For the opening sequence of "The Prisoner", the titular characters' car was lent to the studio before being sent to the customer who ordered it. The owner lived in Australia and later lost it in a racing accident. https://youtu.be/ygLg-7G0Xp0?si=bW47EUf8M3bh-T7y
I wonder if Bohemian Waxwings, the ones we get in the UK, do the same. I've not seen it, usually they just seem to gulp them down for themselves until the trees are stripped by the flock
You have it!
No, you have it!
But I insist!
I really couldn’t!
I WANT you to have it!
You’re too generous.
Please, just take it.
Look, I don’t want it, ok?
But, I’m trying to be nice!
I don’t like berries!
😂
My internal monologue while watching that video.
they also toss berries in the air before swallowing them but sometimes they drop them. this vid is extra cute bc the stripy chest ones are newly fledged bebes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sksOscAP5rs
Before doing MoCap for his videos, RussianBadger use to animate characters in his gaming videos in a more stop-motion-esk way to convey conversations with friends, using Source Filmmaker.
Even when mocapping, he still edits all the videos himself and still uses SFM.
A “petard” was a small explosive, like a grenade. But it was also a 15th century slang term for flatulence. So when Shakespeare coined the phrase “hoisted by his own petard” he was probably making a fart joke.
My BF doesn’t have a BS account, so he asked me to let you now that there is a fish whose official name is *boops boops* and it looks exactly as it should.
Among the many interesting features of the Japanese language, verbs start out as simple stems, and the "in-fixes" - or syllables wedged into the middle - make them function in ways our language will use auxiliaries for. So, a•u (合う) - fit, match, suit, is made passive with "a•waeru", or... (1/2)
... or can be turned into "make something fit/match/suit" by using another in-fix "a•waseru"; this subtlety can be rendered in English as "to get into sync".
(BTW I'm aiming a bit for a brain breaker; from past experience, sometimes that actually provides good distraction.)
Octopi are escape artists. They have been known to make trips to nearby tanks to grab a bite to eat, or just decide that tank life wasn't for them, escape, and head down a drain pipe back to the ocean.
there was an octopus that was so annoyed by the fluorescent light that it memorized the overnight guard's schedule, escaped from its tank, squirted water to short out the light, and then climbed back in before the guard came back around
octopodes are extremely intelligent, but because they're antisocial and have short lifespans (about a year) they don't learn very much. Humans are eusocial, so we learn not only naturally throughout our lives from experience, but we learn from each other and therefore are less limited by lifespan
The word for the colour in Latin is "aurantius", which sounds like it has the same root as "aureus", "golden". So it seems they saw the colour (and the fruit) as a dark shade of yellow / gold and not its own thing.
This is somewhat archaic, but people in Spain used to differentiate sky blue ("celestial") from basically all other shades of blue: navy, royal, etc ("azul"). I don't think they really do this anymore, but I think it's neat!
There's a few shreds of anecdotal evidence suggesting the Mali Empire might have sent an expedition to Brazil in the early 1300s!
Unfortunately there's no hard evidence and the written account is a thirdhand and so vague it doesn't even give the name of the Mansa who led the expiration.
In the early 17th century, Japanese lord Date Masumune built a European-style ship and sent an embassy to Europe led by Hasekura Tsunenaga.
A few members of the embassy stayed in Spain and to this day there are a few hundred Spanish people with the surname "Japon"
A Wrestler from the MPLS Suburbs got given a Soviet Ex-pat character and went so far as to learn Russian, flied communist flags outside his Minnesota home, and NEVER spoke in anything but a broken accented English. Even legally changed his name to Nikita Koloff.
One of the all timers at keeping kayfabe imo. He was on last season of Dark side of the ring and I guess now he is retired he just sounds Minnesotan again.
Wyatt Earp was arrested in Peoria for being a pimp. The newspaper referred to him as “The Peoria bummer.” “Bummer” was a term for looters during the Civil War that became a more general insult.
Earp was not the “law man” of our Wild West myths. Not by a long shot.
Bees are commonly associated with death in cultures around the world. That’s why Egyptian pharaohs had honey placed in their tombs. And if you watched Pushing Daisies, it’s why Chuck was a beekeeper.
