to bright blue, depending on the quality of the soil.

----------


## Shutterbug

A young child (under about 3 years) cannot reach over his head and touch the opposite ear.  This is handy info to use on the "my kid is the smartest and most athletic kid that ever lived" parent to throw a little water on their zeal  :D 

shutterbug

----------


## Sean

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, also wrote the popular children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

----------


## fletch

Sean

In Massachusetts is is against the law to put tomatos in clam chowder!

(NO JOKE)

----------


## fletch

In washington state it is aganinst the law to carry a consealed weapon over 6 feet in length!

GO FIGURE!

----------


## Jana Lewis

LBJ was the first American President to wear contact lenses.......

----------


## Sean

A human fetus develops fingerprints at about 8 weeks.

----------


## Sean

The cereal Cheerios was originally called Cherrioats.

----------


## Sean

A productive milking cow can provide 6,000 quarts of milk per year.

----------


## Sean

W.C Fields was originally offered the wizard's role in The Wizard of Oz,but turned it down.

----------


## Sean

The glue on the postage stamps of Israel is kosher.

----------


## Sean

There are 350 species of sharks, but only 32 species have ever attacked humans. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

The last February without a full moon was in 1999;the next will be in the year 2018.

----------


## Sean

One can see both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean's from the summit of Mount Izaru in Costa Rica.

----------


## Sean

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on the same day in the same year: February 12, 1809.

----------


## Sean

Thomas Jefferson brought the recipe for pommes frites, or French fries, to the U.S. in 1802.

----------


## Sean

The largest diamond found in the U.S. was discovered in Arkansas. When cut, the stone measured 12.42 carats.

----------


## Sean

The human nose can detect smells in quantities as small as parts per trillion.

----------


## Sean

General George S. Patton competed, and placed 5th, in the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics.

----------


## Sean

The lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was -129 degrees Fahrenheit at Vostok Station, Antarctica. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

The onion is actually a member of the lily family.

----------


## Sean

The state of Tennessee was for a brief time known as the State of Franklin.

----------


## Night Train

The 1st couple shown in bed together during Prime Time TV was Fred and Wilma Flintstone

Everyday, more money is printed for Monopoly than the US treasury

Men can read smaller print better than woman can

Coke was originally green

Its impossible to lick your elbow

Alaska is the state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work

The percentage of Africa that is wilderness in Africa: 28%
In the United states? 38%

the average number of people flying at any given hour over the US is 61000

The youngest parents ever lived in China: Ages 8 and 9

The youngest Pope ever was 11

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,234,678,987,654,321

Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of where they were born

If you spell out numbers....one...two...three....youd have to get to a thousand before you used an "A"

Bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and laser printers were ALL invented by women

MEl Blanc (Voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to CArrots

(Dont know about this one:...) GOLF stands for Gentleman Only Ladies Forbidden

----------


## Shutterbug

Your fingers were working too fast  :0)

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

shutterbug :Cool:

----------


## Sean

The mystery novels of Ellery Queen are actually written by a team of two people........ Frederic Dannay and Manfred B.Lee.

----------


## Sean

The first woman governor in the U.S. was Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming, elected in 1925.

----------


## Sean

Ambergris, widely used in perfume manufacture, is whale vomit. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

The world's smallest country is Vatican City, at only two-tenths of a square mile.

----------


## Sean

Mound builder birds of Australia give birth to chicks that are fully fledged and can fly right after hatching.

----------


## Sean

The U.S.S. Monitor, a Civil War ship, was the first ship to have a below waterline flush toilet.

----------


## Sean

A "blue moon" is the second full in the same month.

----------


## Sean

The flying snake of Java and Malaysia is able to glide from tree to tree.

----------


## Sean

Twin births are much more common in the western hemisphere.

----------


## Sean

One-fourth of the 206 bones in the human body are in the feet.

----------


## Sean

X-rays of the Mona Lisa show that Leonardo Da Vinci painted three earlier versions.

----------


## Sean

It is illegal to build a Washington, D.C. building taller than the Capitol Building.

----------


## Sean

Until roasted, cashews contain poisonous oil.

----------


## Sean

Ice cream can be traced back as far as the ancient Egyptians.

----------


## Sean

Tongue prints are as unique as fingerprints.:p

----------


## Shutterbug

Bat guano (feces) is harvested from caves by the ton and used in large part in make-up for women. (Sorry girls)  :)

----------


## Sean

> *Shutterbug said:* 
> Bat guano (feces) is harvested from caves by the ton and used in large part in make-up for women. (Sorry girls)  :)


 So now we have both guano and whale vomit in cosmetics what next?  :Eek:

----------


## Sean

Blind Chameleons still change color according to their environment.

----------


## Sean

In one days time a single cow generates as much waste as 16 people.

----------


## Sean

The air outside a passenger jet at cruising altitude is around 80 degrees below zero.

----------


## jediron

The domestic animal population has increased by 0.5 to 2.0 percent per day during the last century, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report Policy Options for Stabilizing Global Climate (Lashof and Tirpak 1990). Figure 4-14 of the report shows the upward trend in domestic animal populations. One result of this population increase is that emissions from livestock have become a significant source of atmospheric METHANE. In fact, domestic animals currently account for about 15 percent of the annual anthropogenic METHANE emissions. ANother words Farting!  :drop:

----------


## Sean

Polo was an officially recognized Olympic sport from 1900 through 1936.

----------


## Sean

The S in Harry S Truman's name is not an initial. It doesn't stand for anything.

----------


## Sean

The top of the Empire State Building was originally designed to moor blimps.

----------


## Sean

Besides  haircutting and shaving, barbers used to provide blood-letting and crude dentistry.:shiner:

----------


## chip anderson

Gee.  I wonder if any of these barber surgeons practiced optometry or ophthalmology?

Chip

----------


## Chris Ryser

> *Sean said:* 
> Besides  haircutting and shaving, barbers used to provide blood-letting and crude dentistry.:shiner:



ffA timelne from the Ed Jeffers Barber Museum 




5,000 BC 


As early as 6,000 years ago barbering services were performed by Egyptian nobility. The crude instruments were usually formed from sharpened flint or oyster shells



900's


Barbers of the middle ages not only practiced shaving, hair-cutting and hair-dressing, they also dressed wounds and performed surgical operation. They were called Barber-Surgeons.



1096


The Barber-Surgeons formed their first organization in France in 1096.



1300's


In the thirteenth century in England, Barbers formed into two classes: Those who practiced barbering and those who practice surgery.



1450


The Barber's company and the Surgeon's guild were united by law in 1450. The law was enacted so that no one during surgery should practice barbering and no barber should practice any phase of surgery except the pulling of teeth.



1745


Finally in 1745 a bill was passed separating barbers from surgeons. When the Barber-Surgeons separated, the barber kept the pole as their identification. The pole consists of Red and White, or Red, White and Blue strips. Red for blood, White for bandages and Blue for veins.



1770's


Most of the Colonial Days were smooth shaven and many of the rich wore wigs. Also in the Colonial days barbering was hardly considered a white man's trade. Hence it was mostly confined to black barbers. Wealthy people became slave owners and the duty of the barber was shifted to the servants.



1799


George Washington was bled to death by his physician in 1799. He suffered from a prolonged windpipe infection. He died calmly counting his pulse at the age of sixty-seven.



1848


By 1848 bloodletting instruments had disappeared from most Doctors satchels.




1861


The beard did not come into it's own until the Civil War. 1861-1865



1865


After the Civil War with the influx of Dutch, Germans, Italians, and Swedish emmigrants, the white man began to thrive and the barber profession elevated.



1867


The Civil War that closely followed the Western movement brought more changes to America. Including the re-establishment of the barber shop as an accepted institution on Main Street.



1880's


The average shop at this time cost approximately twenty dollars to equip and were ten by twelve feet in size. The shop consists of a straight-backed chair with a head piece resembling a crutch, a basin of water, a piece of common soap and a brush, 'setting' chairs and enough towels to last a week. "One towel to every ten to twelve customers." Hair cuts were five or ten cents and shaves were three cents.



1883


As people moved westward, there were little time for wigs and personal embellishments. The pioneer life was a hard one. The men let their hair grow as well as their beards.




1886


The Barbers Protective Union was formed on December 6, 1886 in Columbus, Ohio.



1887


The Protective Union becomes the Journeymen Barber's International on December 5, 1887.



1893


It was not until 1893 when A.B.Moler opened the first Barber School in Chicago. He also published textbooks at that time.



1897


In 1897 the State of Minnesota passed legislation for a barber license. For the next forty years various states enacted legislation whereby barbers were licensed and inspected for sterilization to protect the public from disease. With the enactment of the licensing laws and stringent inspections, diseases such as impetigo, anthrax, ringworm and barbers itch are seldom heard of today.



1924


The Associated Master Barber of America was organized in 1924 in Chicago, Illinois.




1940's


World War II brought about short hair as barbers were called into service. The flat top, butch, crew cut and the Princeton cut became popular.



1959


In 1959 Edmond O. Roffler developed the Roffler Sculptur-Kut technique, a method were-by barbers could earn "big money" and capitalize on long hair. The Roffler-Kut system started with twenty barbers.



1960


In the early sixties the Beetles set the stage for ling hair. Many barbers who refused to learn the methods of cutting ling hair were soon out of business.



1975


The Roffler-Kut system now has over 6,000 barbers that have been trained in the Roffler Method. It is still being practiced today.



1981


In 1981 the Journeymen Barber International Union became part of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.



1985


Over fifty percent of barber students are female.



1995


Since 1995 over fifty percent of barber students are African-American.



2000's


New technology and techniques continue to shape the future of barbering. Every year more young men and women choose the barber profession. The future of barbering is in their hands.

----------


## Sean

On open ground, most snakes can outrace humans. :Eek:

----------


## chip anderson

Sean:

Seems to me that I remember from high school science that the fastest snake can't hit 3 miles per hour.  Humans can hit 35 and sustain about 20.   Snakes may have the advantage in the swamps, but not on open ground.

----------


## Sean

Mr Anderson,
Your right .....i stand corrected. Me thinks i should have typed it the other way around.:)

----------


## Robert Wagner

The first stop light with red, yellow,and green was installed in New York City in 1911.

Robert
;)

----------


## Sean

The bat is the only mammal that truly flies.

----------


## Sean

Squirrels have no color vision but have crystal clear peripheral vision.

----------


## Sean

The average width of a lightning bolt is about 6 inches.

----------


## Sean

Minnows have teeth inside their throat.

----------


## Sean

Sheep will not drink from running water.

----------


## Sean

The ancient guards on the Wall of China often spent their entire life on the Wall, from birth to death.

----------


## Sean

The roman god Robigus was in charge of mildew. :Eek:

----------


## Sean

The handshake was originally an offer to display a weapon-free hand.

----------


## jediron

I'm not sure this was given yet but here goes. 

The names of Popeye's four nephews are Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye, and Poopeye!

How's that for a Popeye!  


:drop: :hammer:

----------


## jediron

When glass breaks.

When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second!

:hammer:

----------


## jediron

Here's one for your morning breakfast.

Did you know that in 1983, a Japanese artist, Tadahiko Ogawa,  
made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of ordinary toast? 


:hammer:

----------


## jediron

Can you imagine!

Amazingly, goalies in the National Hockey League played without masks until the year 1959. 

:drop:

----------


## jediron

What a seat.

Before 1859, baseball umpires were seated in padded chairs behind home plate. 

I would hate to get hit with a foul tipped ball bacvk there. Ouch

:bbg: :D

----------


## jediron

Talk about a bat!

Black Betsy was the name of Shoeless Joe Jackson's 44 ounce baseball bat. 

That had to be the size of a tree trunk!

:bbg: :D

----------


## Sean

A rhino's horn is a modified clump of hair.

----------


## Sean

Sound travels faster in the water than in the air.

----------


## Oha

The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.

----------


## Oha

No NFL team, which plays its home games in a domed stadium, has ever won a Superbowl.

----------


## Sean

There are 38 peaks in South America that are higher than North America's highest point, Mt. McKinley.

----------


## Sean

A cat uses it's whiskers to test the width of an opening it intends to crawl through.

----------


## Sean

The original coat of arms was a piece of fabric that knights wore over their armor.

----------


## Sean

The "save" icon on Microsoft Word shows a floppy disk, with the shutter on backwards.

----------


## Sean

Pogonophobia is the fear of beards.

----------


## Sean

Pearls melt in vinegar...........

----------


## Sean

Benjamin Franklin originally wanted the national symbol of the United States to be the turkey,not the bald eagle.

----------


## Sean

This is one of the strangest things I have ever encountered. 
" Left brain, right brain " 

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor 
and make clockwise circles. 

Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your 
right hand. 

Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do 
about it. :cheers:

----------


## Robert Wagner

When Mary, later Queen of Scots, went to France as a young girl, for
education & survival, Louis, King of France, learned that she loved the
Scot game "golf." So he had the first golf course outside of Scotland
built for her enjoyment. To make sure she was properly chaperoned and
guarded while she played, Louis hired cadets from a militaryschool to
accompany her. Mary liked this a lot and when she returned to
Scotland,she took the practice with her. In French the word cadet is
pronounced ca-day' & the Scots changed it into "caddie."

Robert

;)

----------


## Sean

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the brides father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based,this period was called the honey month. We know it today as the honeymoon.

----------


## Texas Ranger

You can fit the state of Rhode Island inside of the King Ranch, Texas..

----------


## Sean

Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested?

----------


## JennyP

"All Mine" ?  ;) 
Lots of boats around my home area....and I have seen some interesting names! 
Tell us, what IS the most popular name?

----------


## Sean

> *JennyP said:* 
> "All Mine" ?  ;) 
> Lots of boats around my home area....and I have seen some interesting names! 
> Tell us, what IS the most popular name?


 Obsession :D

----------


## Sean

Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy.

----------


## Sean

The ashes of the average cremated person weigh nine pounds.

----------


## Sean

John Larroquette of "Night Court" was the narrator of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

----------


## Sean

Dr. Seuss and Kurt Vonnegut went to college together. They were in the same fraternity, where Seuss decorated the fraternity house walls with drawings of his characters.

----------


## Shwing

- Why do men's clothes have buttons on the right while women's clothes have buttons on the left?

When buttons were invented, they were very expensive and worn primarily by the rich. Because wealthy women were dressed by maids, dressmakers put the buttons on the maid's right. Since most people are right-handed, it is easier to push buttons on the right through holes on the left. And that's where women's buttons have remained since.

teachers.net/gazette/MAR03/oddfacts.html

----------


## Shwing

- Why are many coin banks shaped like pigs?

Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made of a dense, orange clay called "pygg". When people saved coins in jars made of this clay, the jars became known as "pygg banks." When an English potter misunderstood the word, he made a bank that resembled a pig, and it caught on.

piggybankworld.com

----------


## Sean

Thomas Jennings was the first American convicted on the strength of fingerprint evidence. An Illinois court sentenced him to death by hanging for murdering a man.

----------


## Sean

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit earth. Seven years later, at age 34, he crashed while testing a jet and died.........

----------


## Sean

The odds of finding a four-leaf clover ? One in 10,000.

----------


## zonelinks2004

did u guys know that peanuts are from the family of peaches?
------------------------------------------
http://www.zonelinks.com
------------------------------------------
The Power Link Dimension

----------


## Sean

Or are they...?  :Eek:

----------


## hcjilson

I heard something about them yesterday but for the life of me I can't remember what they're called.

----------


## Sean

:Eek:

----------


## hcjilson

Surprisingly I found this on a website called "amazing facts"

_
The largest spider in the world is the giant bird eating spider (Theraphosa leblondi) of Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. In 1965, a male specimen was collected that had a leg span of 11.02 inches!

are you off today or just goofing around?. will need something tomorrow AM if you're going to be in!

PS I guess we're showing Optiboard how busy the optical business is on Cape Cod!:D

----------


## Sean

> *hcjilson said:* 
> Surprisingly I found this on a website called "amazing facts"
> 
> _
> The largest spider in the world is the giant bird eating spider (Theraphosa leblondi) of Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. In 1965, a male specimen was collected that had a leg span of 11.02 inches!
> 
> are you off today or just goofing around?. will need something tomorrow AM if you're going to be in!
> 
> PS I guess we're showing Optiboard how busy the optical business is on Cape Cod!:D


 I'll be here...........:) 

P.S. So are you telling me these things do exists ? :Confused:

----------


## Sean

The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in the event of an emergency.

----------


## Sean

Olfactory nerves constantly regenerate. They live about a month and are replaced from the nasal lining.

----------


## chip anderson

Taste buds are replaced every two weeks.

----------


## Sean

If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar. ;)

----------


## Sean

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

----------


## Sean

On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.

----------


## Sean

Every human has spent about half an hour as a single cell.  :Eek:

----------


## Sean

It takes 17 muscles to smile :)  43 to frown :(

----------


## Steve Machol

> It takes 17 muscles to smile :)  43 to frown :(


 Then frowning must be better exercise, right? ;)

----------


## Sean

> Then frowning must be better exercise, right? ;)


Yep your right...... either one will beat using a Stair Stepper any day.:bbg:

----------


## Sean

The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.

----------


## walt

> Every human has spent about half an hour as a single cell.


Many retain that quality throughout their lives.:bbg:

----------


## walt

> On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.


How about hair-balls?

----------


## Sean

Elephants can communicate using sounds that are below the human hearing range: between 14 and 35 hertz.

----------


## walt

The faintest sound a human can hear is around 8 decibels, which is the equivalent of a mouse fart at 10 feet.

----------


## Sean

The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.

----------


## walt

> The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.


Before or after the moyl?

----------


## Sean

Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.

----------


## Sean

The only bone in the human body not connected to another is the hyoid, a V-shaped bone located at the base of the tongue between the mandible and the voice box. Its function is to support the tongue and its muscles.

----------


## Sean

A notch in a tree will remain the same distance from the ground as the tree grows.

----------


## Sean

X-ray technology has shown there are 3 different versions of the Mona Lisa under the visible one.

----------


## Sean

Cape Cod was named in 1602 by the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who noted the high numbers of codfish in the coastal waters. ;)

----------


## Sean

The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.

----------


## Sean

"The Four Feathers," finished in 1929, was the last silent movie ever made.

----------


## Sean

No species of wild plant produces a flower or blossom that is absolutely black, and so far, none has been developed artificially.

----------


## Sean

All the moons of the Solar System are named after Greek and Roman mythology, except the moons of Uranus, which are named after Shakespearean characters.

----------


## Sean

Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.

----------


## Sean

Baseball's home plate is 17 inches wide.

----------


## Sean

Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

----------


## hcjilson

Bartholomew Gosnold, during the 1602 trip in which he named Cape Cod, landed on an offshore island and found wild grapes growing. He named the place after his wife. Martha's Vineyard.

He didn't know any limericks so he neglected to name the island of Nantucket! :)

----------


## rinselberg

_I don't usually go in for these "regular feature" threads, but (as my recent posting history confirms) I'll post just about ANYTHING to create another excuse to promote my OptiBoard "website". I enjoy the advertising! These bons mots are not backed up by my customary standard of posting research. It's mostly what I remember reading somewhere or seeing sometime on TV._

Contrary to what must be the general impression, the plutonium bomb that the U.S. Army Air Force dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 was not the end of U.S. combat operations in World War Two. That was followed in a few hours by another raid using B-29 Superfortress bombers to drop conventional explosives on Tokyo. Called "the last mission of World War Two", this attack had an unintended but remarkably fortunate outcome: It ended a plot by Japanese military officers to overthrow the Emperor and continue the war against the United States.

The Thirty-Fifth President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, graduated from Harvard in 1940 and entered the U.S. Navy. His heroic efforts to save himself and his crew after the sinking of PT-109 are enshrined in American history. Some scholars of the war, however, find it curious, at the very least, that PT-109 was the ONLY American high-speed torpedo boat sunk by the Japanese. Some have even suggested that JFK and the boys just might have been _partying_ a little, in the hours before the episode. Was it _Profiles in Courage -- or McHale's Navy?_

Early on in the Battle of Britain, the German Air Force unleashed a devastating air raid that partially destroyed the dockyards of London. Winston Churchill later said that the Germans could have ended the war on their own terms then and there, if they had just returned to finish destroying the same target. There were not many facilities in England for receiving cargo by sea.

Returning to those remarkable Harvard alumni, Isoroku Yamamoto studied at Harvard from 1919 to 1921. In 1941, _Admiral_ Yamamoto plotted the attack on Pearl Harbor.

You can find the phrase "Chocolate Nazi" all over the Internet in different contexts. But the original Chocolate Nazi was Ernst "Putzi" Haenfstagel, so-called for his frequent appearances in a glitzy brown Nazi uniform as Hitler's foreign press secretary. An accomplished pianist and confidant of Adolf Hitler, he was known as "Hitler's piano player". And -- you guessed it: Another Harvard alumnus! (Haenfstagel; not Hitler.)

Before World War Two, two Jewish scholars (or maybe it was just one with a coauthor -- kind of sketchy about this one) working in Germany published a technically superb biography of Frederick The Great. Printed with a swastika on the cover, the book was a national bestseller in Germany. Some scholars consider it the single book that contributed the most to the rise of the Nazi party. The Jewish authors (or was it a single coauthor?) were confident that the Nazi anti-Semitism was only a passing episode, and that their friendly relationship with Hermann Goering (yep: THAT Herr Goering) would protect them. The scholars (or at least the one) finally fled Germany shortly before the war started.



_The Road to Kandahar_ sounds like another of those old Bob Hope movies (The Road to Morocco; The Road to Singapore ...). In reality, it's the first chapter of Jeffrey Kramses's The Rumsfeld Way: A National Bestseller when it hit the bookstores in 2002 ... If you are online from an optical dispensary, you may have Certified NASA Space Technology as close as one of your frame boards. See what the critics are calling _Your passport to OptiBoard Country._ Just point and click in the Signature field (below the horizontal line) on the Web link that gives what is promised: And more!

