Do you have a fun factoid that you want to share?
Asked by
ibstubro (
18804
)
July 3rd, 2016
Random items of interest or trivia that you ran into during the course of your day?
Sourcing encouraged.
Cashew nuts and mangoes are from the same family as poison ivy, and can cause a similar allergic reaction in people sensitive to poison ivy.
If you’re very allergic to the ivy, you can blister your mouth eating cashew nuts!
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131 Answers
Calico cats can’t reproduce. Garfield is a Calico cat. So Garfield can’t reproduce. Nelson’s biology 20–30, Alberta Canada 1995.
@ibstubro I’m not sure. I was taking my teachers word for it. Garfield had black stripes. I guess Garfield can have kittens. YEAH.
In a mechanical hard drive the head that reads the data from the platters can get knocked off by a particle of smoke.
It is like a 747 flying a inch over a field of grass and counting every blade. So back up your data folks.
Calico is 3 colors, and, if I’m not mistaken, female only, @RedDeerGuy1.
Inauspicious start? lol
Whoa, @johnpowell. That is crazy.
Now I know why I’ve never retired a computer – they’ve all tuckered out on me. The amount of data I’ve lost is astounding.
Karl Marx suffered from a chronic skin condition.
@ibstubro :: I worked for Hitachi for a few days making the platters in hard drives. I was let go for having a tendency to touch my glasses and dandruff. There is a good chance my dandfuff destroyed your cat pictures.
What skin condition, @flutherother? And is it still active?
My saved passwords were what hurt, @johnpowell. Couldn’t you just wear a head bag for the dandruff?
1)
Africa is IMMENSE!
Roughly the size of the United States
plus China
plus India
plus Japan
plus Europe.
picture
2)
The place in the US which is closest to Africa is Maine.
@ibstubro :: Everyone was in bunny suits. But it was still a problem. I had a job in a wafer fab that made MOSFETS that went into the International Space Station. They were less strict.
@ibstubro :: I would suggest doing what I do. Back-up your browsers profile to a 5 dollar usb thumb drive. When your computer takes a shit you can just move the profile over. Passwords and bookmarks and everything is intact.
@ibstubro It is believed to have been hidradenitis suppurativa. Not nice.
There is over 100,000 people in The Villages, FL.
There are over 50,000 golf carts in The Villages, and you can drive your golf cart everywhere in the town. You can go to the grocery store, pool, rec center, town plazas, all in your golf cart.
All three plazas/squares in the city have live music and dancing every night. Well, there is a DJ once in a blue moon, but extremely rare.
Here is a link with more fun facts about The Villages.
Here is the official website for The Villages.
Here are some photos of the really fancy golf carts around town.
Fun fact(oid): the word “factoid” originally meant “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.” It is only because the word was misused so many times that it has come to have the colloquial meaning of “a brief or trivial piece of information.”
If you want to calculate your height above ground:
Drop a coin.
Count how many seconds it takes for it to hit the ground.
Square the number of seconds and then multiply by 16.
Example: If it takes 4 seconds, then 4X4=16, 16X16=256 feet.
There is over 100,000 people in The Villages, FL.
157,000 today. The population was 8,333 in 2000 and 51,442 in 2010.
Freaky.
In 1878, one billion passenger pigeons were killed.
At 50 years of age, 1 in 8 people won’t live to age 65.
If your eyes burn when swimming in a chlorinated pool, it means someone peed in it.
1 parsec = 3¼ light years.
A nova discovered on Feb. 23, 1987 exploded outward at approx. 13,889 miles per second.
15 million tons of trash and garbage enter the Earth’s oceans every year. 10 million of those tons are plastic.
The problem with being innocent is that you don’t know what happened.
The Zika virus entered Brazil in 2014. Normal mirocephaly cases per year was 350. Cases grew to 4000 in one year.
Report heard on PBS said superbugs would kill more people than cancer by 2050 if overuse of antibiotics not controlled.
The average high temperature in Rio for August is 78 degrees, low temp. 66, rain 2.0”
A new invasive species comes into San Francisco Bay at the rate of 1 every 14 days.
10% of men are gay. 90% of men who are 35 and never married are gay.
A confirmed bachelor is a man who is 35 and has never been married.
That’s all I got for now…
Ducks, geese and swans are a couple of the only species of birds that actually have penises, along with Ostriches, Kiwis and Tinamous. All other birds just press their
cloacas together to transfer semen but ducks, geese and swans penetrate the female. The longest animal penis in the world relative to size, belongs to a duck.