Fun fact: People from the area around what's labeled "Kansas River" on your map refer to it as the "Kaw," possibly as a way to avoid confusion with the Arkansas River, which in the local dialect is a homonym for "Our Kansas River."
Murray Gell-Mann named the particles we call quarks after a line from Finnegan's Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" because there are three quarks in each nucleon (protons and neutrons).
Probably, especially since someone else pointed out that it was originally coined by someone from Cork, and to me in a Cork accent it sounds like Cork rhymes w/ Mark.
I've only heard beta pronounced bay-tuh, no r (or bay-duh because American) but I can imagine a Brit or Aussie saying bay-ter/bee-ter
Binturong smell like popcorn because they exude the same molecule (2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, or 2-AP) that makes popcorn smell like popcorn. It's a cute movie snack/Southeast Asia mammal fact.
There is a chemist channel on youtube that made cinnamon candy out of styrofoam.
When he tried it he made the best “i know the science is solid but this still feels so wrong” face.
Approximately 5 billion people are awake at any given time, meaning that every minute, humanity accumulates 5 billion minutes of new experiences. That's roughly equivalent to 10 millennia.
If you live in the eastern us, and you dont mow your grass, theres a 50/50 chance the little mushrooms that grow while the grass is still kinda short are psycadelic. The other half is they might kill you. You need a spore print kit to be able to tell the difference.
Stars are colored by their surface temperatures. Cool stars burn low and slow - maybe 3K. Moving up the temperature scale, they go from red to yellower to blue. A blue star’s photosphere is 10 to 15 thousand degrees.
So possibly when you feel blue you are bright and hot and deserving of awe.
At the Cincinnati Zoo, we have a manatee house and in that house, there is a button that you cam press to hear a recording of a manatee fart. It is a very popular button.
I’m 50% Byrds facts, 50% birds facts. In the 1980s some monk parakeets escaped from a pet store shipment and took residence in the archway of Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. They winter in a nearby power relay station. I’ve found them hard to photograph but you can see & hear them clearly.
There was a colony of monk parakeets in Colorado Springs for a long time, with their nest built around a transformer on a pole on an alleyway. The nest was removed after catching fire several times and the birds relocated to a zoo.
Thank you! Technically he's my stepkitty - he belongs to my partner. Which just means he's mine when he's being sweet and Partner's when he's being a little devil. :D
I love re-upping this: for decades the main library at UCLA had the generic name University Research Library because the person most responsible for getting it built was an English professor named Hugh G. Dick and the university refused to name it after him.
We did call it URL when I was there, but sadly it got named after a chancellor about the time the internet was getting big so we never got that convergence.
In their defense I can tell you that the state of Wisconsin has had no shortage of highway sign shenanigan headaches due to their decision to name a recreation area after decorated WWII flying ace Richard Bong
They literally had to stop putting these up because every stoner in the midwest wanted to liberate & put it on the wall of their basement, behind the lava lamp and next to the pink floyd pyramid poster
Wintergreen mints can spark in the dark. The paper on crayons greatly strengthens them. The bus Rosa Parks staged her protest on is in a museum, and the exhibit includes a lot of great information on provenance.
Yes, that is the one! He was definitely not great, but the museum does some worthwhile stuff with the resources he left. The Jackson house being brought in seems like a really big deal.
There's a class of composite organisms called "lichens" in which an algae or cyanobacteria lives among the filaments of a fungus. Sometimes there's even a yeast in there too and they all form a happy little mini-ecosystem. It's wild.
All citrus fruit can be crossbred with other types of citrus, originally most European citrus resembled a smallish white grapefruit and a small yellow lime. So lemon-lime flavor is Peak Historical.
