It’s been almost a year since the previous Random Factoids thread. Loads of new factoid-filled Musers have joined the blog since then. Share and enjoy!
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First post?
If a first post accurately describes itself as a first post, is it really a random factoid? Clearly not. On the other hand, if I delete it, then this post will become the first post, and it doesn’t contain any factoids at all. *is stymied*
Random factoid (Robert-make THIS first post!) : RtH is on spring break! WHEEEEEE!!!
Or you could make mine the first post.
The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
4-OH, brother. Wait! Really? That’s funny because I just can’t see my tongue lifting weights.
so the PoPoPo can’t get us here? awsome
bty Alaska has the least amount of roads than anyother state in the U.S.A.
So the first post goes to… _______ (GAPAs, please fill in)
Anyhow, factoid: some compact flourescents can save about 60% off of what a normal bulb would use. I replaced six bulbs in my house!
Sadly, they have a little mercury in them. But, they last for nine years!
Thank you, GAPA’s, for listening to my request!!!
Random factoids:
I got 6th post, I think. All the factors of 6 (3,2,1) add up to six! 28 is also like this. (14,7,4,2,1) After that, the next number, I think, is something like 692. I can’t remember.
February 1865 is the only recorded month in human history not to have a full moon.
The first meal eaten on the moon was roast turkey.
It’s impossible to lick your elbow.
Virtually 100% of MuseBloggers will now, sometime during their life, try to lick their elbow.
The first person to land on Mars is probably alive today.
The life span of a dragonfly is 24 hours.
A jiffy is a unit of time equal to 0.001 seconds.
The edge of a dime has 118 ridges on it.
there is a law against looking at a moon out of a plane in alaska
lipstick is made of fish scales
a lady once cracked her gum so loud in a court room it was thought to be a gunshot
the mona lisa has no eyeballs
there are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos
the first product to have a barcode was wrigleys gum
that random enough?
kwik kwiz:
1. what is the latin name for Red-tailed Hawk?
2. If a pitcher is thinking about what type of throw he should use, then: I know what he thinks I’m going to pitch A, so I’ll throw B, but he also knows I know he knows I was going to pitch A, so he’ll expect me to throw B, but I also know he knows I know he knows I know he knows I’ll throw B, so he might expect A.
What should he do, and what do you think the pitcher thinks the other guys gonna do? heheh…
Good luck to you!
9 – Well, duh!!! And for that matter, the Mona Lisa has no ears, no nose, no hands, no eyelashes, no skin, no clothes, no nothing except 500-year-old paint and canvas. And perhaps a fingerprint or two.
8 – CURSES!!! I didn’t get 6th post!!!
Most all hockey pucks are produced in the Czech Republic or Slovacia.
West facing beaches are best for surfing
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies room
More people fear spiders than death
The English have appeared in the World Cup 12 times
Their first CAP was against Scotland (they tied)
Their starting defender Rio Ferdinand has the same DOB as me (11-7)
Yes but in the painting she has ears, eyes, nose, eyelashes and skin. Did you know that no one knows who mona lisa actually was?
8- Ah! “It’s impossible to lick your elbow.” False! A guy in some of my classes can do it. He’s got double-jointed elbows or somthing.
14 – In real life she has all that stuff. In the painting, she does not, technically.
15- his name doesn’t happen to be Tylor DeBrobander does it?
President Kennedy was the fastest random speaker in the world with upwards of 350 words per minute.
In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.
Odontophobia is the fear of teeth.
The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottles represents the number of varieties of pickles the company once had.
When you die your hair still grows for a couple of months.
There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal category.
The newspaper serving Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, the home of Rocky and Bullwinkle, is the Picayune Intellegence.
It would take 11 Empire State Buildings, stacked one on top of the other, to measure the Gulf of Mexico at its deepest point.
Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame, appeared in the 1981 arcade game, Donkey Kong. His original name was Jumpman, but was changed to Mario to honor the Nintendo of America’s landlord, Mario Segali.
The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley.
Every year about 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced.
Elephants are the only mammals that can’t jump.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Google is my idol.
Einstein was a high school dropout and often forgot to wear socks.
Both “ATM machine” and “PIN number” are redundant
Platypusses (maybe platypi) have poisonous claws
You will eat over 100,000 spiders in your lifetime, most crawl in through your mouth while you’re sleeping
a bullseye in darts is not the highest-scoring place to throw the dart
our genes are 90% identical with a chicken
there are more chickens on earth than people
jellyfish are 95% water
the king of hearts is the only king in playing cards without a moustache
dragonflies have 6 legs but can’t walk
a hobo works and travels, a tramp travels but doesn’t work, and a bum does neither
22- Not 100,000. 6.
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in the english language- 45 letters
most dollar bills contain trace amounts of cocaine
30-no, really tiny spiders, not big ones
8- a jiffy is .01 seconds, not .001
30- that’s about 3.5 spiders a night if you live exactly 80 years.
Piggy – MAJOR PoPo. You’ve been warned. Can’t you just put all of that into one post?
Ooh! Randomness! Yes!
In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.
Also, a little-known fact (at least to everyone I’ve told), Smith is not the most common last name in the world, it’s Zhang. I think. Or some common Chinese surname.
pizza was first made as a tribute to the queen of italy. it featured the country’s colors:red tomatoes, white cheese, and green basil
the person who supplied the voice to bugs bunny was allergic to carrots
10-
question 2: simply throw pitch C
8- actually, if you break your elbow in a certain way, you can actually lick your elbow. I met somebody who could lick theirs after a motercycling accident.
9- The mona lisa has no eyeBROWS, not eyeBALLS
14- There are tons of guesses. Most people believe she was the wife of a merchant, giocando. The mona lisa wasn’t very famous until it was stolen in the early 20th century.
18- Did you know that heinz has never had 57 varieties of Ketchup, but actually many more? They just like 57 because it sounds like a good number. And your hair (and for that matter, your nails) doesn’t grow after you die, you skin tightens
creating the illusion of growth.
21- The males have poisonous spurs on the backs of their feet, not poisonous claws.
22- That is in no way true. It is very unlikely that you will ever swallow a spider, let alone 100,000
Sorry.
The longest thread on the blog is Out With the Old, In With the New, the random thread from January 2006, with 663 posts.
You can’t post twice in 15 seconds?
*must popo and try*
*gasp*
It’s true! Only the error message I got was different than the cowboy one they were talking about on that thread.
It said:
“Sorry, you can post a new comment only once every 15 seconds. Patience, worthy MuseBlogger!”
No grasshopper?
And more people are killed by vending machines than wolves. According to the West Wing, Season 1, episode titled “The Crackpots and These Women”, about Big Block of Cheese Day, CJ learns it. None are killed by wolves vs. 4 killed by vending machines. This was several years ago, so it may not be true anymore, but still. To paraphrase some dialogue from the episode (I think Donna and CJ): What, do the machines fall on them?
Yes, I have a minor obsession.
Sorry for popos. I kind of didn’t think of one thing until another was already posted.
random facts random facts random facts…..erm…..
Echolalia means ‘meaningless repetition of another person’s spoken words as a symptom of psychiatric disorder’
Echolalia is now my favorite word
Thanks to echolalia, i’m going to the natioanl spelling bee! yipee!
I can’t think of any other random facts that don’t have to do with spelling. oh well.
22 – Hmm, 100,000 you say? Let’s see…wow! That’s almost 4 A DAY!!!
Is it me, or has there been an influx of OMGZ!!1!11 FURST POST U GAIZZZ type behavior? Because it is honestly really starting to bug me. We were doing so well. So very well. Although I weep at my utter hypocrisy, as Robert’s post links to the thread in which I do very that. DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO, AND SUCH LIKE ADVICE! -dies under a rock-
To contribute a random factoid: Gary will bite your head off. He’s on your ceiling right now. Oh, you so looked.
41 – Hah, by only one post it beat December Blizzard!!! And that final record-breaking post was your post!!!
All right, let’s see what random facts I can dig up…
Here is a list of the popularity of letters, in order starting with most popular: etaisonhrdlucmfwypgvbkjqxz.
There are only 84,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible games of bridge!
Peanuts are beans.
Taxi is spelled exactly the same way in English, French, German, Swedish, and Portugese!
“Chi chi chi chi chi chi chi chi chi chi” in Chinese means “when your hunger is keen remember that there are fowls to be had and make arrangements by which you may eat them”.
Vanilla has a nice smell but no taste.
