Random Facts

[ShadowOfAGhost]

well, I thought this would be interesting to start here. the inspiration is the questions thread which I found interesting to read and learn form.... anyway, The purpose of this thread is to post any random or interesting fact that you have stumbled across over the years. For example:


approximatly 80% of your body heat loss is from the head. (so wear a hat if you are cold)

stuff like that. no matter how random the fact is, post it.

[Speedy Boris]

An interesting fact is pizza was discovered, or made first, not discovered, 'cause then it would be under a rock or something, made first here in America, and not in Italy as most people think.

[Jave]

Walt Disney did not create Mickey Mouse.

[purplehairedwonder]

You are never more than three feet away from a spider (according to a Snapple lid, anyway). That creeps me out because I HATE spiders.

[ShadowOfAGhost]

found some good ones:

You are more likely to be killed by a Champagne cork than by a poisonous spider
The average chocolate bar has 8 insects' legs in it.
Cat urine glows under a black-light
The average person swallows 8 spiders a year.
A can of SPAM is opened every 4 seconds.

[Stewie]

Okay, no more spider ones. Unless you're going to say "Spiders don't actually exist."
I am totally getting the heebie-jeebies.

[Artimus Gigan]

Okay, no more spider ones. Unless you're going to say "Spiders don't actually exist."
I am totally getting the heebie-jeebies.Then I guess I shouldn't mention that the average jar of peanutbutter contains on average 12 spiders....12 dead spiders.

Also honey contains vast ammounts of bee saliva

Jello is mostly seaweed

[Kagetsu]

I really agree the "insect food additive" subject should be avoided, we all know about and it's best not to dwell on it. :p :zim:

Light takes 8 minutes to reach earth from the sun.

[Ed Liu]

Howdy,

approximatly 80% of your body heat loss is from the head. (so wear a hat if you are cold)
Actually, it's closer to 30%, at least according to this page in the Merck Manual (http://www.merck.com/mrkshared/mmanual/section20/chapter280/280a.jsp). Still a lot, but nowhere near the 80% that's commonly believed.

The first submarine design (http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blsubmarine3.htm) was made in 1578, although the first working submarine didn't appear until 1620. Subs weren't used in a military capacity until 1776, when an American sub called the Turtle tried (and failed) to blow up a British ship.

Something I was told by a friend who worked in the food industry is that there are a ton of different ways to make Cheese Whiz. Apparently, they take all the cheese they have left over from the day's production, whatever kind of cheese it happeneds to be, and use a big book of recipies to combine it to make Cheese Whiz.

-- Ed/Ace

[Jave]

Every second of every day a lightning falls somewhere on Earth.

[Beguiled]

You are never more than three feet away from a spider (according to a Snapple lid, anyway). That creeps me out because I HATE spiders.
That.. is.. really.. creepy.. *looks around for spiders*

The average person swallows 8 spiders a year.
*shudder* That's.. *in a dark place*

[Arxane]

The average person swallows 8 spiders a year.
One of the most widely circulated "random facts" ever known...and it's not true (http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.htm).

Nowadays most people know more about the useless facts than they do that some of the useless facts aren't facts at all. Therefore, here's some things you might not have known:

- Penguins do not fall onto their backs (http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/penguin.htm) while watching planes fly by.
- A duck's quack does, indeed, echo (http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/duckecho.htm).
- Chewing gum does not take seven years to digest (http://snopes.com/oldwives/chewgum.asp).

[90'sCartoonMan]

You are never more than three feet away from a spider (according to a Snapple lid, anyway). That creeps me out because I HATE spiders.
You have to be careful about those Snapple facts, they put out some false ones. Here are my facts:

1) A peanut is neither a "pea" not a "nut"

2) A jiffy is 1/100th of a second

3) There are more facts about spiders on Toon Zone than facts about anything else

4) Speedy Boris is neither "Speedy" nor "Boris"

[Charlie]

Relish is made from the pickles and cucumbers which are "defective" or have fallen to the ground at any point.