King Ferrante I of Naples was one of the great proponents of art and literature and music and knowledge in the Italian Renaissance… and also kept his enemies mummified in a diorama. He took people he was suspicious of on tours. He also loved kids (not in the icky way.)
although historically associated with the east (orientalism baby!) current archaeobotanical evidence suggests that the opium poppy plant is Europe's only plant domesticant of the neolithic
the consensus in the archaeobotany lit is that it was domesticated mostly as a food crop
as someone with a bg in cultural anth & a drug* researcher I'm actually a bit skeptical of this assertion, but i think we need to see the plants as multiple!
the cutting method is the most efficient means of extraction, but one can also soak the entire bud in tea - a doukhobor friend of mine once told me that they do not use the slit method, instead soaking the bud in hot water as a tea - that's a method less likely to appear in the archaeological record
The further back in time we go with opium the more and more things are mixed in as it's used to medically. It was most likely cultivated in this way by the equivalent of monks making medicine in the middle ages.
this is possible, it is also likely there were a bunch of different uses. for instance in some. archaeological site in Spain they have found chunks of poppy in the teeth of miners, there's also been discoveries of burials with sacks of poppies buried with them
Bees poop, but not inside the hive (that would be unhygienic.) But during winter they close off the hive and huddle in for warmth, so they just store it all up and when spring comes they have a "cleansing flight" where they get to go out and finally have the first poop of the year. Must feel nice.
Deinococcus radiodurans is a radioactive resistant bacteria that was discovered when scientists tried to sterilize canned food with gamma rays and it still spoiled.
If you pinch off and soften up a stonecrop leaf and get the skin to loosen up without tearing, you can blow it up gently like a little green frog balloon
No no there's like sixteen different plants that are ALL called sedum in some places and stonecrop in others, and also we used to think they were all closely related but now like half of them got split off into their own genus
During the filming of Deep Space 9 Alexander Siddig, who played Dr. Julian Bashir, asked for a at the time high speed modem in his trailer specifically so between takes he could play either Ultima Online or Everquest
Holy cow! Thank you so much for this clip! You just made my week! Seriously, I’m a huge DS9 fan and it’s a treat to know that a cast member was playing EQ while working on the show.
i truly hope he was able to get "my account gets everything released in the cash shop for the lifetime of the game" added to his Star Trek Online voice acting paycheck
There was almost a highway built 100 feet in the air across midtown Manhattan, and the only reason it didn’t happen is that Robert Moses cancelled it out of spite for the guy who was Manhattan borough president at the time (and wanted the project to happen!).
While the store lives on in a new location, moved due to rent etc, for most of my life there was a shop across from Trinity College in Dublin selling door handles and accoutrements.
I was always fascinated by the Brush Shop just under Edinburgh Castle. It is now restaurants and tourist shops end-to-end, but until recently they were a niche destination shopping experience.
Emperor Penguins don't just look exactly the same to us, they also look exactly the same to other Emperor Penguins, and can only distinguish one from the other by their unique voices.
Manta rays will literally launch themselves into the air and belly-flop back into the water. Having just seen this for the past week (BONKERS!), can confirm that they really get up there!
We don’t know why - could be to get rid of parasites, or could be because it’s fun.
Marshall Kirk McKusick and Eric Allman, two guys who worked on one of the most important pieces of software ever, BSD Unix, are now married to each other
There was an urban legend that in Manhattan someone noticed getting an oil change was cheaper than a parking garage. So they’d drop off their car for an oil change in the morning and pick it up in the evening. Every day.
Babies are born without kneecaps. This is why it doesn't hurt to crawl when they are tiny. Our kneecaps are why it hurts adults to crawl and need kneepads when kneeling for long periods of time
*one reason, at least. Square-cube law also means we're putting *way* more pressure per square inch on our knees as adults, so even with the same cartilage structure as babies we'd have problems.
Chipmunks eat snakes, small garden snakes, obviously, but snakes nonetheless. I just assumed they ate acorns or something like that, but they're ruthless, at least the ones in our yard. Don't mess with chipmunks.
If you press the call button on the ticket machine at a Japanese train station, an attendant come out from behind the machine to help you, as if the machine really does work by way of having a person inside of it
In 1893 the Supreme Court ruled that tomatoes are a vegetable for the purpose of tariffs and customs, due to a case brought by grocers over a tariff increase on fruit.
In 2003 the US Court of International Trade ruled that the X-Men are “nonhuman creatures,” and therefore that figures in their likeness were toys (imported with a 6.8% tariff), not dolls (12% tariff).
A popular style of drinking glasses in the 1970s were all imported as storage jars for the reason! (My mom worked in a China and glass department in a store, so I have a bunch of random dishes knowledge.)