Sesquipedalophobia is the fear of long words!
A stack of one million dollar bills would be 20 feet tall.
In 1800, the US national debt was $16 per person. Now it’s $13,000 per person.
Only one 20 dollar gold coin was minted in 1849! It’s in the Smithsonian collection.
A rain of thousands of maggots fell over Acapulco, Mexico, in 1968.
A googol is 10000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 . The Google search website only searches through 4000000000000 web pages.
Googolplex is “1” followed by 10000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 zeroes. There’s not enough room in the universe to write it down.
36 – The most common surname in the world is Chang.
In the middle ages, people thought that bathing was unhealthy.
Stand one domino up. How many dominoes can you balance on top of it? The record’s 111.
By federal law, a head of Brocolli can contain no more than 60 aphids.
Snakes have no eyelids.
The word “and” appears 46,277 times in the King James version of the Bible.
A medium-sized oak tree can suck up to 140 gallons of water every day.
If you leave eggs in -60 degree temperatures for an hour, they will bounce like rubber balls.
The average rain cloud holds 60000000000000 rain drops.
If all the insects in the world were divided equally among all humans, each human would get 150 pounds of insects.
The sheep in New Zealand outnumber the people 7 to 1!
YIKES! Everybody MUST be using google, as these are a lot of cool but random facts!
Um, er, I KNOW! 51- Well, first of all, you know a lot, but second: I’m not sure about theclouddrop-count: according to a BOOK, not google, but “The Cloudspotters Guide”, page 26, a cloud contains about 350,000,000,000 droplets just per cubic FOOT! I guess it depends on how big your cloud is. but this book is great! Try to get it from the library, or buy one. It’s really a nice book.
Lt-Col. William Rankin had to eject out of his plane, as the engine had conked out, but to add to the problem, he was 47,000 feet above a cumulonimbus cloud! He ended up falling all the way through the cloud, being bumped by hail and blown around in the cloud. It took him 40 minutes to land and …wait! You have to have some surprises!
48- Actually, they’re legumes. Beans are also legumes. And it’s hippomonstrosesquippedaliaphobia.
The most common pizza topping in Russia is Red Herring.
53 – No, that’s the fear of hippos.
52 – I got my facts from random sources, but not GOOGLE. Most of my facts I got from my big honkin encyclopedia of Ripley’s Belive it or Not factiods. The one about brocolli (I meant that if you’re going to sell the brocolli, it can contain no more than 60 aphids per head) I got from the Handy Bug Answer Book. It’s there that I also got the fact about 150 pounds of insects. Here’s another one from that book: Ketchup can only contain 30 fly eggs per pint.
Isn’t that outrageous?
Other random facts:
Fingernails contain traces of gold.
A single hamgurger can contain the meat from up to 1,000 different cattle
One trillion kids standing on top of each other would reach all the way from here to Saturn.
It would take you 23 days to count to one million. And that’s if you took no breaks!
It would take 95 years to count to one billion (no breaks!)
It would take 224,000 years to count to one trillion (no breaks!)
The last three seem inconsistent.
A billion is a thousand millions. So if it takes 23 days to count to a million, then it should take 23,000 days to count to a billion. That’s 63 years, not 95 years.
Similarly, a trillion is a thousand billions, so if it takes 95 years to count to a billion, then it should take 95,000 years to count to a trillion — not 224,000.
56 – Here’s why. It takes more time to say “two hundred and twenty three billion, one hundred and thirty five million, five hundred and nine thousand, eight hundred and fifty four” than it does to say “four-hundred thousand, two-hundred and twenty-two”. The bigger the number, the longer it takes to say it, so the time goes up.
There’s more math than you think in many of these factoids.
I see. Clever!
55- No, she’s right.
Actually, I just looked it up and apparently both Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and Sesquipedalophobia mean fear of long words. Huh. I wonder why there are two different names for the same phobia? There are other repeats too.
By very defintion nothing can be random. These are all very interesting facts, but they aren’t random. “made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern” is the definiton of random If you are deciding which facts to put on the page, then you must make a decision, or a reason, so they aren’t random. If you were to ‘randomly’ choose a book from a shelf, you would run along the aisle of a library and stop at a row. But you had to decide to stop there, maybe because you like the letter a. No one can be random.
What is a fear of brooms?
60 – the second is probably an abbreviation? because if you look closely sesquipetc is at the end of hippopotomoetc.
63-But if you go to phobialist.com, and just scroll through, you’ll notice at least three or four different words for fear of germs and none of them look like abbreviations of the others. I wonder why that is?
61- The facts have no pattern and are not related to each other. Technically, random is a logical word to describe them. Just because something does not fit every requirement of a definition does not mean it does not fit the word. Not the word “or.” And no, the thought process involved may not be random, but the facts themselves are.
Did u know that if you took all of the veins out of ur body and stretched them out they could reach all the way around the world?
:sick: i think i’m gonna barf.
17- Nope, it’s Maciek (mach-eck) Cencored. He’s anoying.
maciek: sitting in seat*
me: sitting in steat
maciek: *abruptly turns around and sticks palm in my face* HIGE FIVE!!!!!
me: grrrr….
56- but as the numbers get bigger, it takes you more time to say them.
Oh. Someone beat me to saying that. Meh.
41- Nooooooooooo, Febuary Phantasmagoria is longer!! 722! That was the thread I first posted on.
https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=172
What do you call the fear of random factoid threads? I think the
smilie is broken. 
47- yes, I agree. It’s been bothering me too.
why would the spiders want to crawl through your mouth in the first place? If I came across a giant mouth, I think I’d stay away from it.
the universe is beige.
69 – You got that from MUSE!!!
~~~
Random fact: Maine is the only state that has a one-syllable name.
70- yes, I know, I don’t have very many others… Muse is a rather good source for facts…
69 – no, it’s not. i hate it when people say that the universe is beige, because the universe is made up of 99.9% EMPTY SPACE, and as we all fully well know, empty space cannot possibly have any color. much less beige.
The numbers ‘172’ can be found on the back of the U.S. $5 dollar bill in the bushes at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.
The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
The most money ever paid for a cow in an auction was $1.3 million.
The white part of an egg is called the albumen.
random enough?
Quick quote, which is also on the books and reading thread. “Outside of a book, a dog is your best friend. Inside it’s too dark to read.”
If anyone remembrers one of my previous names (queen-o-random), I still do hold that title. Do you want to know some really cool random facts?
The average rhino eats…
Wait, I’ll save it for my submittance to the “Musecast”.
Today is 3/13/07.
3 + 1 + 3 = 0 + 7.
Also, they are all prime numbers.
The next time this will happen is on 5/03/07.
Hmm, my post isn’t showing up. Oh well. A wonderful source of random facts(my favorite things) is my absolute favorite show, QI, which I believe I’ve mentioned before. Its a british , what they call a “panel”, show, and isn’t on BBC America so the only way to watch it is on YouTube. Basically, the host, Stephen Fry, asks obscure random fact questions that a panel of comedians has to guess the answers to. This means you get things that are ridiculously funny as well as educational. Hey, it got me brownie points in my chem class for knowing the triple point of water. I highly recommend you watch, but be forewarned the conversations can get a bit, um, lewd.
What I had put in my previous post was:
72- It would look beige frome the outside. (Ok, it was a little longer, but whatever)
Did you know that Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake? They measured, and it’s true! Guess where I learned that? Tehe….
73- Groucho Marx. I don’t even have to look. Now I’ll be wrong…
76- Wasn’t he the voice of the Guide in the H2G2 movie?
The largest ball of twine in Minnesota is in a city called Darwin. Guess where I found that out. </sarcasm>
In the United States, 21 states have names that end with the letter “a”.
(8) Wrong. There is a sophomore at my school who can lick her elbow. I saw her do it.
(19-29 Piggy) Those are all very interesting, but please try to reduce chain posting in the future by putting all your factoids in one post. It decreases blog clutter.
The combined weight of all the ants on the planet is greater than the combined weight of all the humans.
You guys are right. The revised fact is…
99% of people can’t lick their elbow.
(and now 90% of the people reading this will try!)
A soccer player will run 8 miles in the 90 minutes it takes to play each game.
Fries contain sugar.
The fattest person ever weighed about 1,305 pounds.
2007 will be the peak year of all oil production, past, present, and future.
Ever wonder why your deemed extremely accurate clocks always seem to get off? Every once in a while, the official International Clock adds a leap second in order to stay in beat with the earth’s rotation. Why…
A day is not 24 hours long. It is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 44 seconds long.
