Random Facts Thread.

The shadow

The shadow knows!
110 years ago today.
Titanic's sister ship Olympic departs New York for Southampton, where her master, Captain E.J. Smith, will take command of the White Star Line's new flagship, Titanic. This was destined to be Capt. Smith's last visit to New York, a port Titanic will never reach.FB_IMG_1647098999848.jpg
 

nivek

As Above So Below
In 1960, David Latimer planted a garden inside of a bottle and sealed it shut. He opened the bottle and watered the plant in 1972 and sealed it for good. It has been a self sustaining ecosystem for 60 years.

Screenshot_20220312-202052.jpg
 

nivek

As Above So Below
America's 704 billionaires have gotten $1.7 trillion richer—57%—over two years of the pandemic. Almost all of those wealth gains will go tax-free.

 

wwkirk

Divine
Can't vouch for truth, but if true, rather amazing. The question and answer are from Quora.

Why didn't the Latin language thrive and spread like the use of English today, given that it had the powerful backing of the Roman Empire?

I will tell you a little story. A little under a year ago I was on a business trip to Europe. In meeting in Italy there were six of us: two Italian speakers, two Portuguese speakers and two Spanish speakers. Can you guess the language we were using in the meeting? Are you sure? Well, you're wrong: each one of us used his mother tongue and we were perfectly able to understand each other, only having to explain a word every now and then.


The reason why this happened is because Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are in the end just different dialects of Latin. We call them languages because they're established as official languages of different nations*, but I'm sure a Roman legionnaire would find less differences between them than what were found in Latin as spoken in different parts of the Roman Empire back in the day.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
If every person on Earth sat in the ocean all at once, how much would sea level rise?

.

The answer?

The total rise in sea level would be about 0.00012 of an inch, or less than 1/1000th of an inch. If everyone completely submerged themselves, this would double the answer to 0.00024 inches, which is still only about the width of a human hair.

.
 

wwkirk

Divine
The answer?

The total rise in sea level would be about 0.00012 of an inch, or less than 1/1000th of an inch. If everyone completely submerged themselves, this would double the answer to 0.00024 inches, which is still only about the width of a human hair.

.
That makes me feel puny.
Makes all of us look puny.
 

wwkirk

Divine
I had always thought the Germans during WWII were highly mechanized.

Until the end of the war the fuel-short Wehrmacht still depended on the horse for the majority of its infantry’s transportation needs. Journalists by 1941 had mythologized blitzkrieg. But more often Germans conducted a Pferdkrieg, a war relying on horses— and plentiful spring and summer pasturage.
-Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars
 

nivek

As Above So Below
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
art.memes__China's fast railway growth map.jpg

Very useful image to have in mind. That's just 12 years. No more.

That's why China will beat crap out of everybody else in years to come.

Maybe consider starting to learn Mandarin, yoo bro!
 
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pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
I had always thought the Germans during WWII were highly mechanized.


-Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars

More so than many and they were the first to really effectively employ combined arms tactics. Wonder weapons aside they used an awful lot of horses and bolt action rifles no different than Imperial Germany did a generation before.

M117s and Bradley Fighting Vehicles and BMPS and their various offshoots and successors are supposed to be the answer to that in the 21st century. There were still a fair number of horses used in Afghanistan though - not like their general utility has changed. And they're ecofriendlierish, which is now important in the military for some reason.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
More so than many and they were the first to really effectively employ combined arms tactics. Wonder weapons aside they used an awful lot of horses and bolt action rifles no different than Imperial Germany did a generation before.

German army used 1/2 million horses out of necessity, for a simple reason that they have no access to oil. During WWII more then half of the worlds oil was produced by US, than USSR and Iraq and Saudi Arabia combined produced less then 1/4 of what USSR produced ( writing from memory ). So, if it wasn't for access to the oil, Germans would had been much more mechanised. All the oil they had was a trickle from Roumania.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
 

wwkirk

Divine
I did not know this. Snatched from Quora:

Brown light is NOT possible in any way, shape, or form. How so? Because brown isn’t a real color found in the visible spectrum.

“But we see brown things with our eyes! We see brown stuff on screens! There’s brown right there!!”

Assorted-Choc3.jpg

If you’ve ever had experience with using a color wheel on a computer in digital photo editing or drawing software, you’d see that in order to create brown, you’d have to first create orange, which is red and yellow mixed, which are colors of the visible spectrum. Then, all you do is darken it!

Brown is essentially a dark orange. We call it brown because when surrounded by other brighter objects, it looks brown. We don’t see it as a dark orange, funnily enough.
 

wwkirk

Divine
Primarily about a particular classic TV, but also about other shows of that era. (From Quora)

"Originally airing in Black and White, when it [Bewitched] switched to color, the producers realized that they could reuse old scripts to save money. They assumed correctly that the audience wouldn’t remember or would just be tickled to see their show in color. Actually, because of this, Bewitched was cheaper to film in color. If you ever binge watch this TV classic, notice that many of the color episodes are line for line, shot by shot remakes of the black and white ones. More than a few shows did this, although Bewitched is the worst offender."
 

wwkirk

Divine
Most Americans have British accents! (Again from Quora, but with additional back-up.)

Americans DO have a British accent. It’s just a British accent that was common in the early 18th century when most English speaking people started coming to the country.

One Shakespeare teacher had to insist to their American students that they not try to do the plays in a British accent because modern American accents are very close to what English was like in Shakespearean times.

How Americans preserved British English

 

wwkirk

Divine
I think most of you have heard of the Navajo Code-Talkers. Well, the question has been raised (on Quora), why didn't the Japanese capture a Navajo and force him to decode the messages?

Answer: They did capture a Navajo soldier and tried to get him to decode the messages, even going so far as too torture him, but they were unsuccessful. Their problem is that the code-talkers weren't using the Navajo language directly, but a code based on the language. The messages sounded like gibberish to the captured soldier.

Anyway, the soldier in question was Joe Kieyoomia.

As punishment for his inability to crack the code and possibly because the Japanese viewed him as unwilling to crack the code, he was stripped naked and forced to stand for hours in deep snow until he talked. When he was finally allowed to return to his cell, a guard shoved him, causing the soles of his feet to tear as they were frozen to the ground.

After surviving the prison camps, the "hell ships" and the torture, Kieyoomia was a prisoner in Nagasaki when that city was the target of the second atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF). Kieyoomia survived the attack, saying he was protected by the concrete walls of his cell.

Kieyoomia is notable for having not only survived the Bataan death march and related internment and torture in a concentration camp, but also being a hibakusha (survivor of an atomic bomb blast).

After the war, Kieyoomia returned to the United States and he regained the use of his wounded leg, and his feet healed. He lived to age 77, dying in 1997.

Joe Kieyoomia in uniform.

joe.png

Joe Kieyoomia before his 1997 death.

Joe Kieyoomia before his 1997 death.jpg
 
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nivek

As Above So Below
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