I’m not sure if they’re still doing this but for a while in the last decade, dress shoes would get imported with a thin fabric sole over the real sole because the tariff on fabric bottomed footwear was less than rubber or plastic bottomed.
there is a complicated point system for determining if a pistol is legal to import or not so things like glocks will have "target sights" installed to make them importable. The sights are then replaced before the guns are sold at retail in the US.
Ford builds the Transit Connect utility van in Turkey, and for the US market, imports them with rear seats so they qualify as passenger vehicles, then removes the seats and sends them back for the next round, to circumvent the Chicken Tax*
I teach this case in a freshman business class and every year I try to impress on the students how ironic it is that the X-Men definitively lost their battle to be considered human.
Every semester I feel like there's one kid who gets it.
Finland is always voted as the happiest country in the world but nobody wants to admit it. We have many heavy metal bands and the sun doesn't rise above the horizon in the middle of winter
I used to work at a video dubbing place. One day I got a work order to make a copy of the movie Rising Sun to be played on a camcorder during a Shuttle/Mir mission. I haven't been able to confirm it but I like to think I made something that subsequently flew in space.
Touching the tree sap sounds super super miserable, but I don't see any contact-only deaths attributed to it.
Urtica ferox, a stinging nettle on steroids, has killed a few people on skin contact alone. A few stings are survivable, but walking through an entire patch of it may not be.
The gympie-gympie tree in Australia has fine needles that not only cause acute burning pain for months, but are easily shed, and thereby inhaled by people nearby. Even researchers find themselves getting poisoned by it.
I was on a rainforest tour led by an Indigenous man, showing us all the interesting plants. So many of the descriptions ended with “don’t eat it, it’ll kill you”. The gympie-gympie story he ended with “don’t touch it” and paused… we chimed in “it’ll kill you!”. “Nah, but you’ll wish it had” 😅
Trees are more hardcore than people may realize! The sap from Tree of Heaven can cause myocarditis, barehanded pruning or cutting down can be seriously unhealthy for you.
I've had to advise people about it before, particularly older landowners, just to make sure they don't get injured. It's not super common but it's the type of thing that's hard to predict who it would happen to. Plus gloves solve the issue, so it's worth the simple precaution.
Also gingko contains the same chemical that causes itching/rash as poison ivy, so folks that react to that should stay away from gingko leaves and nuts!
The pirate perch is a North American native fish born with its anus in the usual fish location of at the base of the tail. As it grows, the anus moves up the body until it’s at the equivalent of the base of the throat.
Plants are mostly made out of molecules they pulled out of the air except for the parts of them that are made of molecules they dragged out of the ground.
Agatha Christie once got so pissed off at her philandering husband she faked her own death and quasi-framed him for it, then pretended to have amnesia when she was found at a spa later, then pretty much never answered any questions about it ever again and went back to her everyday life.
The greatest pollution event in Earths history was caused by algae oxygenating the atmosphere. The scale of the shift was ENORMOUS, going from almost 0% to 35% at the height (now around 16-18%).
This is why our oceans are green instead of purple. The purple algae didn't produce oxygen when they photosynthesized, and the oxygen was toxic to them, so they're gone now.
David Bowie created Ziggy Stardust as a reflection on how stardom will make you miserable and in less than two years he was so miserable from playing Ziggy Stardust that he announced at a concert, just before playing the last song on the album, that Ziggy would never be seen again. And he wasn't.
Eggs are hydrophobic. If you ever crack one open into a bowl and get some eggshell in there, just wet your finger with some water, then you can pull the shell out with no issues.
In human brains, 80% of the neurons are in the cerebellum, and more of those are dedicated to controlling our hands than any other muscle group. In elephants, it's 98% in the cerebellum, speculated to be mostly trunk, but it's hard getting elephants into an fMRI scanner.
Percentages are reversible. 8% of 25 = 25% of 8. And most times, one is a lot easier to figure out than the other. So if you ever get stuck trying to figure out a percentage in your head, try reversing the numbers!
I always think of “of” as “times” and “is” as “equals”, so this tracks. The percentage moves the decimal two digits, but it’s irrelevant which of the multipliers carries the decimal. But, you’re right - it’s sometimes easier in one direction than the other, so good to keep in mind! Thanks.