The Argentine Blue Bill has a 17 inch penis. Larger that a blue whales penis in relative size. haha
One of my favorite weird factoids: Every time you urinate a small amount of urine is secreted in your saliva.
Cows have friends like humans..as per study conducted their heart rates other parameters are less / more in presence / absence of fellow cow..)
^^ saliva / urine – how’s that possible? Didn’t get that
Eighty-seven percent of statistics are made up on the spot.
@imrainmaker I used to work at the place that study was done and met the researcher. In fact I may even have helped her in her research since she came into the library and asked me a question!
@Call_Me_Jay What’s freakier is it’s really hard to find anyone who lives in The Villages who will say anything negative about The Villages. Very Stepford Wives feeling, and you wonder if there are spies around who will boot you out if you are negative.
@Irukandji I had no idea. That’s the best answer on here in my opinion.
The word “teenager” came into use in 1941.
I can’t source that, but it was on some show on NPR yesterday.
Anyone else source it?
1944
You’d think a magazine named Time would know?
Before the 1920’s – 1940 in earnest – people went from being a child to being in the workforce.
“Teenaged angst” was unheard of.
@imrainmaker I can’t find the source but I read that in some science facts somewhere once.
@stinley – you can check the name of research scientist.
@Call_Me_Jay that meme is misleading. As a continent Africa is about average size. Whomever started that idea of its size compares the entire continent of Africa to various countries within other continents. Here is a world map. It is not bigger than the European Continent nor the North American continent. It’s only a bit bigger than the South American continent. It’s not even as big as Russia.
that meme is misleading. As a continent Africa is about average size
Not misleading at all. There’s nothing wrong with the comparison.
It surprised me. I would have guessed Europe might cover North Africa and the US would cover the rest. I am sure I am not alone.
^^Calculation seems to be correct..
Look at the map. Africa is a continent. The meme compares its size to countries within other continents, some of them really tiny countries. The Asian continent dwarfs the African continent. To me, it doesn’t even look as big as the North American continent, although the figures says it is bigger. But not by much.
Asia 43,820,000
Africa 30,370,000
North America 24,490,000
I don’t know why people aren’t gasping over the sheer size of the Asian continent.
@Call_Me_Jay is basically correct.
At 11,730,000 square miles, Africa is the second largest continent. It’s about 3 million square miles larger than the USSR was. I.e., Africa≈USSR + Brazil.
Terrestrial land masses exist on a spherical surface.
When they’re distorted to fit the boundaries of parallel longitudinal lines (as opposed to the converging longitudes on a globe), the resultant areas become distorted.
If you want to see an accurate representation of their true shapes and sizes, look at a globe.
E.g., on a flat map, Greenland is almost as big a North America, when NA is actually over 10 times as large in area (9.45 million square miles compared to about 836,000).
Look at the map. Africa is a continent. The meme compares its size to countries
And?
A new radio telescope was just built in China. Are you upset that it’s described as “the size of 30 football fields”?
I don’t know why people aren’t gasping over the sheer size of the Asian continent.
Most people know Asia is the biggest continent.
Well, I guess you could compare a chigger to a grasshopper and be amazed how much bigger the grasshopper is.
Very Large Arrays are always awe inspiring me to me.
The North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are moving away from each other at the rate of about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) per year. That just trips me out. Where are we going? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? I have to pee!!
The Queen of the Unified Kingdominium of Greatest Britainshire is so old her pussy is haunted
And her husband, the Right Honourable Duke of Edinburghshire (no connection whatsoever with Battenberg or the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, or Europe especially after the recent referenderum) is so old he looks as though he has been dead for the last 15 years.
(So glad there is no onnection whatsoever with Battenberg or the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, or Europe especially after the recent referenderum. I was worried about that.)
No connection with Battenberg at all the name is Mountbatten I tell you, Phillip Mountbatten,and if anyone says I was born in Greece they will be shot.
Battenberg lace is a type of tape lace named in honour of a wedding of the Battenberg family, which occurred about the time the patent applied for.
@SmartAZ It is just a whimsical slang word that means what your link specifies. haha
Yes of course you may @Dutchess_III You can shoot him or boil him in olive oil as you prefer. The courts will understand.
…That’s a lot of oil. Don’t want to spend that much.
Fun fact(oid): @SmartAZ didn’t read enough of the previous answers to realize that we had already covered the meaning of the word “factoid.”
@Irukandji Haha, touche!
Fun factoid # 212 Fluthers gene pool is rapidly expanding to showcase some great new blood.
And some old users seem to be making appearances, too.