And a year is not 365 days long…it’s actually 364 and 3/4 days, which is why we have leap-years!
#9, there is a law against looking at the moon out of a plane in AK? Really? ’cause I’ve lived here all my life and never heard that…If it’s true, I’ve probably broken that law *hee hee hee*
I dont’ think your hair actualy grows. It just appears to, as your skin and the rest of your body is shrinking away from it.
22, You’re joking, right? ‘Cause I don’t think that’s possible about the spiders. Certainly hope not anyway…
Random fact: Eagleheart by Stratovarius just made my day a whole lot better.
83-No, no, no. It’s 364 and ONE fourth, that’s why leap years happen every four years. And a handy way to remember which year is going to be a leap year, they happen every year that there is a presidential election, adding one more day of campaining and waiting! WHAAAAA!!!
Owls have two toes that point forward, one that points backward, and one that is reversible. Also, Saw-Whet Owls can turn their heads almost all the way upside down. (I’m doing a report on owls. They are surprisingly interesting.)
Alliumphobia is fear of garlic.
Cacophobia is the fear of ugliness.
stewardesses is the longest word you can type with only using the left hand side of a keypad.
78- Yes.
82- The length of a day is not constant. It is always slightly more or less that 24 hours.
at a moose, not the moon.
83, 88 – You’re both incorrect.
It’s 365 days, 5 hours and 56 minutes, which is slightly under 365 1/4 days.
As you can see, we can get ahead a little bit after a while. That’s why all century years are not leap years, except those divisible by 4. However, all millenium years that are divisible by 4 are not leap years. The rest are.
Example: (yes = leap year, no = no leap year)
1000 not
1100 not
1200 yes
1600 yes
1800 not
1900 not
2000 yes
2100 no
3000 yes
4000 no
This all was all carefully worked out a long time ago.
If you only use the letters from one row of the keyboard, TYPEWRITER is the longest word you can make. [note the coincidence]
Has anyone ever noticed that the election, leap year, and Summer Olympics all happen in the same year? I think that’s pretty odd…
A three-dimensional shape with 20 faces is called an Icosahedron.
More Native Americans live in Oklahoma than in any other state.
The youngest person ever to recive an oscar was Shirley Temple.
She also became the world’s youngest ever millionare at the age of six.
Ceres is now a dwarf planet.
Here are some numbers look like in Hindu:
1=1 2=2 3=3 4=8 5=y 6=S 7=} 8={ 9=E 10=10 20=20 50=y0 100=100
95- I said that in post # 88 (about the leap/prez. years)
96 – You didn’t mention to Olympics!
~~~
The average size of a word in Engish is 4.5 letters.
Mayans say the end of the world will occur between December 23 and December 25, 2012.
The Bugle can only play 7 notes.
>The average size of a word in Engish is 4.5 letters.
The average size of a word in that sentence (excluding the number “4.5”) is 3.9 letters.
The average size of a word in this sentence is 4.0 letters.
By the way, I mentioned the Maya date in my article on the end of the world in the December 1999 issue of Muse.
A can of Coke is sold every 6 seconds.
In the same amount of time, 51,600 packs of cigarettes will be sold. (That’s 1,135,200 cigarettes!)
That adds up to 5 TRILLION cigarettes being sold every year.
If the current rate of posting continues, this thread will break the longest thread record in 31 days.
Random factoid: davidude’s post came at a great time, the 100’th post!
“Why Do Battery Letters Skip from A to C? Was There Ever a B-Cell Battery?
Battery letter designations are based on the size of the battery: for common sizes, A is the smallest, and D is the largest. By the same logic, AA batteries are larger than AAA. Unfortunately for B batteries, it’s not the size that counts. You never see B batteries around because they aren’t very useful. The size never caught on in products made for consumers, so stores didn’t carry them, and the cycle continued. They are sold, but only in Europe, where they’re used primarily to power bicycle lamps. ”
Woo!! Thank you Neatorama and Mental_Floss.
97- Are you sure about the bugle? I can think of six notes that I could play the equivalent of on a trombone, and I know of at least one other that it’s possible to play. That makes seven, but there hs to be more notes a professional could play. Not particularly nice-sounding or sustained, but I have to believe they could exist.
Here: (from wikisource’s 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica) ( http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Bugle) “Only five notes are required for the various bugle-calls, although the actual compass of the instrument consists of eight, of which the first or fundamental, however, being of poor quality, is never used.”
It would be eight, then.
Aha. I guess I didn’t count the first one because I never hear it played…
I play the trumpet. The bugle is essentially the same thing except with no valves. So I counted the notes that I thought were possible. There could possibly be more than eight, but extremely high or low notes are notoriously hard to play, if possible at all. I guess you could say, “Realistically, the bugle only has seven notes.”
Hmm…I’ll go do a little more reaserch.
Aha! Found it!
"There are only ten possible notes on a bugle."There you have it.
From the official anonymous source.
If the current rate of posting continues, this thread will be dead in about 2 days.
I guess everybody has run out of facts.
WELL I HAVEN’T!
Random factoids:
In the next three days, the world will use enough toilet paper to go to the moon and back.
The new dollar coins have George Washington on them. In a little while they will have John Adams on them. And they are raising debate since “in god we trust” has been moved to the side and put in microscopic print and the word “liberty” is missing.
weird
“or” means gold in french
I love these! And here are some more:
-American car horns beep in the tone of F.
-In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator.
-When you die your hair still grows for a couple of months.
-Each of the suits on a deck of cards represents the four major pillars of the economy in the middle ages: heart represented the Church, spades represented the military, clubs represented agriculture, and diamonds represented the merchant class.
-The average person makes about 1,140 telephone calls each year.
-The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
-The elephant is the only animal with 4 knees.
MA- I thought that the suits of the cards came from the tarot cards that the pagans used in the olden days? Is any of the stuff that he presents as fact in the Da Vinci Code true?
110 – i think someone already posted all of those factoids. i don’t know. :confused:
(111),
I wouldn’t rely on The Da Vinci Code as a source of factual information. There’s a reason librarians put novels on the “fiction” shelf.
As for Tarot cards, it never hurts to read what Wikipedia has to say on a given topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot
scrap post 106
110 – That’s because your skin shrinks after you die, so you see the hair that was previously underneath your skin. Same thing with fingernails and toenails.
Random Factiods:
The largest sunflower head ever was 19 inches in diameter.
Robert Wadlow, who holds the record for the world’s tallest man, also holds the record for the world’s tallest Boy Scout.
A.C.Johnson of Michigan could balance the egg on the back of a spoon!
The average person eats 56,133 pounds of food in their lifetime.
Steak is 75% water.
A chicken without feathers is “dressed”.
The 13 South American Capitols by their geographical position form a huge question mark.
21-The males have spurs on their hind legs that contain poison that kills stuff like frogs. It’s been used in cane toad poison. They’re also the only mammals that do not have bellybuttons.
The song ‘Venus’ is the only song to have reached #1 on the Billboard charts four times by four different artists.
Prince keeps refusing “Weird Al” Yankovic’s requests to parody his songs.
(111, 113) Even some of Dan Brown’s “nonfiction” sources should be approached with care. When I read the novel, I immediately recognized lots of reworked material from the “goddess” literature of the 1980s, much of which itself was generated more from enthusiasm than serious scholarship, despite the academic attire worn by some.
It can be extremely frustrating to look for reliable information about tarot cards and subjects of similar ilk. Until recently, for the most part serious researchers kept their distance, leaving the territory wide open to those less finicky about the facts.
115 – I think there’s one other mammal that does not have bellybuttons. It’s called the echidna.
105-lessee…C, G, C, E, G, C…i can only play 6 notes…i might be able to go lower. possibly. maybe. so mebbe 7 notes? idk. Are bugles diff from trumpets, or are they exactly the same minus valves?
114- Are you sure of that? I seriously doubt a steak is 75% water. Anyway, would the water really count as part of the steak?
117- Both the echidna and the platypus are the only animals in the order monotremata, as they are the only mammals that lay eggs. The platypus also does not have nipples, rather, it sweats milk for it’s young.
Why do people keep posting the same information? I already corrected a lot of these ones that keep being debunked in post 40. I don’t mean to sound mean, but it’s just getting kind of annoying. We need some new facts. Here’s some:
Water is not colorless. In fact, it is very slightly blue.