3 Musketeers bars used to come in packs of 3 bars; one vanilla nougat, one chocolate nougat, one strawberry. During wartime rationing they cut the package to just one bar, the most popular one which was chocolate nougat. This is the 3 Musketeers bar we know today.
Okay, firstly, that’s awesome, and secondly, I misread the first sentence at first as “Sharks predate (as in prey upon) the North Star” and spent a few seconds like 😳🤔
I love these facts because they open up a bunch of interesting yes-buts and sortas.
Sharks are older than Polaris...but HOW much older depends on what counts as a shark!
The rocks of the Appalachians are older than bones, and they were mountains back then...but for a while the mountains were gone!
Gone flat, or nearly so.
The mountains were originally pushed up by several orogenies (collision of continents/island arcs) during the Paleozoic, but once that uplift ceased erosion took over and leveled things off. Later episodes of uplift in the Mesozoic/Cenozoic rejuvenated the old topography.
Sharks first showed up around 450 million years ago, and Polaris is a measly 70 million years old. Sharks are older than trees, they're older than bones. They're older than FIRE — certainly on earth, possibly in the galaxy.
Earth is the only place where fire is KNOWN to exist - it requires life to do the hard work of transforming solar energy into unstable chemicals that can be set alight by lightning.
In Japan, it is legal to burn or desecrate the Japanese flag, but illegal to do so to the flag of another country (though an official complaint must be made by the offended embassy for the police to take action). (1/2)
The reason is that when post-shogunate laws were being written, the flag was counted as an imperial symbol and covered under laws prohibiting disrespect of the emperor. Post-WWII, those rules were discarded, but flag-protection was never added back into regular law. (2/2)
The world’s largest known living creature is a gigantic mushroom colony in Oregon, nicknamed the Humungous Fungus, which covers approximately 3.7 square miles.
Whoa… that’s cool. Of course they call it humongous fungus. 🍄🟫
Wait, I thought the largest organism was an aspen forest? Quaking aspen, all attached at the roots.
This feels like the possible origin of a new Miyazaki movie, somehow. Nausicaa-inspired.
Not surprised, do they also have a nice, typically catholic, after the fact reasoning for it?
With the capybara it was that it looks like a beaver which is “aquatic” and haves a “scubbed tail” (the pope is a bad biologist)
I just read that baby elephants raised by rescue orgs in Africa, after they are released and join a herd, communicate (somehow!) to their new herd that the rescue org people are Good, so members of that herd sometimes show up at the rescue org when they are injured, and I teared up.
That's right! I paid a baby elephants sponsorship as birthday present for my mum and they sent us information and stories every now and then. Elephants don't only recognise humans but also communicate so here we are 😊
paper nautilus, also known as the argonaut, a cool cephalopod
(also i just found out that's not true- the penis can't swim, the male just yanks it off and hands it to the female)
I wondered aloud a little while back why we call pandas "panda" when the Chinese word is nothing like that (it's xiongmao, iirc, my pinyin suuucks), and yesterday at dinner one of my kids informed me that it is from a nepalese word, and that the original "panda"s were red pandas, from Nepal.
Cobalt got its name from “kobold ore”, a German word for dangerous ores that didn’t produce good metal and created arsenic fumes when heated, because they believed kobolds were sneaking around and cursing their metals. When the metal was isolated from them in the 1700’s, it got their name.
Fun story about this factoid. In my job I sometimes have to tend to members of Congress on overseas trips. I was staffing a groups of reps who had just been to Nicosia, and one member - Steve fucking King of Iowa - was joke-haranguing the other members, complaining no one could find him
a cypress tree to take a photo with during the trip. I stepped in and shared that etymology to spare the staffers, who looked miserable. Homeboy was hooked, and he spent the next 48 hours engaging me on every historical fact about our location he could dredge out of me. Super surreal.