@Coloma When I first got on the internet I chose the screen name “Wallstar”. It seemed like something I had seen every day. Then I wondered just where I had seen it. I started watching for it. I finally found it at work, in the men’s room. The screen in the urinal had the brand name Allstar in white letters, and at a certain angle the overhead light put a white ‘W’ in front, making it WAllstar. I had named myself after a urinal screen!
Back in the BBS days “SmartAZ” was the name of a board run by the Arizona chapter of Mensa. I never liked the board but I admired the name so I swiped it.
BTW if you google “wallstar” now you only get water heater dealers.
Four out of five doctors is not a statistically significant sample.
“Four out of five” doesn’t necessarily mean they literally only asked five doctors. If they asked 100 doctors and 80 gave the same answer, that would be four out of five.
@Irukandji Pretty sure they just kept asking around, and when they got 4 that gave a good review, they threw one in the mix who gave a bad review, and thus you have, legally, 4 out of 5. They don’t conduct any serious “studies.” It’s just BS. It’s a commercial.
Well, in the 50’s 4 out of 5 doctors smoked Camels. lol
@Coloma Eggs-actly, which was my point, in a wry post.
Also @Irukandji If they asked 100 and got 80 who gave the same positive answer, they wouldn’t hesitate to use that statistic. And they’d call it 80%, not 80 out of 100.
And they’d call it 80%, not 80 out of 100.
Four out of five is shorthand, just like 80% is shorthand. If they asked 3000 and 2400 gave the positive, they would say 80%, not “2400 out of 3000”.
If you spilled half a box of sugar, you would say, “I spilled a ½ a box of sugar.”
You wouldn’t say, “I spilled 1,234,467 grains of sugar out of 2,468,934”.
I understand the math, silly! I’m just saying that if they say “4 out of 5 doctors…” then they probably literally mean 4 out of 5 doctors, as in they asked a bunch of doctors and choose to have 4 of them represent them positively and 1 of them negatively. They throw the negative one in for credibility. I’m pretty sure there has to be a “truth in advertising” hurdle there. 80% would be suggestive of a much larger study. If they could actually claim 80%, based on 1000, or 2000 or whatever, then I’m sure they’d do that, rather than 4 out of 5.
_ then they probably literally mean 4 out of 5 doctors_
They don’t. I guarantee you they did not mean 5. Not remotely possible.
If you are curious, feel free to look further. It was a Trident gum slogan. You can probably Google up the the actual study. Enjoy.
It’s a slogan for a lot of dentists and doctors too. And it’s always “4 out of 5 dentists would recommend this tooth brush.”
Find the Trident study. We’re done with guess and conjecture.
There’s your answer, thank you for the link. Not 5 dentists. 1,200 dentists. Not 5.
Sigh. The link you posted is exactly the same link I posted just above you. Look at it closely, @Call_Me_Jay. It was a set up. A gimmick. They sent out questionnaires to dentists asking, “Would you recommend sugarless gum, or sugared gum, to your patients?” That’s a no brainer. But the Trident advertisers insinuate that the dentists are recommending Trident gum specifically. They don’t.
From your link (and mine):
The research people came up with a list of 1,200 dentists who were supposed to represent a cross-section of their profession. The dentists were asked what they recommended to their gum-chewing patients—sugared gum, sugarless gum, or no gum at all.
Sugarless gum won with 85 percent. Nobody seems to remember exactly how many votes sugared gum got, but I figure there had to be at least one. Cast by the same guy that in a real election always votes for Donald Duck.
Whatever. Four of five did not mean a sample of five. Everybody understands that.
I mean everybody EXCEPT one out of everybody. Can you guess who the one is?
What is wrong with you? It’s a gimmick. Your own link proves it. That was my bottom line.
And it certainly CAN mean they literally asked 5 doctors and happened to hit on “4 out of 5,” right away so they didn’t have to expand the study until they got the results they wanted. Hell, they don’t even have to say what kind of doctors they asked. But, if legally challenged, they do have to prove that they asked 5 doctors.
Posting this link again.
It’s a gimmick.
Well this has been a rousing debate.
Okay…I discovered a new factoid today. Did you know that it is nearly impossible to find a welcome mat that doesn’t say “Welcome”? lol
Yep, 4 out of 5 stores and 4 out of 5 mats today said freaking “WELCOME!”