----------


## Sean

The number 4 is the only number in the English language that has the same number of letters in its name as its meaning.

----------


## Sean

In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.

----------


## rinselberg

November 12, 1997: Antimatter is one of the most recognized and attractive words in science fiction. It's the stuff that drives fictional starships from one side of the universe to the other. Now NASA is giving it serious consideration as a rocket propellant to get around the solar system. A *gram* of antimatter would carry the same potential energy as *1,000* Space Shuttle external tanks filled with chemical rocket engine fuel. (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Website.)



The Great Karnac explores a scientific paradox involving the Washington Redskins. Rinselberg considers John Kerry's FUTURE military service. Follow the PURPLE web links to The Great Karnac and "Back to the Future!"

----------


## rinselberg

Those "celebratory shots" -- bullets fired into the air -- that we are seeing at Arafat's funeral in Ramallah. Can be DEADLY. Bullet can return to earth at as much as 120 mph and strike a person. Bullet will be tumbling wildly instead of its normal stable mode, and so may tear open a large wound like the action of a dum-dum (soft lead core) type bullet. Credit Brian Williams of MSNBC

----------


## chip anderson

A Dum-Dum is a solid lead bullett that has been cut in at 90 & 180 then Dug out so that it looks a little like the open mouth of one of those creatures on tremors.  They open a lot wider and fragment than a soft core bullet.
Very popular with 1920's & 1930's gangster types who for the most part had low powered weapons and wanted to make sure great damage was done.

Chip

----------


## coda

> Those "celebratory shots" -- bullets fired into the air -- that we are seeing at Arafat's funeral in Ramallah. Can be DEADLY. Bullet can return to earth at as much as 120 mph and strike a person. Bullet will be tumbling wildly instead of its normal stable mode, and so may tear open a large wound like the action of a dum-dum (soft lead core) type bullet. Credit Brian Williams of MSNBC


This has been a problem in New Orleans and Miami (and possibly other American cities that haven't made it into the news) for years, particularly on New Year's Eve.  Two or three years ago three people died in New Orleans as a result of the return of 'celebratory shots'.

----------


## coda

On at least one occasion in the long history of our odd little planet there was a functioning 'natural nuclear reactor'.  


A Natural Nuclear Reactor In Gabon
Since uranium-235 undergoes self-sustaining fission in commercial reactors and since uranium lies in the Earth in great quantities, Paul Kuroda predicted that naturally operating reactors are possible under special conditions. Not nowadays, when the ratio of uranium-235 to uranium-238 is only about 0.7%, but in the past, when the ratio was much higher owing to the fact that U-235 has a shorter half life than U-238.

The conditions necessary for self-sustained fission would be as follows: a uranium deposit where U-235 was present at the 3% level (the level at which modern reactors operate); the presence of material (such as water, carbon, and most organic compounds) that could moderate, or slow down, the neutrons issuing from fission reactions; and the absence of material (such as Fe, K, Be, Gd) that would absorb the neutrons outright. 

In 1972, such a natural reactor was found at the Oklo mine in Gabon, in West Africa. There a 2-billion-year-old uranium deposit some 5-10 meters thick and 600-900 meters wide was bathed by an ancient river. This reactor is reckoned to have released 15 gigawatt-years of energy and operated at an average power of 100 kilowatts.

Now physicists at Washington University in St. Louis have defined a likely mode of operation for this ancient reactor and confirmed one of the proposed mechanisms of its self regulation. According to Alex Meshik (am@wustl.edu), the reactor cycled on (producing heat that boiled the nearby water) typically for 30 minutes and then off (when the now-scarce water failed to moderate the nuclear fission process) typically for 2.5 hours. 

This cycling saga is deduced from microscopic mass-spectrometric examination of the rock samples from the area. Meshik says that tiny alumophosphate grains found in the material of ancient reactor preserve a signature of the reactor's operational mode. "It is fascinating that xenon isotopic composition measured today provides us with such pristine timing records for a natural reactor operated 2 billion years ago." (Meshik _et al._, Physical Review Letters, 29 October 2004.)

----------


## rinselberg

The epic 1957 movie Bridge On The River Kwai, directed by David Lean, will forever be associated with the famous Colonel Bogey March that figured so prominently in the film's soundtrack. During World War Two, the old marching tune acquired some very strange *lyrics!* CLICK HERE TO SEE ...


For more about the fictional movie Bridge On The River Kwai:
http://www.optiboard.com/forums/show...8&postcount=76




For the REAL story of the bridge that still spans the River Kwai:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bri...the_River_Kwai
... and http://www.biography.ms/The_Bridge_o...iver_Kwai.html


The *real* bridge that spans the River Kwai (2004).


Turn up the SOUND on your PC and CLICK on the *record icon* below:

"March Of The River Kwai" featuring Mitch Miller and the Gang
Track length 02:29  courtesy of Boy Scout Troop 1853 Springfield, VA (USA)
Inspired by the famous 1957 movie "Bridge On The River Kwai", Mitch Miller's cover of the movie soundtrack was a big commercial success: For more, see What was the name of that bridge again?

----------


## rinselberg

During World War Two, Nazi mass murderer and war criminal extraordinaire Heinrich Himmler thought that the church bells of Oxford exerted a mystical influence or charm that protected the famous English university town from damage by the German Air Force; or at least, so says one site on the Internet.


Heinrich Himmler: A strange *ringing* in his ears?


Credit: http://dchipaux.free.fr/_syl_/_txt_/...e%20Occult.txt

----------


## rinselberg

More about the bizarre ideas of the major Nazi war criminal (chief of the Nazi SS) Heinrich Himmler 

Quoting from the website
http://dchipaux.free.fr/_syl_/_txt_/...e%20Occult.txt

_The centre of the SS "cult" became the castle of Wewelsburg in Westphalia, which Himmler bought as a ruin in 1934 and rebuilt over the next 11 years at a cost of 13 million marks. The central banqueting hall contained a vast round table with 13 throne-like seats to accommodate Himmler and 12 of his closest "apostles" - making, as some occult writers have pointed out, a coven of 13. Beneath this hall was a "Hall of the Dead", where plinths stood around a stone table.  As each member of the inner circle of the SS died, his coat of arms would be burned and together with his ashes, placed in an urn on one of these plinths for veneration. In this slightly ludicrous atmosphere of theatricality, Himmler instigated the systematic genocide carried out by the Third Reich in its last years._



Wewelsburg Castle


I have not been able to find any Internet reference for this, but I remember reading previously on the Web that Himmler believed that the _decapitated heads_ of the deceased members of his SS inner circle were capable of _channeling:_ Communicating across the ages with long dead historical figures that Himmler viewed as Germanic heroes, such as King Heinrich I "Hammer of the Slavs" and Frederick the Great.  (As far as I know, this channeling idea was never put to a test!) So there you have it -- decades before the advent of 24 hour cable news channels like MSNBC and political commentators like former DCI James Woolsey (a personal favorite of mine), former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan (another favorite), Rudy Giuliani, Mary Matalin; even Bill Clinton on occasion; etc. TALKING HEADS!

If its true, its a strange fact. If its only another fable on the Internet, thats also a strange fact. And if its only something I think I read, but never was on the Internet  well, that also would be a strange fact. That's a WRAP!




Wewelsburg Castle: Hall of the Dead


Wewelsburg Castle photo tour
http://www.wwiirelics.com/wevelsburg.htm

----------


## rinselberg

Wewelsburg: Castle of Evil. Take the complete photo tour at http://www.wwiirelics.com/wevelsburg.htm. See my brief photo essay Talking Heads! at http://www.optiboard.com/forums/show...&postcount=552.



_Eye on history ..._

----------


## Sean

Chocolate syrup was used for blood in the famous 45 second shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Psycho, which actually took 7 days to shoot.

----------


## Sean

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it's own weight each year.

----------


## Sean

A father Emperor penguin withstands the Antarctic cold for 60 days or more to protect his eggs, which he keeps on his feet, covered with a feathered flap. During this entire time he doesn't eat a thing. Most father penguins lose about 25 pounds while they wait for their babies to hatch. Afterward, they feed the chicks a special liquid from their throats. When the mother penguins return to care for the young, the fathers go to sea to eat and rest.

----------


## rinselberg

Using a laboratory device called a "diamond anvil cell", geophysicists and other scientists are able to simulate the same extreme high pressures and temperatures that are believed to prevail at the very center of the earth, or 4000 MILES below sea level! The device has many applications. It is currently being used to explore a theory that petroleum is being generated deep inside the earth's mantle, directly from rocks -- as opposed to the widely accepted idea that petroleum comes only from the effects of high pressures and temperatures on fossilized plants/animals. In theory at least, if not in practice, it may turn out that (some) petroleum is actually a renewable resource. There is evidence that some of the petroleum industry's oil reservoirs are actually refilling with crude oil even as oil is being pumped out for use.  


Diamond Anvil Cell: schematic
_Argonne National Laboratory_



reprinted from the Laramy-K World News Forum
_Rinsie reports, you decide ..._
http://www.laramyk.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=11

----------


## hcjilson

This could be the best news we've had in a long time! We might even be able to stop fighting wars over it! Thank you Ron!

hj

----------


## rinselberg

It would just be an elevator.

An elevator anchored to a platform in the middle of the ocean and rising some 25,000 MILES to geosynchronous orbit! GOING UP --???? As crazy as it sounds, NASA is giving it some serious thought, as a radical alternative to the Space Shuttle and other rocket-based launching platforms. NANOTECHNOLOGY may make it possible.

The Space Elevator: Artist's concept
http://www.mondolithic.com/Images/06_SpaceElevator.jpg

The Space Elevator comes closer to reality:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._020327-1.html

Thanks to Keith Benjamin, who clued me to this latest update.

----------


## coda

See: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7280483/

NASA has at least two active competitions in the area already.  They have the 'climber' contest and the 'belt' or 'cable' contest.  I believe the 'cable' contest has gone through an iteration already.  The advances in carbon nanotube technology over the past three years has been astounding, the technology for the cable is probably achievable within about 10 years.

----------


## Sean

Although construction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg started in 1015, it was not until 1439 that the spire was completed.

----------


## Don Lee

> It would just be an elevator.
> 
> An elevator anchored to a platform in the middle of the ocean and rising some 25,000 MILES to geosynchronous orbit! GOING UP --???? As crazy as it sounds, NASA is giving it some serious thought, as a radical alternative to the Space Shuttle and other rocket-based launching platforms. NANOTECHNOLOGY may make it possible.


I read about this last night in Popular Mechanics.  My brain hurts.:hammer:

Don

----------


## coda

The moon faithfully reflects the suns full spectrum of light but at 1/1,000,000 of the intensity.  Therefor, under optimum conditions, it is possible to see rainbows at night (named moonbows for some reason).  Waterfalls in areas with little or no artificial light are apparently the optimum condidtion.  Because of the greatly reduced intensity of moonlight the bows generally appear to be light grey or even 'black' rather than the intense colors we're used to during the day.


(this fact brought to you as a result of Chris Reyser's post about photochromic lenses,  thanks Chris)

----------


## rinselberg

New fossil evidence suggests that flying dinosaurs like this pterosaur could have grown to almost the same 64-foot wingspan as the Navy's F-14 carrier plane (image below).



For more, see *TheTimesOnline* report:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...icle564394.ece

----------


## rinselberg

Space elevator robot passes 1,000-foot mark
LiftPorts balloon-based test marks milestone on long road to orbit

By Leonard David
Senior space writer
Updated: 3:37 p.m. ET Sept. 23, 2005

A private group has taken one small step toward the prospect of building a futuristic space elevator.

LiftPort Group Inc., of Bremerton, Wash., has successfully tested a robot climber  a novel piece of hardware that reeled itself up and down a lengthy ribbon dangling from a high-altitude balloon.

The test run, conducted earlier this week, is seen as a precursor experiment intended to flight validate equipment and methods to construct a space elevator. This visionary concept would make use of an ultra-strong carbon nanotube composite ribbon stretching up to 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) from Earth into space ...

_MSNBC's complete report_
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9454786/

LiftPort Group Inc. home page
http://www.liftport.com/


Space Elevator (artist's concept)
credit: http://www.monolithic.com



reprinted from the Laramy-K World News Forum
_Rinsie reports, you decide ..._
http://www.laramyk.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=11

----------


## izzybrewer

There are as many planets in the universe as there are grains of sand on the beach

----------


## rinselberg

In 2002, Kevin Millar joined Ruppert Jones, Ricky Lee Nelson, Dave Kingman, Jose Canseco and Alvaro Espinoza as the only players in Major League Baseball history to hit a fair ball that got stuck in a stadium obstruction.


credit: Kevin Millar - Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia



rinselberg - good posts for your good times
http://www.optiboard.com/forums/show...3&postcount=16

----------


## rinselberg

In 1970, Columbia recording artists Simon and Garfunkel received a Grammy award for their hugely successful single "Bridge Over Troubled Water".



*RIAA Gold Record Award*


The legendary duo was so impressed that they put the gold-plated award disc on their stereo record player.

They were more than a little surprised at what they heard coming from their *speakers!* 


 Make sure that your PC speaker volume control is set for listening and CLICK on the loudspeaker icon. If you don't instantly recognize this audio track, you can look it up at the end of another OptiBoard post: Hitler's anatomy and a bridge in Thailand. And for more background information see: No "hum bridge" was taken!


_Credit: http://440.com/twtd/archives/feb27.html_

----------


## hcjilson

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for
blood plasma.

----------


## amoura_0

> The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. 
> >


haha....that's very amazing... if its that easy to invent something, i'd better start from now..
;)

----------


## Sean

A rat can last longer without water than a camel can.

----------


## amoura_0

More money is spent on gardening than on any other hobby

A person uses approximately fifty-seven sheets of toilet paper each day!


Honolulu is the only place in the United States that has a royal palace!


One gallon of used motor oil can ruin approximately one million gallons of fresh water!



More money is spent on gardening than on any other hobby!
In 32 years. there are about 1 billion seconds!

Rice paper does not have any rice in it!

----------


## Sean

A Holstein's spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

----------


## Sean

Elvis Presley made only one television commercial - an ad for "Southern Maid Doughnuts" that ran in 1954.

----------


## amoura_0

*Blind Spot In Eye* 
The optic nerve exits the retina as a single bundle. The exit point within the retina has no receptor cells. This location forms a blind spot in each eye. We rarely notice these spots because they do not overlap within the image formed by the two eyes. Your ophthalmologist can only detect your blind spots by having you close the eye not being tested.

----------


## amoura_0

*Eyes See Inside Out* 
The light-detecting receptor cells within the retina, called rods and cones, are actually at the back of the retina under several layers of cells. The neurons and support cells within the retina are fairly translucent, so light is able to pass through them and reach the receptors.

*No Octopus Blind Spot* 
 The octopus has a single layer of cells in the back of its eye. These receptor cells project directly back to the brain via the optic nerve. Because the optic nerve forms behind the receptors rather than passing through them, the octopus has no blind spot. 

*No Pain in Brain* 
There is no sense of pain within the brain itself. This fact allows neurosurgeons to probe areas of the brain while the patient is awake. Feedback from the patient during these probes is useful for identifying important regions, such as those for speech, that are spared if possible

----------


## amoura_0

*Why Animals Have Big Eyes* 
Receptor cells in the eye are thought to be capable of detecting single photons, the smallest units of light. Nocturnal animals take advantage of this sensitivity by having large eyes with large apertures to let in as many photons as possible allowing them to see remarkably well at night.

----------


## chip anderson

Stranger fact on same subject.  I used to take retinal pictures.  I saw a patient who had a piece of steel exactly the diameter of the optic nerve covering the optic nerve.  He saw 20/20 with no field loss.  He had gone to the eye doctor and got tired of waiting in the doctor's waiting room, and went home.  The steel had been there 20 years.   Thank God the patient got tired of waiting and went home.  Any ophthalmologist would have felt compelled to remove the foreign body.


Chip

----------


## Sean

A father Emperor penguin withstands the Antarctic cold for 60 days or more to protect his eggs, which he keeps on his feet, covered with a feathered flap. During this entire time he doesn't eat a thing. Most father penguins lose about 25 pounds while they wait for their babies to hatch. Afterward, they feed the chicks a special liquid from their throats. When the mother penguins return to care for the young, the fathers go to sea to eat and rest.

----------


## Sean

This 14-year-old pedigreed Chinese crested recently won the Sonoma-Marin Fair contest for the third consecutive time.

----------


## jasupin

> There is a Welsh town called.............Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllll  antysiliogogogoch


To extend that fact... I found a website (though I can't vouch for it's authenticity) that has a little article about the longest place name in the world.  
*THE WORLD'S LONGEST PLACE NAME
THE LONGEST LIST OF THE LONGEST STUFF AT THE LONGEST DOMAIN NAME AT LONG LAST*



*What is the world's longest place name?

*



*A little village in Wales boasts the longest place name at 58 letters:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyr
ndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch...* 

*...But New Zealand makes the same claim with a hill containing 92 letters:
Tetaumatawhakatangihangakoauaotamateaurehaeaturipuk
apihimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuaakitanarahu...* 

*...But after some further digging we found the winner to be Bangkok. OK, so that's only 7 letters, but the official ceremonial name of Bangkok is Krung Thep Mahanakhon for short meaning 'City of Angels'.* *The full name of Bangkok has many variations in spelling but we found what is believed to be the official spelling coming in at 163 letters:
Krungthepmahanakornamornratanakosinmahintarayutthaya
mahadilokphopnopparatrajathaniburiromudomrajaniwesmaha
satharnamornphimarnavatarnsathitsakkattiyavisanukamprasit*

*-  from http://thelongestlistofthelongeststu...m/long200.html*

----------


## amoura_0

A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.!

Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, every time you breathe!

In the White House, there are 13,092 knives, forks and spoons!

Slugs have 4 noses!

Recycling one glass jar, saves enough energy to watch T.V for 3 hours!

Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on this planet!


*Owls are one of the only birds who can see the color blue!*

----------


## Sean

> To extend that fact... I found a website (though I can't vouch for it's authenticity) that has a little article about the longest place name in the world. 
> *THE WORLD'S LONGEST PLACE NAME*
> *THE LONGEST LIST OF THE LONGEST STUFF AT THE LONGEST DOMAIN NAME AT LONG LAST*
> 
> 
> 
> *What is the world's longest place name?
> 
> *
> ...


Thanks for the update........:cheers:

----------


## Sean

Animal gestation periods: the shortest is the American opossum, which bears its young 12 to 13 days after conception; the longest is the Asiatic elephant, taking 608 days, or just over 20 months.

----------


## rinselberg

> I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you.


_... from the Biblical prophet Habakkuk._

Almost halfway through the last century, the British government had detailed plans drawn up to build a giant military aircraft carrier out of *ice.*



If this sounds like lunacy, there were some exculpatory circumstances. First of all, there was a bit of a war on at the time - World War Two, to be precise - and German submarines were coming dangerously close to closing down England's vital sea lanes from Canada and the United States. There was a great need for military airpower in the middle part of the North Atlantic Ocean - too far away for land-based planes from either the East or West side to cover.

Secondly, the plans were refined to use something better than pure ice. A mixture of ice and wood chips was developed that had some of the strength and workable properties of reinforced concrete. The material was (and still is) known as "pykrete".

The plan called for a huge aircraft carrier with a hull made from pykrete. There would be generators and electric motors to propel the ship without making so much heat as to melt the pykrete. The ship would include equipment to keep the pykrete hull refrigerated. With an outer hull of 40-foot thick pykrete, the proposed ship was thought to be unsinkable by any weapon short of the as yet undeveloped atomic bomb.

One problem: By the time the British could have built even one such ship, they reckoned that they would have already lost the war.

With improvements in the range of land-based aircraft, and a series of other disasters and problems on the German side that tilted the overall balance in favor of the Allies, this "ice-capade" came to an inglorius but predictable end, and all further work on the project was canceled.

_Credit: http://jwgibbs.cchem.berkeley.edu/CF.../habakkuk.html_

----------


## amoura_0

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

----------


## fjpod

We throw away contact lenses after one day, or one week, but we keep contact lens cases for a year.

----------


## amoura_0

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

----------


## Sean

Chocolate syrup was used for blood in the famous 45 second shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Psycho, which actually took 7 days to shoot.

----------


## rinselberg

Bronze key depicting the Roman god Mercury, dated to the time of the first century BC to the third century AD. Found in Anatolia,Turkey. Credit: The Keyless Lock Store at http://www.nokey.com/ankeymus.html

_More from The Keyless Lock Store website:_

It has been said that the most ancient lock every discovered is that described by Mr Joseph Bonomi in Nineveh [near what is now Mosul, Iraq] ... as having secured the gate of an apartment in one of the palaces of Khorsabad. He says that the gate was fastened by a large wooden lock like those still used in the East, the wooden key with iron pegs at one end to lift the iron pins in the lock, being as much as a man can carry. Mr Bonomi adds that the length of such keys ranged from thirteen to fourteen inches to two feet or more. In a letter which appeared in a trade journal in 1850 Mr W C Trevelyan said that it was remarkable that the locks which had been in use in the Faroe Islands [in the North Atlantic Ocean], probably for centuries, were identical in their constructions with those of the [ancient] Egyptians. They were, lock and key, in all their parts made of wood; of which material, he believed, were others which had been found in Egyptian Catacombs, thus making the Egyptian so like the Faroese in structure and appearance, that it would not be easy to distinguish one from the other. The frequent mention of locks and keys in the Old Testament is further evidence of their great antiquity ...


Drawing of the ancient lock and key of Nineveh. From Youngfolk's Book of Invention at http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/pr...ions/chpt8.htm



_The UAE (United Arab Emirates) was the country at the center of the recent US port terminals controversy. Why are they known as America's "Top Gun" in the Middle East? RinselNews has the answer: See http://www.laramyk.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=207_

----------


## hcjilson

This coming Wednesday at 2 minutes, 3 seconds after 1:00am the time will read:

01:02:03  04/05/06

This not happen again until 2106 when we will probably be too infirm to celebrate.

