Interesting Facts That You Know

[Greed™]

So can kidney stones, had them twice.....painful bastards,

Go easy on the gym old man!

[Diablo]

The Duke of Wellington - the one who won at Waterloo - was called the Iron Duke, but it had nothing to do with the battle. After the war he was in government and passed some unpopular measures, and the mob attacked his house so he had iron shutters put up over the windows.

He had a great address too: Number One, London.

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Nelson - the one on the column - had a brooch called a Chelengk which he wore in his hat. The central gem had a small watch mechanism which caused it to rotate.

Nelson is a piece of cricketing slang:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_%28cricket%29

The name, applied to team or individual scores of 111 or multiples thereof (known as double nelson, triple nelson, etc.) is thought to refer to Lord Nelson's lost eye, arm and leg; however, notably Nelson actually had both of his legs intact, and the third missing body part is mythical.[1] Longtime cricket historian and scorer, Bill "Bearders" Frindall once referred to it online as "one eye, one arm and one etcetera", implying that Nelson's alleged third lost body part was "something else", however this is equally mythical. Umpire David Shepherd during a radio interview to mark his retirement explained it as "One arm, one eye and one lump of sugar in his tea."[2]

[Chas]

Since lots of us go on and on about the moon, why not one more?


The distance from the Earth to the Moon is ~300.000 km (fun fact, light takes 1 second to go from the moon to the Earth)
The Planet Earth's diameter is ~13.000km.

So, the distance from the Earth to the moon is about 23 times larger than Earth's diameter.... which renders images like this one completely wrong!

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Here's the factual picture:

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Fact: All the other planets in the Solar System could fit between earth and the moon with thousands of kilometres to spare.

At perigee it would be a very close fit:
Distance at perigee: 238,857 mi.
Sum of 7 planets diameter: 236,130 mi.

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Western scientists owe Moslems a huge favor.

Maybe we could repay them with a course in science.

Or maybe a course in critical thinking.

[Thumpalumpacus]

A broken tooth and an infected jaw can make a tough man into a crybaby..

Pain ain't nothing but a little warning.

[popeyespappy]

The average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow is roughly 11 meters per second.

Might want to remember this one for your next grail quest.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

If you live in a city of more than 50 000 people in the temperate or tropical zones, you are never more than six metres from a rat.

Boru

[Thumpalumpacus]

The Duke of Wellington - the one who won at Waterloo - was called the Iron Duke, but it had nothing to do with the battle. After the war he was in government and passed some unpopular measures, and the mob attacked his house so he had iron shutters put up over the windows.

He had a great address too: Number One, London.

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Nelson - the one on the column - had a brooch called a Chelengk which he wore in his hat. The central gem had a small watch mechanism which caused it to rotate.

Nelson is a piece of cricketing slang:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_%28cricket%29

The name, applied to team or individual scores of 111 or multiples thereof (known as double nelson, triple nelson, etc.) is thought to refer to Lord Nelson's lost eye, arm and leg; however, notably Nelson actually had both of his legs intact, and the third missing body part is mythical.[1] Longtime cricket historian and scorer, Bill "Bearders" Frindall once referred to it online as "one eye, one arm and one etcetera", implying that Nelson's alleged third lost body part was "something else", however this is equally mythical. Umpire David Shepherd during a radio interview to mark his retirement explained it as "One arm, one eye and one lump of sugar in his tea."[2]

This is a badass post.

[pocaracas]

Why is the sky blue?

- Short answer: Rayleigh Scattering.
- Long answer: Rayleigh Scattering "is the (dominantly) elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light", for which air particles qualify. This scattering follows the fourth power of the radiation's frequency. So, for lower frequencies (red side of the visible spectrum), any incoming light goes through the atmosphere. For high frequencies (blue and violet), the light from the sun gets scattered in the atmosphere, instead of going straight down.
Since the light from the sun is practically a continuum in the visible spectrum, we see the color that comes up when integrating the spectrum raised to the power of 4, and that yields something close to violet (the last color we can see before ultra-violet), but not exactly violet..., it's pulled a bit to lower frequencies... so we get blue.

Here's a picture:

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How about that reddish band at sun-set?
You can only see it near the horizon, and the sun is setting, because light from the sun's light has to go through more atmosphere near the horizon and the effect is noticeable, due to the low light caused by the setting of the sun. All blue light gets scattered and the only remaining frequencies are the lower, closer to red (frequencies lower than red, you get infra-red... that's sort of what "infra" means.... below. That's why I like to speak of these things in terms of frequency instead of the more common approach which uses the wavelength and makes us invert the whole reasoning, but then the nomenclature infra-red and ultra-violet stop making sense).
An image is worth a thousand words:

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You see this effect better in the afternoon than in the morning because a warm atmosphere rises and provides a wider reddish band... and in the afternoon, the atmosphere has been warming up for some 12 hours.... in the morning, it's been cooling off for the other 12 hours and the reddish band is smaller.

[Cyberman]

Our Frank Bruno would totally wipe the floor with Bruce Lee. Mainly because he has the advantage of still being alive.

And a few loony ones:

• Buzz Aldrin's real name is...
  
  

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  Buzz Aldrin. He had it legally changed from Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr in the early 80s.

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• 'Buzz' came from his sister Fay's mispronunciation of 'brother', rendering it 'buzzer'.
  
  
• Rather pleasingly, his mother's maiden name was Marion Moon.
  
  
• The "Good luck, Mr Gorsky" urban legend is complete bollocks.
  
  
• When Eagle touched down in the Mare Tranquillitatis, Buzz was already in need of a toilet break. But you can't just whip it out and splash the porcelain on a historic spaceflight, especially with the whole world watching. So as he made his way down the ladder he relieved his bladder into a purpose-made bag in his moonsuit. Put another way: while Neil Armstrong was the first human ever to set foot on an alien world (a record which stands to this day), Buzz Aldrin was the first man to piss on it.

[The Valkyrie]

If you live in a city of more than 50 000 people in the temperate or tropical zones, you are never more than six metres from a rat.

Boru

When I'm at work I'm rarely more than a few metres from a rat.