I just wanted an unwelcome mat, no Welcome slogan, no cutesy little cats and birdies and flowers, or goddamn seashells or vines or flower pot designs, just-a-fucking- DOOR MAT! lol
I finally found one that is just plain black rubber background with a stone design in some sort of brownish cobbley material. haha
Did you know that it is nearly impossible to find a welcome mat that doesn’t say “Welcome”? lol
My upstairs neighbors have a cool doormat that says Hola! in one direction and Adios! in the other.
@Coloma are you still in your temporary accommodation? You should get this doormat!
@Dutchess_III I was responding to @Setanta, who said that four out of five doctors is not a statistically significant sample. My point was that “four out of five doctors” does not always and in every case mean that they asked exactly five doctors and exactly four responded in the same way.
Poison ivy can grow into a tree.
Prove or disprove – an 18 yo told me that this last Sunday.
Well, it’s a vine, so…yeah. It climbs up trees like any other vine. The stems can get really super thick too, and the leaves really super big.
Rick and I standing under an arch my son made for my wedding. He pulled those thick vines off of trees. ..... It was poison ivy. He had to go to the ER the next day.
No, no, no.
The boy told me that they even amazed the conservation agent with their stand-alone, ginormous, poison ivy trees.
I’m going to go see, if the damned rain will let off long enough for me to pick blackberries in the same trip.
I have seem poison ivy as big as my ankle, but it was supported by a tree.
He emphatically states that this is not the case here.
Oh, you mean TURN INTO a tree. Become a tree. Well, I suppose it could turn into a really big bush. Don’t know about an actual tree, though.
I’m googling, don’t see a thing, so I doubt it.
I had a 20 foot Poison Oak bush/tree across the road from my driveway at my old house. I cordoned off the entire area with ribbon and posted signs when I threw a party back in 09. I didn’t want people parking right up against this monster and opening their car doors into the beast as they exited, getting swished by the vines. It was the biggest P.O. bush, tree, I had ever seen in 25 years in these hills.
Also..Poison Oak/Ivy fact. The oils in the leaves have been shown to still be viable after 10 years of being dried and sealed in a bag! Bio-warfare at it;s finest if you ask me. haha
Was it supported by something that it surrounded initially, perhaps a bush or a small tree that it killed?
@Dutchess_III No, it was just a huge bush/tree about 30 feet wide and about 15–20 feet tall. It had probably been growing there for a 100 years untouched. haha
The boy told me that they have multiple trees growing on their property.
I have seen something similar to what @Coloma describes, and could easily happen if multiple vines of the same age intertwined and supported each other. Like wisteria does?
Right. But I’d still be more likely to call it a bush than a tree. But it doesn’t matter.
A burning bush for sure.
That’s what I used to call it. haha
For anyone here who believes that ad agencies in the 1950s and 1960s conducted methodologically sound surveys of doctors opinions and preferences when writing ad copy:
I have a nifty bridge I can let you have at a deep discount. Cash only, no checks.
@Setanta Of course not, I was being facetious but…doctors did smoke Camels. haha
The average woman uses her height in lipstick every 5 years.
(Cherophobia is the fear of fun.)
Your arm span is very close to your height.
Very useful when you need to measure things, like the size of a room or the width of gate.
Left handed people die younger than right handed people. It’s been nice knowing you all. lol
Fun fact(oid): one doesn’t have to believe that ad agencies in the 1950s and 1960s conducted methodologically sound surveys of doctors opinions and preferences when writing ad copy to understand that four out of five can still be statistically significant in certain situations.
Extra fun fact(oid): the original statement that led to this chain of discussion was a blanket generalization that made no reference to ad agencies and suggested a certain ignorance of how statistics work.
I would observe that anyone claiming that four out of five of a class embracing thousands and thousands of individuals can be a significant sample is certainly ignorant of how statistics work.
During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
The king of hearts is the only king in a deck of cards not sporting a mustache.
@Setanta You still don’t get it. “Four out of five” can refer to literally four out of five, but it can also refer to 4,000 out of 5,000 or 400,000 out of 500,000 or 800,000 out of 1,000,000, etc. That’s how statistics (and fractions) work.
Related fun fact(oid): Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour.
No, you don’t get it. What part of “fun” in “fun factoids” don’t you get? It was a wry remark, it was humor. Someone who is being statistically accurate would say 80%, or more likely 82.3%. Lighten up, this is not a good place for the internet warrior type who argues just because he can.
@ibstubro I have no idea why the K of H has no musthache. There is a fair amount of history on cards, including how they have evolved, what they look like in different countries and at different times, but no logical explanation for the one hairless lip.
The phrase “17 Year Locusts” is a misnomer. It refers to cicadas, which are more closely related to crickets than grasshoppers.