----------


## rinselberg

... *this* would be the face of Einstein today -





- instead of this one.



Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, at the age of 36.



It was his last major contribution to the science of physics.


Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and General Theory of Relativity (1915) made him a revolutionary on the world stage of twentieth century physics, and established his credentials, still valid today, as the world's most celebrated scientist since Isaac Newton.

In 1929 Einstein published a "Unified Field Theory", attempting to reconcile the physics of large scale phenomena like stars and planets with the newly emerging and even more revolutionary world of quantum physics - a world populated by subatomic particles that - in accordance with a mysterious new set of rules that begin with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of existing in two different places at the very same moment of time.

But Einstein's Unified Field Theory was a scientific failure. The new priesthood of quantum physicists quickly demonstrated its shortcomings, and within a few short years Einstein had to retract it.




_Quantum superposition: It's as if a compass needle were pointing to magnetic north and magnetic south at the very same time. And there was even more for Einstein not to like about the brave new world of quantum physics, starting with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states the impossibility of knowing with arbitrary precision a subatomic particle's location and energy at any given moment. More certainty of its location could only be obtained by measurements that would create more uncertainty about its energy level - and vice versa._



Einstein couldn't reconcile himself to the implications of quantum physics. He was certain that God's creation, the universe, had to be orderly and predictable, if it were only possible to recover all of the information that was available at the very first instant of time. He wasn't prepared to coexist with the uncertainties and random possibilities that are at the heart of quantum physics. He summarized his position in a signature statement: "God does not play dice with the universe." Although his famous equation e=mc² was the principle of the atomic bomb, Einstein made no further scientific contribution to the Manhattan Project - the monumental enterprise that developed the world's first nuclear weapons.





_Schrodinger's Cat: The most celebrated "feline" in the history of science was an icon of the new quantum priesthood._



The scientific world had come to revere him for his earlier accomplishments, but as a theoretical physicist, he never again "hit the long ball" after reaching the age of 36, in 1915. The high priest of time and space had lost his acolytes. In their private moments, the newly minted quantum physicists probably shrugged their shoulders and wondered why the old man wouldn't or couldn't reinvent himself and keep up with the times. The twentieth century passed its midpoint, and Einstein's seat on the train was empty. He was lost somewhere, back at the station.


From 1930 to his last day of life in 1955, Einstein single-mindedly pursued what has come to be called "The Theory of Everything" - a perfected version of his failed Unified Field Theory - but he never found the answers he was looking for.



Einstein, after 1930 - _ala_ the late American humorist Jean Shepherd:


> Blah-blah-blah Schrodinger's Cat. Blah-blah-blah the Uncertainty Principle. Blah-blah-blah the whole damn (quantum) thing ...



If commercial broadcast television had been born earlier, it might have unfolded like this:


_Well Joe, do you think we'll ever see Albert publish again at the Nobel Prize level?_


_I don't know Jon. Thirty-eight, thirty-nine - even the best trained minds start to have trouble getting around on those ten-dimensional spacetime vectors ..._






_Sign Of The Times: GTR (the General Theory of Relativity) dates back to 1915. They're experimenting with new ways to measure the effects of GTR in the universe of today._



This post is optimized for viewing with the OptiBoard Red forum skin.

Images: http://nacho.princeton.edu/fowler/Ta...01/slide05.jpg http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/spin.gif http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/c..._mechanics.jpg http://news-service.stanford.edu/new...pb_diagram.jpg




rinselberg pays homage to Cadillac's "Art and Science" design philosophy. Click on the poster art for more about *rinselberg.*

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## rinselberg

Ever get hit with a ton of -- quark?

In May 2002, a group of researchers at SMU (Southern Methodist University) reported the possibility that strange matter may have been responsible for two unexplained seismic events recorded on October 22 and November 24 in 1993; they proposed that two strangelets of unknown mass moving at roughly 400 kilometers per second had passed through the Earth, generating seismic shock waves along their paths. . . . It has been suggested that the IMS (International Monitoring System) for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty may be useful as a sort of "strangelet observatory", using the entire Earth as its detector: The IMS will be designed to detect anomalous seismic disturbances as small as the equivalent of a single ton of TNT (or less), and could be used to track strangelets passing through Earth in real time, if properly exploited.

Strange matter is an ultra-dense phase of matter that is theorized to form inside particularly massive neutron stars.

If a "strangelet", or volume of strange matter as small as a single human blood cell could be weighed on a balance scale, it would register as much as a single ton, or even ten tons, depending on its exact state of condensation.


_BaBar particle detector data - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. What strange matter would look like to a particle physicist - not a whole ton of it, but maybe 0.0000000000000000001 tons or something like that ..._

If the suspicious seismic data recordings are actually the signatures of strangelets, they were invisibly small, blood cell sized fragments of strange matter that collided with the earth, at about ten times the ingress speed of an average meteor or meteorite. The ultra-dense strangelet would have drilled straight through the earth's crust, deep into the mantle and then exited from the earth's crust almost a half-world away from its entry point, boring an invisibly small tunnel in the earth's rock, all the way along its path. Its path would have been perfectly straight, essentially unperturbed by the collision, and it would have travelled through the earth and then exited at almost exactly the same speed as it entered. The strangelet would have passed through the earth's entire domain in less than sixty seconds.

The strangelet would have delivered about the same energy as a fifty kiloton atomic bomb - but, because that energy was spread uniformly all along the thousands of kilometers of its path through the earth, from ingress to egress on the other side of the world - the event would not have been noticeable to anyone, except as a seismic disturbance.

However, the seismic (sound) waves produced by such an event would be radically different in character than anything that could be caused by any known or imaginable kind of earthquake - and it was these unique sonic signatures, recorded at seismograph stations, that led the SMU scientists to offer the hypothesis of an earth-strangelet collision.

To read more about this story:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/matter_pr.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2502755.stm
http://www.smu.edu/newsinfo/releases/01342.html

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelets



The invisible ninja soldier - is it closer to reality than you might think?
http://www.optiboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17042

----------


## Shwing

What future president appears with George Washington in the famous Emanuel Leutze painting: George Washington Crossing the Delaware?

----------


## Spexvet

George Washington?

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## Shwing

Hahaha!  

Actually, you are absolutely correct (Washington was not yet president), but I was looking for another future president...

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## rinselberg

Read more about Antares underwater telescope:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0404201252.htm
http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/474.htm
http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/antares.asp
http://antares.in2p3.fr/



*Only you can prevent CPU fires*

----------


## DRAINGE1

It's illegal to drink beer out of a bucket while you're sitting on a curb in St. Louis!

----------


## Sean

> Hahaha! 
> 
> Actually, you are absolutely correct (Washington was not yet president), but I was looking for another future president...


 My first guess would be James Monroe..........if not him then..... maybe Madison?

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## Shwing

Very good.

Lt. Jame Monroe was the officer standing behind Washington, holding the American flag.

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## Sean

A father sea catfish keeps the eggs of his young in his mouth until they are ready to hatch. He will not eat until his young are born, which may take several weeks.

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## rinselberg

_SGR 1806-20 is a "magnetar": a rapidly spinning neutron star that not only has an incredible density, trillions of times greater than ordinary matter, but an incredibly strong magnetic field._

On December 27, 2004, scientists detected the most powerful single burst of energy ever observed, aside from the Big Bang at the universe's first moment of existence.

It was from a special kind of star called a "magnetar".

You can read more and view images and video animations, here:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/..._nsu_0205.html



Don't shoot the messenger ...
Postcard from Tora Bora
Gravity's Rainbow
Axis of Knievel
Scientists building new telescope - at bottom of the sea
Ya' think ...
Satan decided they should play their home games at Coors Field ... 
prejudice
145 becomes a very lucky number for MNF Iraq ...
A non-running computer produces fewer errors ...

Just the ten latest reasons to make RinselWorld** your next Internet port of call ...

----------


## hcjilson

Imagine that, after a journey of 50,000 years it arrives during our lifetime. Mind Boggling! Thanks for directing us to the site.
harry

----------


## Sean

A Holstein's spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

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## Dave Nelson

Steam is wet right? Wrong. Drier than dust. Dry. Bone dry. But you can see the water in steam right? Wrong. Steam is invisible. Dry, invisible. When you "see"  steam, you are actually seing the steam condensing to water droplets, or water vapour, which is indeed wet, and visible. Steam itself is dry because ALL the water has been turned into a gas- there is no liquid in steam. I found this to be a rather amazing fact when I first heard this, but I got a first hand demonstration of this when I recently built a reproduction windsor armchair, which requires some steam bending wood in a steam chamber. After steaming for over an hour in a steam chamber, the wood emerges DRY, really hot, and surpisingly pliable for about 30 seconds. :idea:

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## Sean

> I recently built a reproduction windsor armchair, which requires some steam bending wood in a steam chamber. After steaming for over an hour in a steam chamber, the wood emerges DRY, really hot, and surpisingly pliable for about 30 seconds. :idea:


Just curious.........how long does it take to make one of the chairs?

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## Dave Nelson

Hi Sean. The one I built is a reproduction "comb-back" windsor, based on an American design used in the 18 century, It was considered a colonial "lay-z-boy," if you will. I had never built one before, so it took a considerable long time. I used hand tools as much as practical, and hand shaved and tapered all the back rest spindles. I also turned all the legs, spindles, stretchers, ect out of solid maple on a lathe, the seat, in keeping with tradition, is carved out of pine, and the upper sections, arm rest, head rest, ect, is out of oak, which is a wood that lends itself well to steam bending. The legs enter the seat in a tapered hole, go right through the seat, then wedges are driven through to lock them in place. It was a really difficult project, I am by no means a very experienced wood worker, so all together it took three months, and about 80 hours to complete. I could build another one in less than half that, now that I know how to do it. If you are interested there are websites dedicated to chairmaking, and windsor chairmaking in particular. The piece is really beutiful, a bit gothic, and is very eyecatching in my home. Its comfy to sit in too. If you ever watch "the Patriot", with Mel Gibson, you will see windsor chairmaking in action right at the beginning of the movie. Let me know if you do decide to build one. :D

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## Sean

Thanks for the info.....i'll pass it along to my father who has always been into restoring old wood furniture.....but never building any....I think he is ready to take the plunge. He just finished with a rocking chair made by my wifes grandfather.....and has started on a wooden chest that has a brass plate on the bottom that reads Christmas 1842 or 49...something like that.

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## rinselberg

Where's the boof?


Try Minnesota.

Minneapolis St. Paul, to be more precise.

Since joining the Minnesota Twins pitching rotation earlier this season, Boof Bonser has appeared in six regular season games. The 25 year-old, right-handed starter has compiled a record to date of two wins against one loss, with an ERA of 4.68 over 32 and 2/3 innings.

Born John Paul Bonser, he legally changed his name to "Boof" in 2001.

It was his customary nickname from childhood.




American League Division Series, 2006.


A no-brainer
And they still haven't found it ...
Don't shoot the messenger
Postcard from Tora Bora
Gravity's Rainbow
Axis of Knievel
Scientists building new telescope - at bottom of the sea
Ya' think ...
Satan decided they should play their home games at Coors Field ... 
prejudice
145 becomes a very lucky number for MNF Iraq ...
A non-running computer produces fewer errors ...
Postcard from the Riviera Maya

Just a baker's dozen of the latest reasons to make RinselWorld** your next Internet port of call ...

----------


## Sean

A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length.

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## rinselberg

Schematic of a single-celled organism with a rudimentary eye. http://www.biocab.org/Euglena_Class.html


In his 1995 book, River Out of Eden, and again in his 2004 Ancestors Tale, Richard Dawkins estimates that image-forming eyes have evolved anywhere from 40 to 60 different times [on earth], using a total of nine very different optical forms. It is striking how different the compound eyes of insects are from the single-lensed eyes of vertebrates, and how similar the camera like eyes of octopi and squid are to our own. Because photoreceptors reside on the inner side of the retina in those mollusks, yet on the outer side in vertebrates, we can be sure that such differences signal deeply independent [evolutionary] origins.

At least nine distinct design principles are evident in the total range of eyes: Pinhole eyes; two kinds of camera-lens eyes (vertebrate and octopus); curved reflector (satellite dish) eyes and several kinds of compound, multi-lensed eyes. Compound eyes have evolved independently in ostracods v. crablike crustaceans, as well as among annelid worm (sabellids), and bivalve mollusks. Camera-like eyes have evolved not only in vertebrates and octopuses, but independently in jumping spiders, some snails, alciopid polychaete worms, cubozoan jellyfish, and the backward looking eyes of coral reef shrimp.

Finally, while many single-celled protists have photosensitive eyespots, single-celled dinoflagellates have a *lens* in their eyespot!

_For more on convergent evolution:
http://thegreatstory.org/convergence.html_



Eye of a Queen conch (strombas gigas). http://www.arkive.org/species/GES/in...tml?size=large


_See why computing with those tedious, old-fashioned bits (binary digits) is becoming so 20th century ...
http://www.optiboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17515_

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## Dave Nelson

Kinda reminds me of the conch I picked up snorkeling in Fiji. It was alive, and when I looked inside, I was startled to see 2 tiny bright blue eyes with black pupils looking back at me. They were so human-like, I had to put the little critter back where I got it.

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## rinselberg

> Kinda reminds me of the conch I picked up snorkeling in Fiji. It was alive, and when I looked inside, I was startled to see two tiny bright blue eyes with black pupils looking back at me. They were so human-like, I had to put the little critter back where I got it.


Ah yes, The Eye Of The Conch ...

Did it look anything like this?


Eye of a Queen conch (strombas gigas). http://www.arkive.org/species/GES/in...tml?size=large


_See why computing with those tedious, old-fashioned bits (binary digits) is becoming so 20th century ...
http://www.optiboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17515_

----------


## rinselberg

I just saw the new two-hour National Geographic TV segment "Sky Monsters", on the topic of pterosaurs (winged dinosaurs).

If you've only imagined pterosaurs as rather primitive birds, more gliders than fliers, and able to get aloft only by taking advantage of rising currents of warm air, then you're in for a number of surprises ...

The computer generated animations are awesome in their apparent reality.


_Flying by wires, a model Pteranodon longiceps takes to the air over western Kansas._

Credit: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ng...re5/zoom2.html 


I posted some images previously on this topic:
Flying dinosaurs now thought to be as big as an F-14 Tomcat!

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## rinselberg

> Religious certainty is based on faith. And that is the crux of it. A religious devotee may try to prove that the god that they have faith in [actually] exists, whereas everyone else doesn't feel the urge to prove or disprove [a] god, because the motivation of faith isnt there.
> 
> I might argue that the world was created by a big green blob of jelly, that is visible to me in the night sky ...


And that would not be all that far from the truth.


The filamentary structure in 3D. There are at least three intersecting filaments.


*Newfound blob is biggest thing in universe*
Structure is 200 million light-years wide, made up of galaxies and gas

By Ker Than
Staff Writer

Updated: 1:34 p.m. PT July 27, 2006
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.

The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea ...

_For more, see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14062964/_


Quicksand!
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
"Remember the Maine(s) ..."
Sky Monsters
sabermetrics
Guess what?
Evolution - the eyes have it!
B612 - the cure for (aste)roid rage?
Where's the boof?
The second Big(gest) Bang
Postcard from Tora Bora
Gravity's Rainbow
Scientists building new telescope - at bottom of the sea

Just a baker's dozen of the latest reasons to make RinselWorld** your next Internet port of call ...

----------


## chip anderson

OD1:  Always captialize *GOD*!

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## rinselberg

> QDO1: Always capitalize *GOD!*


It's cool, Chip. That was* me,* quoting an old post from QDO1. Since he was not talking about God - the (Jewish or Christian) God - or any other specific god, but just about the general concept of (a) god, it's proper to use "god" in that context.

OK?

As for QDO1 - well, I haven't seen a post from him in months.

----------


## chip anderson

Ri:  

I know you were quoting and directed post to OD.   Hey, maybe OD found God.

Chip

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## Dave Nelson

The first measureable sign of hypoxia occurs at 5000 feet...there is a measureable decrease in night vision. At :Eek:   63,000 feet... your blood and other bodily fluids will boil.

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## Ory

> The first measureable sign of hypoxia occurs at 5000 feet...there is a measureable decrease in night vision. At 63,000 feet... your blood and other bodily fluids will boil.


 
How......pleasant.

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## Dave Nelson

A common alchoholic drink in Newfoundland is "screech." its made by fermenting empty whiskey barrels to leach out the whiskey that soaks into the wood over the years. :cheers:

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## rinselberg

Around 37 AD, the Roman emperor Caligula - a madman of legendary depravity - commissioned two extraordinary ships for his exclusive use on the small and shallow freshwater lake called "Nemi" on the outskirts of Rome.

The ships were colossal, even by Roman standards. One was a floating temple to the Greek goddess Diana - or the Egyptian god Isis - archaeologists have entertained both theories about it. The other was a lavishly equipped floating palace, with a heated deck and baths, running water and other ornate and extravagant furnishings that would rival a cruise ship of today for comfort and luxury.


_Decorative bronze from one of Caligula's ships.
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/romanc...ivimages12.htm_

The priceless ships were scuttled when a palace revolt ended Caligula's brief reign and also his relatively brief life. And it was unprecedented extravagances like these ships that had drained the Roman treasury under Caligula and comprised part of the motivation for his violent overthrow.

The ships lay forgotten until 1446, when a first attempt was made to salvage artifacts. Other salvage attempts were made in 1535, 1827 and 1895, but no one had a workable plan to raise the sunken ships.

Enter the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who rose to power in Italy after the first world war with dreams of restoring Italy as a modern reincarnation of the ancient Roman Empire. He had a cunning plan to retrieve the sunken ships. Instead of raising the ships, he would drain the lake - and he knew just how to do it. Long before Caligula's time, the Romans bored a mile-long tunnel through the adjacent hills - another amazing story - for drawing water from the lake. In 1929, Mussolini's regime installed powerful electric pumps and drained the entire lake, pumping the water out through the ancient Roman tunnel.

As archaeologists studied the remains of the ships, their astonishment grew with a series of unexpected discoveries. The ships featured corrosion resistant copper-clad nails, precision-built water pumps and precision water control valves cast in bronze, an unexpectedly modern anchor design and even what looked like modern ball bearings for a "magic" revolving statue, rotated by a mechanism hidden under its base - some 1400 years before the historical invention of ball bearings by Leonardo da Vinci.

The engineering and construction of the ships was a revelation that Roman technology, already regarded as unprecedented for its time, was even *more* advanced than anyone had previously realized.


_Remains of one of the Lake Nemi ships.
http://www.abc.se/~pa/mar/nemships.htm_

The ship remains and artifacts were housed in a purpose-built museum and teams of archaeologists continued to study them until the outbreak of the second world war.

Enter Adolf Hitler.

In 1944, retreating German soldiers, either at the behest of Hitler or anticipating his desires, set fire to the museum and burned the invaluable Roman artifacts.

Caligula, Mussolini, Hitler - a tale of three madmen.

_Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemi http://www.gonomad.com/readuponit/20...floors-on.html http://www.archaeology.org/0205/abstracts/caligula.html http://nemiship.multiservers.com/_


_A seemingly conservative "media" blitz worthy of today's Karl Rove helps transform ancient Rome from a floundering republic into a burgeoning world empire in Political Correctness 101._

----------


## rinselberg

It seems that a financial swindle has delayed (if not ended) Frenchman Michel Fournier's bid to set a new record for the highest altitude parachute jump.

Protected only by a pressure suit, somewhat alike to an astronaut's spacesuit, Fournier was planning to jump from a high altitude balloon at 130,000 feet (well into the stratosphere) and free fall long enough to accelerate and drop faster than the speed of sound before pulling the ripcord to open his parachute.

For more:
http://www.legrandsaut.org/site_en/home.htm
http://www.space.com/news/060713_big_jump.html
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53928,00.html
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml

----------


## rinselberg

_Malachite (copper ore). Credit: http://www.utexas.edu/tmm/exhibits/g...y/calcite.html_

The Great Orme Copper Mine in Wales is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest Bronze Age copper mine. The History Channel has called it the largest copper mine in the world - period. They say it is only about five-percent explored, and they have already uncovered more than five miles of Bronze Age tunnels and over 30,000 Bronze Age mining picks made from deer antlers. Elsewhere it's posted that prehistoric miners recovered enough copper worldwide to smelt more than ten million Bronze Age axes - although I can't find another source for that.


> In the 19th century, the old mine workings were assumed to be Roman, but since serious modern excavation began in 1987, over four miles of tunnels dating from 1900 to 600 BC - long before the Roman era in Britain - have been surveyed. In 1995 Mark Randall (in a University College London dissertation) estimated that up to 1,769 tonnes of copper metal were extracted from the mine during the Bronze age. This figure, based only on the surveyed area of the workings, would make the Great Orme the pre-eminent source of copper in the Bronze Age. http://www.data-wales.co.uk/orme.htm


 If you really wanted to (!), you could listen online to this *thirty minute audio clip* about the mine from the BBC ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/...m_20030826.ram ... if a new icon appears on your Mac or PC desktop, you may have to "click" on it to start the audio playback.

Credit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/...20030826.shtml

Are you reading more posts and enjoying it less? Make RadioFreeRinsel your next Internet port of call ...

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## Dave Nelson

quote=rinselberg;155323]It seems that a financial swindle has delayed (if not ended) Frenchman Michel Fournier's bid to set a new record for the highest altitude parachute jump.

Protected only by a pressure suit, somewhat alike to an astronaut's spacesuit, Fournier was planning to jump from a high altitude balloon at 130,000 feet (well into the stratosphere) and free fall long enough to accelerate and drop faster than the speed of sound before pulling the ripcord to open his parachute.

For more:
http://www.legrandsaut.org/site_en/home.htm
http://www.space.com/news/060713_big_jump.html
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53928,00.html
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml[/quote] I believe the record still belongs to Capt Joseph Kittenger, USAF,who chronicled the leap in a book called, aptly, the long, lonely leap. Kittinger bailed out of a balloon at 103,000 feet. A civilian attemt to beat the record resulted in a fatality, when the faceplate of the suit blew out. I only recall the first name as Nick." I made a couple efforts to break the Canadian high altitude record of 35,000 feet, far short of the world record, but I was unable to do so. Last I heard, the US air force stated, "The effects of super-sonic speeds on a parachutist and his equipment are unknown at this time."

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## Ory

> I made a couple efforts to break the Canadian high altitude record of 35,000 feet, far short of the world record, but I was unable to do so.


Ummm.....how exactly does one try (and fail) to break a parachuting record multiple times. I thought all your jumps had to be successful or......:drop:

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## rinselberg

References to couching, the earliest form of cataract surgery, can be traced as far back as the Assyrian Code of King Hammurabi in Mesopotamia, around 1700 BC. Couching was a mechanical displacement of the cataract-degraded crystalline lens, commonly accomplished by inserting a sharp metallic instrument into the eye. The Hindu surgeon Susruta is known to have practiced couching on the Indian subcontinent around 700 BC. Archaeological excavations from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Egypt have uncovered bronze instruments that would have been appropriate for couching.


_Ancient medical instruments suitable for couching - http://www.bremseyecenter.com/cataracttrivia.htm._

During the classical period of ancient Rome, hollow needles were being used to break up the cataract and remove it with suction - with the surgeon's mouth being the source of the vacuum.

The first attempt at a systematic description of the cataract and its treatment in the West appears in 29 AD in "On Medicine", the work of the Latin encyclopedist Cornelius Celsus - and physicians used this script for the next 1700 years. 

Couching could provide some improvement of vision by removing the cataract from the visual field, but the patient was deprived of the focusing power of the crystalline lens - and corrective spectacle lenses and IOLs were not options in the ancient world.

Couching was the only surgical option for cataract treatment known before the late 19th century.

I will leave it to OptiBoard's *professionals* to speculate about the success rate and side-effects of this earliest kind of cataract surgery.

Sources:
http://www.bioline.org.br/request?am04039
http://www.aaofoundation.org/what/he.../antiquity.cfm
http://www.alconlabs.com/ca_en/eo/su...tsurgery.jhtml
http://www.planetpapers.com/Assets/2854.php

Image hosting: http://imageshack.us/
Poster art: http://www.linotype.com/



"I want justice," Bush said. "And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that said 'Wanted, Dead or Alive' ..." The President was talking about Osama bin Laden, but there's another suspect still at large, just as elusive or even more so. And they're *not* looking near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. To join the hunt, just *CLICK* on the poster art (above).

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## Dave Nelson

> Ummm.....how exactly does one try (and fail) to break a parachuting record multiple times. I thought all your jumps had to be successful or......:drop:


 hi, Ory. High altitude parachuting has its own set of precautions beyond the usual. Oxygen must be worn by both the pilot and the jumper, and the jumper must then switch to an oxygen system for the freefall, which must be free of moisture so the equipment does'nt ice up. There are issues with pressure above 30,000 feet as well. The difficulty is accessing suitable equipment, as well as a suitable aircraft. In my attemps, I was able to access a pilatus porter, a light 6 passenger aircraft with an operational ceiling of 30,000 feet. The plan was to drop off other jumpers at 12,000 feet, until I was the only one left, at a time when the gas tanks were nearly dry, then full throttle it to see if we could get to 35. I never even got off the ground, so my "attempts" were organizational ones. I did, however, jump from 16,500 feet one fine day, 4,500 feet above the requirement for on-board oxygen, which we did not have. I was in freefall for nearly a minute and 30 seconds, and probably reached approx 350 kph. I hold only one record, per se, by doing the first BASE jump in Canada, and was one of the first 3 or 4 people in the world to parachute from a hang-glider. This, and 3 bucks, will get me a coffee at Starbucks.:D

----------


## rinselberg

Real Solar Zodiac: The thirteen constellations, against which the sun moves over the course of a single year, as seen from the Earth. Indo-European cultures developed a zodiac based on the ecliptic, which is the path of the sun independent of the earth's rotation - a path in the sky, traced over the course of a single year, by observing the position of the sun at the same time on each successive day.

Credit: http://www.geocities.com/astrologyzo...olarzodiac.htm.


_Ecliptic: Path of the sun on the celestial sphere ... http://www.uccs.edu/~tchriste/course...lecobserv.html._

Constellations are nothing more than figuratively named patterns of stars as we see them from the earth's surface - stars projected onto the celestial sphere. The thirteen constellations of the Real Solar Zodiac are the background in the night sky, against which the ecliptic or yearly path of the sun is seen to progress.


More than a hundred years ago, in 1902, sponge divers recovered parts of an extraordinary mechanism of some kind, from an ancient shipwreck near the Mediterranean island of Antikythera. It baffled archaeologists. Was it an astrolabe? Was it an orrery or an astronomical clock?



For decades after 1902, archaeological investigation failed to yield much insight and relied more on imagination than facts. But then, starting in 1951, more systematic research, drawing on the best of modern scientific techniques, has finally begun to reveal its many secrets.



The Antikythera Mechanism dates from around the first century BC and is the most sophisticated machine ever recovered from the ancient world. Not until the development of precision clocks - over 1000 years later - would Europeans again make scientific instruments of this complexity. The device is now understood to have been a complex analog computer that predicted the celestial positions and movements of the sun, moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and a handful of stars.


_A representative, but highly simplified schematic of the sun-moon assembly and zodiac display ... http://www.matrixofcreation.co.uk/ancient-clocks.htm._



_A full scale modern reconstruction, just over 12 inches high. The front dial displays the annual progress of the sun and moon through the constellations of the zodiac, against an Egyptian calendar rendered in Greek on the outer annulus ... http://www.grand-illusions.com/antikyth.htm._

The Antikythera Mechanism's differential gear construction predated the common use of this technology by more than 1500 years. There were more than thirty rotating gears. It was remarkable for the miniaturization and complexity of its parts, which were comparable to the workings of an 18th century precision chronometer. When past or future dates were entered using a hand crank (now lost), the mechanism calculated and displayed the corresponding ephemeris data - the celestial positions of the sun, moon and certain planets and stars, against the constellations of the zodiac. The use of differential gears enabled the mechanism to add and subtract angular velocities ... It is possible that the mechanism was based on heliocentric principles ... suggesting that the modern concept of the earth and planets revolving in a system with the sun at its center was more widely accepted in the ancient world than we have previously known.


_Another modern reconstruction ... http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/ArchimedesGears.htm._

In 2005, as part of the Antikythera Research Project, researchers were able to access the device in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and with the assistance of HP Labs, apply state-of-the-art reflectance imaging techniques to the front and rear surfaces of the seventy-plus corroded bronze fragments recovered from the seabed.

To view some of these remarkable reflectance images online:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/a...ism/index.html



_Parts of the calendar and zodiac dials, engraved with closely spaced calibration marks, are visible in this photo of another recovered fragment ... http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Kythera.htm._

For an extraordinary discussion of the Antikythera Mechanism, there was a report in Scientific American which is reproduced online via An Ancient Greek Computer? Everything that was known or theorized about the ancient device at the time of publication (1959), from its purpose and operation and the astronomical system that gave rise to it, down to its exact construction and manufacture, is detailed at great length, but very readably, in this article.


This one-minute video clip is an artistic (but not very technical) animation of the device, set to "theme" music. I had to download it to my desktop first, in order to play it.



_Still frames from video animations ... http://www.etl.uom.gr/mr/index.php?m...ntikythera_ani._


Other sources:
http://www.history.com/shows.do?acti...isodeId=186952
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSc...t/extgreek.htm
http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSc...yth/anti60.htm
http://www.red-ice.net/specialreport...ncomputer.html
http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert...a/kythera3.htm
http://www.rationalinquiry.org/essays/antikythera.html

Image hosting: http://www.imageshack.us/


Are you reading more posts and enjoying it less? Make RadioFreeRinsel your next Internet port of call ...

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## rinselberg

October 13 fell on a Sunday in 1985, but it must have seemed like *Friday 13th* for the St. Louis baseball Cardinals, who were about to play game four of a best-of-seven series with the Los Angeles Dodgers for the National League Championship.

A major ingredient of the Cardinals' winning "Rx" was a speedy rookie outfielder named Vince Coleman, who had already stolen 110 bases in his first year in the majors.

Two hours before gametime, the threat of rain in St. Louis prompted the groundskeepers to deploy the infield tarp. The tarp in Busch Stadium was coiled on an electrically powered spool that unrolled at the press of a button, from a recess in the ground in foul territory near the Cardinals dugout. Coleman, who was standing next to the tarp, intent on his pre-game stretching exercises, was trapped. Other players hustled over to lift the tarp, but Coleman had suffered a broken ankle and was lost for the last three games of the playoff series with the Dodgers and then the World Series that followed.

Teammate Rick Horton, a Cardinals relief pitcher, had the most memorable comment on this unique milestone in the history of baseball, posing a conundrum for medical science that is perhaps still unresolved, even to this day:


> It's our leadoff guy, and also it's our friend that may be dead. For a moment we didn't really understand what the human body could handle underneath a tarp ...


The Cardinals went on to best the Dodgers, but lost the World Series to their cross-state rivals, the Kansas City Royals, in a series that was remarkable for a controversial umpire's call on a close play at first base that opened the door to a Royals rally in game six.


Sources: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...2/ai_n15645205 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Na...ionship_Series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_World_Series http://www.zeprock.com/ColemanGallery.html http://www.covermaster.com/tarpmachine1.asp


Are you reading more posts and enjoying it less? Make RadioFreeRinsel your next Internet port of call ...

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## Dave Nelson

Did you know that when some falcons lose a primary wing feather, the same feather in the opposite wing drops out? It's to maintain symetry during high speed flying and diving. Is that cool or what?

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## rinselberg

Say "how d'ya'do" to the Einstein of the dinosaur set. Or so say the paleontologists. Not many Troodon fossils have been discovered, but evolutionary biologists are impressed with its large brain to body size ratio - as high as has ever been discovered among the known dinosuars. With its predatory and possibly nocturnal habits, a head structured for binocular vision, with the capacity for evolving highly accurate depth perception, moderate body size (not real big; not real small), cooperative or pack-hunting behaviors (conjectural) - and last but not least, that relatively large-sized brain cavity, Neo-Darwinists think that Troodon was a real evolutionary "go getter" - a species with exceptional potential for evolving even more remarkable capabilities. To put it in perspective, dinosaur specialists credit it with about the same animal intelligence as today's domesticated farm chicken. Very smart in dinosaur terms, apparently.

Some documentarians have speculated on what might have been, if it were not for certain global impact events that have been dated to the same time or just prior to the K-T extinction 65 million years ago, when the last of the dinosaurs went extinct. One in particular was the Deccan traps - one of the greatest prehistoric volcanic events ever discovered. A huge crack in the earth's crust opened on what eventually became the Indian subcontinent, spewing tremendous quantities of molten rock and rock vapor. Some scientists think this set off a major greenhouse or global warming episode, triggered by the large amounts of carbon dioxide that they believe were released into the earth's atmosphere - and creating unfavorable climate conditions for continued dinosaur evolution. And then there is the Chicxulub crater in Mexico - evidence of a huge asteroid impact that has been dated to the time of the K-T extinction. "The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs" is now a familiar theory, probably, to the many (the many of the few ...) that may read this post.


_The K-T extinction: Did the last dinosaurs see it coming?
Credit: http://faculty.uca.edu/~benw/biol440...e11/sld008.htm_

If it weren't for these cataclysmic events in the planet's history, it's been speculated that it might have been the long distant evolutionary descendants of Troodon putting their scaly (or feathered) reptilian hands to the keyboards that animate OptiBoard. And instead of a search for "little green men", SETI@home might be a search carried forward _by_ little green men, scanning the heavens for radio signals from the fabled "hairless, intelligent apes" of contemporary science fiction.

Additional sources:
http://www.biopark.org/troodon.html
http://www.dinosaur-world.com/feathe...n_formosus.htm


More than just a search for little green men

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## rinselberg

This is Bridge 277, spanning the River Kwai in Thailand. It's more commonly known as "The Bridge On The River Kwai", from the famous 1957 movie directed by David Lean and starring Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, Jack Hawkins and William Holden. Bridge 277 (actually, there were two of them) was part of the Japanese Army's military railroad that operated between 1943 and 1945. The railroad was part of an even larger project known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which famously involved a certain amount of demolition work by the Japanese Naval Air Force at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1941 - making the Co-Prosperity project and its railroad of paramount interest to millions in the United States, as well.

The rounded steel trusses were part of the original bridge construction as carried out during the war. The angular trusses were installed by the Japanese after the war as a goodwill gesture (reparations) to restore the bomb-damaged bridge to serviceable condition. The photograph reveals the bridge as it stands today.

Exactly nine of the labor force that built the two bridges known as "Bridge 277" were permanent casualties of the construction, but the bridge that stands today is symbolic of the roughly 100,000 who were permanent casualties of the entire railroad project. Almost 20,000 were Allied POWs; the other roughly 80,000 a work force of Asians that were impressed by the railroad adminstrators and engineers to carry out the construction work.

The railroad was one of the larger engineering feats of World War Two.

Its construction constituted one of the larger war crimes of World War Two, and like most war crimes, the story includes punishment for the few found criminally responsible, and for the many more who escaped formal justice, a second life of guilt, illusion, denial or forgetfulness - in whatever proportions we can only guestimate.

Most of the railroad's major constructions - bridges and trestles - were destroyed by a weapon called AZON. It was a radio-controlled bomb developed for and used by the US Army Air Force. With AZON, bomber crews were able to drop gravity bombs from an altitude of 5,000 to 10,000 feet and steer them by radio very accurately onto their targets. Based on my "research", I think that was probably the fate of the first Bridge 277 - the wooden one.


_To my not quite expert eye, this appears to be a photo taken during the war. In the foreground, the first Bridge 277 - a wooden one. Barely visible in the background, the second bridge that was constructed using concrete piers and steel trusses._

AZON bombs were not powerful enough for the second bridge, which was put out of commission, but not completely destroyed, in a low level attack by B-24 bombers.


_At top, the second bridge, before it was bombed in February 1945. At bottom, two of the bridge's bomb-collapsed spans._

For those who have spectacle lenses and frames to dispense or similar tasks at hand, I would be very surprised and also very pleased to realize that you actually read this much. But for the complete "River Kwai" experience, with more photos, narratives, a brief sound clip - and two memorable audio tracks reflective of the original movie soundtrack that you can listen to online - consult these other genuine rinselberg** posts ... accept no substitutes!

No "hum bridge" was taken!
What was the name of that bridge again?
Hitler's anatomy and a bridge in Thailand


Sources:
http://www.msu.edu/~daggy/cop/bkofdead/obits-t.htm
http://www.atterburybakalarairmuseum..._we_forget.htm
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:...d=3&lr=lang_en
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_kwai/index.html

Image hosting and resizing courtesy of http://www.imageshack.us

_Chalk all this up to my habit of watching certain segments on cable channel KQEDH._

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## Grubendol

Rinsel that was truly awesome....I gotta go home tonight and watch my Kwai DVD again now.

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## FVCCHRIS

at the age of six, in 1965, I clearly recall watching my Dad say goodbye to all of us and board choppers to fly to Point Mugu, Ca. to head with his Construction Battalion to build an airfield at DaNang, South Vietnam. It was cold and foggy on the grinder that morning and over the loudspeakers was playing the soundtrack from that movie. I can whistle that tune to this day and it makes me choke-up like I'm doing now. Chris. 

The movie was a masterpiece. Anyone remember the last two words spoken in the movie?

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## Grubendol

Chris, I was hiking up near Mugu just last week.  Camped in Los Padres after Thanksgiving.

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## FVCCHRIS

I once did Reyes peak to Fillmore by myself all the way down the Sespe. I was permanently mentally affected by the trip. I could tell you some stories....... :Eek:      Chris.

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## Grubendol

I'm a native of NorCal, so my camping/hiking experiences are fairly limited down here so far, but I'm getting my wife into it, so we'll be hitting more trails soon.

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## rinselberg

My younger (smarter) brother just alerted me to some breaking news on the Antikythera Mechanism - a topic which I posted on this very same "Strange Facts!" thread not too long ago.

The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient analog computer, now dated to about 100 years before the birth of Christ, that predicted and displayed the heavenly positions of the sun, moon and some of the planets.

The machine, recovered from a Mediterranean shipwreck over a 100 years ago, has startling implications about the knowledge and sophistication of the ancient Greek civilization that constructed it.

One question that is still unanswered for me: Was the mechanism based on a Copernican model of the solar system, with the earth revolving around the sun - or was it constructed according to the older idea of the earth at the center of the observable universe?

The answer is perhaps revealed in certain research reports that I have not had the time to read (yet) or perhaps cannot gain access to without paying a subscription fee.

But I leave *that* question for any readers of this post to consider!

For an even more detailed and up to date report, see In search of lost time by Jo Marchant, online at http://www.nature.com/ ...



*Part of the Antikythera Mechanism on display. Credit: http://www.nature.com/*

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## Grubendol

That is awesome, and I would assume it's based on Copernican, but that's just me.

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## Dave Nelson

Strange fact#100,564,672,000.
Canada has no Northern border.
Huh? you say? 
True. Where the Canadian mainland ends, there are a series of large arctic islands that are mostly Canadian territory, although there is still some dispute. Denmark has a claim over one island that Canada claims. The Canadian control and claim over northern arctic areas, including the waters, is still undefined and in dispute, partly by the United States which sent a ship to navigate the waterway a few years back, drawing protests from the Canadian Goverment. The U.S. finally agreed to provide notice to the Canadians when they intend to enter the disputed waterway. The northern border is being disputed more than ever because of the probability that the waterway will remain open to ice for all or a large part of the year due to global warming, and become a major shipping route. 
Personally, I'll let you have my share for some pretty beads, and a Timmy's double-double. (If you can tell me what a Timmy's double-double is.:D )

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## hcjilson

Dave. We've only Starbucks and Peets down here! All the cream and sugar you want for $4.95  :):)

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## Grubendol

You poor folks who don't have Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

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## Dave Nelson

Another uniquely Canadian amazing factoid: When a miner named Davis arrived late at the gold rush in the British Columbia interior during the 1880s, all the gold fields were staked. He took a tape measure, and measured some of the claims, until he found one that was 12 feet longer than legally allowed. He then staked out the 12 foot section, took a fortune in gold out of it, and went down in B.C. history as "Twelve Foot Davis."

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## rinselberg

You probably know what the largest dinosaur looked like (more or less).

But if you are what I estimate as my "typical reader", you probably don't know its precise name, or how big it really was - or when and where its bones were discovered.

The aptly named Seismosaurus - meaning "earth shaker" - as illustrated in this artist's conception - may have been the longest dinosaur from nose to tail, but the most massive one ever discovered was Argentinosaurus. Fully grown, it's estimated to have weighed more than 100 tons. Part of a fossilized skeleton was uncovered in the far south of South America in 1993. In 2000, CNN reported on these excavations under the heading "Dinosaur leviathans of Patagonia come back to life".



If you _click_ on the thumbnail (above), you can see a remarkable photo of its reconstructed skeleton on display at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. And if you look _closely enough_ - perhaps with a magnifying glass - you may also discern some _lilliputian_ representatives of that more contemporary species, _homo sapiens,_ inspecting it.

The people of today are about 65 million years distant in time from the last living specimen of that most iconic of dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, illustrated against a white background and again, with a conifer forest of the late Cretaceous period for a backdrop. But T. rex, among the last of the dinosuars, was even farther removed from the first dinosaur species to emerge - a distance in time of about 130 million years - and testament to the observation that dinosaurs were one of evolution's most successful experiments in survivability and speciation.


*Replica of Tyrannosaurus rex at the Senckenberg Museum.* Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs.

_The photo of the Argentinosaurus skeleton was copyrighted by Pamela Gore in 2001 and was lifted from the website of Georgia Perimeter College. The embedded dinosaur art is from critters.pixel-shack.com. Image hosting courtesy of ImageShack._


rinselberg's long awaited Jurassic Post opened Wednesday to record view counts on OptiBoard's Word of the Day!

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## Sean

All the moons of the Solar System are named after Greek and Roman mythology, except the moons of Uranus, which are named after Shakespearean characters.

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## Sean

Wrigley's promoted their new spearmint-flavored chewing gum in 1915 by mailing 4 sample sticks to each of the 1.5 million names listed in US telephone books.

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## Dave Nelson

Another amazing story from the wild west. The place: New Hazelton, British Columbia. The time: the 1880s.
The small town silence is broken by the sound of gunfire erupting in the streets of New Hazelton. Three armed men have robbed the bank, and are trying to shoot their way out of town with their loot. Our hero, an ordinary citizen, goes toe to toe in a bloody shootout that rivaled the gunfight at the O.K. corral. (with the theme song from "the good, the bad, and the ugly playing in the background) The smoke and dust settle to reveal the bandits lying dead. The townsfolk slowly walk out into the streets to stare at the hero who shot it out with the bad guys. They are astounded to realize it is the town's Anglican minister.

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## Sean

Astronauts have brought back about 800 pounds of lunar rock to Earth. Most of it has not been analyzed.

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## Grubendol

When the moon was formed it was 15 times closer to the earth than it is today and actually caused the planet to bulge on the side facing the moon.  It created tides that were ten thousand feet high.

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## Sean

Colored diamonds are caused by impurities such as nitrogen (yellow), boron (blue). With red diamonds being due to deformities in the structure of the stone, and green ones being the result of irradiation.

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## Sean

Absinthe is another name for the herb wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) and the name of a licorice-anise flavored green liqueur that was created at the end of the 18th century, and manufactured by Henry-Louis Pernod. Called the 'green Muse' it became very popular in the 19th century, but was eventually banned in most countries beginning in 1908. The reason is the presence of the toxic oil 'thujone' in wormwood, which was one of the main ingredients of Absinthe. Absinthe seemed to cause brain lesions, convulsions, hallucinations and severe mental problems. Thujone was the culprit, along with the fact that Absinthe was manufactured with an alcohol content of 68% or 132 proof.

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## Sean

In 1957, the Shipping port Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United States, went on line. (It was taken out of service in 1982.)

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## chip anderson

Absynthe is being re-born.  Now available for sale in Germany and some other European countries.   See Discovery Science Channel, History of drink episode.

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## Fezz

> Absynthe is being re-born. Now available for sale in Germany and some other European countries. See Discovery Science Channel, History of drink episode.


 
Have you ever tried? I read a good article/review of these drinks in Maxim magazine 2(?) years ago. Very interesting libation! I have not tried, but am always up for a challenge.

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## Sean

In 1968, "Apollo Seven," the first manned Apollo mission, was launched with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham aboard.

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## Sean

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the single-seeded fruit of the giant fan palm, or Lodoicea maldivica, can weigh 44 lbs. Commonly known as the double coconut or coco de mer, it is found wild only in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.

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## Sean

BVD stands for the organizers of the company: Bradley, Voorhies, and Day.

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## Sean

Mt. Everest grows about 4 millimeters a year: the two tectonic plates of Asia and India, which collided millions of years ago to form the Himalayas, continue to press against each other, causing the Himalyan peaks to grow slightly each year.

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## Sean

In 4000 BC Egypt, men and women wore glitter eye shadow made from the crushed shells of beetles.

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## Sean

Hostess Twinkies were invented in 1931 by James Dewar, manager of Continental Bakeries' Chicago factory. He envisioned the product as a way of using the company's thousands of shortcake pans which were otherwise employed only during the strawberry season. Originally called Little Shortcake Fingers, they were renamed Twinkie Fingers, and finally "Twinkies."

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## rinselberg

_"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
-- Shakespeare; Julius Caesar._

Case in point: In 2003, Norway's Royal Navy located the undersea wreckage of German U-boat 864. One of the last U-boats to go down in World War Two, U-864 was sunk by the British submarine HMS Venturer on February 9, 1945. It's the only case in history when a submarine, running submerged, used torpedos to sink another submarine that was running submerged.

But Norwegians are not merely contemplating one more grim undersea wreck from the second world war. Fishing in nearby waters has been prohibited. And the Norwegian government is considering a plan to enshroud the wreckage in a protective seal of gravel, cement and sand.



*"You've got to put Mercury on your list."*


The reason? Mercury. U-864 was laden with over 60 tons of mercury stored in an array of steel flasks, which are now corroding. Chemical tests have revealed an alarming concentration of deadly mercury in the immediate vicinity of the wreck.

Operation Caesar was a last-ditch effort by the Germans to transfer war technology to their Japanese cohorts, in the lunatic hope of reviving the flagging Japanese war efforts in the Pacific and thereby diverting some of the Allied war energies and resources from the impending invasion of Germany.


_The masssive IX D2 class German submarines were just short of 300 feet long._

In December 1944, U-864 departed the German port of Kiel, planning to navigate through the North Sea west into the Atlantic and then south, around the Cape of Good Hope, into the Indian Ocean, before reaching its intended destination of Japan. U-864 was a "Monsoon" or IX D2 class German submarine, designed for long-range operations as distant from Germany as the Indian Ocean - and armed with a large battery of torpedos and over-sized deck guns. The mercury, used in munitions manufacture, was intended to help the Japanese produce more bombs, torpedos and artillery shells. U-864 was also carrying parts and plans for the construction of dangerously advanced "Swallow" jet engines and other war rockets and missiles. In addition to the German navy crew, there were a number of Japanese and German war scientists and technicians onboard.



_Avoid ingesting elemental mercury and its organic compounds. You won't like the results._


Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6193979.stm
http://www.cdnn.info/news/eco/e061220.html
http://www.archaeology.org/0401/news.../venturer.html
http://www.collectinghistory.net/U-182/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterseeboot_864


When is a forum post *more* than just a forum post? See OptiBoard's Word of the Day!

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## chip anderson

Damn glad we sunk it and it didn't reach it's destination.

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## rinselberg

One of the oldest known mathematical artifacts [of prehistory] is a fragment from the fibula of a baboon, found near Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains, between South Africa and Swaziland. Discovered in the 1970s during excavations of Border Cave and dated to about 35,000 BC, the Lebombo Bone is marked with 29 clearly defined notches. It appears to have been used as a lunar calendar and it resembles calendar sticks that are in use even today by the Bushmen of Namibia.

In 1962, Jean de Heinzelin discovered a bone near the shore of Lake Edward, on the border between [the present day] Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). This bone, known as the Ishango Bone, was originally thought to be between 6000 and 9000 years old. However, more recent [dating] efforts have [moved it back to about 18,000 BC] - during the Upper Paleolithic period.

The Ishango Bone is remarkable in having a number of notches carved in three rows: Markings that appear to be very deliberate. They are arranged in 16 groups, each group having a different number of notches, from 3 to 19. Because of the complexity of the groupings it is generally agreed that the markings are not random. But what then was their purpose?


_The Ishango Bone. Courtesy of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels, Belgium._

Various details have led some researches to suggest that the Ishango Bone is [essentially a prehistoric calculator] ... for example, along one edge the number of notches in each group is a prime number. (Prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and one; e.g., 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19, etc.)

Coincidence? Perhaps. But ... there are three separate rows of notches, and the total number of notches in each row is a multiple of twelve. Another coincidence? Maybe. [And] along one row, the notches in adjacent groups appear to be related by a factor of two: 3 notches in one group and 6 in the next, then 4 followed by 8, then 10 and 5. A crude multiplication table? Or just another coincidence?

[Does the Ishango Bone have some astronomical significance?]

If these arrangements are not coincidences and the mathematical interpretations [are] correct, then the Ishango Bone clearly has little to do with astronomy. However, an alternative explanation was put forward by Alexander Marshack in 1965. Noticing certain patterns among the notches, Marshack claimed that the markings are (again) a lunar calendar - a record of the changing phases of the moon. Marshacks idea has yet to be proved or disproved.

The Lebombo and Ishango bones are not the only Stone Age artifacts believed to have had astronomical significance. A number of similar bones have been found, the oldest of which date back 30,000 years, to the last major Ice Age. One of the oldest is the Blanchard Bone, a carved segment of reindeer bone that was found in the Blanchard rock shelter in modern day France.

The complexity of the markings is arresting. Whereas the notches in the Ishango Bone are simple tick marks of varying lengths all in neat rows, the 69 notches that decorate the Blanchard Bone include more than 24 distinctly different shapes that make a winding, snakelike design. It seems beyond all doubt that these marks were deliberate and again, some researchers believe that the marks were used as a detailed record of the lunar cycle.

Sources:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclo...ombo_bone.html
http://www.planetquest.org/learn/ishango.html


_OptiBoard member rinselberg updates the veridical paradox known as the "Monty Hall problem" under the post title Three Card Rinsel._

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## rinselberg

The NFC representative Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl XLI coin toss - the tenth consecutive Super Bowl game that started with the NFC team winning the coin toss. The streak began when the NFC Green Bay Packers won the coin toss before Super Bowl XXXII in 1998.

If you reduce the complete Super Bowl coin toss history to the most basic statistic, of how many times the NFC team won the toss, vs. the AFC team, it's probably not all that remarkable.

But let's say, just prior to the coin toss in 1998, you had asked one of the players - or a descendant of Thomas Bayes - about the probability that the NFC team would win that coin toss and then the coin toss for the next nine Super Bowl games, going all the way to 2007. Pretty slim odds?

How about a probability of 2E-10 ... or the inverse of 1024 ... or less than one chance in a thousand?

_Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_B...n_toss_results_


_OptiBoard member rinselberg updates the veridical paradox known as the "Monty Hall problem" under the post title Three Card Rinsel._

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## rinselberg

What's the longest animal that you've ever (or more likely, _never_ ...) seen? Aside from the prehistoric ones ...

A blue whale? That's what I would have said - yesterday. A giant squid? Not even close.

According to one website, it is (or was ..?) Lineus Longissimus - a ribbon worm that lives in the sea. They say a 180-foot long specimen washed ashore in Scotland towards the end of the 1800s.

But I think I will go with a *siphonophore* - a kind of deep sea jellyfish. This one was photographed deep in California's Monterey Bay. According to my source, it can grow as long as 50 meters - which is just a fraction over 164 feet. That makes it a good candidate for the longest animal _ever_ - even longer, perhaps, than any prehistoric one - on land or in the sea.



_Photo: Brian Hackett; 2006. Science: "Expedition to the Abyss"; The Discovery Channel. Image editing: myImager. Image hosting: ImageShack. Metric conversions: Online Conversion._


OptiBoard member rinselberg is a volunteer staffer for DoD - "Defenders of Darwin".

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## rinselberg

_The United Kingdom's fabled MI5 Security Service has a website. But I am not at liberty to disclose how I came into possession of this Top Secret MI5 dossier._


Who's got the largest eyes on the planet - and how big are they?




_No one is safe! The United Kingdom has faced down terror from the sea before - including Nazi battleships and U-boats. Can our friends across the pond stand up to the cephalopod menace? And if not - will America be next?_


Think squid: As in giant squid - or its even more fearsome cousin, the colossal squid, which inhabits the frigid depths of the Antarctic Ocean.


_"You're gonna need a bigger retinascope!" The eyes of a colossal squid._

Although many sources reference the colossal squid as having the largest eyes of any living species, it would be safer to credit the giant squid. Fully grown, the circular eyes of a giant squid can exceed one foot in diameter - about the same size as dinner plates or frisbees.



_This diver, working undercover for the United Kingdom's MoD, is part of an urgent effort to formulate a national defense strategy to cope with the growing cephalopod threat._

Sources:
Holy Squid! Photos Offer First Glimpse of Live Deep-Sea Giant
Cephalopod News Special Report: Colossal Squid Caught!
Yahoo: Is there any scientific proof of giant squids?
BBC News: New giant squid predator found
Giant Squid and Colossal Squid Fact Sheet
Colossal Squid a Formidable Customer
Deep Sea Photography
GameGossip Forums: The Greatest Photos Megathread


OptiBoard member rinselberg is a volunteer staffer for DoD - "Defenders of Darwin".

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## rinselberg

Cats have nine lives. Black cats are bad luck. Mere superstitions, of course.

Of course.

Meet the (late) Oscar - the black cat on the left of this rather surreal looking image:



The caption under the image reads "Pastel portrait by Mrs. Georgina Shaw Baker", although to my eyes, the cat looks distinctly photographic. Perhaps it's really a collage - or just a very good painting of Oscar. On the right, a British serviceman or officer from days gone by - perhaps a member of the Royal Navy. And in the background, the suggestion of a ship - or a buoy? Maybe it's a nocturnal scene. Or maybe this is just an amateurish and poorly lit photograph of the specimen as it hangs on a museum wall.

Oscar first became known to the world as the pet or mascot of the World War Two battleship DKM Bismark. That would be a German warship. Or a Nazi warship, to be downright precise ... On the whole, Oscar didn't bring the Bismark any unadulterated good luck. On its first war mission and only a few days at sea, the Bismark was rendered inoperable by shelling from the British navy. In the end, Bismark's technicians actually sank their own ship by scuttling it with explosive charges. By that time it was, in reality, no longer a battleship. In the space of one hour and fifty-three minutes, it had been converted into just a badly worn out gunnery target by the British navy. Few of the Bismark's crew survived the day of May 27, 1941.

But Oscar did.

HMS Cossack (a British destroyer) retrieved Oscar, unharmed, where he was perched atop some of the Bismark's floating wreckage.

The Cossack didn't fare much better by Oscar. It was torpedoed and sunk about five months later on October 24, 1941.

Once again, Oscar survived. His third ship became the aircraft carrier Ark Royal.

But only for about three weeks.

On November 14 of 1941, HMS Ark Royal was torpedoed and sunk near Gibraltar.

Needless to say, Oscar survived.

British sailors rescued him from a floating plank.

Considering his record, they decided he belonged on land - where things don't often sink. So they put him up at "The Home for Sailors" in Belfast. His life (or lives ...) finally ran out in 1955.



A drawing of Oscar. Maybe this was him, perched atop that floating plank from the wreck of Ark Royal. The caption says "thanks to J. von Spee". A British man (or woman?) with a German name? I don't know. With that one, I "Googled myself out". No more hits.

THE END.


Sources:
http://www.battleshipbismarck.info/cat_oscar.htm
http://www.iwm.org.uk/upload/package...WarObjects.pdf


"You're gonna need a bigger retinascope!" Meet the world's biggest and baddest pair of eyeballs ...

----------


## rinselberg

Truly "colossal" Colossal Squid taken. Dead specimen could be biggest ever. If calamari rings were made ... they'd be the size of tractor tires! Some believe that the Colossal Squid has the largest eyes of any living species. Others cite its cousin, the Giant Squid.

MSNBC report plus photos and video clip:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17275072/

Video clip only:
http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?...&f=00&fg=email

This updates my other recent post ... How would you like to refract THESE eyes?





*CLICK* for a brief *AUDIO* update on Darwin's theory of evolution!

----------


## Sean

In the 16th century, British sailors were allowed ten pints of beer a day for rations. :cheers:

----------


## chip anderson

Sean:  

If you studied the conditions and hardships these sailors had to endure, they probably needed this and more.   I think it was only last year that the Brit's discontinued the daily ration of rum on thier warships.

Chip:cheers:

----------


## Grubendol

beyond that, there was very little safe water to drink when crossing an ocean.  it was a way of keeping nourishment in their systems, believe it or not.

----------


## k12311997

now if I can get the dr. to replace the water cooler with a beer cooler.

----------


## Grubendol

the doctor?  Doctor Who?

----------


## k12311997

> the doctor? Doctor Who?


 
I'm sure he'd just have a gadget to allow me to store a keg's worth of beer in a pocket flask.

----------


## Sean

> Sean: 
> 
> If you studied the conditions and hardships these sailors had to endure, they probably needed this and more. I think it was only last year that the Brit's discontinued the daily ration of rum on thier warships.
> 
> Chip:cheers:


 So sorry..............i did not know i needed your ok to post......these are just for fun....breaks the day up.......the next time i need a critic/cynic....... i'll be sure sure to get your approval.

----------


## rinselberg

> So sorry..............i did not know i needed your ok to post......these are just for fun....breaks the day up.......the next time i need a critic/cynic....... i'll be sure sure to get your approval.


Gentlemen, please - no fighting in the war room!

For the record:


> Although the American Navy ended the rum ration on September 1, 1862, the ration continued in the Royal Navy. Toward the end of the nineteenth century temperance movements beggan to change the attitude toward drink. The days of grog slowly came to an end. On January 28, 1970 the "Great Rum Debate" took place in the House of Commons, and July 30, 1970 became "Black Tot Day," the last pipe of "Up Spirits" in the Royal Navy.


Source: http://www.contemplator.com/history/grog.html

----------


## Sean

> Gentlemen, please - no fighting in the war room!
> 
> For the record:Source: http://www.contemplator.com/history/grog.html


Thanks for the intervention .............but i'd rather ask for forgiveness......than to ask for permission.:).........Not..............let'em speak for himself.

----------


## Sean

84% of a raw apple is water.

----------


## chip anderson

How the Hell did I get this stirred up.  It was a comment, not a criticism.

----------


## Dave Nelson

I cannot, for the life of me, see why any offense was taken by what Chip said. He simply elaborated on what was already being posted.

----------


## Grubendol

I didn't even realize something was stirred up til I opened this in the a.m.

so confused....granted it's a very common natural state for myself, but still.

----------


## rinselberg

Albert Einstein didn't like the new 20th century theory of QM (Quantum Mechanics).

So much so, that he coined the somewhat derisive phrase "spooky action at a distance" to describe one of QM's mathematical consequences.

Are you inclined to think that there is no process, effect or change in the physical world that takes place faster than Einstein's famous Special Relativity "speed limit" - the speed of light in a vacuum?

"Let's go quantum ..."



Spooky action at a distance: The diagram demonstrates a pair of photons that are in a state of quantum entanglement. It has been demonstrated that an observation performed on one photon - in this example, a measurement  that reverses its spin polarization - instantaneously reverses the spin polarization of the other photon. Remarkably, there is credible experimental evidence to indicate that "spooky action" (i.e. quantum entanglement) has been confirmed when the photons are separated by as much as 144 kilometers - the distance between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife. Since the effect is literally instantaneous, it is also called a "superluminal" effect (i.e. faster than light).

A photon is the elemental, indivisible unit of light.

Leaving aside the most subtle aspects of QM, it is fair to say that a photon has zero mass and zero size or volume. It's been called a "point-like particle".

For more from the distinctly counterintuitive world of "Dr. Quantum", see "Landmark" experiment with light delves into mysteries of quantum physics.


_Image: Toshiba Research Europe.

For the complete technical report from Toshiba Research Europe, see Improved fidelity of triggered entangled photons from single quantum dots._

----------


## Sean

> How the Hell did I get this stirred up. It was a comment, not a criticism.


Chip,
Sorry i misinterpreted what you said...please accept my apology.

----------


## Grubendol

it looks like you were misunderestimated there chip!

;)

----------


## hcjilson

Mistakes happen all the time when you can't actually hear what is being said and have to rely on what you read.The title above is a case in point. Did I just say "Hey Grueby, or did I say Hey Grubby. I can see someone taking what was written the wrong way, and I think you know I would never violate posting guidelines by name calling.....so let me make this perfectly clear I meant  Grewby. See ?, three seaparate spellings and three possible reactions. A mistake was acknowledged and an aplogy sent. Let's put that dog to sleep.:D

----------


## Grubendol

Hey!  Who's Grubby lookin'?

(sorry I simply could not resist the oh so obvious Star Wars reference)

----------


## Shwing

> In the 16th century, British sailors were allowed ten pints of beer a day for rations. :cheers:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splice_the_mainbrace

----------


## Sean

In 2009, the Burj Dubai will be the tallest building in the world, but it's final height is still a secret.

----------


## rinselberg

> In 2009, the *Burj Dubai* will be the tallest building in the world, but its final height is still a secret.



The world's tallest buildings: How the Burj Dubai stacks up.



*CLICK* on the thumbnail to view a hi-res JPEG image. (Time; December 27, 2004.)



_For the latest Strange Fact from rinselberg:
Quantum Mechanics: "Spooky Action At A Distance"_

----------


## Grubendol

the common cleaning chemical of ammonia gains its name from an Egyptian god....




> Workers at the Temple of Ammon in ancient Egypt combined                      camel dung and urine collected on the temple grounds, and                      used it for cleaning clothes. The origin of that recipe is                      unclear. But the Romans called this substance sal ammoniac,                      the salt of Ammon. A gas, first extracted from the salt in                      1782, was called ammonia

----------


## Sean

The words canoe, hammock , barbecue and hurricane all come from the Arawak Indian language.

----------


## rinselberg

Since this *is* St. Patrick's Day ... the next time that you find yourself contemplating a fresh pour of Guinness Draught in a pub glass, watch the bubbles carefully by looking directly through the side of the glass: Lower your head to pub glass level - or elevate the pub glass to eye level.

Bubbles always float upwards to the surface of a liquid - right? Physics 101. About two thousand and two hundred uninterrupted years of the Archimedes Principle of Buoyancy ...

The experts in such matters predict that you would actually see the bubbles sinking down to the bottom of the glass.



_Using a Kodak HS4540 high-speed digital camera to capture video of bubble flow in a poured Guinness Draught. (Stanford University's Zarelab bears the name of Stanford Chemistry Professor Richard N. Zare.)_


If it's a scientific explanation ye' be wantin', mouse-click your way to Do bubbles in Guinness go down? They break it all down like an NFL coaching staff prepping the football players on the new game plan: Easy-to-read text, animated diagrams and online video clips. An explanation that anyone can follow "by the numbers".

There's more Guinness lore under the post title Rocket science you can drink - including some tech notes on the Guinness widget can and widget bottle - on the Laramy-K Optical discussion forum. (I don't know whether that's _good_ publicity for Laramy-K  ... or do you subscribe to the theory that there's no such thing as bad publicity?)


_The strangest Strange Fact that's ever been posted?
Quantum Mechanics: "Spooky Action At A Distance"_

----------


## Sean

Iceland has the highest per capita Internet usage rate in the world, with 86 percent using the web. The U.S. is at 69 percent.

----------


## rinselberg

Sharks - not as mindless as you may think.

At Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, which displays a selection of shark species in its Wild Reef exhibit, the sharks have been trained to assist in their own care. Trainers have conditioned each shark species to recognize and respond to one of a set of species-differentiated "shark flags", which are brought into the exhibit at feeding time. Each species of shark responds only to its own flag and swims to a different part of the exhibit, which enables staff members to ensure that each shark receives the proper amount of food and check up on their health.

The flags present the sharks with simple geometric designs that the sharks can be trained to discriminate - for example, a horizontal bar for one species vs. a vertical bar for another species; etc.

http://www.sheddaquarium.org/index.html


_"The Contra Rap", from impersonator Rich Little's "Ronald Reagan Slept Here" album, was aired some 26 times on Dr. Demento radio broadcasts from 1988 to 2006. Play it online at Theirs is a scandal that deserves to be told._

----------


## Sean

Niagara Falls is actually three sets of falls....American, Bridal Veil and Horseshoe.

----------


## Sean

Garbage disposals for use in the home were first made available in 1938.

----------


## rinselberg

When you think of the U.S. State Department, you probably think of the language of international diplomacy: Guarded, polite, understated, nuanced ... in a word, _diplomatic_.

But the State Department can be refreshingly candid when it comes to travel warnings.




> Driving in Qatar is likened to participating in an extreme sport; drivers often maneuver erratically and at high speed, demonstrate little road discipline or courtesy, fail to turn on their headlights during hours of darkness or inclement weather, and do not use seat belts - all resulting in a high vehicular accident rate (in excess of 70,000 annually). In fact, traffic fatalities are Qatar's leading cause of death ...


Source: https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=62019


I did some rough calculatons. There are about 300 U.S. citizens for every citizen of Qatar. The U.S. has about six million road accidents a year, of late. So road traffic in Qatar generates about _five_ times as many road accidents _per capita,_ vs. the U.S.

And _that_ warning from the State Department is relatively low-keyed, compared to some other _nuggets_ ...




> Police involvement in criminal activity is both legendary and true in Mexico ... Reporting crime is an archaic, exhausting process ... and is widely perceived to be a waste of time ...





> Driving in Egypt can be a harrowing experience and not for the faint-hearted ...





> Despite Malta’s geographic proximity to Italy, organized crime is almost nonexistent ...





> Be aware of drink prices in Croatia's gentlemen's clubs, where tourists can unknowingly run up exorbitant bar bills, sometimes in the thousands of dollars ...





> Greek police have limited ability to deter criminals and receive little support from the Greek government and even less respect from the Greek population ...


The online travel advisory for Switzerland approaches the poetic:



> Being surrounded by the majestic, snow-covered Alps, combined with a pervasive sense of orderliness, it is understandable that travelers might forget that the city of Geneva and the adjacent cantons are not immune from crime ...


And when it comes to Haiti, the State Department is downright philosophical:


> The tragedy of Haiti is that Haitians have become great leaders in every profession and in every country, with the exception of Haiti ...


Of course, there's always the _Travelocity_ version ...


"We'll be greeted as liberators by the Iraqis ..."

The Travelocity Roaming Gnome - DENOUNCER of Travel Myths


Sources:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17870454/
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/arc..._undiplomatic/


_Will you be the first to submit a correct answer for my new OptiBoard brain teaser? Find it under Werewolf Test ..._

----------


## Sean

Mr. Willy Müller invented the first automatic telephone answering machine in 1935.

----------


## specs4you

Fun with words;

1-  _BOSS: How did the "boss" get his name?_
_From the fact that at one time he had complete authority over his workers and could thrash them at will.  "Boss" comes from the Old High_
_German bozan which means "to beat"._

_2- DOUBLE HEADER:  What is the origin of this baseball term?_
_Baseball took this from railroading.  In railroading, a "double header", is a train with 2 engines on it. Hence, in baseball, a "double header" is two games on a single afternoon._

_3-  TAXI:_
_The reason a taxi is called this?  The word referred to the "meter" carried by the cab.  It was called a "taximeter" because it measured the fare or "tax", and cabs boasted of the fact by painting "taximeter" ontheir doors. Soon this was shortened to taxi._

I like words....

----------


## specs4you

Fun with words;

1- _BOSS: How did the "boss" get his name?_
_From the fact that at one time he had complete authority over his workers and could thrash them at will. "Boss" comes from the Old High_
_German bozan which means "to beat"._

_2- DOUBLE HEADER: What is the origin of this baseball term?_
_Baseball took this from railroading. In railroading, a "double header", is a train with 2 engines on it. Hence, in baseball, a "double header" is two games on a single afternoon._

_3- TAXI:_
_The reason a taxi is called this? The word referred to the "meter" carried by the cab. It was called a "taximeter" because it measured the fare or "tax", and cabs boasted of the fact by painting "taximeter" ontheir doors. Soon this was shortened to taxi._

I like words.... :Rolleyes:

----------


## rinselberg

Chicken Kiev by candlelight? A bucket of Extra Crispy from KFC? Either way, the latest from the paleontologists is that you could be chowing down on a distant relative of that most iconic of dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex.

In a remarkable experiment that brings to mind the 1990 novel and 1993 movie Jurassic Park, scientists recovered seven protein sequences from the 65 million year old thighbone of a Tyrannosaurs rex and matched them with proteins from living species.

Three of the proteins matched up with proteins from chickens.

The findings are thought to reinforce the theory that modern birds are on an evolutionary line of descent that started with dinosaurs.

The refinements in analyzing mass spectrometer data that were achieved in the course of the experiment are expected to add to the progress of human health care - possibly by providing the means for earlier detection of cancers.


Source: MSNBC "T. rex analysis supports dino-bird link".


View MSNBC slideshow that explores the dino-bird theory.

----------


## rinselberg

It's estimated that about one in every million lobsters is blue. This one was photographed at the New England Aquarium in 2006. "Click" the photo for a higher resolution image.

Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_lobster


Today's "crustacean moment" has been brought to you by Rogue Ales, brewers of ...



- today's Beer Of The Day.


Beer Of The Day is _always_ brought to you by ...

----------


## rinselberg

Want to sink your teeth into a decades-old controversy?


Have a Baby Ruth candy bar.




According to the official Baby Ruth website:


> Introduced in the early 1920s by Curtiss Candy Company, Baby Ruth was said to be named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth. At the time, the child was endearingly referred to as "Baby Ruth". The trademark was patterned after the engraved lettering used on a medallion struck for the 1893 Chicago World's Colombian Exposition. The image pictured the President, his wife, and young daughter Baby Ruth.


_That's not exactly how the story goes down in the online reference Wikipedia, however ..._

Although the name of the candy bar sounds like the common moniker of legendary baseball player Babe Ruth (George Herman Ruth), the Curtiss Candy Company has always claimed that it was named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth Cleveland.

Nonetheless, the bar first appeared in 1921, as Babe Ruth's fame was on the rise and long after Cleveland had left the White House and years after his daughter had died. Moreover, the company had failed to negotiate an endorsement arrangement with Babe Ruth, and many viewed the company's story about naming the candy bar as a ruse to avoid having to pay the baseball player royalties.

Ruth Cleveland, born in 1891, in between President Cleveland's two terms of office, _was_ a national sensation. But she was an unhealthy child who only lived to the age of twelve, having died of diphtheria in 1904 - and 17 years before the candy bar that was supposedly named in her memory.



Ironically, in 1931, Curtiss successfully shut down a rival candy bar called the "Babe Ruth Home Run Bar" that was _honestly_ named for and endorsed by the ball player, on the ground of trademark infringement.

More twists to the story are referenced in the trivia book series _Imponderables_, by David Feldman. In the edition called _What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway?_ Feldman (1995) reports the standard story about the bar being named for Grover Cleveland's daughter, repeating the explanation involving the medallion struck for the 1893 Chicago World's Colombian Exposition.

The next edition in 1996 - _How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch?_ - offers what seems like a more credible explanation. Feldman was tipped off by a letter writer, referring to another trivia collection, _More Misinformation_, by Tom Burnam: "Burnam concluded that the candy bar was named after the granddaughter of Mr. and Mrs. George Williamson, candy makers who developed the original Baby Ruth formula and sold it to Curtiss."

The Williamsons had also sold the "Oh Henry!" formula to Curtiss around that time.

Burnam observes that describing the product as having been named for a mere businessman's granddaughter would not have had the same marketing appeal; hence the motivation for the story about Ruth Cleveland.



As if to lampoon their very own account of how the candy bar was named, the Chicago-based Curtiss Company installed a lighted sign advertising Baby Ruth, after Babe Ruth's "Called Shot" home run at Chicago's Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series. The sign was installed on the roof of one of the flats across Sheffield Avenue, near where Ruth's fabled home run ball had landed. The Baby Ruth sign stood there for forty years.


_The Urban Legends Reference Pages serves up another historical tidbit ..._

Part of the official explanation offered by the Curtiss Company has been that Ruth Cleveland visited the Curtiss confectionary factory when the company was just getting started.

Ruth Cleveland died in 1904.

The Curtiss Candy Company was founded in 1916.

It must have been a remarkably macabre kind of visit ... more like a _visitation_ than a visit.



Antique advertisements:
http://www.wmob.com/artpages/babyruth1.html
http://www.zanesville.ohiou.edu/emed...thumbnails.htm




Visit the oldest unsolved puzzle in optics ...

----------


## chip anderson

Ruth's Chris ususally has some blue Lobsters.

----------


## rinselberg

[move]

```
Just when you thought it was safe to answer the phone ...
```

[/move]



In 2004, California's Monterey Bay Aquarium exhibited a young female specimen Great White Shark ... i.e. "Jaws".

After 198 days of captivity in the aquarium's million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit, the shark had grown from five feet long and 60 pounds to just over six feet and 160 pounds. It had to be returned to the ocean because it had developed an unnerving habit of chasing after some of its tankmates - perhaps with an unauthorized in-between-meals snack in mind or some other kind of mayhem. Almost a million visitors had come to see it.

The shark was fitted with an electronic tracking tag and returned to Monterey Bay. After a programmed interval of 30 days, the tracking tag popped to the surface for collection at a point almost two hundred miles to the south, offshore from Santa Barbara. The data recovered from the microcomputer that was encapsulated in the tracking tag revealed that the shark had traveled as far as 100 miles from shore and descended as far as 800 feet beneath the surface during its 30 day journey.



_"... before a shark is returned to the wild, we fit it with an externally attached pop-up satellite tag with a tiny computer that collects and stores data. The computer records sensor data at five-second intervals to track the shark - how far below the surface it goes, the water temperature and the ambient light level where the shark is swimming. It's a detailed log of the sharks journey. On a pre-programmed date, the tag pops off the shark and floats to the surface. When the shark tag is recovered, the data is transmitted via satellite to a marine laboratory where it can be analyzed for its scientific value ..."_



_"In the thirty days after we released our first white shark in March 2005, it traveled more than 100 miles offshore and dove more than 800 feet deep ..."_


They did it again in 2006. The second white shark was a young male specimen. After 137 days in captivity, it had grown to six and a half feet long and 170 pounds. It drew almost 600,000 visitors. When it was returned to the ocean, it was fitted with a tracking tag that was programmed to self-release and float to the surface after 90 days. The tag revealed that the shark's 90-day journey, starting from the release point in Montery Bay, had taken it more than 1100 miles to the south, off the coast of Baja, California.

The aquarium has donated $700,000 of its revenues to TOPP (Tagging Of Pacific Predators), which has enabled scientists to tag almost 100 Great White Sharks, including large adult specimens. Whenever a shark "phones home" (i.e. when its electronic tracking tag is recovered) the scientific database of shark behavior patterns is enlarged with a new set of measurements.

If you would like to browse some webpages that offer photos, video clips, podcasts and scientific observations of the world's largest predatory fish, you couldn't do better than to start with these:

White Shark Phones Home
White Shark Research
National Geographic - Great White Shark



Select ("click") the photo if you would like to *hear* some of the background audio presented to visitors at the Outer Bay exhibit. For a super high resolution image, click here.


Audio credits: WickedBlue Friends and Christopher KueB.



at Beer Of The Day

----------


## Sean

The guppy, a popular tropical fish kept by hobbyists, is named for its discoverer, R.J. Lechmere Guppy.

----------


## Sean

The first woman in the U.S. cabinet was Frances Perkins. She was named U.S. Secretary of Labor by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

----------


## chip anderson

Sean:
You have spoiled one of my illusions.  I read in a book on tropical fish back in the 1950's the name guppy ment: Millions of fish.

Chip

----------


## rinselberg

Serbia hasn't exactly been tops on my list of places to chill out during an international vacation.

The last time I took any notice, it was as a live bombing range for NATO's combat air arm - and nothing more.

So why is the Serbian news media suddenly so mirthful as to be joking that the "S" in Superman secretly stands for "Serbia"?

It's because of a new mineral that was just discovered there.

Scientists have classified it as a form of "sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide". Which is exactly what was written on one of the props in the movie _Superman Returns_. In the movie, it appears as the writing on a case of rocks stolen by Lex Luther from a museum. Not just any old rocks ...

*Kryptonite.*

Unlike the large green crystals of kryptonite in the Superman comics, the real "kryptonite" is a white, powdery substance which doesn't contain fluorine and isn't radioactive.

Officially, the new mineral will be known as _Jadarite_.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18289647/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18306151/

----------


## Sean

The Monopoly board game mascot, Mr. Monopoly, was originally named Rich Uncle Pennybags.

----------


## rinselberg

According to Dusty Sklar, author of _Hitler and the Occult_, there was a deposition from a German professor of anthropology during the Nuremberg trials, who said that he had heard a story that "fine young specimens of SS men" had been beheaded, in an attempt to use their decapitated heads to communicate with certain"Eastern masters"; i.e. the spirits of long-dead Germanic heroes, like King Heinrich the First and Frederick the Great.

Talk about an unwelcome promotion!

I've not found anything online to corroborate the story, but if there are further details of record, I would look in Dusty Sklar's aforementioned book ... if I still read books anymore.

True or false, such grisly proceedings would certainly have fit in with the spectrum of occult activities undertaken by the SS under its bizarrely malevolent leader Heinrich Himmler. Citing from Wikipedia:


> The Ahnenerbe Society, the ancestral heritage branch of the SS ... was dedicated primarily to the research of proving the superiority of the "Aryan race" but was also involved in occult practices. Founded in 1935... the Society became involved in searching for [the lost civilization of] Atlantis and the Holy Grail.


Wikipedia also reports:


> A German expedition to Tibet was organized in order to search for the origins of the Aryan race ... Another [such] expedition was sent to the Andes. Similar expeditions were organized in the pursuit of semi-mythical objects believed to bring power or granting special powers to their owner, such as the Holy Grail and the Holy Lance or Spear of Destiny ...


Getting back to the decapitations legend, it's not too hard to imagine such macabre proceedings being undertaken in the dimly lit recesses of Castle Wewelsburg, one of the centers of the mystical and malevolent SS cult that was carefully fostered by the half-mad Himmler.

_For other rinselberg posts on this topic, see Wewelsburg: Castle of Evil and The bells of Oxford._


Eye on history ...


Charles Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and Wasatch Brewery's _Evolution_ Amber Ale - it's a winning combination at today's Beer Of The Day!

----------


## rinselberg

*One for the money ...*



Select ("click") the icon for a brief video presentation.



*Two for the show ...*

Tsar Bomba was a formal designation for the largest and most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.

Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb had a yield of about 50 megatons and was codenamed Ivan by its developers. The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, on Novaya Zemlya, an island in the Arctic Sea. The device was scaled down from a 100-megaton blueprint to reduce the amount of radioactive byproducts, and true to its design, the explosion was remarkably "clean", producing nothing more in the way of radioactive fallout than many smaller atmospheric tests.

Political fallout was another matter.

In the fall of 1961 the Cold War was in full swing. The Tsar Bomba test came shortly after France exploded its first nuclear weapon. Construction had just started on the Berlin Wall. The next year would see the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the U.N., U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson opened disdainfully with "Mr. Khrushchev tested his giant bomb, just as he said he would." Stevenson, calling it a "monstrous and unnecessary weapon", described the test as a "deplorable event for the world, a step backward from international security, toward chaos and anarchy." He berated the Russians for breaking an informal ban on atmospheric tests and polluting the air with new radioactive byproducts.

When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev addressed the U.N., he dusted off an old Russian idiom, "to show somebody Kuzka's mother", meaning to punish someone. This is how the Tsar Bomba acquired its slangier appellation, "Kuzka's mother".



*Three for the critics ...*

After the release by the carrier aircraft, the huge 27-ton bomb was slowed during its drop by a "ginormous" parachute constructed from 5400 square feet of nylon - and a story began making the rounds that for some time thereafter, it was all but impossible to find nylon hosiery for sale in Russia.

The bomb released the same total energy as 50 million tons of chemical explosive - ten times the sum of all of the explosives used by all of the warring nations during World War Two. It was 2,500 times as powerful as the larger of the two atomic bombs used against Japan. Upon detonation, the bomb fuel burned for 39 nanoseconds (0.000000039 seconds). During this virtual instant in time, "Kuzka's mother" released an astonishing one percent of the total energy radiated by the Sun. In a single second, the superheated gases from the explosion expanded into an incandescent fireball over four miles in diameter.

Despite cloudy skies over the Arctic, observers at a distance of 1,600 miles saw the flash. There was a sensation of abnormal heat out to a radius of 500 miles. Had the skies been clear, anyone within 60 miles of ground zero, outside and without protection, would have been "toast". The seismic shock wave was recorded at earthquake monitoring stations even after circling three times around the globe. The mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 40 miles. Most of the bomb's energy was radiated harmlessly into outer space:  one of the reasons why such enormous bombs were considered to have no practical military use.

Because of an unpredictable and unavoidable effect called "atmospheric focusing", shock waves raced through the air at the speed of sound before reflecting downwards, touching down like tornados and creating scattered and isolated areas of destruction almost 1,000 miles away. These long distance shock waves were reported to have shattered window glass and damaged buildings as far from the test site as Finland and Norway. That's more than the distance from Boston to Detroit.

Belying all of the Soviet sizzle and showmanship, "Kuzka's mother" was not a useful military weapon. It was too big to go on top of a missile. It could be dropped from a specially modified long range aircraft (as it was during the test), but attempting to penetrate the strong U.S. air defense with aircraft was a dubious proposition at best, and the extraordinary weight of the bomb, coupled with the aerodynamic drag of the oversized bomb compartment, would have made the carrier airplane(s) even more vulnerable. The U.S. and Russia alike developed arsenals of thousands of smaller nuclear weapons that offered a more credible strategic deterrent than any number of the "king size" bombs could have provided.



*Image gallery ... "click" any image to enlarge.*

   



*The banal awfulness of the Reliable Sources ...*

Mushroom Clouds Image Gallery
Soviet Weapons Programs
Russia's Nuclear Weapons Program
AllExperts Encyclopedia
Wikipedia

----------


## Sean

In M&M candies, the letters stand for Mars and Murrie, the developers of the candy in 1941.

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## rinselberg

This artist's impression of a supermassive black hole highlights the swirling accretion disk and the fantastic power radiated outwards into space in the form of two tightly focused energy beams or jets. One jet is aligned with a magnetic north and the other with a magnetic south. The jet energy is distributed across the radio spectrum, and sometimes upwards into the visible light and X-ray bands.



As "fuel" in the form of interstellar gas and dust is captured by gravity and enters the accretion disk, it's accelerated to incredible speeds and temperatures. Friction and interaction with the powerful magnetic field releases the electromagnetic force that powers the energy jets. It's thought to be the most perfectly efficient energy conversion process in the observable universe.

How efficient? If the internal combustion engine in a car could be reengineered to run like a black hole, it would deliver about 1,000,000,000 MPG; i.e. one billion road miles per gallon of gasoline. That's about five "road trips" to the Sun and back - and there'd still be a long way to go before the next fill-up.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12465712/
http://htxs.gsfc.nasa.gov/resources/...e_gravity.html


Updated:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19461296/

----------


## rinselberg

There's an excellent review of the Roswell Flying Saucer legend on the National Geographic Channel under the title The Real Roswell, and it's airing again on Saturday.

The most credible explanation to date of the 1947 Roswell incident and the frenzy of UFO sightings that preceded it emerged (finally) in 1995, but not having followed any of it (myself), this National Geographic segment was (mostly) news to me.

This one hour TV segment is brand new - it's dated 2007.

For more of what you most need to know, see the Laramy-K World News Forum - the optical world's most respected source for news.

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## rinselberg

*U.N. team still looking for Iraq’s WMD*
Though work is seen as irrelevant, Security Council can’t agree to end it

U.S. official: "Been there, done that ..."

Updated: 5:25 a.m. PT June 2, 2007
UNITED NATIONS - More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein's deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq -- inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist.

The inspectors acknowledge that their chief task -- disarming Iraq -- was largely fulfilled long ago. But, they say, their masters at the U.N. Security Council have been unable to agree to either shut down their effort or revise their mandate to make their work more relevant. Russia insists that Iraq's disarmament must be formally confirmed by the inspectors, while the United States vehemently opposes a U.N. role in Iraq, saying coalition inspectors have already done the job ...

_For the complete MSNBC report:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18970426/_


Updated:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12342626/

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## rinselberg

Pimp my toad!



Is purple the new "black" in Suriname? That's the South American country where a recent expedition of naturalists, sponsored by two mining companies, discovered what are considered to be as many as 24 new species, including this Atelopus toad. Junior's Custom Auto Painting and Body Shop denies any involvement. The Associated Press described the markings as "fluorescent" purple, but I think that was just a figure of speech. I haven't turned up any evidence that the markings on this toad would react to ultraviolet light by changing or intensifying their color.

_Select ("click") the photo to view a higher resolution image._





Visit the oldest unsolved puzzle in optics ...

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## Sean

The full name of breakfast cereal mascot Cap'n Crunch is Horatio Magellan Crunch.

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## Sean

The crimped bottle cap was invented by Baltimorean William Painter in 1891.

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## rinselberg

Darkness falls on the evening of March 24, 1944. Before the next sunrise, 76 POWs - mostly airmen from the U.K. and other Commonwealth nations - are on the lam in Germany after breaking out of a prison camp from a concealed underground tunnel. Disguised in fake civilian garb or counterfeit German uniforms tailored to match carefully scripted cover stories, they're ready to back up their fictitious identities by answering in German and presenting forged German documents when challenged. They carry food rations and copies of stolen German maps and railroad timetables. It's the culmination of a truly incredible escape plan involving almost a year of secret preparations by over 600 Allied prisoners.

The mass breakout triggers an international dragnet that diverts thousands of German soldiers and police from other tasks. Hitler is furious. Of the 76 fugitives, 73 are quickly recaptured. Fifty are gunned down in cold blood by Gestapo agents who in a lame attempt to conceal yet another Nazi war crime, fictitiously record that the prisoners were shot while trying to escape from transport vehicles. Another 23 are returned to German captivity alive. Only three actually live the dream of escaping from Nazi-occupied territories. It goes down in history as "The Great Escape".