[Speedy Boris]

4) Speedy Boris is neither "Speedy" nor "Boris" You've found me out! You big lumpy lump!

[HumanoidTyphoon]

More spider wisdom:

Spiders have no circulation haemolymph (blood) just fills up their body.

Spider silk is stronger than steel.

Average sized spiders can lay about 100 eggs. Some larger spiders lay over 2000 eggs and the smaller ones lay no more than a dozen.

All spiders are predatory.

The movie 8 legged freaks actually happened.

Spiders hunt using their extreme sensitivity to vibrations.

There is a spider called the Pirate Spider. This is the best spider for two reasons. One It feeds on other spiders. Two it has pirate in it's name.:cool:

[Metroid_spy]

More spider wisdom:

Spiders have no circulation haemolymph (blood) just fills up their body.

Spider silk is stronger than steel.

Average sized spiders can lay about 100 eggs. Some larger spiders lay over 2000 eggs and the smaller ones lay no more than a dozen.

All spiders are predatory.

The movie 8 legged freaks actually happened.

Spiders hunt using their extreme sensitivity to vibrations.

There is a spider called the Pirate Spider. This is the best spider for two reasons. One It feeds on other spiders. Two it has pirate in it's name.:cool:I'm arachnophobic!!!!!

[Kury Wagner]

I've got a million random facts. All day long I'll pop into conversations just stating randomness... of course, I can't remember anything good right now, but eh.

Oh wait, here's something, did you know that emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards?

[Arxane]

Spider silk is stronger than steel.
Just to clarify, spider silk has more tensile strength (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile_strength) than steel, but it's far more flexible. Still, the strength of spider's silk is undeniable - if the substance can be manufactured, it might be used as a stronger and lighter substitute for kevlar, which is used to make bullet proof vests.

It's also been estimated that a strand of spider's silk the thickness of a pencil can stop a (flying?) Boeing 747.

[Ed Liu]

Howdy,

Just to clarify, spider silk has more tensile strength (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile_strength) than steel, but it's far more flexible. Still, the strength of spider's silk is undeniable - if the substance can be manufactured, it might be used as a stronger and lighter substitute for kevlar, which is used to make bullet proof vests. Oooh, this leads into one of my favorite random, stupid facts. They've spliced spider DNA into female goats' to literally milk spider silk out of them (http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0219/061.html). There are still lots of issues to work out, but if it works, it'll be the first time any human process has managed to produce spider silk. Most articles that talk about this deal with why spider silk is as strong as it is and why it's so hard to make artificially. File under, "I don't know whether this is the coolest thing I've ever heard or the creepiest."

Of course, whenever my wife and I mention this, we usually break into a rousing chorus of "Spider Goat, Spider Goat! Friendly, Neighborhood Spider Goat!" to the tune of the 60's Spidey theme song.

This thread should be renamed "Random facts about spiders" at this rate :).

-- Ed/Ace

[ShadowOfAGhost]

I'm surprised that this thread was as succesfull as it is!

The average American will eat 35,000 cookies in his/her lifetime

[shoujoaifan]

Whirlpools spin in the opposite direction in one half of the planet than the other.

Leonardo's designs for flying machines partially inspired the creation of Batman.

Spider-Man is a man with the powers of a spider. What to know why? Becasue he was BIT by a radioactive SPIDER!

Just messing with you Metroid_spy :sweat:

[Daughterof_Evil]

Howdy,

Oooh, this leads into one of my favorite random, stupid facts. They've spliced spider DNA into female goats' to literally milk spider silk out of them (http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0219/061.html). There are still lots of issues to work out, but if it works, it'll be the first time any human process has managed to produce spider silk. Most articles that talk about this deal with why spider silk is as strong as it is and why it's so hard to make artificially. File under, "I don't know whether this is the coolest thing I've ever heard or the creepiest."