Some slugs (maybe all?) mate in mid air while dangling on a long rope made of slime. After they’re done one slug drops off and the other climbs back up by eating the slime rope. Here’s a video narrated by David Attenborough: https://youtu.be/wG9qpZ89qzc?si=HuvVMAIkRfjmqjrt
The rapper Big Boi is a HUGE Kate Bush fan (see video below for his rapturous analysis of Running Up That Hill). In part because of that video, he inducted her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame recently. https://youtu.be/Ewxa2ynChgc?si=ul382Sqf2L41zH4B
Another fun fact: your request for fun facts has increased so many people’s happiness. I hope the rest of the day is as bright as you have made it for others
Jumping spiders make great pets because they're intelligent enough to understand that human = food giver and can recognize their owners. They're basically really tiny puppies
Aerospace engineer Judith Love Cohen developed an emergency guidance system for spacecraft that is credited with returning the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. In 1969, she worked through her pregnancy and brought work print-outs with her to the hospital before she gave birth to Jack Black
ah fuck no that was apparently the gangly piece of a different 90s bully duo (boy meets world). but i still think this counts as a wholesome and good fact lol
acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) have a complex social structure with multiple adults and subadult helpers all communally raising the chicks in a shared nest. if the breeding adults of one sex happen to die, they have a big ol' hoedown with a neighboring clan to replace them.
they hammer acorns into dead trees and utility poles as granaries, which are the clans' great treasures and used for generations. when one of the granary poles in this neighborhood needed replacement, PG&E kindly left it standing and put the replacement pole (wrapped in kevlar) nearby.
to be clear, fuck PG&E: the corporation and everyone extracting shareholder value from what should be a public utility has blood on their hands, but at the ground level its employees are very kind members of the community. in summary, land of contrasts, etc,
The worm thing fucked me up when I earned it. The reason that old-growth trees are uniquely large is because the ground cover made the ecosystem and how trees competed totally different.
i think since i started working with glass i started perceiving colors based on manufacturer names, which is *very* strange as a side effect of capitalism
That's probably reversed. The more colors you perceive, the more names you develop.
I did read something that said you can determine the age of a language based on how many color words it had. And that the first three were always black, white, and red.
While I can't attest to the accuracy of the theory, there *is* a theory that states that when people have more names for a wider variety of color, they are able to better notice and identify differences between colors.
You can absolutely train yourself to perceive subtle nuances in colours, and also sounds -- from my own experience, bird songs. The more I listen, the easier it is to tell birds apart. Our minds being what they are, I guess the naming and the perceiving go hand in hand.
It was in a documentary I saw; they were talking to some African tribe and they didn't have a word for "blue" and when they asked them what color the sky was, they said it was "colorless"
Sociolinguist in me thinks that we say "clear skies" and thats basically "colourless sky." Its hard to separate "you told me you perceive yellow and orange" with being able to SAY "I perceive yellow and orange."
Do link any linguistics documentaries tho
Alternately, my older son had a hard time learning the color "orange" because so many different shades are labelled "orange." He could get red, yellow. but couldn't figure out how to put parameters on "orange."
Scientists learned about the existence of sperm in part by making little overalls for male frogs out of fish air bladders. Apparently this was more technically challenging than they first thought. (They tried pants first but the frogs simply swam out of them.)
In the UK, the bird species the US knows as Loons are called Divers. Where the US has Cedar Waxwings, we get Bohemian Waxwings. The American Robin is a thrush-type bird with an orange breast, the European Robin is a little old world flyatcher with an orange breast
Fun fact: Chuck Berry had three songs named Carol, Marie and Johnny B. Goode. My parents had three children they named Carol, Marie and John, all born before the songs. 🎸
When one of my dogs stretches, instead of doing the downward dog thing where he puts his back legs way out behind him like a normal dog, instead he stands on three legs and stretches one leg straight back like a discount superman and it's very funny. (It's the brown one on the right)
They were the main plot device in 2 horribly ignorant movie in the same year, I think. Deep Impact and Armageddon. I swear I lost so many brain cells watching those movies.
When Frankie Laine recorded the title song for Blazin' Saddles, he thought it was a serious Western and was so excited to sing a song for a Western that he gave everything. Mel Brooks, who wrote the song, knew how much Laine was putting in and didn't have the heart to tell him it was a comedy
I think he comes in on the second chorus and when I heard this fact a few years ago I immediately listened to the song I’d listened to hundreds of times and could not believe I had never noticed. He sounds like he’s doing a Mick Jagger impersonation. He wants everyone to know it’s him
Carly Simon has said it's not. She's told 2 people: Dick Ebersol paid for the answer at a charity auction and she told Howard Stern, who forgot what she told him because the answer was so obscure.