But you already knew all this, because you're one of the millions who've seen the iconic 1963 movie "The Great Escape" at least once - and probably more than once.

The movie was remarkably close to the real-life story, aside from what are probably the two most obviously fictional embellishments: Steve McQueen's character stealing a German motorcycle and James Garner's character swiping a German airplane. Those things didn't happen.

_Here's some things you probably didn't know ..._

Not a single American serviceman was among the 76 escapees who broke out.

When tunneling was detected by German guards or "ferrets", they usually pretended to be unaware, allowing the prisoners to continue their underground digging without hindrance. Then, when the ferrets judged that the tunnel was almost complete, they would pounce, driving heavy trucks around the POW compound to collapse the escape tunnels and galleries.

Concealing the escape preparations was a task assigned to the very capable hands of a particular American serving with the RCAF. He worked out a scheme in which a rota of prisoners logged in every German guard or ferret entering the POW compound using what was called the "Duty Pilot" system. The Germans were tailed everywhere inside the compound until they left, when they were logged out. An elaborate system of innocent-looking signals was devised to alert POWs engaged in escape activities, and give them enough time to either disguise their nefarious handiwork as one of several permissible camp recreations, or to completely conceal whatever it was that they were doing. Unable to effectively combat the Duty Pilot system, the Germans allowed it to continue, and on one occasion actually took their own advantage of the Duty Pilot log, inspecting it and then bringing charges against two German guards who were logged out several hours before the scheduled end of their watch - slackers, caught red-handed but inadvertently by the prisoners they were supposed to be guarding!

The accomplished German actor Hannes Messemer (figure on the right; below) was cast in the role of the suspiciously named Colonel von Luger. "Luger" ... like the famous German sidearm?


_"Give up your hopeless attempts to escape, and with intelligent cooperation, we may all sit out the war as comfortably as possible ..." Credit: IMDb movie database._

The script for the von Luger character was drawn to match the real-life Kommandant of Stalag Luft III, a Luftwaffe staff officer who was held, ironically, in considerable regard by many of his captives. Colonel Freidrich-Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau was a courteous and totally professional soldier without the slightest use for Nazi fanaticism or brutality - 180 degrees apart from the thuggish Gestapo agents who were sometimes assigned the task of tracking down escaped POWs.

Camp security was headed by Hauptmann (Captain) Broili and Oberfeldwebel (Warrant Officer) Hermann Glemnitz. The latter, who was 44 (in 1943) and endowed with a sharp sense of humour, was usually referred to as "that b*****d Glemnitz", and was both feared and respected by the prisoners as a dedicated disrupter of escape plots.

After the war, Glemnitz was discovered living in West Berlin and was flown to the 1965 POW reunion in Dayton and the 1970 reunion in Toronto. Upon arrival in Canada, Glemnitz, still very much in character, declared "I am here to make sure that you people aren't trying to tunnel out of Toronto."



Eye on history


Sources:
NOVA on PBS: The Great Escape
History In Film: The Great Escape
The Great Escape From Stalag Luft III by Rob Davis
First hand account of Stalag Luft III by Wing Commander Ken Rees
Wikipedia: The Great Escape
AXPOW: American Ex-Prisoners Of War Organization home page
AXPOW: Prisoner of War Stories and Articles

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## chip anderson

A little post script on Riseberg"s post. I have been told my many veterans of the D Day invasion: "No German Prisoners were taken after the 73 escapees were gunned down."
Think of how this contrasts with our "treatment of prisoners" today.

Chip

P.S. As you probably know in the retaking of the islands of the Pacific, no Japanese prisoners were taken except those too wounded to fight back, thier choice, not ours.

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## Sean

One of the largest freshwater fishes is the Paiche of the Amazon, which can grow to ten feet long and over 500 pounds.

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## rinselberg

Please return later ...

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## rinselberg

Yesterday (July 18) marked 69 years to the day since an ambitious U.S. aviator known to history as Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan landed at Baldonnel Airfield in Dublin, Ireland.

The year was 1938.

The flight made Corrigan just the eighth pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic.

You may not have noticed, but Tuesday (July 17) was Wrong Way Corrigan Day - so designated because the flight began 28 hours and 13 minutes earlier, on July 17, when Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York.

Corrigan acquired his "pre-owned" Curtiss Robin OX-5 for the grand sum of $325 in 1933 and fitted it with his own jury-rigged engine and extra fuel tanks. The Bureau of Air Commerce, unenthused with the condition of the airplane, declined his application to certify it for transatlantic flight. Before taking off, Corrigan told airport officials that he was going to fly west, all the way across the U.S., and land in Long Beach, California. Because of weather conditions (fog), they told Corrigan to take off heading east, make the Atlantic coastline and then turn back heading west in accordance with his flight plan.

Corrigan explained his unexpected materialization in Ireland as a navigation error. He said that either his 20-year old flight compass had malfunctioned, or in unfavorable lighting conditions inside the cockpit, and distracted by coldness in his feet and a menacing fuel leak, he had misread his compass, transposing east and west. He said that he didn't realize that he was over the Atlantic and closing on Ireland until 26 hours into the flight. He had no radio and because of the front-mounted auxilliary fuel tanks, his straight-ahead vision was obscured. He could only see out through the side windows of his plane.



_Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan and his Curtiss Robin high-wing monoplane "Sunshine". Photo: Museum of Flight._


The offbeat news story caught the public's imagination at a time when the dreariness of the Depression years was still wearing on a somewhat dispirited and anxiety-ridden nation. The straight-laced officials at the Bureau of Air Commerce sent a 600-word transatlantic telegram, listing all of the regulations that were violated by the unauthorized transatlantic flight. They also suspended his pilot's certificate for the next two weeks. But they were out of step with the temper of the public. Corrigan and his patchwork Curtiss Robin returned to New York aboard the steamship Manhattan on August 4th, the last day of his temporary decertification. He was given a ticker-tape parade down Broadway that drew a larger crowd than the one that turned out for Lindbergh in 1927.

The confetti had scarcely been swept from Broadway when the pilot turned author started the manuscript for his autobiography. The book was ready for the year's end gift market under the title "That's My Story". Wrong Way endorsed "Wrong Way" novelty items including a watch that ran backwards. In 1939 he was cast in an autobiographical role in RKO Radio Picture's "The Flying Irishman". The $75,000 that he netted almost immediately from his celebrity surpassed the income that he would have realized from 30 more years at his previous airfield mechanic and pilot's wages.

Decades later, the retired aviator turned orange grower recounted that one of the high points of his life was meeting President Roosevelt, who told Corrigan that he never doubted the veracity of the "compass story" for even a moment.

Perhaps Roosevelt was just being congenial.

There's an air of "publicity stunt" about the celebrated flight that has never been dispelled.


For more:
Curtiss Robin C-1 page at Museum of Flight
http://www.santaanahistory.com/articles/corrigan.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Corrigan

----------


## Sean

The basenji is a breed of dog that cannot bark.

----------


## Sean

The first mass-produced typewriter was made by the gun manufacturer, Reminington.

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## chip anderson

Not only did Fredric Remmington produce the first typewriter, one of his first compeditors was L.C. Smith a famous  producer of Shotguns and partner in Smith-Corrona.
However this is not too amazing as Remmington was the first to make firearms with interchangeable parts.  This allowed for the first production line and the first successfull mass production line of anything.

See even pen pushers owe their success to a man with a gun, as he enabled them to write in a fashion that one could actually read.

Chip

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## gemstone

*Behind the Legend*

You'll be pleased to hear that this is not true. The only way one could reasonably say that a person eats eight spiders a year is by assuming, a) that you can add up all the spider parts found in typical foodstuffs (e.g., vegetables, rice, hamburger buns) until you reach the mass of a spider and call that one spider, b) that all spiders are as large as medium-size tarantulas, when in fact most of the spiders eaten each year are significantly smaller, and c) that spiders that crawl into your mouth while you are asleep don't count as having been eaten. But without making such wild assumptions, one can only say that the average person eats 10-12 whole spiders a year, and some two to three pounds of miscellaneous spider parts

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## DragonLensmanWV

The glass lizard looks like a snake but is actually a legless lizard. The name comes from the fact that when endangered, it can shed it's tail into several pieces and escape while the predator is eating it's tail.

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## Sean

Andrew Johnson was buried with his head resting on a copy of the U.S Consititution.

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## chip anderson

Sean:  Do they dig him up and change it as the courts re-write it?

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## DragonLensmanWV

> Sean:  Do they dig him up and change it as the courts re-write it?



Uh-Oh, starting to sound like the old "digging up Beethoven"  joke.:D:D

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## Sean

> Uh-Oh, starting to sound like the old "digging up Beethoven" joke.:D:D


:bbg::):bbg:

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## rinselberg

This manganese-rich nugget or "nodule" was recovered from a depth of 17,000 feet - more than three miles down - from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Metallic oxide mineral deposits like this are known to carpet large areas of the ocean bottom. Some are as large as footballs. The nodules are laden with manganese, iron, cobalt, copper, nickel and other valuable metal content.

During the early 1970s the possibility of mining the sea floor for these rich metal ores garnered considerable attention in the U.S. and a number of other countries. Ocean mining was the topic of numerous media reports. The National Science Foundation (among others) loosened its purse strings and looked with new favor upon grant proposals from scientists and engineers with ideas of how to tap the economic "gold mine" waiting deep below.

It all started with a public disclosure that eccentric billionaire and business tycoon Howard Hughes, whose holdings included the Hughes Tool Company, had contracted with Los Angeles based Global Marine to design the _Hughes Glomar Explorer_: a 63,000 ton, 619-foot long ocean-going platform of unprecedented design and capabilities. The Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company delivered the ship in June, 1974. The costs for its design and construction surpassed $350 million. Press releases rounded out the story for the public: The ship was going to be used by the Summa Corporation for deep sea mining operations, starting with the recovery of manganese nodules in commercially significant quantities.

The venture was called "DOMP": short for "Deep Ocean Mining Project".

It was one of the CIA's most carefully crafted cover stories.

The only undersea deposit of metals that _Glomar Explorer_ was ever intended to "mine" was a Soviet Navy submarine that had sunk by accident. The CIA hoped to retrieve the water-logged sub, which was thought to be otherwise relatively intact, from the bottom of the Pacific. The submarine's encrypted communications gear and battery of nuclear-tipped missiles were to be painstakingly disassembled and analyzed by U.S. military experts, revealing a very different kind of "gold mine": a gold mine of new intelligence about Russian military capabilities. It would be recorded in the annals of international espionage as "Project Jennifer".



The _Glomar Explorer_ was revolutionary in its station-keeping technologies; i.e. its ability to maintain an exact, fixed location at sea without the hindrance of having to be anchored to the seabed. This was one of the special requirements of its unprecedented mission.

A large mechanical grasping device or "claw" (known to the machinery-smitten engineers and operators as "Clementine") was designed to be lowered all the way to the ocean floor, 16,500 feet below, grasp the sunken submarine hull, and then lift it all the way up to the ship. It worked by threading steel pipes together in the same way as oil drilling rigs, descending by one 60-foot long pipe section after another. After a successful capture with the claw, the process would be reversed, and the pipes would be unthreaded to raise the captured materials.

The entire submarine (or more likely, just a large section thereof) was to be lifted all the way upwards into a huge flooded compartment in the middle of the ship, called the "Moon Pool". The outer doors of the Moon Pool would then be closed, creating a secluded compartment to contain the salvaged materials, and the seawater would be pumped out. The Moon Pool was the final element of the CIA plan to conceal the entire salvage attempt from detection by any nearby surveillance ships or by overflying aircraft or spy satellites.

The _Los Angeles Times_ revealed the secret operation in 1975. After news stories that the CIA had approached the media to convince them to discontinue publication, Harriet Ann Phillippi, a journalist, used the FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) to ask the CIA to disclose any records about its contacts with the media. The CIA responded by refusing to either confirm or deny the existence of such records. The CIA declared that if there were, in fact, any such records, they were classified.

It was the first time that the CIA ever went public with a statement that it would "neither confirm or deny ...".

A new idiom had been added to the language.

Amid the legal wrangling that ensued after the publication by the _Los Angeles Times_, Global Marine executives were obliged to testify in court that the ship was not designed for commercial mining operations.The ship's enormous lifting capacity was intriguing, but no one could identify another practical use for it, in view of its staggering costs of operation. In 1976, GSA (General Services Administration) invited businesses and other interested parties to submit proposals for leasing the ship. GSA received a total of just seven bids.

Defense giant Lockheed Missiles and Space came the closest to putting an acceptable package on the table, but they couldn't come up with the financing.

Scientists rallied in support of the _Glomar Explorer_, urging President Ford to maintain the ship as a national asset, but neither the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) or any other agency was amenable to picking up the formidable tab for maintaining and operating the one-of-a-kind vessel.

To add insult to injury, GSA received a bid of $1.98 from an individual who "planned" to seek a government contract to salvage nuclear reactors from two U.S. submarines; presumably, submarines that were known to have gone down.

A Nebraska college student offered more: Two dollars even.

By year's end (1976), the ship was designated the _USNS Glomar Explorer_ (T-AG-193) and drydocked as part of the Navy's reserve or "mothball" fleet.

From 1978 to 1980, the ship was reactivated by a private consortium, led by Lockheed Missiles and Space and including Global Marine and units of Standard Oil Company of Indiana and Royal Dutch Shell. In a kind of "Life Imitates Fiction" scenario (the fiction having been the CIA cover story), the vessel was put to sea to test its capabilities for deep sea mining, and specifically, the recovery of manganese nodules from the ocean bed. This may have been when the ship recovered the manganese nodule that is pictured at the very top of this post.

In 1997 the _Glomar Explorer_ was reactivated for the second time, after 17 years at drydock. It underwent an extensive conversion that transformed it into an ultra-deepwater drillship for the petroleum industry. Under a lease agreement with the Navy, Global Marine's oil recovery unit stationed the ship in the Gulf of Mexico, where it set a new industry record by drilling to a depth of 7,718 feet below sea level. The ship is currently operated by GlobalSantaFe Corporation under the name _GSF Explorer_. It's on station near Angola, where it's expected to support oil recovery operations until the end of 2009.


_GSF Explorer passing under a bridge in Istanbul._


But what about that Russian submarine?

The U.S. has never released an official report for public scrutiny, although it's been 33 years since the salvage attempt and 15 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's indisputable that parts of the submarine were recovered.

During the salvage operation, the CIA (anticipating, perhaps, a future era of improved U.S.-Russia relations) made a video record of memorial services that were conducted within the seclusion of the Moon Pool for six Russian sailors whose bodies were recovered from the wreckage. The video was quietly presented to the Russian government about the same time or shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. In 2003 excerpts from this video were included in TV segments about Project Jennifer, including a Cold War submarine episode of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's NOVA series.

Some accounts have it that only a small forward section of the submarine was ever recovered. According to these reports, the salvaged materials did not include either the nuclear-tipped missiles or the cryptography equipment that were the focus of the CIA's interest. By other accounts, however, the operation is said to have retrieved both nuclear-armed and chemically explosive torpedoes, cryptography gear, operating manuals and other documents and an assortment of electronic components that were of significant import to U.S. military experts.

And then there are those who have reported that the entire submarine was recovered virtually intact ...


Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_...lomar_Explorer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...ts_cover_story
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Gl...%28T-AG-193%29
http://longburn.blogspot.com/2005/11...e-nodules.html
http://www.americanheritage.com/arti...999_3_36.shtml
http://www.btinternet.com/~derek.mac...vessels01e.htm
http://www.casgen.com/pr/pr970003.htm
http://www.chesterchallenge.org/past/sanders/sra.html
http://www.coltoncompany.com/newsand...ws/2006/09.htm
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~adg/adg-psoimages.html#mn_nodule
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1341110
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/jennifer.htm
http://www.globalsantafe.com/index_fl.html
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=480527
http://www.rigzone.com/data/rig_detail.asp?rig_id=272

----------


## rinselberg

A gifted parrot that learned to mimic English words to the extent of demonstrating that he could count from zero to six, discriminate among 7 different colors, 5 different shapes and 50 different objects and even express frustration with repetitive scientific tests, has died, after 30 years of helping scientists better understand the capabilities of the avian brain.



Alex, the world's smartest bird. See MSNBC for the complete report.

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## rinselberg

Released in 1969, "Krakatoa, East of Java" starred Maximilian Schell and Brian Keith. It superimposed a fictional story against the background of the legendary catastrophe of 1883, the largest and most destructive volcanic eruption in modern history. The movie was created with state-of-the-art cinematic technology.

Krakatoa is in the Sunda Strait, immediately to the *west* of the island of Java.

After the mistake was recognized, the original film title was retained; partly because the powers that were thought that "East" sounded more exotic than "West" in that context. And partly, I guess, because they didn't want to undertake the trouble of renaming the film.

Of course, they could have renamed it "Krakatoa, South of Sumatra", but that would have been a step backwards as well. "Java" rolls off the tongue more easily than "Sumatra".



rinsel's latest OptiBoard Word of the Day! lets you experience a time when popular jazz tunes went to war for the "dark side" in a rare *multimedia* presentation.

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## rinselberg

Those who hungered for sausage during the Great War (1914-1918) were often out of luck. Especially those in Austria, Poland and German-occupied France and Belgium. Under German authority, the manufacture of sausages was forbidden in these areas. And not just out of caprice. Sausage casings are made from the intestines of slaughtered livestock, and during the Great War, those intestines were in great demand for another use: as raw material for the manufacture of goldbeater's skin.

Goldbeater's skin is a parchment-like material that acquired its name from its usefulness in the manufacture of ultra-thin gold leaf by "beating down" gold.

During the Great War, goldbeater's skin was sorely needed by the German war industry. It was made into a fabric that was used to construct and repair the hydrogen-filled buoyancy cells of Germany's Zeppelins: The rigid but lighter than air ships of the German armed forces. And it was needed in enormous quantities.



_A Zeppelin crew at war ... artist's conception. Select ("click") to enlarge._



_A Zeppelin crew at war ... photograph. Select ("click") to enlarge._


The Germans started using goldbeater's skin for this purpose before the war. At first, it was only one of a few different fabrics that were used. It was combined with other fabrics. But after the war started, goldbeater's skin became the German fabric of choice for the Zeppelins. And so the making of sausages was strictly regulated and outright forbidden in many areas under German control. Butchers were required to send the intestines of slaughtered livestock to wartime collection agencies. Thousands of women were employed during the war for the stomach-churning job of scraping and cleaning the intestines.


_The year before the war (1913), a German Zeppelin was photographed after landing in France. It's clear that the Zeppelins were already enormous. Select ("click") to enlarge._


In the years after the Great War, the Germans continued to use enormous quantities of goldbeater's skin throughout the dawn of a new era of large, luxurious passenger-service Zeppelins. The construction of a Zeppelin or dirigible typically consumed the innards of about half a million cattle. The Zeppelin company used the guts of several million animals per year. And the British followed suit. There are photographs from 1927, during the construction of Britain's Airship R101 passenger-service dirigible, of ranks of women performing the revolting task of preparing the intestines of over 100,000 oxen.


_Airship R101. Select ("click") to enlarge._


In 1930, Airship R101 encountered turbulent weather over a mountainous area of France. It crashed and its buoyancy generating hydrogen gas burned. Only six of the 54 passengers and crew survived. Thus ended Airship R101's first and last operational flight. Up to that point, it was only considered to be undergoing test flights.

As the years went by, dirigible builders turned to other raw materials. In 1931 Time Magazine reported on the U.S. Navy's giant new dirigible Akron. The article remarked that the quantity of gelatin-latex treated cotton fabric, developed by Goodyear-Zeppelin and used in the Akron, was substituting for goldbeater's skin that would have required the intestines of 1.5 million cattle.


_U.S.N. Akron. Select ("click") image to enlarge._


Just recently, the case of Airship R101 and its tragic demise was analyzed from a modern perspective by a group of NASA flight systems engineers.


_The charred remains of Airship R101 near Beauvais, France (1930). Select ("click") image to enlarge._


The results were published in April, 2007 as one of NASA's System Failure Case Studies under the title "Innovation Pushed Too Far Too Fast"; available on line.




All that stuff about dirigibles and livestock intestines was originally published in 1922, in the French journal L'Aeronautique, under the title "Balloon Fabrics Made Of Goldbeater's Skin" and credited to one Capt. L. Chollet of the S.T. ae. (Whatever that stands for ...) The French was translated into 13 pages of antiquated looking typewritten English under the auspices (and bearing the official stamp) of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the organization that eventually gave rise to NASA. The 13 typewritten pages were scanned, converted into PDF format and stored on the Internet, in an archive domain. I found it earlier today, prompted by a segment that I viewed on cable TV. I found it here.


_National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; 1915-1958._


Long live the past!

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## rinselberg

*Chicago: 1929.* Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, often referenced as "Dr." Schwimmer (he wasn't), was a 30-year old eyeglass fitter (or optician, as we usually say here) with a hotel residence and an office on Chicago's North Side. He was more interested in gambling and hanging out with members of Chicago's notorious North Side Gang than he was in pursuing the trade of his business office, where he actually spent little time. He liked to brag about town that he was centrally involved in the gang's bootleg liquor operations and that he could have anyone in Chicago "whacked' if he wanted to do so.

Schwimmer's bragging had little to do with reality. He just liked hanging around with the gang members, and they found his company tolerable. Schwimmer had never been arrested or charged with any criminal offense. He had divorced his first wife and married again, this time into "money", but his second wife got fed up with his indolent ways and divorced him in 1928.

If that were all there were to his story, he probably wouldn't be recorded in any particular Internet archive. But on the morning of a cold, winter Thursday, Schwimmer got "lucky". He decided it was time to pay his gangster cronies another social visit.

It was February 14, 1929: The feast day of St. Valentine.

And the rest is history ...





> One of the seven Moran gangsters who were lined up facing a brick wall and mowed down with machine guns and shotguns in a garage at 2122 N. Clark Street at 10:40 A.M., 2/14/29.