Ooh, neat! I read that in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and I thought it was something she just made up (then thought "Why didn't I think of that!?"), but now that I know it's real...yeah, definitely cool and/or creepy.

Random facts:

The silk rope on a samurai sword (katana) used to secure it is called a sageo, however the sageo is not secured to the belt (obi). Instead, the sword's scabbard (saya) is threaded through the obi and the sageo is tied through a specially-made hole on the front/side of the samurai hakama (bonus random fact: though often referred to as pants, hakama is actually a big pleated skirt...which means Tom Cruise was correct in The Last Samurai when he commented, "I know why you're pissed. 'Cause they make you wear a dress.")

The amount of C4 in a Claymore land mine is about the size of a baseball.

Another baseball fact (sorta): The amount of weapon's grade uranium needed to kill hundreds of thousands of people is roughly the size of a softball.

A "bodkin" in a daggar-shaped hairpin.

[PressureCooker]

The amount of C4 in a Claymore land mine is about the size of a baseball.More Claymore fun:

The front of a Claymore Mine says "Front Toward Enemy" a commonly know fact, but do you know what it says on the back? It says... "Back"

A Claymore Mine is filled with 800 ball bearings designed to cut people in half. Hence tha name of the mine is derived from the "Claymore" sword.

Other weapon facts:

A standard issure hand gernade has a kill radius of 30 meters.

An anti-tank rocket (man portable, single shot) dosen't make that cool "Swoosh" sound whan launched. It just goes "Bang"

On several types of maching guns, the barrel has to be changed every so often when being fired. If it isn't, it will heat up and droop down causing the bullets to hit lower than intended.

C4 explosives can be burned with out exploding. It can also be shot, run over, thrown on the ground, and stomped on with no ill effect. It can only be trigered with a electrical charge.

Nuclear weapons that work on the "implosion principal" can be disarmed by busting open the uranium core (not saying anything about the radiation caused by opening said core). But this fact is no longer valid as most "IP" bombs have been replaced with Thermonuclear types.

Thermonuclear bombs are 2 bombs in one. The first is a standard fission type bomb that is detonated to release a massive amount of X-rays. These X-rays bombard the plutonium core of the second bomb and trigger a fusion reaction. This fusion reaction works on the same principal as the sun. This is why the reaction is markedly larger than a fission bomb.

The Russians have always had more nuclear weapons than the U.S. In fact the former U.S.S.R. built and tested the largest bomb in history. It was rated at 100 megatons... this is equal to 100,000,000 tons of TNT. The were worried about fallout from the device so it was only tested at half-yield. To this date it was the largest man-made explosion ever.

[Kagetsu]

A "bodkin" in a daggar-shaped hairpin I always heard a Bodkin to be the thin point of an arrow used to pierce Medieval plate armour.
C4 explosives can be burned with out exploding. It can also be shot, run over, thrown on the ground, and stomped on with no ill effect. It can only be trigered with a electrical charge. Actually, the electric charge detonates the cap inserted into the C4. Most transportable HE (high explosive) require a shock wave (detonator) to set them off.

[Jave]

From every 10 posts at Toon Zone, one of them has the word "spider" written in it.

From 100 Toon Zone members, 50% of them is half.

[sun]

At the end of the 19th Century,(about l900) the Patent Commissioner told Congress that the Patent Office should be closed because everything that was ever going to be invented had already been invented.

[90'sCartoonMan]

You've found me out! You big lumpy lump!
I'm a what now?

90sCartoonMan is neither lumpy nor a lump

The most consumed fruit in the United States is the coffee bean

[Daughterof_Evil]

I always heard a Bodkin to be the thin point of an arrow used to pierce Medieval plate armour.
I think that's where the reference comes from, that these hairpins were made to look like daggars and/or arrow points.

The invention of fiber optics was based largely on a gastroenterology student's desire to make a gastronic scope smaller than a garden hose. When he began stringing out threads of molten glass, he realized they could be used to transmit light over distance.

