[Golden Legacy]

Anything about history, science, the arts, random trivia, that just blows your mind or is not known by many people, post it here.

I'll begin with one. Cleopatra lived roughly between 70BC and 30BC. The Great Pyramids were built around 2560BC. The first Apollo Moon landing was in 1969AD.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to humans landing on the moon than the building of the Pyramids.

[Someone Else]

• The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body
  
• Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California (seriously, how???)
  
• The longest recorded amount of time that someone has stayed awake is eleven days. The holder of this record is Randy Gardner. Note that this is the last record Guiness World Records was willing to accept.
  
• Horses, rats, and rabbits cannot vomit.
  
• Supposedly, the average American will spend 6 month's time of waiting at a stoplight within a lifetime.

[Mallick]

I'm usually quick to bring up random factoids of great interest but...

it's hard to recall random facts when there is not a particular subject at hand. >:

[Someone Else]

Did you know that if you hold down the left arrow key right when a YouTube video starts you can play snake while watching the video? It's true! Try it!

[Drizzy Drake]

^ bullshit

[Mallick]

The Thorny Devil is a species of lizard whose skin is covered with a dense network of cappilarys all leading to the corners of its mouth, allowing it to drink water from any part of its body.

You are now breathing manually,and blinking manually. You are now aware of the human psychology behind this.

In some countries, the thief of a famous work of art may become the rightful owner after a specified time has passed since it was stolen.

A sneeze is about 1/10th as powerful as an orgasm.

Your heart is the same size as your fist. (Proof that a lot of the facts in this thread are not amazing)

Whale penises (Also known as Dorks) are actually large bones (no pun, it's a fucking bone with muscles and skin)

Every time you shuffle a deck of cards it is overwhelmingly likely that it is the first time that particular combination has ever existed in the entire history of humans and cards. (52! permutations equalling 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000 possibilites TROLLFACE)

Isaac Asimov is the only author to have published a book in 9 out of 10 major Dewey Decimal categories. The tenth category is philosophy.

In 19th century Britain the penalty for failed suicides was hanging.

7,000 new insect species are discovered every year. The best place to discover a new species? In your own garden.

2 of the world's largest empires--the Roman and Mongol empires--are each responsible for us not being more advanced right now despite each having their own innovations; the Romans destroyed the Library of Alexandria, and the Mongols destroyed the Grand Library of Baghdad, both of which (the latter especially) are believed to have had copies of pretty much every scholarly book written in their parts of the world. The Grand Library of Baghdad was at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia and thus is believed to have had much more.

Baghdad also used to not be a desert. They had a sophisticated irrigation system that was destroyed by the Mongols in that same conquest.

Google operates the information archives in 36 of the 50 US states.

AIG paid about 1% of its income in taxes after the 2008 bailout; Newscorp regularly pays around 5%; PepsiCo paid much less than 1% a few years ago.

Coca Cola is the only company in America allowed to import coca.

Many Tibetan monks have the ability to decrease their metabolism and oxygen consumption by over 65%. They've also been recorded wearing wet towels in 40F rooms and raising their body temperature enough to cause the water to steam off. Oh, and they also chop up their dead and feed them to the birds since they have trouble decomposing fast enough up there.

Pickles are soaked with enough salt to kill you, and need to be rinsed heavily beforehand.

People who are lying to you tend to look to their left.

You can make upwards of $12,000/year donating sperm, assuming you do it regularly enough and are "favorable" enough.

If everyone in China were to walk past you in a single-file line, it would never end due to the rate of reproduction.

85% of men don't use the slit in their underwear.

Women tend to prefer intelligent and average-looking men.

Weathermen on the news are wrong 54% of the time.

ALWAYS choose your own stocks; You're statistically more likely to get good returns on investments if you throw darts at your stocks, than the packages offered by stockbrokers.

Drugs are used evenly by race in proportion to their population (9.5-11.5% for each), yet blacks make up 45% of those arrested, Latinos make 30%, and whites make up about 20%. This is despite Blacks, Latinos, and Whites making up 12.4%, 15.4%, and 65.0% of the population respectively.



That's about all the contributing I'll be doing for now. Fuck. I tried to keep the grammar and punctuation as tight as possible but I dropped out of english in eighth grade >_>;

[TheEnglishman]

According to 100 facts about Pandas: 'It has become tradition for the departing French heads of state to be served panda as their final meal.'

[Lemontime]

Fuck I hate the french

[ThankMeLater]

=(

[Caael]

A human looking up at a giant redwood tree is the equivalent scale to a mouse looking up at a 6ft human.

[Moonear]

Caael, on Aug 13 2010, 05:35 AM, said:

A human looking up at a giant redwood tree is the equivalent scale to a mouse looking up at a 6ft human.

That somehow reminded me of:

http://www.gifbin.com/bin/1232024489_The_size_of_planets.gif

[Zeypher]

Drizzy Drake, on Aug 6 2010, 12:45 AM, said:

^ bullshit

You can. Just tried it.

http://i54.tinypic.com/2r4qvjm.png

[Saturos S.]

• In Venice all gondolas must be black by law.
  
• Greyhounds are not grey but actually a shade of blue.
  
• Before the 1900's the colour for boys was blue, and girls were donned in pink. Pink was considered to be a more forceful colour as opposed to the more paler, quieter blue.
  
• In the 19th century the word "girls" actually meant something like "children." Not sex-specific. Male children were called "nave girls" and female children were called "gay girls." And the word boy just meant "servant".

[Mallick]

Saturos S., on Sep 10 2010, 03:36 AM, said:

• Greyhounds are not grey but actually a shade of blue.

facepalm.

[Zeypher]

Quote

I tried to keep the grammar and punctuation as tight as possible but I dropped out of english in eighth grade >_>;

How's that working for you?

[I'm Always BROKE]

Amazing fact; my penis is bigger than yours. :joy:

[Mallick]

Zeypher, on Sep 11 2010, 12:28 AM, said:

How's that working for you?

its working out well. why do you ask?

[Saturos S.]

Mallick, on Sep 11 2010, 06:01 AM, said:

facepalm.

The great Stephen Fry said it to be so.

[Mallick]

afaik it's less of a fact than it is an argument of semantics though. it reminds me of the dominant sabino gene in horses. i could be wrong, but so could stephen fry. the QI research team isn't always 100% accurate

[Saturos S.]

Mallick, on Sep 12 2010, 11:03 AM, said:

afaik it's less of a fact than it is an argument of semantics though. it reminds me of the dominant sabino gene in horses. i could be wrong, but so could stephen fry. the QI research team isn't always 100% accurate

True that, but I was watching it the other day and it's one of the few I remembered. Good show though, QI.

[Mallick]

yeah i like it. tim has suggested to me that there are much better panel shows out there though.