Source: Chicago Police Department Homicide Record.


That's the way the Chicago Police Department recorded the late Reinhardt Schwimmer in their homicides file.

Schwimmer would probably have liked being described as "one of the seven Moran gangsters". He was the only one of the seven victims with no prior criminal record. George "Bugs" Moran, a name that's far better known to history than Reinhardt Schwimmer, was the last significant chieftain of the North Side Gang - and a vexing obstacle to Al Capone, who wanted to expand his South Side operations into the North Siders' territory.

According to Wikipedia, it's not clear what the North Side gang members were up to that morning at the garage, or why Moran himself wasn't there when the brazen gangland hit of legend went down. Six of the seven victims, including Schwimmer, were dressed in fashionable suits that seem to discount the widely circulated theory that the gang had assembled with the expectation of meeting and unloading a truck shipment of bootlegged whiskey.

The other man found dead at the scene was John May, a one-time safe-blower turned auto mechanic. May was there to fix one of the gang's broken down vehicles and was dressed accordingly. He calculated that his relatively minor role in the gang's activities as the North Siders' "Mr. Goodwrench" made him an unlikely target for the seemingly endless gang-on-gang violence that had taken root in the streets of Chicago since the passage of Prohibition a decade earlier.




> The killers ... used two Thompson [submachine guns], one with a 50-round rotating drum magazine and one with a 20-round stick [magazine]. This theory [was] put out by Rick Mattix and Bill Helmer ... as the newspapers ... exaggerated the [number] of bullets found at the crime scene ... [about] 70 spent shells were recovered by investigators, leading to the theory that a Thompson with a 20-round stick was used along with another one with the 50-round drum, in case the somewhat less reliable rotating drum magazine jammed.


http://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id58.htm


It's possible that the St. Valentine's Day Massacre might have been postponed, if not for another day then perhaps for another hour, but one of the assassination team's lookouts mistook another gang member whom he saw entering the garage for Bugs Moran, and that lookout gave the "go" signal. Some accounts say that the man who was mistaken for Moran was Albert Weinshank; but at least one account speculates that it may not have been Weinshank, but the aforementioned "optometrist" Reinhardt H. Schwimmer.




*Countdown Iran*
High profile OptiBoard poster rinselberg reports on the Pentagon's latest plans ...

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## chip anderson

How'd they make chitlins?

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## rinselberg

MSNBC's Erin Burnett just reported that one of every four of the world's construction cranes are currently at work in "Dubai Inc.", the biggest boom town on Earth. Even bigger than China. Or bigger, at least, than any one place in China.

"They" send us oil. "We" send them Dollars (and Pound sterling and Euros). "They" invest heavily in "our" enterprises. And "they" are investing heavily in the United States.

This video segment (07:40) from June is still current: It's about the construction boom in Dubai. It doesn't go into the investment side of the story.



_Coming to Southern California: Honda's FCX Clarity. It's the first fuel cell powered automobile to venture into the open U.S. marketplace. OptiBoard has a full report ..._

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## rinselberg

*You'll need to part with a lot of money to buy our product!*

There _are_ consumer products for which "pitchmen" are not averse to letting on, directly or indirectly, that said product is costly to purchase. The products that come to (my) mind: Rolls-Royce automobiles, Rolex watches, Parfum V1 (that took a little research on my part); etc. You can no doubt think of some other examples.

But you probably wouldn't think of Chevrolet.

Chevrolet is GM's entry level division. GM's economy brand. You'd have to go way back in automotive history to find a time (if ever there was one) when it was otherwise.

Of course, there's the Corvette: a premium priced, eight cylinder, fiberglass body sports car. But I've never seen an ad that literally bragged about how high the asking price was for a new Corvette.

Yet it happened once. In 1973. But it wasn't the 1973 or 1974 Corvette.

_It was the limited edition Cosworth Twin Cam Vega._

Cosworth Vega featured an all-aluminum, twin cam, fuel injected, four cylinder engine, designed by United Kingdom based Cosworth Engineering Ltd.

And Chevrolet was only too happy to announce that you could have _one_ Cosworth Vega for the price of _two_ Vega hatchbacks.


"ONE VEGA FOR THE PRICE OF TWO" ... select ("click") image to enlarge.

Dealers opened waiting lists and started accepting customer deposits in 1973. By then, the plan called for a 1974 public rollout, but it would be 1975 before the first Cosworth Vega was ready for delivery. They needed another year to modify the engine parameters until it passed the federally mandated requirements for fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. At the end of this process, the hand assembled Cosworth engines were good for a decidedly modest 120 horsepower, or about 30 more horsepower than the single cam, carburetor fed, mass produced Vega engines.

*I found a 30-second video clip on MySpaceTV: The audio track is the sound of a 1975 Cosworth Twin Cam engine as the owner revs it up from idle.*

Introduced with an MSRP of $5,916 (in 1975) the Cosworth Vega was, as advertised, almost double the price of a Vega hatchback and only $900 less than a baseline Corvette: The asking price was the highest ever for a new Chevrolet - not counting the Corvette. 

Running from 1971 through 1977, GM's Vega/Astre assembly lines produced over 2 million cars. Of that number, the Cosworth Vega ran for just two years - from 1975 through 1976 - coming to only 3,508 cars total. (Astre was the Pontiac division's Vega "clone": a footnote to a model that was all told, only a mere footnote itself in automotive history.)

Falling short of the projected sales volume (of 5,000), the parts to assemble 1,500 additional Cosworth Vega engines went straight to the scrap heap.

Chevrolet Vega has all but vanished completely from public view - and thought, for that matter. But if you chance to catch sight of one (I did, the other day), it's likely to be one of the 3,508 Cosworth Twin Cam cars. These few have caught on to a certain degree as collector's items.

Just about _all_ the others (more than 2 million cars) have long since gone to junkyards, and many - by all recorded accounts - not long after their first mile on the road.



Photo: 1976 Cosworth Twin Cam Vega. Select ("click") image to enlarge.


*Sources:*
Wikipedia
A Cosworth Vega History
Chevrolet Small Cars: Cobalt, Cavalier, Monza and Vega
Complete Vega History 1970-1977
Cosworth Vega Owners Association


Q. This is the "Strange Facts!" thread. What's the strangest fact about this post?

A. THIS POST.

See "syllogism". (Better yet: see a "shrink" ..?)

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## rinselberg

Caveat emptor is always in order, especially if your neighborhood witch doctor promises you that genuine, custom-made _tsantsa_ (shrunken head) for your living room curio collection by tomorrow at five.

It takes about six days to make a shrunken head (starting with a freshly separated head) using the authentic South American process developed by the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, who were able to supply an increasing world demand for these once trendy collectibles during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

If you're a Do-It-Yourselfer, I have just the web page for you: It gives a brief, step-by-step description of how to make one. It also explains the spiritual significance of the tsantsa from the Jivaro perspective.

The same web page explores the effectiveness of the "revolutionary razor" (guillotine). Was it really the painless, instantaneous killing machine that its champions maintained? Or did the typical guillotine client experience a macabre interval or even a moment of conscious self-awareness, of inhabiting a living yet uniquely disembodied state of existence, after completing the "severance" process?

You can also catch up with the latest developments in brain and head transplants.

It's all on line at Strange Horizons under the title Guillotines and Body Transplants: the Severed Head in Fact and Fiction, by Fred Bush (September 2002).

If (on the odd chance) you are in any way appreciative of this post, you may also want to see another of my OptiBoard posts Talking Heads! and its companion post Wewelsburg: Castle of Evil.



March 4, 1970: Pioneering neurosurgeon Robert J. White has surgically attached the living head of one rhesus monkey to the living body of another. It was reported (by White) that upon regaining signs of activity, the transplanted head tried to bite Dr. White's finger.

White, who has been called a "modern day Dr. Frankenstein", accentuated the positive aspects of his research by calling the operation a "body transplant", rather than a "head transplant", which sounds even more grotesque, and nowadays, reminiscent of the 1983 Steve Martin film comedy "The Man With Two Brains". White was interviewed in March of 2007. The four-page transcript can be read on line at Litmus.

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## rinselberg

Ever seen one of these thrown onto the ice by a fan at a hockey game?

I did. At a college hockey game. And until I was inspired just now to look it up, I thought that I had witnessed something unique. The home team was taking a pasting. There was a rowdy, well "marinated" group of fans in one section, and one guy threw an octopus onto the ice. Not during a break or timeout, but during actual play. A security guard went up there to eject him from the facility. And the other fans in that section were shouting (at the security guard) "Your mutha' wears aaaarmy boots ..." One of those timeless lines, I guess. I may need that to respond to some future posts like other ones I have seen, but that's just a hypothetical at the moment.

The first octopus landed on the ice during the [Detroit] Red Wings' 1952 Stanley Cup run ...

See About.com: Where did Red Wings' octopus tradition come from?


_"I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you." --Habakkuk. Today's OptiBoard "Just Conversation" vintage post.._

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## rinselberg

Middle names are much in the news of late, starting with Barack Hussein Obama. Which has led TV commentators to recall Hilary Rodham and William Jefferson Clinton. Before that: Richard Milhous Nixon.

Which leads me to remark of one Robert Strange McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. Legacies: Vietnam. Computerization of the armed services. Adoption of the M-16 assault rifle as the armed services primary single-soldier long-barrel weapon.


_"No, you may not use smilies."_
--posted by an OptiBoarder who is no longer active

_"I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you."--Habakkuk._
--today's vintage post

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## rinselberg

Professor Tudor Parfitt from London's School of Oriental and African Studies believes that the remnants of a large, 600-year old African wooden drum, last filmed inside a museum storage room in Zimbabwe, are the remains of a lineage of reproductions of religious artifacts that started with the legendary Ark of the Covenant.

Parfitt believes that this artifact is likely the closest that anyone will ever come to actually living the Indiana Jones fantasy and "discovering the long lost Ark of the Covenant".

This History Channel documentary covers the thousands of miles that Parfitt traveled in pursuing his theory.

Incredible?

Parfitt may merit some credibility. He also promoted the idea that the Lemba tribespeople of Zimbabwe are the descendants of one of the legendary lost tribes of ancient Israel. According to the documentary, there is convincing scientific DNA analysis now on record to support this "lost tribe" theory.

I haven't checked on that any further.

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## hcjilson

During World War ll .50 caliber ammunition belts for use in B-17's were 27 ft long. That's where the expression the 'whole 9 yards' was born.

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## Don Lee

> During World War ll .50 caliber ammunition belts for use in B-17's were 27 ft long. That's where the expression the 'whole 9 yards' was born.


Although there are many charges and credits to the phrase, such as yours, there is not a definite answer from whence the phrases origins came.  Some say it's how many yards to make a suit, others a wedding veil.

Don

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## chip anderson

HC is right on this one.  However it think it was the Mustang (P-51) that held 27 feet of ammo. (And no, I didn't fly one.)

Chip

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## hcjilson

> Although there are many charges and credits to the phrase, such as yours, there is not a definite answer from whence the phrases origins came.  Some say it's how many yards to make a suit, others a wedding veil.
> 
> Don


The information came from an article appearing in the Smithsonian Magazine having to do with the Normandy invasion. It should be an easy thing to verify- all one would need do is find a pre WWll reference to the expression.I have other fish to fry today but if you have the time, have at it! :)

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## Uncle Fester

> Although there are many charges and credits to the phrase, such as yours, there is not a definite answer from whence the phrases origins came.  Some say it's how many yards to make a suit, others a wedding veil.
> 
> Don


I agree it's lost in antiquity.

http://www3.telus.net/jennybr/origins.html#yards

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## Spexvet

Are you sure it's not a second down play option after getting only one yard on first down? :Rolleyes:

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## rinselberg

The Clover commercial coffee brewer costs $11,000 to own and install.

In Chicago, at Intelligentsia's Millenium Park retail coffee outlet, you can pay anywhere from a "few bucks" up to *$22* for a 12-ounce cup of Clover-brewed coffee, depending on the beans you select.

Something to do after you fill up with $4.00 per gallon gasoline..

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## rinselberg

> In 1924, two friends, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, decided to commit the perfect murder. Bobby Franks, an aquaintence of the two boys, was selected. They enticed him to their vehicle, then killed him with a chisel, dumping his body in a culvert in a marsh. The body was discovered, but no arrests were made. However, a pair of horned-rimmed glasses were discovered near Franks' body. The eyewear - with a distinctive Rx and unusual hinge - was traced to a Chicago optometrist. The eyewear was identified by the optometrist and confirmed as Leopold's: they fell out of his pocket during the murder. In spite of having famous lawyer Clarence Darrow to defend them, the boys were sentenced to life in prison. Loeb died in 1934 after being attacked in prison. Leopold was released in 1958 and lived until 1971.


It was the _hinge_ that proved to be Leopold's undoing.




> Leopold's prescription [was] a very common one and the frames were ordinary too, except for a patented hinge connecting the earpiece to the nosepiece. The hinge was manufactured by a New York company that had only one outlet in Chicago: Almer Coe & Co. Especially unfortunate for Leopold was the fact that Almer Coe had sold only three pairs of glasses with the patented hinge. One belonged to a lady, a second pair belonged to an attorney  (Jerome Frank, who, nearly thirty years later as a federal appellate judge, would deny the final plea of Juilius and Ethel Rosenberg for a stay of their executions) traveling in Europe, and the third belonged to Leopold. It was a matter of a few days before detective work on the glasses led police ... to Nathan Leopold.



For more, including a photograph of the telltale reading glasses:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/proj...b/LEO_GLAS.HTM

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## rinselberg

For sale: Stereo loudspeakers from Pioneer. The wood loudspeaker cabinets are made from oak barrels that were used to age whiskey. Just as aging in wood improves the taste of whiskey, Pioneer's speaker specialists claim that whiskey improves the sound of wood. Don't believe it? Here it is..

http://www.pioneerusa.com/PUSA/Shop/...into+a+Speaker.

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## rinselberg

What would you do if you saw a bird headed your way--with a gi-normous head and beak and a staggering 60-foot wingspan? Drop dead from heart failure? It might have happened if only there had been a human alive some 70 million years ago. Pterosaurs.. flying reptiles. Dinosaurs with wings, although technically they are not classified as dinosaurs (I think) by contemporary paleontologists. 

Science owes as much to pterosaurs as pterosaur history does to science.

It was a pterosaur fossil, subjected to the sharp eye of naturalist Georges Cuvier, just about the year 1800, that led to the first commonly accepted realization by modern scientists that there were animals that had lived and disappeared from the face of the earth long before there were humans or recorded history.

_For more on these legendary creatures:_

Sky Monsters
Flying dinosaurs now thought to be as big as an F-14 Tomcat!

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## chip anderson

Don't let them kid you it was all due to global warming and the vehicles of the time.

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## bob_f_aboc

> Don't let them kid you it was all due to global warming and the vehicles of the time.


Brontosaurus farts!!!:idea:

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## rinselberg

American ornithologist James Bond wrote "The Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies", which found its way to the shelf of novelist Ian Fleming, who was living in Jamaica. Fleming took that name "James Bond" for the hero of his famous series of "007" spy novels.


[youtube]I3fzxX9Iatw[/youtube]

Hot summer? Chill out with one of the coolest jazz tracks of all time--Oliver Nelson's arrangement of "Stolen Moments". It's the epitome of 1960's "cool"..

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## rinselberg

Some paleontologists speculate that in the not very distant future, genetic engineering could be used to create a living, dinosaur-like creature, similar to the Velociraptor in the movie Jurassic Park, starting with the DNA of that familiar flightless bird we know as an "emu".

Lab experiments have already shown the way to modifying the DNA of a chicken to grow a chicken embryo with an elongated tail, teeth and scales instead of feathers.

The scientists who are interested in this idea theorize that birds are the living descendants of a family of dinosaur species known as Therapod dinosaurs.

The premise of the movie Jurassic Park was that dinosaur DNA could be retrieved from insects trapped within ancient amber that fed on dinosaur blood before they died.

After the movie Jurassic Park was released, at least one scientist tried to retrieve DNA from prehistoric insects trapped within ancient amber, but it couldn't be done: The DNA had already disintegrated.

_Just some of the latest stuff on cable TV.._

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## carlos83eye

Wherever you get ur facts, don't trust the snapples one.....they're fake.......errrrrrg........:angry:

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## carlos83eye

As long as the first and last laetter of the words are the same, the rest of the letters can be jumbled up and we still can read and understand sentences rather easily........

"Waht teh mnid pecreievs is otefn inmocpelet or jmulbed. Our anecsotrss cnotepmroareis, who dleyaed to pndoer the dtaa too mcuh bofere acitng, otefn wunod up as sbaer totoh dnnier. So, we hmauns leraend to flil in the blnkas, so to spaek, and to act qckuily uopn our prcepetaul asumstopins, ucnsoinocus or orhteisw, aobut the wrlod aournd us. Aals, the Unvirese is a dbloued egedd srowd, whit ervey gian cmeos a cerrospndoing lsos, hcene our dpleey ingriaend cpaciaty to see olny what we pferer to see and to dsirgeard raletiy.  Glboal wrmrnig aynnoe?"

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## rinselberg

San Francisco's Fossil Fuels Brewing Company brews beer using a prehistoric strain of yeast that was revived after 45 million years. The yeast was cultivated from the fossil of an insect that was trapped inside ancient amber. The yeast is said to give the beer a distinctively "spicy" taste.

The beer is not being bottled (yet) and is only starting to appear on tap at some select bars and pubs in the San Francisco area.

I haven't tasted it.

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## Leighlee

*In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for a man to purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife.*

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## Jacqui

> San Francisco's Fossil Fuels Brewing Company brews beer using a prehistoric strain of yeast that was revived after 45 million years. The yeast was cultivated from the fossil of an insect that was trapped inside ancient amber. The yeast is said to give the beer a distinctively "spicy" taste.
> 
> The beer is not being bottled (yet) and is only starting to appear on tap at some select bars and pubs in the San Francisco area.
> 
> I haven't tasted it.


Only in San Francisco would something like this happen. What is that town coming to ??

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## Jacqui

> *In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for a man to purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife.*



This is a good law, more states should have it.

:cheers:

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## Leighlee

*In 1945 a computer at Harvard malfunctioned and Grace Hopper, who was working on the computer, investigated, found a moth in one of the circuits and removed it. Ever since, when something goes wrong with a computer, it is said to have a bug in it.*

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## HarryChiling

> *In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for a man to purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife.*


That's why Fezz is a home brewer. :cheers:

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## eyequeue

for any statue that is on horseback; if all four legs of the horse are on the ground, the rider died of natural causes, if the horse is on only the back legs with the front legs up, the rider died in combat. If the horse has only three legs on the ground, the rider died as a result of battle wounds. Isn't that amazing? This is a universal thing, I guess. :p

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## DragonLensmanWV

Guppies can change their sex. If you have one male and a tank of females and the male dies, at least one of the smallest ones will change to a male.
I have had this happen recently in my tank.

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## rinselberg

Ever been to the White Shark Café..?

Probably not! Tagging studies have revealed that every winter, some sizable white shark populations congregate in a small area of mid-ocean, far from any coast, about half the distance between San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands and far to the south of the most direct route between those places. The area has been dubbed the "White Shark Café".. and the reason(s) that the sharks go there every winter are not well understood.

For more about the White Shark Café:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0218134617.htm

The bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas) is commonly said to have the highest testosterone level of any animal--higher even than lions and elephants, which are known to be "testosterone heavy".

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## rinselberg

In its January 2009 issue, National Geographic magazine wrote: "In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools."

Another way to describe it: If all the gold possessed by man were collected and melted into one solid cube-shaped bullion, it would measure only about 20.28 meters high by 20.28 meters long by 20.28 meters wide. And 20.28 meters comes to just about 60 and 1/2 feet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold

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## hcjilson

I thought it was about time to start this up again!

http://pjcockrell.wordpress.com/2007...e-black-notes/

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## PhotonicGuy

Strange indeed...

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## MarySue

> the doctor? Doctor Who?


The Tardis Flying, Alien sorting, Human loving Dr Who. :)

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## Sean

Without the caramel coloring in Coca Cola , it would be green in color.

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## alexxste

Forest fires move faster uphill than downhill!

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## Johns

> Forest fires move faster uphill than downhill!


Welcome to Optiboard!

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## fjpod

The stars don't come out at night.



They're there all day long, but we just can't see them due to the overwhelming light of the sun.

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## SharonB

Islanders of Punjalap Atoll in the South Pacific were almost wiped out by a typhoon many years ago.The few residents who survived have progeny with no color vision.

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## crixussteave

If the Sun stopped producing energy today, we wouldn't know about it for ten million years. :D

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## kat

My father did a rotation in the jail while in Med school and treated Leopold. He culdn't remember what for, but remembered the man.

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## Sean

Gilligans first name, though never mentioned on the show, was Willie.

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## SharonB

The only stop light in the U.S. with the green on top is in the "Tipp" (Tipperary) Hill section of Syracuse N.Y. Just google it to find out the whole story!

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## newguyaroundhere

It's illegal to drink beer out of a bucket while you're sitting on a curb in St. Louis

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## mdeimler

The Rockville Bridge in Harrisburg, PA is the longest stone arch bridge in the world.

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## newguyaroundhere

Typing 'illuminati' backwards into the address bar, followed by '.com', will take you to U.S. government's National Security Agency website - See more at: http://www.funfactz.com/weird-facts/....GvzArp9g.dpuf

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## cookiespam

Jellybeans are a tasty treat and come in many flavors, but did you realize their shiny coating is made from bug feces? Shellac, also known as confectioner’s glaze, is made from a resin excreted by the female lac beetle, indigenous to India and Thailand. The resin is processed into flakes, dissolved in denatured alcohol to make liquid shellac, and then sprayed on food products or used to make lacquer for hardwood floors and furniture. 

Peanuts are actually legumes, not nuts

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