[Punisher]

The first Major League baseball team was the Cincinatti Reds, NOT the Yankees as many believe.

And another spider one- The Daddy Long Legs is more poisonous than the Black Widow, but it's teeth are too small to bite or so I heard, but I don't know if it's true or not.

[Phantasm]

Our DNA is 99% identical to that of Chimpanzees.
A prominent part of our DNA is comprised of viral DNA.

[Zach Logan]

President William Howard Taft once got stuck in his bathtub. In order to avoid the reaccurance of this event, a new bathtub was installed which was considered to be the size of a 'small pool' and could fit four normally-sized people. President Taft's weight was due to his distaste for the presidency, but after he failed to win reelection, he lost weight and pursued his life-long dream and became Chief Supreme Court Justice, the only president to do so.

[HumanoidTyphoon]

And another spider one- The Daddy Long Legs is more poisonous than the Black Widow, but it's teeth are too small to bite or so I heard, but I don't know if it's true or not.This is false.


We actually use all of our brain as opposed to the common thought of only using 10%.

[Jasmine_G.]

Babies can breath underwater until they're 3 months old! ( Or something like that. )

[ToOn~g@l]

Killer whales or orcas can live in the wild for as long as 80 years while in Captivity they can only live to be about 30

Sperm whales can hold thier breath for up to two hours while some dolphins can only hold it up to five or ten minutes.

Bottlenose Dolphins are as smart as Chimpazees

Flipper was a cool movie

Millions of years ago, whales lived on land and slowly became more acustomed to water.

Groups of whales are called pods and if one member of the pod is sick it will go and beach itself while the others follow.

The smallest dolphin is the hectors dolphin at five feet, while the largest is the orca.

[solarflere]

The strongest muscle in a human body is a heart,
A person has 2006 bones in a body.

[PressureCooker]

A person has 2006 bones in a body.
I've got a bone to pick with you... You mean 206, right?;)

[solarflere]

I've got a bone to pick with you... You mean 206, right?;) Right, my mistake, too many zeros :D.

Edit: North and South poles have half a year of night/darkness and half a year of day/light.

[Arxane]

- Charlie Chapman once lost a Charlie Chapman look-a-like contest (http://snopes.com/movies/actors/chaplin2.htm).

- Harrison Ford, irritated by the blazing heat on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark, bypassed a scripted, grueling sword duel with a bad guy by improvising (http://snopes.com/movies/films/raiders.htm) one of the movie's most memorable scenes.

- People thought a cardboard cut-out of a boy was actually a ghost (http://snopes.com/movies/films/3menbaby.htm) on the set of Three Men and a Baby.

- People also thought the hoverboards in Back to the Future II were real (http://snopes.com/movies/films/hoverbrd.htm).

- The old wive's tale about a frog in a slowly-heated pot of water...is bollocks (http://snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.htm).

[ToOn~g@l]

HEres another interesting fact that many of you don't know about.

Every year around this time, the colorado front range has a small plague of Miller moths that fly in from the plains to the mountains for the wild flowers that grow there. Half of them don't make it however. Some are eaten by Swifts that like to play suicide with cars on intersections. Those birds scare me too because they miss your cars windshield by inches before flying back up for more. Another reason why some don't make it is because they sneak inot my old high school and hang out on windows and distract you while your in class because all you want to do is try and catch them or watch them try to fly through the windows without success.

Just thought I'd pass that along because I saw my first one today.

They are coming. :evil:

[Punisher]

Carrots do not improve your vision.

[tucsoncoyote]

on average 1 out of every 100 Tornadoes in the United states do not rotate "Anti-Cyclonic" (Counter Clockwise) and not all tornadoes travel from Southwest to North east

:coyote:

[Delthayre]

In American English in the words bidder and bitter (and similar words) the intervocalic (between two vowels) /t/ and /d/ are actually an alveolar flap (a kind of r-like sound) /4/ rather than a stop. However, in most British dialects this does not hold true for /t/.

