Fun Facts

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Mongrel
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 25, 2021 12:12 am

"How does that fish smell?"
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Büge
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Büge » Sun Jul 25, 2021 10:02 pm

mharr wrote:Afaik fish nostrils are purely sensory and cannot pass water through to the mouth or gills. Kinda like that pokey airspeed thingy on the front of planes. But for smells.


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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 25, 2021 11:00 pm

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Büge
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Büge » Mon Jul 26, 2021 1:41 pm

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby atog » Mon Jul 26, 2021 3:36 pm

Büge wrote:

oh fuck I know where this is/was. May have even supported it without knowing it was a Hapax Mimic.
Placeholder for something witty that doesn't make me sound like an asshole

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby mharr » Mon Jul 26, 2021 5:21 pm

Welcome to Earth timeline #CHONN-E-5, unique in the pleasant mundanity of its anomalous artifacts causing the typical containment organisations to exist only as story wikis and videogame scenarios. It's a great place to visit but you wouldn't want to be born here.

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Tue Aug 10, 2021 8:18 pm

Scientists rediscovered the recipe for Roman concrete (noted for being lasting, greener than modern concrete, and - most importantly - relatively immune to seawater or other saltwater!).

We actually had the recipe the entire time, but where it said "mix with water" the Romans always used SEAWATER (Which is also WHY it's, y'know, relatively immune to seawater), they just never specified it because it was a "Well, duh" thing. Same as the way e.g. modern recipes stipulate milk and eggs and we know they mean chicken eggs and cow milk.

So, lol.

Also there was a hilarious argument in the article comments where some guy complained you can't use rebar in this "salted concrete", when it's like, hey man, there's a bunch of this shit that survived 2000 years, maybe you don't need rebar, huh?
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby mharr » Tue Aug 10, 2021 11:02 pm

That sounds highly compatible with house scale printer gantries

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Sun Aug 15, 2021 5:02 pm

I knew about hatpins being used in this way but I'd never known about The Great Hatpin Moral Panic.

You go, stabby ladies.

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 06, 2021 11:54 pm

Viking longships have come in many shapes and sizes over the years, but this is about warships. There are of course lots of types of Viking ships on the longship model, including huge ones with actual enclosed decks (these were almost all Knarrs; fatter, sturdier, slower longships used for trading and exploration, including the famous voyages to Iceland, Newfoundland, etc.), but these are not the stereotypical fast, open-topped, shallow-draft warships used for raiding that usually first come to mind when someone says "longship".

Anyway, those most famous longships have been given many names over the years, but a common one cited as an actual contemporary term in use by the Vikings themselves is a "drakkar".

Turns out that this is a bit of a poetic misnomer because Drakkar, or "dragon ships" actually refers only to the largest of the traditional open-deck warships. The bulk of Viking raiding fleets would have been made up of similar, but smaller ships, which were collectively referred to as "snake ships", or "Snekkar".
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Sat Oct 09, 2021 3:12 am

This isn't a fact that's any fun, just sobering (but this is kind of also the TIL thread):

The general consensus of demographers is that about 108 billion human beings have ever lived, and that mosquito-borne diseases have killed close to half—52 billion people, the majority of them young children.
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Büge » Sat Oct 09, 2021 7:56 pm

Most of us are familiar with the 1999 animated film The Iron Giant, based on the children's book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes.

What you probably don't know is that Pete Townshend (of The Who) wrote and produced a stage musical based on The Iron Man, with John Lee Hooker as the titular role.

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby mharr » Sun Oct 10, 2021 11:59 pm

I'm surprised the movie is considered an adaptation. They're obviously responses to the same writing prompt but wildly different in terms of characters, plot and general cohesiveness as a story. The book is very much from the 'just make shit up as you go along' school of writing for children.

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Mon Oct 11, 2021 12:06 am

I've actually never watched the film. I know the story from reading the book as a kid.
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Upthorn » Mon Oct 11, 2021 12:23 am

The Iron Giant is a fantastic film. I remember seeing the trailers when it came out, and being really excited to see it, but we decided to see Mystery Men instead.
Then about ten years later I rented it and it blew me away.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

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Re: Fun Facts

Postby mharr » Mon Oct 11, 2021 5:17 am

Ohhhh yeah you've dodged a classic there. You absolutely do not know the story beyond "so there's this huge metal dude". Skipping the Iron Giant is like not bothering with Lilo and Stitch.

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Büge
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Büge » Mon Oct 11, 2021 9:02 am

Upthorn wrote:The Iron Giant is a fantastic film. I remember seeing the trailers when it came out, and being really excited to see it, but we decided to see Mystery Men instead.


You know, I think I did the same thing. More fool we.
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:37 pm

That the digital equivalent of the old "Burglar cracks a safe by using a stethoscope" meme is referred to as Side-Channel Attacks

Incidentally, there's some cool-ass shit in there for cyberpunk/spy stories.
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Re: Fun Facts

Postby Mongrel » Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:37 pm

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