TNT stands for Tri-nitro-toluene
It rains more often on weekends because of the buildup of industrial smoke, providing condensation nuclei for the water particles.
Fertilizer is explosive if lit on fire.
The man who did the most damage to the environment was named Tomas Midgely, jr. He was the first to add tetra-ethyl-lead to gasoline, and invented chlorofluorocarbons.
Honey is the only food that never goes bad.
Coffee beans are not beans.
I’m pretty sure they’re exactly the same minus valves, since the sound is the same, but you have less notes to work with.
On the trumpet, I can play a low F (which sounds really bad), middle C, G, high C, E, G, and maybe the very high C. The highest I’ve ever heard someone play on the trumpet or bugle would be the very high F (3 octaves higher than the low F). That would be…1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 notes. Hmm…
You can play a lot of notes on the flute, but more on clarenet I
thinkknow. I can play… oh, about 38 of the 40 listed in my book. Still working on super-high D-flat and D. Helps that I have the extra b-flat foot joint, though. Or are we not counting flats and sharps? Well, you get the idea.Random factoids:
Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.
Peanuts are not nuts. They are legumes.
Honey can embalm people.
In the Philippines, a common food is a fertilized duck egg.
Pwt is male. (Very debatable.)
Diet coke and mentos, mixed together, are wonderfully delightful.
Muse rocks.
If you search for “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in dictionary.com, it will either a) tell you how to spell it, or b) give you two different definitions. (I tried.)
I’m getting braces tomorrow.
What color will your braces be? Hope they don’t hurt too much. Eat jello. And pudding. It helps.
122-seriously? i thought it was acrobutrophobia….
122: yeah right, coke and menthos, you just try that.
125-I’ve tried it! or at least, i’ve seen others try it. It’s fun.
what are mentos?
Birmingham has more canals than Venice.
The shortest thread on this blog (this title is only availible to threads at least one day old) is July/August 2005 Contents and Links . It was started August 15, 2005 and has 2 comments. The weird thing is, it’s still open for posting.
127- Chewy candy. There’s been a fad recently to drop them into diet coke and watching the coke spurt out of the top. People believe this happens because mentos are not perfectly smooth, but have many little ridges that serve as nucleation sites for the carbon dioxide in the soda. You can find tons of vids of people dropping them into coke on you tube or pics if you google it.
Squirrels cannot carry or contract the rabies virus. If you have to get bitten by a wild animal, a squirrel would be your safest bet.
119-Trinitroluol.
131-Or a marmoset.
FDR’s favorite solitaire game was Spiderette. Mine is Klondike/Clock.
Ben Bova has written or edited 110 books so far.
Branwell Bronte, brother of Charlotte and Emily, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece to prove it could be done.
Canada is the nation with the most lakes in the world.
The reason the Trans-Siberian railroad has a kink in it is because it was originally drawn in a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it.
The CIA once considered using a bomb disguised as a starfish to assassinate scuba diving enthusiast Fidel Castro, according to the JFK museum in Dallas.
Sir Wifrid Laurier could write with both hands, and often did.
The first dog biscuit made entirely out of blood was invented by Tamsin Virgo, a young woman from Stokes, England.
President Andrew Jackson had a parrot that could swear in Spanish and English.
There is a city called Rome on Every continent.
Coconuts kill more people a year than sharks do.
The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottles represents the number of pickle varieties they once offered.
More people commit suicide on a monday.
Tuesday is the most productive day in the workplace
The most money ever paid for a cow at an auction was 1.3 million.
Lethologica is the state of not being able to remember the word you want.
The three best known american names in China are Jesus Elvis and Nixon
St. Stephen is the patron saint of brick layers.
YYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH
132- No, I’m pretty sure it’s trinitrotoluene. And marmosets are the origianal carriers of the bubonic plague, so you really wouldn’t want to be bitten by one. And young sloths are so inept they often grab at their own limbs instead of tree branches and thus fall out of the trees they are hanging on
133 – “There is a city called Rome on Every continent.” I never heard of a city called Rome in Antartica!
One brow wrinkle is the result of 10,000 frowns.
The most popular boy’s name in the US is “Jacob”.
Bo the cow is a girl. (Just in case you didn’t know…)
The longest toenail ever was 6 inches long.
The word “quiz” came into our language when a dude bet another dude he could introduce a word into the English language in 24 hours. Then the dude went around at night and spray-painted “quiz” everywhere. The next day, people were asking, “What’s a quiz?”
Beethoven once conducted a symphony when he was completely deaf.
curses! This is off the main page!
oh well, I’ll just post links to this thread everywhere
Phoo! nobody came yet
Sorry, I just don’t have any factoids and didn’t want to clog the thread with comments to other posts.
The HAWK
I can’t think of any factiods besides the ones from Muse that everybody here would know. I got some weird looks at school the other day when I told my friends about the Muse fact in the last episode that said that we share 60 percent of our genes with fruit flies.
139 – That is interesting
~~~
William Shakespere died on his birthday.
140- They think he died on his birthday. They don’t know for sure what day he was born, only the day he was babtized and how long people waited between the day a baby was born and the day it was baptized. If the baptism had been delayed, say there was sickness or something, he could have been born earlier.
Sorry for double posting, but I just remembered this.
139- Fruitflies are used in a lot of science experiments because they can get almost every disease humans can get, and since you have a new generation every two weeks it’s easy to see how something effects the lifecycle. And we share at least 33% of our genes with daffodils.
Hmm. I think this thread is almost dead. I was waiting to see if someone corrected me, but I guess not. In post 134, I think I said marmosets were the origianal carriers of the bubonic plague, but I was confused. Marmots, not marmosets, were the origianal carriers of the plague. Oh well.
Cows give more milk when they listen to music.
Oysters can change gender.
You burn more calories frowning than smiling.
Ketchup was once sold as a medecine.
142-That daffodil fact is awesome!
146- Thank you, thank you. The other day, I fell down the stairs (yes, I am so graceful) and my dad was inspecting my back for bruises. I told him it was useless because a bruise like that wouldn’t show for at least two hours. He started to say “how do you know…” but stopped midsentance and said “never mind, if anyone would know, you would Julieb(not my real name)” I am very proud of myself. And then, in another example of my amazing skills, I tripped in the parking lot of my school and know he’s worried I have an inner ear disorder. Such is my life.
I feel obligated to add some random facts. Here they are:
The american buffalo is not a buffalo. It’s a bison.
Ozone smells of geraniums.
Christopher Columbus didn’t think the world was round. He thought it was pear shaped. Everyone already knew it was round.
Genes only compose about 2% of the human genome.
The full name of LA is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula
There are really only 46 states in the USA; Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky are all commonwealths.
oysters can change gender at will
This thread has been in existance for 40 days. In those 40 days, there have been 149 posts. So the average number of posts per day is 3.725. If you look at the first 7 days, though, in which there were 130 posts, the average # of posts per day is 18.571428. And in the first 3 days, where there were 105 posts, the average was 35! And on the first day, there were 51 posts .
Yay! This thread has a link on the lost threads thread.
Ooh, I like factoids.
Here are some pencil facts from “radioactive cheese” the MBer:
152- I think he(she?) meant graphite is an allotrope of carbon, not a “chrystelline form of graphite.”
Here are some random factoids.
Giraffes chew in a figure eight movement.
The man who wrote Moby-Dick thought that whales were fish.
It took J.R.R. Tolkein 17 years to write The Lord of the Rings.
Ingredients in a Lemon-Lime bottle of gatorade:
Water, sucrose syrup, glucose-fuctrose syrup, citric acid, lemon and lime flavors and other flavors, salt, sodium citrate, monopotassium phosphate, ester gum, yellow 5.
Ummm. No actual lemon or lime, I see.
(Yes, I gave up on writing pentameter. Let alone iambs.)
There is a raft of trash the size of Texas floating in some ocean or another.
157 – The size of Texas?
That’s what I heard. Disturbing, no?
Rabbits are lagomorphs, not rodents.
Hares are born with fur. (They’re lagomorphs too.)
Paul Baker posted something in NORMAL WRITING!!!! (Comment 128.)
161 – he’s the odd one out with the GAPAs. His name isn’t a link, it doesn’t have Administrator after it, he doesn’t post in italics, he doesn’t post very much in general, he’s the only one who’s name starts with something besides R, and he’s the only GAPA to live outside the United States.
He does post in italics. In the Fractured fairy tale RRR and once on the music thread. But I get what you’re saying.
I think we need more Random Factoids.
Mars could be colonized.
100% Apple Juice and Coke have roughly the same amount of sugar per ounce.
The name “nylon” came from “New York and London” where peopel hoped it would sell.
Wikipedia tells a different story about nylon.
Didhe writer state their facts? Sometimes you have to check for that.
Here’s what Snopes has to say:
“Inventing it was only half the problem; what to call it was the other half. Carothers referred to his brainchild as Fiber 66, but as its inventor it’s not surprising he didn’t appreciate the need for name more attractive to consumers. Sexier was better, said Du Pont. Its naming committee considered 400 names, one of them Duparooh (short for Du Pont Pulls A Rabbit Out Of Hat). Another was No Run. A good name, except the fabric did run. The committee tinkered with No Run until it became Nylon. (Some like to view “nylon” as a modification of “no run” spelled backwards.) Du Pont did not announce the new fiber until 1938.”
Nylon stockings were introduced at the New York World’s Fair of 1939.
Oh. I see. Well, maybe I was wrong.
135- The online etymology dictionary says that that theory about the word “quiz” is doubtful. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been spray paint. It was in the 1800s.
Here’s a random factoid: I only know this random factoid!
From the former Random Dark Cloud, I present a random factoid:
63.7% of statistics are made up on the spot.
You got it wrong. It’s 95% of all facts are made up on the spot. The problem is that that factoid only works if you make it up on the spot, not if you already knew it. Confused?
Not confused at all. It works if you have “___% of numbers are made up on the spot”, and then just make up a number. Then it’s still random. Like me.
More randomness…. the only prime number that is a factor of 16 is 2.
Bart Simpson is left handed.
I am right-handed, but I am left-eyed and left-footed.
176 – me too! I write with my right hand (and can write rather well with my left, but not nearly as well as with my right), and my left eye is my dominant eye, and I’m left-footed.
177 – The chance of that similarity is 12.5%.
Did you know that a quail hen’s eggs have the same patterns, and that supposedly you could find out what hen lays what egg if you memorized the egg pattern? Which is a completely useless liife skill…
177: I do everything with my right handed, except I thread needles with my left hand.
I am right-handed, right-eyed, and right-footed. At least, I think I’m right-eyed. How do you tell?
180 – With both of your hands, make a circle just big enough for one eye to peek through. Hold your hands in front of you, and then bring your hands toward your eyes. Your hands should naturally go toward your dominant eye. (Don’t concentrate too hard, or it won’t work.)
180 – I’m not sure. My eye doctor told me my left eye is my dominant eye…that’s how I know.
WIKIPEDIA to the rescue! Here’s some information about side dominance:
Right Handedness: There is no prevailing theory that explains why right-handedness is so much more prevalent than left-handedness. Neurologically, the motor skills of the right side of the body are controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, so researchers believe the explanation may ultimately be found in the differences between the two halves of the brain. For example, a recent study that found that right-handers use the right side of the brain to focus on an entire image, but the left side of the brain to focus on details within an image. This observed difference, like many others, shows the effects of right-handedness but does not clearly indicate its cause.
Left/right-footedness and ocular dominance:
Being right-handed does not always mean that the favoured foot is also on the right side. When playing football for instance, many people prefer using their left foot rather than the right, despite being right-handed.
People typically also have a dominant eye, a preference known as ocular dominance. There is only a weak correlation between being right handed and left eyed.
I’m no expert, but I assume that your dominant eye is the one you naturally plop onto the eyepiece of a telescope, a monocular microscope, or a hole in a fence.
181- Didn’t work.
183- That would be my right eye. But only because I can only close my left eye. Well, not REALLY, I can close my right eye too, but if then open my left eye, my right eye opens too.
184 – Then that’s why you can only close your left eye successfully. Your body wants to close your weaker eye, so it gets stubborn when you want to close your dominant eye.
I can wink with both eyes quite well, but it is still a little bit tougher to wink with my left eye.
I am left-handed, but I skate the normal way so I guess tat makes me right-footed. I’m pretty sure my right eye is dominant because I ook in things like telescopes with my right eye, and also because yesterday I was wearing those glasses they use sometimes for 3D pictures that has red in the left ee and blue in the right, and things seemed to look slightly bluer than redder. I can wink both eyes, but the left is easier and more natural.
This is interesting. Most people are right-handed, on soccer teams I’ve seen most people are right-footed. And most people are probably right-eyed. Why is everything predomenantly right?
183- should work as it’s the same theory as putting your hands out and making a triangle and looking at something inside the triangle and bringing it towards your face.
I’m right handed and right eyed. How can you tell for feet?
188- Play soccer.
188 – Just kick a ball around, then look down and see which foot you’re kicking with.
173- Yes, you are. Because you still didn’t make it up on the spot, you only made up the number on the spot.
Here’s a random factoid:
I made up this random factoid on the spot.
(Paradoxes rule!!!)
Here are some fun-filled random factoids about our friend the maggot:
Sorry if that deeply disturbs anyone.
Did I scare everyone away from this thread? *glances around*
This isn’t a factoid, but I’m telling you that that was completely unnecessary. That’s a fact.
Post 195 was completely unnecessary?
No, 193. Especially the last one.
198 – They’re random factoids…….
Where is everybody!?!?
Right here! Ever notice how we manage to run into each other on the dead threads? It’s weird.
My random factoid of the day:
Fruit bats are more closely related to lemurs (and therefore us) than they are to other bats.
Wow, strange. I haven’t seen you either of you on the Chronicles of Museica. You should go, hardly anyone’s there.
The Chronicles of Museica have been going on for too long. I couldn’t join now, I’d have no idea what was happening.
203 – That’s what happens to blog worlds when they get too long. Eventually people start to leave, and new people stop showing up because it would be too hard to figure out what’s going on. The same thing happens with extremely long RRRs.
204- Unless you’re me, then you try to figure out what’s going on in the RRR, and in the end you just ask for a summary.
I’m thinking of something specific.
Anyway, here’s a factoid.
People in Mexico or South America found that they could reduce the damage by a certain kind of moth to their crops by 50% just be playing a tape of bat-sonar. The moths heard it and got out as quick as posible.
203- Nothing’s going on right now, because noone’s there. It’s basically starting over again once people come back.
Classical music help plants grow, Jazz has no effect, and Rock hurts plants badly.
207- What do other kinds of music do? I wonder what affect looping Birdhouse in Your Soul would do for a plant.
I don’t know. Those were the only ones tested.
Blarg. Practically no one’s here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2012 will be the 50th anniversary of queen elizabeth 2’s coronation.
I’m here, I just don’t have any factoids.
Houdini died of being punched in the stomach. He wasn’t ready for it and it burst his appendix.
Who’s “Houdini”?
You don’t know who HOUDINI is?!?!?!
I’m totally obsessed with him. Sort of. At least, I think he’s very interesting. Harry Houdini, the escape artist. Muse did an article on him a million years ago, back in… 01 or 02. Whenever I had a subscription.
You don’t subscribe anymore?
Bother! I wrote a long post explaining my history with Muse and then the power went out! Grrrr.
I subscribe now. As of yesterday. And I read Muse devotedly, through the most excellent library system. I had a subscription when I was eight/nine, and then it expired and I didn’t bother having it renewed. (I was little, and it didn’t matter much to me. I still read Spider.) But I had those few treasured copies and read them every few weeks until they were ruined. (You don’t want to know, therefore I won’t tell. Let’s just say that sheep in the house are a bad idea.) Then in January or February, I was bemoaning my lack of old Muses, when it occured to me that maybe I could get Muse from the library! I did, and in doing so I discovered that I needed a subscription. After much pestering, I got my dad to get me one. And now I am a happy subscriber. Except I still think it one of the biggest tragedies of my young life that I missed 03. And another of the biggest that my Houdini issue was ruined. *sniff*
216 – If you need reference to any old Muse thing, I have a fairly complete collection of all the Muses that ever existed.
214 – April 2001 Muse issue. I typed up the first 2 pages or so of the article to give you a sample.
A new passion gripped the great magician Harry Houdini in the 1920s. He had held the public’s attention, entertaining people by escaping from handcuffs and packing cases and straitjackets, for more than 20 years. Now he had a cause: the debunking of Spiritualists. Spiritualism is the belief that certain people, called mediums, can communicate with the spirits of the dead in meeting called séances. Séances were usually held in the dark, the participants holding hands around a table. The medium then contacted a spirit, who communicated by ringing bells or rapping on tables. “I am waging war on the fraud mediums in this country,†Houdini wrote. He said that the fees mediums charged for pretending to contact the dead were “the dirtiest money earned on this earth.†Phony Spiritualists caused “Exploitation and miseryâ€. Spiritualism became very popular after World War 1. Ten million people had died in combat. And in the fall of 1918, just before peace returned, an epidemic of influenza swept across the war-torn world. That flu, more deadly than other types, killed another 20 million people. By 1920 practically everyone in the world had lost a relative. Belief in Spiritualism rose sharply, especially in the United States and England. Surveys reported that one out of every three Englishmen thought it was possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Spiritualism stirred up painful emotions in Houdini. He was certain that every medium he had ever seen was a fake, yet he longed to contact the sprit of his mother. He spent hours at her graveside and often awoke in the night speaking her name. “My mind has always been open and receptive and ready to believe,†he said about séances. “I too would have parted gladly with a large share of my earthly possessions for the solace of one word from my loved departed.†Even after hundreds of failures, he still hoped to find a genuine medium who could establish contact with his mother. But he showed no mercy for the people who tricked the innocent public. Houdini traveled across America in 1924 lecturing about the evils caused by crooked mediums. “I have watched this great wave of Spiritualism sweep the world in recent months,†he wrote, “and realized…that it has become a menace to health and sanity.†He told how people committed suicide, even murdered their own children to be reunited with lost loved ones. Mediums often made spectacular amounts of money. It was quite common for voices from beyond the grave to encourage the living to give everything they owned to the medium conducting the séance. Scientific American magazine offered a $2500 cash prize to any medium who could convince its committee of scientific experts, one of whom was Houdini, that he or she was genuine. A number of mediums competed for the prize, but their tricks were quickly exposed. Then Mina Crandon stepped forward. She was the attractive, soft-spoken wife of a famous Boston surgeon. To protect
Aww, now I want to read it again.
217- You lucky duck. How long have you subscribed? Forever?
8-YA! I proved you wrong! I just licked my own elbow! Okay it was the INSIDE elbow so that may not count…
Teeth are harder than bones.
There are more Musers in the world then Musebloggers.
Motorcycles are faster then bicicles.
Genreal Greivous’s wheel bike is really a monowheel.
The first two factoids in this post are obvious.
“Owling” is the act of smuggling wool or sheep out of England. No, really!
All the bad guys in Star Wars get Killed.
The only Star Wars charecters who appear in every movie are Obi-Wan, Anakin, C-3PO, and R2-D2.
yo!! koko du pelle!!!! teeth ARE bones!!!! i think…
there are glass pebbles in the moon’s dirt, and when moondust is sprinkled on the ground around a plant, it acts as a fertilizer
pteronophobia is a fear of being tickled by feathers
peladophobia is a fear of bald people
genuphobia is a fear of knees
and my personal favorite…
EPHEBIPHOBIA, THE FEAR OF TEENAGERS!!!!! BWA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!!
jus imagine a twisted laughing evil dude here, cause i cant remember how to get him on here….
227- Are you sure you’re not making that up? A fear of teenagers? Okay, I guess I can see that…
And this is how you make a “twisted laughing evil dude” : twisted : Only no spaces.
225- You forgot one character(I think)- Darth Sidious/Emperor Palpitine(I know I didn’t spell that right)
Another Star Wars fact: The two lines that were said in all six of the movies were “May the force be with you” and “i have a bad feeling about this”.
227- Close, but no cigar. (I have a random factoid about that, but hang on a few minutes.)
An ephebe is a young man between 18 and 20. Therefore, if there really is such a word as ephebiphobia (which seems likely, as I doubt you came up with that on your own, no offense, but very few people have vocabularies that large; I know I don’t) it would mean “fear of young men”. But fear of teenagers is more fun, since I am one myself, and it’s darn scary.
Another random fact- you can only have 255 characters in your name on this blog
i tell you, the teenager fact thing is true!!!!!
also, chickens see the sunrise 45 minutes before humans
…which is also true!!!!!!
oh yeah, regarding comment 225. Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader was NOT a bad guy. he was just severely mentally disturbed. so there.
just so you know….
232- I don’t really doubt it. I was just giving you some etymology to chew on.
Oh, and about that cigar fact. Close, but no cigar, comes from when you were given a cigar as a fair prize, for example, hitting the coconuts. “Good job! You win a cigar! No, I don’t have any stuffed scooby-doo dolls, why do you ask?”
Alice and robin hood, apparently the word was coined in 1994 — according to an article in Wikipedia.
http:// en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Fear_of_youth
208-
236- Ah! That would explain why our dictionary didn’t have an entry for it.
fear of youth?? FEAR OF YOUTH?!?! SWEET!!!!!!!!!
sound like my kind of website!!! ;D
guess what? There is seriously a “mean world syndrome”!!!!!! It’s a real medical conditition. Thank you Wiki.
is this another dead thread? wow, i must be really bored….
Your Butt is the biggest muscle. And your tounge is the second. No kidding.
Not true. The Tongue doesn’t even come close to being second, and gluteous maximus only wins by virtue of bulk. If you go by surface area the latissimus dorsi wins out.
242 – Gluteus Maximus is the biggest muscle in your body.
220 – I’ve subscribed since January 2001, and I always ask my parents for a renewal subscription of Muse [instead of something else] for my birthday and back issues of Muse for Christmas.
You’re actually all wrong. The tongue is not the biggest, but the strongest in porportion.
Where does everyone get that tongue fact? There is no way in which strength is judged that would make it the strongest muscle in the body, and for that matter, it isn’t a single muscle.
I know wikipedia isn’t the most reliable source, but here’s what they have to say:
The ‘strongest’ human muscle
Since three factors affect muscular strength simultaneously and muscles never work individually, it is unrealistic to compare strength in individual muscles, and state that one is the “strongest”. Accordingly, no one muscle can be named ‘the strongest’, but below are several muscles whose strength is noteworthy for different reasons.
In ordinary parlance, muscular “strength” usually refers to the ability to exert a force on an external object—for example, lifting a weight. By this definition, the masseter or jaw muscle is the strongest. The 1992 Guinness Book of Records records the achievement of a bite strength of 4337 N (975 lbf) for 2 seconds. What distinguishes the masseter is not anything special about the muscle itself, but its advantage in working against a much shorter lever arm than other muscles.
If “strength” refers to the force exerted by the muscle itself, e.g., on the place where it inserts into a bone, then the strongest muscles are those with the largest cross-sectional area. This is because the tension exerted by an individual skeletal muscle fiber does not vary much. Each fiber can exert a force on the order of 0.3 micronewton. By this definition, the strongest muscle of the body is usually said to be the quadriceps femoris or the gluteus maximus.
A shorter muscle will be stronger “pound for pound” (i.e., by weight) than a longer muscle. The uterus may be the strongest muscle by weight in the human body. At the time when an infant is delivered, the human uterus weighs about 1.1 kg (40 oz). During childbirth, the uterus exerts 100 to 400 N (25 to 100 lbf) of downward force with each contraction.
The external muscles of the eye are conspicuously large and strong in relation to the small size and weight of the eyeball. It is frequently said that they are “the strongest muscles for the job they have to do” and are sometimes claimed to be “100 times stronger than they need to be.” However, eye movements (particularly saccades used on facial scanning and reading) do require high speed movements, and eye muscles are ‘exercised’ nightly during Rapid eye movement.
The unexplained statement that “the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body” appears frequently in lists of surprising facts, but it is difficult to find any definition of “strength” that would make this statement true. Note that the tongue consists of sixteen muscles, not one.
The heart has a claim to being the muscle that performs the largest quantity of physical work in the course of a lifetime. Estimates of the power output of the human heart range from 1 to 5 watts. This is much less than the maximum power output of other muscles; for example, the quadriceps can produce over 100 watts, but only for a few minutes. The heart does its work continuously over an entire lifetime without pause, and thus does “outwork” other muscles. An output of one watt continuously for seventy years yields a total work output of two to three gigajoules.
Have you ever walked up to a sleeping person and pryed their eyes open? It’s really creepy. (you see Rapid Eye Movement, or REM)
It’s also really rude. I have never done it and never will.
Oooooh that sounded snobbish. Sorry.
I did that only once like 5 years ago on my baby brother.
i tried it on my (thankfully younger) brother once. will not discuss the reaction i got….
Did he wake up?
Do you know that about 50% of people can read words as long as the first and last letters are in place. For example:
Hlleo, ym nmae is Aicle.
It takes twenty-eight days to form a habit.
Hmm. Itetininserg. Did taht wrok?
Yaeh.
Poor man’s liquid nitrogen: chunks of dry ice in an insulated
container of rubbing alcohol. Amazingly enough, many of the things you
can do with liquid nitrogen are associated with its great thermal
coupling power. It’s a liquid, so it touches the entire surface of any
object dipped within. Dry ice is cold, and SEEMS to work poorly, so most
people assume that this is because it’s only -110F, not -320F. Wrong.
It’s because dry ice is not a liquid, and any object stuck into a dry
ice container is insulated by the layer of gas. It cools down, but only
very slowly. So, use dry ice chunks to chill some alcohol! Then try
freezing and shattering a rose or a rubber band. Make springs and chimes
out of solder or lead sheets. Dip an operating LED into the stuff and
watch it grow intensely bright.
If you put sodium into water it bursts into flames
the atomic number of silver is 47, 47 is my favorite number
Factoid:
Dear Abby is married and no one knows who her husband is.
Strange!
250 –
50 pneecrt of pleope can? Smees pttery hrad to me.
257 – Oooh. When you put sodium cloride into water though, it only dissolves.
The man who wrote “Take me out to the ball game” had never been to a ball game in his life.
Or so I’ve heard.
If you type half the time for three days, your elbow will get very sore from resting on the table.
I know this from experience.
My desktop is “Bo knows” and my screensaver is Bo knows, Pwt pwns, Resistance is Museless, Muse academy, Mostly Harmless, and Kokopelli for president.
Well, you know, random factoids.
1.) young coconut milk can be used as blood plasma
2.) coral can be used as a replacement bone, which is cool becuase many things are observed as foriegn objects to the body, so antibodies attack it, and to make a long story short, its bad.
You cannot be harmed by touching a mushroom, no matter how poisinous it is. The danger is in the juice inside the gills, not on the cap.
I am sorry if i have been going crazy suggesting threads, but i think it would be fun to have one about amazing things we have done in the past, or our family or friends have, or strange things, it would be fun to hear peoples stories!!!!
(sorry if i spelled things wrong, i am one of the worst spellers on this Earth)
Did you guys read that thing on time travel in one of the last magazines? I thought that was really cool.
Did you know they eat Guinea Pigs in Peru?
Sorry, a couple more things, i forgot:
1.) It takes 26 muscles to smile and 62 to frown
2.) More money is printed for monopoly every day than the us treasury
3.)Coke was originally green
4.) 1/4 of Las Angelas is covered by automobiles
5.) Half of all the Americans live withing 50 miles of where they were born
6.) Bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, laser printers, and the material used to make ships and skis etc. were all invented by woman
7.) The numbers ‘172’ can be found on teh back of the $5 dollar bill in bushes at the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial
8.) In an average persons lifetime a person will walk about 5 times around the equator
9.) an average person spends about a week of their life waiting for the traffic light to turn green
10.) Statistics for suicide shows that Monday is when people prefer to destroy themselves
11.) When you die your hair still grows for a few months
12.) You burn more calories when you sleep than when you watch TV
13.) If you sleep in a cold room there are more chances of you having a bad dream
14.) Every time you lick a stamp you consume 1/10 of a calorie
15.) An average person spends 30 years being mad at a family member
16.) The heads side of a penny weighs more than the tails sied
17.) The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at nighttime
*Pant pant* that took a while. Sorry again for posting two!!!
266 –
10 – That statistic was formed probably just by sheer chance. The safest day for driving is Tuesdays, but does that tell you much?
11- Incorrect. Your skin shrivels and shrinks, so the hair roots underneath your skin are exposed, so hair appears to grow, but doesn’t. It’s the same thing with fingernails.
13 – I doubt anyone could measure that. You don’t remember almost all of your dreams, and what little memories you have fade away very quickly except sometimes on very good memories.
16 – That’s backwards. The tails side weighs more than the heads side. That’s why, when you set a penny upright on the table and then bang the table, it will have heads far more often than tails. The tails side, being heavier, draws the penny that way so the tails ends up on the bottom, and the heads on top.
Random factoid:
You probably know why you say heads in “heads” and “tails”. Do you know why you say tails? In pre-1959 pennies, two wheat ears were placed on the back of the penny instead of the lincoln memorial (you can see what the wheat ears look like on the back of a South Dakota state quarter). They look like tails, and the name stuck better than “ears”, because that was part of a head.
But the Earth pulls equally on all objects, and all objects fall at the same rate. Why does the penny land heads-up???
267- sorry, i am not the one who ran the tests, i was just trying to contribute
That’s okay-he just likes to spend his time researching what other people have said to try to say they’re wrong. His hobby, I guess!
269 – No, I should say sorry. I guess that was kind of rude of me!
*bangs head against desk* *mutters, “why do I always sound so rude?”* *bangs head against desk more*
270 – Oh no. *bangs head against desk even more* *mutters, “how come I get reputations like this?”* I just knew that some of her facts weren’t correct. They were mostly very interesting, but I just got bothered by that hair one. It’s a common misbelief.
I heard George W. Bush was head cheerleader in high school. Is THAT true??
I did NOT get that from a political cartoon, either!!!!
John lennon shoplifted the harmonica you hear him playing in the song love me do. I love that one.
272- Well, he was a cheerleader. Though I think that was in college.
274- It’s true.
I don’t see why everyone thinks that is a bad thing. I definitly do NOT want to be a cheerleader but I don’t see whats wrong with President Bush having been one.
272 – Which one?
on coins, if one side is indented, and the other is pushed-out, then the non-indented side is the heaviest.
what’s weird about me is that i’m right-handed, but i’m left-footed because i ride skate-/snowboards goofy. i can ride my bike while only holding on with my left hand, but i can also ride my bike with no hands while pedaling.
272 – probably not. that would make his ratings go below negative, if that’s possible.
so, if sodium burns when it reacts with water, then shouldn’t salt spark when you pour it into a glass of water?
266 – if you sleep in a cold room, you’re likely to have trouble sleeping. *heh*
193 – seriously? i’ve heard about flys lying their eggs in wasps and then the maggots pop out and eat the wasp alive, but it sounds like sci-fi that they ate the dude’s brain.
if you go to UTube and type in “coke+mentos” you can see a video of a guy who put coke in his mouth and then eats mentos. it doesn’t end too well, and he drops a few F-Bombs.
there are more sheep in Australia than there are peoplez.
278 –
’bout the maggot fact: I dunno. It was in Ripley’s Belive it or Not. You have to trust your gut instinct on their facts: after all, they do say “Belive it or Not”.
’bout the right/left handedness: hmm…things are like that. F’rinstance, I’m right handed, but play tennis with my left hand.
’bout the salt: I don’t know. Salt is sodium chloride, so the chloride may keep the sodium from igniting or something.
’bout the sheep: I’ve also heard that in New Zealand the sheep outnumber the people 7 to 1.
Thanks 270, and its ok E2MB, its kind of hard to tell if someone is being rude when you are on a thread. But thanks for telling us what was the truth!!! I have driven my mom nuts telling her the spider one, even though she gets mad when I freak out about a spider in the house (oops!). Have an awesome day!!! (Or night depending where you live)
You too dancegirl13!
Random factoids:
Scientists estimate you are never more than 4 feet away from a spider at any given time.
I am currently eating bread
Factoid: E2MB-Head to the june jelly thread please!!!
[/pointless post] Sorry I have been looking for him…
10- Throw pitch C.
Random factoid: if current trends continue, the african elephant will be extinct in the wild by 2050.
285 – Really? Because I know, in many parts in Africa, the elephants are really overpopulating some areas and they’re having to kill a lot of them because of it. But maybe things changed…
286 – I got the fact from Wikipedia, which as most of us know, is not the most reliable source in the world.
On a related note, I read an enviromental book from the 1970’s a while ago and it said the african elephant is expected to be extinct in the wild by the year 2000.
287- Oh really? I didn’t know it was outright extinct! There was a Muse at some point that had descriptions of inventions that would be around by the year 2000 and some of them were VERY far fetched.
288 – They aren’t extinct. That’s the whole point. The environment book was inaccurate.
289- I know. I hate the way sarcasm comes over the internet, or rather, doesn’t come over the internet.
(289) Warning calls like that can change the future, however. In 1970 environmentalists say “the way things are going, elephants will be extinct in 30 years.” So Africans and international organizations set up sanctuaries, crack down on the ivory trade, make elephants a cause — and as a result, the prediction doesn’t come true. If they had never made that prediction, however, elephants might well have gone extinct. Somehow I suspect that in this case, the prophets of doom were happy that their prediction didn’t come true.
Now other large animals are in trouble: rhinoceroses, gorillas, most big cats. You might very well see the last of the wild gorillas in your lifetimes. I hope that prediction doesn’t come true — and if it doesn’t, it will be largely because someone made it and got other people to worry about it and change things.
291- *gasp*
The last of the wild gorillas? 
The last of big cats? 
No more rhinoceroses? 
Wa-hay too many smileys. Sorry ’bout that.
292 – Don’t worry! Many people feel the same way you do, and now are actively trying to save them from extinction! That’s what Robert Coontz said saved the elephant.
Yeah, but not many people know how endangered these animals are. For my siblings B’nai Mitzvah, I’m donating 100 dollars to charitable organizations. My sister is unknowingly adopting a mother-child gorilla pair from the Diane Fossey foundation, my brother will probably have a donation made in his name for something like invisible children. It makes me so angry that people where I live through 50,000 dollar parties. That much money could be better spent eliminating poverty or saving endangered species. Ok, I’m going on a long rant that’s really off topic. I will justify this post with a couple of random facts : The longest animal on earth is the bootlace worm, the largest living thing is a honey mushroom in oregon.
295- Honestly, I haven’t any money and when I do I spend it on rabbit food and chocolate ice cream. There’s a really cool charity organization called Heifer International, but it’s not about endangered species.
Ack, that should say throw. What is with me today?
296- I’ve heard of that, it’s a really cool idea. That’s the one that donates livestock, isn’t it?
297- Yeah, and then the person who gets the livestock gives some of the baby livestock to another person, and so on, until the whole country is overrun with chickens/cows/rabbits/etcetera.
297 – Yea. You send them some cash, then they send you a card that says “A cow/duck/goat/whatever has been donated in your name to a family in Africa/Asia/wherever” that you can give to somebody. It’s really cool.
299- You’ve done it? Cool.
The motto of Luxembourg translates to mean “We wish to remain what we are.” Yes, I know, it has deeper political meaning, but it sounds funny when you first hear it.
298- Lol. “until the whole country is overrun with chickens/cows/rabbits/etcetera”
300 – Yea. My family occasionally does it during the holidays.
*ahem* a part 2, pretty please?
*racks brain for random factoids* Argh! I can’t think of any random factoids.
Oh dear, I just read this whole thread to make sure I wouldn’t restate something *wipes watery eyes*
31. Actually, the longest word in the English language has 1,909 letters and is the term for the formula C1289H2051N343O375S8. A Tryptophan synthetase A protein, it is an enzyme that has 267 amino acids.
Random factoids:
No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times (Oh, go ahead…I’ll wait…)
Donkeys kill more people anually than plane crashes or shark attacks.
Oak trees do not produce acorns
until they are fifty years of age or older.
American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. (Since Venus is normally associated with women,what does this tell you!)
Apples, not caffiene, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.
Most dust particles in your house are made from DEAD SKIN!!!
The first owner of the Marlboro company died of lung cancer.
Pearls melt in vinegar!
A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.
Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush
be kept at least six feet away from
a toilet to avoid airborne particles
resulting from the flush.
Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush
be kept at least six (6) feet away from
a toilet to avoid airborne particles
resulting from the flush.
Turtles can breathe through their butts.
(I know some people like that, don’t you?)
Well, I don’t know about breathing, but a lot of people exhale from there!
Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first US president whose name contains all
the letters from the word “criminal.”
The second? William Jefferson Clinton.
305 – Actually, this girl got a huge roll of toilet paper, spread it out, and folded it twelve times to prove the people who said that wrong. There was an articles about it in Muse.
306- Oh yeah.
Oh. Does that count as actual paper, though?
308 – I’d assume so. It’s toilet paper, after all.
True, true. Let me see if I can dig up some more random factoids…
These are some factoids I found from phrasebase.com:
1) India bases it’s time zone on a half hour basis because back when it was an English Colony, people could easily tell what time it is back in England by simply turning their wristwatch upside down. So, for example, if your watch in India says 8:20, turn it upside down, and it will appear to read 10 minutes to 3.
2) China cuts through 5 standard time zone longitude lines, but the goverment has decided to only use one time zone for the entire country in effort to simplify/standardize on things… so when it is 12 noon in Beijing, the far western towns are just getting their sunrise. But it’s 12 noon there also.
3) There is only one place in the world where you can watch the sun rise over the pacific ocean and then within a days drive away, watch it set into the Atlantic Ocean…. Where? —–> Answer below
4) Hurricanes and typhoons supposedly do not occur within plus or minus 9 degrees lattitude off the equator.
5) What is the only human made structure visible from outer space, the space shuttle. – Answer Below
6) The Maldives, an island/state/country off the South West of India is sinking at a rate of several inches per year and is estimated to be completely submerged by 2025.
7) The custom of doing “cheers”, which is to click drinking glasses together, usually at a bar with a new friend or someone you just met, dates back to, oh, I think the 15th century in England, when there was such competition for power, that before drinking ones drink, to insure your rival didn’t poison it, you’d spill a little bit off the top into his glass. the clinging of glasses later now signifies a gesture of friendship.
8) If you want to be really romantic in celebrating an anniversity or birthday of your significant other, or you want to celebrate new years eve twice in a day, simply spend the special day in Micronesia, Vanauatu or Tonga in the south pacific islands and then at the end of the day, fly east over the international dateline to the islands of Apia, Cook Islands or French Polynesia, Tahiti… and the day starts all over again and you get to celebrate it twice in 48 hours.
9) Both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, in effort to try and be the hub of doing business in Asia, have centered their time zone relatively. While both S’pore and KL lie geographically in the same longitude slice as Bangkok Thailand, they are one hour ahead. So when it’s 5pm in Japan, it is 4pm in Singapore & KL and 3pm in Bangkok. This becomes interesting when flying from Singapore over to Bali Indonesia, which is an hour and a half flight due East. Typically, when you fly the distance of a typical timezone longitude slice from West to East, you LOSE time, you lose one hour each time zone. However, when traveling from Singapore eastbound to Bali, you GAIN an hour.
10) As bonus point to ponder, there is another case where this “general rule” of gaining time as you travel east to west while losing time as you travel west to east is broken… do you know where? Answer is below.
ANSWERS:
10) When crossing the international dateline, so when you travel from Japan to the US, (west to east), you gain time.
3) Costa Rica
5) Great Wall of China… Although, when Saddam burned all his oil fields in the 1991 Gulf War, the smoke streams were visible also.
305- Well, I’m sure the pearls won’t actually melt. They will probably dissolve, though. And the apples thing, not necessarily. Some people think the fructose and chewing wakes them up, but it doesn’t give you that rush of energy a jolt of caffeine does.
305- Don’t you read Muse? There was article on that in it.
Random factoid: This is the pi post!
313.- Actually, I don’t read Muse…*blocks face with hands and begs for mercy* I used to, but my subscription kind of lapsed and I forgot about it, so I don’t get it anymore *blocks face and begs for mercy once again*. Don’t worry though, I still like it! I read it at Dancergirl13’s house once in a while…
::
315- Well, we’re not going to physically attack you. The internet, wonderful though it is, doesn’t allow us to reach through the screen and hit you with rolled up Muse issues. We do strongly suggest you get a new subscription, because you’re missing alot. And you’ll probably be fined chocolate and/or pied. *pies*
314-No, it’s approximately 10Ï€. it’s not Ï€.
Closer to 100Ï€, minus a smidgen.
318-err….that’s what I meant to say. 100Ï€. Minus approximately 0.15926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679.
315- Don’t worry. See this.
316- I was none of those things.
319 – I think you mean 0.0015926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679.
Somebody was once arrested for snoring too loud. Or, I think she was arrested, but I’m not entirely sure. Either way, she was promptly dubbed ‘The Snoring Lady’ by a certain daily columnist.
I’m seriously wondering if Robert remembers this.
320- What do you mean, I was none of those things?
323- Pied or fined. I phrased it badly, sorry.
New thread, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze GAPAs?
This is turning into a π discussion. Maybe a new thread would get rid of it.
We can take a hint. New thread now available.