Locust is not even a species, but a transformation that occurs within certain species of grasshoppers, often during a drought, when a chemical change occurs in their brains, causing them to swarm in masses.
Random sharing here. A fact if you will, but more like a living Farside cartoon. haha
Yesterday one of the hens here was sitting on a large stump with a giant axe impaled in it. It was hilarious. Little did she know how lucky she is, being an eggs only farmey friend. lol
Oh here’s a fun mathy factoid on the topic of periodical cicadas. You may notice that the periods tend to be prime numbers (in North America we have 13 and 17 year cicadas). This is not a coincidence!!
If the cicadas came on a cycle that had lots of multiplicative factors, such as 12, their emergence would coincide with any other creatures that come out every 2, 3, 4, or 6 years. They’d have more competition, and potentially more predators.
Because 13 and 17 are both prime, these two species will only appear at the same time once every 221 years!
There’s a great party trick (likely not for older folks) in which one puts a book of matches on edge on a smooth floor (no carpet) and invites people to lace their fingers together one the back of their neck, and pick up the match book by joining their elbows. Women can do it, men can’t. That’s because women’s centers of gravity are lower, because of the structure of their hips. Men just fall over.
Lots of examples of that. Like placing a chair against a wall, and a person has to lean over from the waist and pick it up by the seat. Women can do it, men can’t.
Fun fact(oid): a fun fact(oid) has to be a fact(oid) before it can be a fun fact(oid).
It is a fact that internet warriors who can’t give up an argument are no fun.
Turtles can breath through their butts.
It took exactly one week for the birds to discover a new bird feeder I hung. Now they are eating about $6.00 of seed a week.
The boomslang snake’s venom causes you to bleed from all holes of your body.
TMOTS, don’t get bit by a boomslang.
Women have twice as many pain receptors on their body than men. But a much higher pain tolerance. Ok, so I’m cheating. I googled…
Horses roll to align their backs/spines, not because they are happy or it feels good, though I am sure it does feel good too.
By law, a pregnant woman can pee anywhere she wants to in Britain, even if she chooses, in a police officer’s helmets.
Wait, @RedDeerGuy1…calico cats can reproduce, or we wouldn’t have any. The problem is male calico cats are extremely rare. We used to live next to some people who had a female calico. They just let the poor thing poop out litter after litter after litter, year after year after year, hoping for a 1 in a million male so they could get rich. It never happened. Poor cat.
“Calico” is not a breed of cat. It’s a term used when a cat has three colors of fur: predominantly white, with patches of black and orange. @Dutchess_III is correct; male calico cats are rare. The males are often sterile. I learned this from my sister when she a male calico.
….Your sister was a male calico? :)~
Duchess, just you straighten up and stop being a bad girl!
Same is true with Pinto and Palomino horses. Pintos and Palominos are not a breed, they are a color, and can show up in many different breeds, some more common than others. You will rarely see a Palomino Thoroughbred and never a Pinto or Paint pattern.
“Setanta” is the number “70 in Catalan Language. ;) Are you a 70’s child @Setanta? If so I shall consider you an equal. Some how I think it refers to Irish Mythology, though. :)
It’s the Irish connection, as you can see in my profile. Keep in mind that the Irish never, ever lie. I wish i could speak Catalan, and Occitan, too.
Mauna Loa is a type of volcano called a shield volcano. That means it is broad, with gently sloping sides. Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth. But Olympus Mons on Mars, is a shield volcano that dwarfs Mauna Loa—it is more than 100 times as massive. It is more than 300 miles across the base, and it is more than two and a half times as tall as Mount Everest. If you were to set it down in the center of France, it would stretch from Paris to Bordeaux.
Really? Any idea what it was worth?
Simon is priceless. Aside from that, he is neutered, so his monetary value is nil.
I am, right now, stuffing 350 horsey goodie gift bags for Saturdays big endurnance event in my area. Held since 1955.
www.teviscup.org
The largest and most intense endurance event in the world and we have entrants from all over the U.S. Australia, Japan, Argentina, on & on.
Last years winner was a super fit team and the rider was 72 years old!
@Coloma I hope the bags are stuffed with carrots and sugar cubes.
Fun fact(oid): an Irukandji is an extremely venomous jellyfish.
Bonus fun fact(oid): I’m having plenty of fun.
@Call_Me_Jay No, no carrots and sugar cubes, healthy horsey stuff like salt and mineral samples, supplement samples, mane and tail combs, hoof picks and coupons for all sorts of horse stuff, tack, supplements, boots. Horse athletes don’t get any sugar. lol
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