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Post a random fact people probably don't know! (And even if they did, they wouldn't care.)


Benice
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The first phrase spoken to the Pilgrims when they arrived in America was, in perfect English, "Do you have any beer". Trade routes existed before then and the Native Americans looked forward to their traded booze.

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The Dark Eldar of Warhammer 40K are hopelessly evil and have to constantly come up with new means of torture, depravity, and perversion in order to get any sort of pleasure from their existence. 

 

Edited by Wraith
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The seeds have been all but bred out of commercial banana varieties. New banana crop has to be formed by "grafting" pre-existent plants (a portion of them is cut off and replanted as a new plant), meaning that all commercial banana plants are clones. This is actually a bit of a problem, because it means banana crops have very low genetic diversity and are easily wiped out by diseases. If it can kill one of them, it can kill all of them.

Edited by AnonymousSpeed
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22 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

The seeds have been all but bred out of commercial banana varieties. New banana crop has to be formed by "grafting" pre-existent plants (a portion of them is cut off and replanted as a new plant), meaning that all commercial banana plants are clones. This is actually a bit of a problem, because it means banana crops have very low genetic diversity and are easily wiped out by diseases. If it can kill one of them, it can kill all of them.

Wild bananas are tiny and full of seeds.

Sandwiches were invented by, and named after, the Earl of Sandwich. He was an avid card player who would have his servant bring him meat and cheese between two pieces of bread so he could eat and play cards at the same time.

Edited by Dragoncat
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The reason that some people think cilantro tastes like soap is because of a genetic trait which detects a chemical in cilantro that resembles soap. The majority of people do not possess this trait, however.

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ByuN is back.

Spoiler

Actually doesn't wholly fit the thread description. If you knew already, you probably care.

 

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9 minutes ago, Benice said:

Who?

Byun Hyun-Woo, Korean StarCraft 2 player, World Champion 2016.

He just finished his mandatory military service and immediately qualified for the GSL (the most prestigious SC2 event outside of the world championship) through a very tough bracket, beating the GSL finalist from only three months ago in the qualifying match.

Edited by ping
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1 minute ago, ping said:

Byun Hyun-Woo, Korean StarCraft 2 player, World Champion 2016.

He just finished his mandatory military service and immediately qualified for the GSL (the most prestigious SC2 event outside of the world championship) through a very tough bracket, beating the GSL finalist from only three months ago in the qualifying match.

Ah, I see! Thanks for explaining.

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On 8/26/2020 at 1:26 PM, Dragoncat said:

Compsognathus was a dinosaur the size of a chicken.

Love those guys. The poor little things even got eaten by dragonflies. Then again, dragonflies back then were gigantic. But still. Ouch.

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In Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker series, he described the secret to flying as "learning how to throw yourself at the ground... and miss".

The strange part, which I only realized well after reading that joke: This is weirdly similar to how satellites are brought into orbit: The rocket is initially just shot straight upwards (so that they leave the atmosphere as soon as possible to minimize energy loss through friction) and only then lateral acceleration is applied. As a result, the satellite's trajectory becomes a parabola that widens as the horizontal velocity increases - until at one point, the spot where the satellite would crash down goes past the curvature of the earth and the satellite misses the earth when "falling down".

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I have averaged 3.84 posts per day since I joined the forum. I also have sworn once, in my last update of the Trainee solo. (Although it was via a meme that I was just too lazy to edit.)

Edited by Benice
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Not all good Catholic warriors wanted to go on Crusade when the first one was called. According to one (Arab) account, when Roger I of Sicily was informed of the plans to to invade the Holy Land and take Jerusalem, he lifted his leg and farted, then stating "By the truth of my religion, there is more use in that than in what you have to say".

To be fair to Roger's lack of zealotry, he was an older man concerned about consolidating his hard-earned possessions in southern Italy. His realm was chiefly comprised of Sicily, which had a significant Muslim population, and it would be hard to peacefully trade with the infidels of North Africa if he was off killing their fellow believers in the Levant.

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On 9/3/2020 at 9:47 PM, Interdimensional Observer said:

Not all good Catholic warriors wanted to go on Crusade when the first one was called. According to one (Arab) account, when Roger I of Sicily was informed of the plans to to invade the Holy Land and take Jerusalem, he lifted his leg and farted, then stating "By the truth of my religion, there is more use in that than in what you have to say".

To be fair to Roger's lack of zealotry, he was an older man concerned about consolidating his hard-earned possessions in southern Italy. His realm was chiefly comprised of Sicily, which had a significant Muslim population, and it would be hard to peacefully trade with the infidels of North Africa if he was off killing their fellow believers in the Levant.

Sounds like a guy I'd support.

Diogenes was similar, once a bunch of snooty council members kept calling him a dog so he lifted his leg and peed on them.

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In Germany (and Skandinavia and parts of eastern Europe, I think), the musical note "B" is called "H" instead, so the A minor scale goes A-H-C-D-E-F-G-A. While this makes things unnecessarily confusing (I always briefly think, "that's not right" when somebody mentions the "Mass in B minor"), it also allowed J.S Bach to make his last name into a musical signature of sorts - you find the sequence Bb-A-C-B (or a transposition) in many of Bach's works, or in other composer's works as a reference to ol' Johann Sebastian.

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Players of Animal Crossing: New Horizons who live in the Southern Hemisphere could've caught every bug by July 1st. Fall and winter bugs were available between March and July, and they could travel to islands in the Northern Hemisphere via online to catch spring and summer bugs during that time. The earliest day Northern Hemisphere players can catch every bug is December 11th, because dung beetles require snowballs to spawn, which don't appear when playing online.

On 9/8/2020 at 6:21 AM, DragonFlames said:

On the topic of dinosaurs and chickens:
The closest modern relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex (yes, that thing) is in fact the chicken.

Due to how phylogeny works, T. rex is equally related to all modern birds since the bird ancestor diverged from the Tyrannosaur ancestor at the same time. Modern birds are specifically descended from dinosaurs related to the family Dromaeosauridae (commonly called raptors), which were basically birds with teeth and claws anyway. Though as theropods, birds are indeed more closely related to T. rex than they are to most other dinosaurs like Triceratops or sauropods (meanwhile, the closest living relatives of birds are crocodilians).

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12 hours ago, Dragoncat said:

Winston Churchill once responded to a lady saying he was drunk with "yes madam I am, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly"

Of course, the plot twist being that Winston Churchill, the next morning, was still an arsehole.

Edited by ping
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