[ShadowOfAGhost]

????

in english please?

Lewis Black claims to have seen a starbucks across from another starbucks in the same shopping center.

[PressureCooker]

????

in english please?

Lewis Black claims to have seen a starbucks across from another starbucks in the same shopping center.No he said British... get it? Yeah, me neither.

Down the street from my house is a stripmall with a Starbucks on the end of it... at the other end is an Albertson's market with a full Starbucks in it. I'd say it's about 200 yards from the other one.

[Tash]

The strongest muscle in a human body is a heart,
A person has 2006 bones in a body.It's not the tunge?

[HumanoidTyphoon]

Whirlpools spin in the opposite direction in one half of the planet than the other.This is not true for things like your sink or toilet. http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html (http://www.ems.psu.edu/%7Efraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html)


The strongest muscle in a human body is a heart It's not the tunge? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle#The_strongest_human_muscle

No and the heart isn't necessarily either it's fairly weak in terms onhealing ability. It just depends on how you define strong.

[LightShadow1890]

I heard if you get the highest score on the arcade version of Street Fight Alpha/Zero 2, and write "CAMM" as your intials, you unlock Cammy. Problem is she doesn't have an ending like everyone else when you beat the game with her.

Also, there's a school in NY, Fresh Meadows, in the Queens borough to be exact. It was a recipient of the US's Department of Education Excellence in Private Education Award, was recongnized by US News and World Report as an..."Outstanding American High School". And if you go/went to a private Catholic School in NYC, you'd know that it was the 2003-2004 City Champs....for Varsity Soccer. The Random Fact is: It's the biggest private Catholic secondary school in the US. Wanna know the name: Find out yourself. Why: I go there. And so does MahouShoujo13.

[Jasmine_G.]

A squillion comes after a million million, and has 24 zeros!

( I learned that when I was looking through the dictionary... You can learn things anywhere! )

[sun]

The lowest point in the U.S.A is Death Valley Calif, and I suspect that in the desert at Death Valley, they do have spiders,. Once about l50 miles west of San Diago in the Salten Sea, a State or National Park, I saw, just walking along a tarantula, a spider..I like spiders. Most are harmless and eat flys and mosquetos, I do not like flies and mosquetos...Spiders have not gotten a fair spin here..

[X-ville Solid]

While in some countries the penalty for driving while intoxicated can be death (yes, death), in Uruguay intoxication is a legal excuse for having an accident while driving. "Please believe me officer, I really was drunk."





Paul Revere’s metals company once supplied the Mint with rolled copper for the production of early cents.

The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary.

When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.

[Faethie]

The spider facts were, uh....interesting.

Here are a couple:

If you keep a goldfish in the dark room, it will eventually turn white.

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than

left-handed people do.

If someone places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will

instantly go mad and sting itself to death.

Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying. Trust me. I cook alot.

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

If you yelled for 8 years ,7 months and 6 days you would have produced

enough energy to heat a cup of coffee.

The youngest pope was 11 years old.

Gross fact:
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or

it will digest itself. (YUCK!)

[rrarbecy]

Lord...how do you people come up with this stuff?

[Delthayre]

The Basque language (Euskara) has no living relatives and is considered by linguists to be the last living member of a pre-Indo-European language family. However it is considered by Edo Nyland (http://www.highspeedplus.com/%7Eedonon/) to be the origin of all world languages, which were originally developed from word games played by Basqe-speaking monks.

Edo Nyland (http://www.highspeedplus.com/%7Eedonon/) is, coincidentally, considered by most linguists to be a perfect example of a crackpot.

On a related topic, the Indo-European language family, to which English belongs, contains a vast stretch of languages ranging from Scotch Gaelic, to Danish, to Albanian, to Farsi, to Hindi with dozens more in between.

