Do you know... (The Trivia Thread)

[ghoulbler]

Did you know that cannibalism itself is not illegal? (at least, here in the US, I don't know about other places). People typically get in trouble with the law for murder and desecration of a corpse, but not from the actual act of eating another person's flesh.

 

[Sylar]

Most bats actually have fantastic eyesight. The echolocation (sonar) commonly linked to bats is only found in a small number of species.

 

[Spinosaurus kin]

Eular's identity I believe it is called.

If you don't know what that means, e is eular's constant, in which an exponential graph of e^(x) would be equal to its gradient.
i is an imaginary number, the square root of -1
And we all know pi, the coefficient used in circles.

I am such a maths geek.

 

[GallacticGorilla]

a group of unicorns is called a blessing

 

[Laughingowl1975]

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the loss of HMS Pathfinder, the first ship to be sunk by a locomotive/mechanized torpedo fired from a submarine and marked he start of the rise of the submersible as a weapon of war. Only 18 out of 259 men survived.

 

[Peace]

Hi all. Why not post some trivia you feel like sharing with others?

I shall start first.

Do you know that...

Singapore's $1 coin is designed to be a charm/bagua (octagon diagram) so as to ward of the bad luck associated with building of underground tunnels for our subway system?

View attachment 6595

The sky is not really blue. It is all of the colors of the (here's my favorite word) spectrum. Red,Orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The human eye is so insensitive that we can only see the blue.

 

[Ste11aeres]

Did you know that cannibalism itself is not illegal? (at least, here in the US, I don't know about other places). People typically get in trouble with the law for murder and desecration of a corpse, but not from the actual act of eating another person's flesh.

I'll bear that in mind. Might come in handy someday...

 

[Manuheleku]

In Alabama it is illegal to walk around with an ice cream cone in your back pocket.

 

[donkey_kebab]

The bolt that holds the rotor head onto a helicopter is called the Jesus Bolt. It was named such by pilots because if it failed, it was the last thing you said/next person you saw

 

[Manuheleku]

Antoine Lavoisier proved that diamonds are combustible, despite De Beers claims that they are forever.

 

[IContainMultitudes]

There's no evidence that Vikings wore horned helmets, some believe that this was invented for 19th Century productions of Wagner operas:

HowStuffWorks "10 False History Facts Everyone Knows"

 

[nowwhat]

"Centrifugal Force" does not exist. There is no force moving the proverbial weight on a string directly away from the center of its rotation, parallel to said string. Centripetal Force, however is often misconstrued as the former, and is simply the whirling weight attempting to continue moving in whatever direction is currently happens to be going (perpendicular to the constraining string). Try it some time. When you let go of the string/allow the sling to open, the accelerated mass, does not does not fly off wherever the string happens to be pointed, but continues whatever its vector happens to be at the moment you let go. Now recontextualize everything you ever thought about whirling and spinning things.

 

[Laughingowl1975]

The extinct Huia bird of New Zealand was unique in the extreme sexual dimorphism of its beak, the males had a chisel-shaped beak while the females had a thin down-curved beak

 

[joshodude1308]

A tantalising trivial factoid of the word trivia is that it derives from the Latin word 'trivium' meaning 'where three roads meet'.

 

[joshodude1308]

In Alabama it is illegal to walk around with an ice cream cone in your back pocket.

Ah... Outrageous laws, you have got to love them... Did you know in the reign of Elizibeth I, it was compulsory to wear a wooly hat on Sundays to support the wool trade?