The bassoon is actually too small to produce the pitch we hear. Instead, it produces a set of frequencies that mimic the overtones of that pitch and our brain interprets that to mean that the fundamental tone exists.
Which makes me hope that synesthetes tend to "see" bassoon music as shades of purple and/or vice versa.
(According to another fun fact here, purple, unlike other colours, cannot be produced by a single frequency of light, but requires both red and violet in some combination.)
Oliver J. Smoot, who for a frat pledge has been used to measure (by laying down repeatedly) the Harvard bridge and thus established a nonstandard unit of length (the bridge is 364.4 smoots long), went on to become the president of the International Organization for Standardization.
The woman doing the vocals on this 1950s track (which is generally known from Dirty Dancing) was also the producer of the first commercially successful hip-hop single: https://youtu.be/U6gJUnI2qPE?si=Jopih-I5TvdF9gDE
Ancient Greeks stored their wine in clay jars that were sealed with pine sap that leached into the wine. The Greeks became so used to the taste that when storage methods changed, they deliberately added sap to the wine to recreate it.
The wine was called "retsina" - Greek for "resin."
Oh, I never claimed it tasted good. 😉
In fact, a Western ambassador named Liutprand, upon drinking it, was certain the Emperor was trying to poison him.
Comments
https://youtu.be/ygLg-7G0Xp0?si=bW47EUf8M3bh-T7y
https://archive.ph/GiF1k
No, you have it!
But I insist!
I really couldn’t!
I WANT you to have it!
You’re too generous.
Please, just take it.
Look, I don’t want it, ok?
But, I’m trying to be nice!
I don’t like berries!
😂
My internal monologue while watching that video.
I have witnessed this personally... it included hanging upside down 😁
Even when mocapping, he still edits all the videos himself and still uses SFM.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boops
(BTW I'm aiming a bit for a brain breaker; from past experience, sometimes that actually provides good distraction.)
https://www.npr.org/2016/04/16/474412283/inky-the-octopuss-great-escape
Their species' short lifespan always makes me sad.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ecstasy-turns-antisocial-octopuses-lovestruck-cuddle-buddiesjust-us-180970363/
They live for just under a year. 😢
(Reading about them makes me feel like an elf)
Unfortunately there's no hard evidence and the written account is a thirdhand and so vague it doesn't even give the name of the Mansa who led the expiration.
A few members of the embassy stayed in Spain and to this day there are a few hundred Spanish people with the surname "Japon"
And so horrifying.
Earp was not the “law man” of our Wild West myths. Not by a long shot.
https://youtu.be/_KccMVwat8s?t=116
I've only heard beta pronounced bay-tuh, no r (or bay-duh because American) but I can imagine a Brit or Aussie saying bay-ter/bee-ter
When he tried it he made the best “i know the science is solid but this still feels so wrong” face.
They've got it all figured out and are broodily harrumphing as they organize branches.
It's in the upper hollow (basically invisible), above the branch, above last year's nest in the lower hollow, which you CAN see.
Both the new nest AND last year's nest are occupied by magpies.
This is a new development!
(They also absolutely despise the wind storm)
So possibly when you feel blue you are bright and hot and deserving of awe.
https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/graham-crackers.htm
Woman are crazy and men are stupid
The reason woman are crazy is that men are stupid
-- George Carlin
Stotinki
http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9t1nb5rm;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00016&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere
In fact, because of it's small orbit, the closest planet to any other planet in our solar system is usually Mecury.
this is a good little factoid for my homebrew theories of drug preference determinism
as someone with a bg in cultural anth & a drug* researcher I'm actually a bit skeptical of this assertion, but i think we need to see the plants as multiple!
c'mon people just admit that humans like to get high
what i think they're looking for is tools for cutting out the opium from the bud b4 it flowers, which is the method used to extract opium today 1/2
(I guess somewhere in my brain I knew that morphine at least is an opiate, but I didn't make the connection.)
are there tools indicating they washed the opium off?
because why bother... eating and getting high is just more efficient
now I'm imagining mustard with opium in it
There's all sorts of weird things where alcohol tolerance and even an opioid response shift depending on gut bacteria.
https://asm.org/articles/2023/april/the-gut-microbiome-and-drug-addiction-an-emerging
Meaning it's... Well...
jade plant leaves work too
100% true
(This was off the top of my head, I promise.)
Alas, they did not sell t-shirts.
We don’t know why - could be to get rid of parasites, or could be because it’s fun.
There's a dad joke here about kidneys, but I'll skip it for now.
Pangolins are more closely related to humans, bats, horses, and a bunch of other mammals than they are to armadillos.
Among Whales' closest relatives after hippos are cows, goats, camels, and giraffes.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:e67ee6f4-e0c3-44e4-8615-01b5fbb4ae7e
Every semester I feel like there's one kid who gets it.
https://www.ft.com/content/5af5b182-349a-4a25-b4fb-4551908f2b3f
The answer was "no".
Which means that cats can usually punch an attacking snake who’d leave embarrassed.
🐱 🤜 💥 🐍
Urtica ferox, a stinging nettle on steroids, has killed a few people on skin contact alone. A few stings are survivable, but walking through an entire patch of it may not be.
WTAF Kikorangi why didn't you tell me?!?!?!
Oh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides
Also gingko contains the same chemical that causes itching/rash as poison ivy, so folks that react to that should stay away from gingko leaves and nuts!
Elli is very fast
https://youtu.be/H9-Yo8zjfAg?si=5og712tcfGKtLEtw
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/27/mystery-of-agatha-christie-disappearance
I had to break up the band🎶
Then they tried to reanimate him with goat blood
Altered.
Somniosus microcephalus, which loosely translates as sleepy tiny-head
Sharks are older than Polaris...but HOW much older depends on what counts as a shark!
The rocks of the Appalachians are older than bones, and they were mountains back then...but for a while the mountains were gone!
The mountains were originally pushed up by several orogenies (collision of continents/island arcs) during the Paleozoic, but once that uplift ceased erosion took over and leveled things off. Later episodes of uplift in the Mesozoic/Cenozoic rejuvenated the old topography.
Wait, I thought the largest organism was an aspen forest? Quaking aspen, all attached at the roots.
This feels like the possible origin of a new Miyazaki movie, somehow. Nausicaa-inspired.
I also love that you’ve described it as “living creature” because fungi defy our flora and fauna categories.
(Though since this fact is related to the conquistador army eating them during lent maybe it doesn’t count as “fun”)
With the capybara it was that it looks like a beaver which is “aquatic” and haves a “scubbed tail” (the pope is a bad biologist)
(also i just found out that's not true- the penis can't swim, the male just yanks it off and hands it to the female)
And of course, they're not related.
In fact, I think red pandas are the only animal in their family.
https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/an-immense-world-9781529112115
Also sharks are older than Polaris. This is usually taken to mean sharks as a species, but actually every individual shark is that old.
I did read something that said you can determine the age of a language based on how many color words it had. And that the first three were always black, white, and red.
Sociolinguist in me thinks that we say "clear skies" and thats basically "colourless sky." Its hard to separate "you told me you perceive yellow and orange" with being able to SAY "I perceive yellow and orange."
Do link any linguistics documentaries tho
I can't remember the documentary but I will make an attempt to find out when I'm home later
Except peas.
They hate peas.
saurus = lizard
THUNDER LIZARD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_purples
Mick Jagger sang backing vocals on the chorus of Carly Simon "You're So Vain."
Here are my cats:
🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈
I taught History of Rock at the college level and I used to blow minds with that one 🤓
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/belgian-man-whose-body-makes-its-own-alcohol-cleared-of-drunk-driving?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
(According to another fun fact here, purple, unlike other colours, cannot be produced by a single frequency of light, but requires both red and violet in some combination.)
This being Boeing, I have no doubt it's only a matter of time before somebody actually does this. Probably when both are full of paying punters.
in a straight line
https://youtu.be/U6gJUnI2qPE?si=Jopih-I5TvdF9gDE
Less well-known wombat facts:
* Wombats kill predators with their arses.
* Wombats walk away from collisions that kill cars, & sometimes the drivers.
* Wombats have reverse pouches to keep out dirt.
The wine was called "retsina" - Greek for "resin."
In fact, a Western ambassador named Liutprand, upon drinking it, was certain the Emperor was trying to poison him.
Hope it helps ✨️