[Feist]

Here's some: if you are a smoker, it takes 15 years from the time you quit for your risk of lung cancer to return to that of a non-smoker.

Hens can be fed certain colored dyes to produce eggs with varicolored yolks.

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".

All clams start out as males, some of them chose to become female.

A polecat isn't a cat. It is a nocturnal European weasel.

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

[Ed Liu]

Howdy,

Here's one I heard when one of my wife's college roommates was dating a guy on a SWAT team. Apparently, they don't use those little laser pointer sights in real life, because in the chaos of the situation you can't tell whose little red dot is whose.

I'm really kind of hoping that they figured this out during training exercises rather than on an actual op...

-- Ed/Ace

[Raeofdarkness]

I learned my ABC'sfor the soul purpus of being able to belch them.

[solarflere]

Every time you sneeze your heart stops, and you shut your eyes.
Try it, sneeze with your eyes open, I dare you;).
Also your sneeze flies with 120mph.

If you are going outside at night and don't want to be bitten by masquetos, dont eat bananas.

If you have hiccups, light up a match and put it in a glass of water. remove tha match and drink up.
Batteries do not get recharged if you put them in a freezer, its just a mith.

[Aquagirl15]

Every time you sneeze your heart stops, and you shut your eyes.To be exact it stops for a nano-second. ;)
A google is a number with a hundred zeros.
Everyday it is at least one person's birthday, and deathday.
To go along w/ the above one: the most often sang song in the world is 'Happy Birthday'.
You cannot dig to China. (lol... I put that there for your amusement)

[Vivace]

Our DNA is 99% identical to that of Chimpanzees.
Human DNA Is more like Pig DNA than Chimpanzee DNA.

[tucsoncoyote]

Some Little Known Quake facts.

The Richter Scale Developed by Charles Richter, used to record Earthquakes, is a double open ended scale. There is no upper Limit in terms of quake size, and in fact there can be "Negative Richter Numbers".

Also an Increase of One Full Point of the Richter Scale is in fact a 32 fold increase in the energy released by the quake.

and finally to give you an idea of how big a 6.5 Magnitude Earthquake is, it would have the same energy release as a 5 megaton Nuclear device Detonated below the Earth's Surface at a Depth of 1 mile.

:coyote:

[Michael24]

An interesting fact is pizza was discovered, or made first, not discovered, 'cause then it would be under a rock or something, made first here in America, and not in Italy as most people think.
I once read that pizza actually originated in China. :confused:

Light takes 8 minutes to reach earth from the sun.
And about a million years to get from the interior of the sun to the surface. So the sun could completely die out and stop producing light, and we wouldn't know for a million years.

Don't know if these have been mentioned yet, but . . .

Coca-Cola originally contained a small amount of cocaine. (Hence the nickname Coke. :D ) When the affects of cocaine were discovered, it was removed, but took several years until it was finally completely removed.

Pigs are the only creatures on the planet (besides humans, of course) that can get sunburn.

A giraffe's tongue is naturally black to provide protection against sunlight since they are so high up.

Golf balls contain a small amount of honey at the center. (Or so I've read.)

[tucsoncoyote]

The Chimmy Chonga actually was created at Charro's Resturant here in Tucson, Arizona, by the Resturant's Owners Grandmother when she accidentally dropped a Burrito into a deep vat fryer. of course the name is really a Spanish "Swear word" or a derivative of one.

so all you folks eating Chimmy Chongas.. Well now you know..

:coyote:

[Daughterof_Evil]

For the first six weeks after conception, all humans are female. It takes hormone differentiations in this sixth week to produce the opposing sexual organs.

There is a Romance language called Ladino that is actually a mix of Spanish and Hebrew...and it's spoken primarily in the Balkans.

The Gypsies (or Romany) were called Gypsies because it was believed they came from Egypt. Comparing words from their language to words in other world languages, it is now known the Gypsies actually originally came from northern India.

Just trying to start this up again. I like it.:anime: