Tell me/ us an interesting fact we might not know. I’ll start.

Wombat poop is cube-shaped.

An average of 1,679 shipping containers are lost at sea each year, and represent a significant shipping hazard. Almost half of the skippers who retired from the ’16-’17 Vendee Globe race did so because of collision with an Unidentified Floating Object, usually either a semi-submerged shipping container or a cetecean.

or.. You are 95% alien, 95% of the cells in your body do not belong to you. They are microorganisms hitching a ride.

I think it’s 95% of the DNA no?

Actual cells is just under half apparently

“Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.”

An average of 1,679 shipping containers are lost at sea each year

A container load of plastic rubber ducks was lost at sea, hundreds of thousands of them, and they became distributed all around the world on ocean currents and became a really valuable tool for oceanographers tracking ocean currents as they monitored when and where they arrived.

It is bollocks, though the reasoning is sound. IPA is India Pale Ale, a beer characterised by an higher than normal amount of hops which act as a preservative for the journey.

That is a convenient coincidence of acronyms. Iso-propyl alcohol turned out to have undesirable health effects but fortunately those were similar to malaria, at the time prevalent in many parts of India. So the brewers were able to quietly change to ethyl alcohol, which with the advent of the crown cork was less problematic. The “India pale ale” name was coined at this time. Subsequently treatment for malaria became more effective so the reduction in cases was attributed to that rather than the change in formulation.

Oooh – good one, Molgrips! I’d forgotten about that story. Linky

There’s also a region in Canada where people keep finding human feet washed up on the beaches. 15 so far. It’s a pretty weird story.

Then there’s the Lego beach in Cornwall.

So the brewers were able to quietly change to ethyl alcohol,

How, exactly? Asking the yeast to excrete differently? I don’t think yeast can make IPA. From Wikipedia:

“In 1920, Standard Oil first produced isopropyl alcohol by hydrating propene. Isopropyl alcohol was oxidized to acetone for the preparation of cordite, a smokeless, low explosive propellant.”

I understood that IPA had extra hops added to keep it stable for the long journey.

Ooh from that Lego beach link, some materials scientists tested Lego and predicted you’d need to build a 2×2 brick tower 3,500m tall to crush the bottom bricks under its own weight.

Dogs poop facing North

No they don’t, regardless of where they are.

@molgrips so a whole 105 years after India Pale Ale became widespread then. Those brewers must have been clever guys!

drink cordite and you’ll do extra hops

cells/bacteria in human body: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19136

Looks like earlier 90% non-human estimates were based on assumptions that people are more full of shit than is usually the case.

The air speed velocity of an unladen swallow is about 11 metres per second.

african or european?

I have more than the average number of legs but less than the average number of ankles.

IPA = India Pale Ale
Berkshire != Berk – It is pronounced Barkshire so you would be a bark which you aren’t

From memory, IPA was developed to be strong enough to make the journey to India before going off and it got lighter during the trip. Iso alcohol would have made drinkers blind.

Anyway, for an actual fact, how about nuclear fuel doesn’t glow green, it’s actually blue (or it is in water anyway).

An average of 1,679 shipping containers are lost at sea each year

That’s what the insurance companies are told. I bet there’s a few that go missing elsewhere.

Berkshire != Berk – It is pronounced Barkshire so you would be a bark which you aren’t

Already covered that, it’s Berkley.

Besides which, pronunciation is in the mouth of the pronouncer, or something. Londoners call me a cant, I’m fairly sure that’s not how its spelt.

Besides besides which, who’s to say it’s taken from spoken words rather than written?

Besides besides besides which, it could well have been pronounced ‘bark’ and corrupted over time as the etymology was largely forgotten.

If you hold a bullet in one hand and a gun horizontally in the other at the same height, drop the bullet and fire the gun simultaneously, both bullets will hit the ground at the same time

More on the Eiffel Tower.

Photos of the Eiffel Tower taken at night are subject to copyright law.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/illegal-photos-eiffel-tower-night_l_5c38bf78e4b0c469d76d9eb1

But you can fill your boots with photos of it taken during the day.

Purple is not an actual colour.

There’s a Sumerian cuneiform tablet that on one side has some dull shit about a corn delivery and a credit note, and on the other a joke about a wife farting while sat on her husbands lap. Written 5000 or so years ago, it’s the oldest know joke

I’d have loved to be in the room when that was translated for the first time 😀

When Stonehenge and the Pyramids were built. There were still woolly mammoths living in Alaska and Russia.

Also on a related theme, Musk Ox, are more closely related to sheep and goats than Oxen.

Liquid oxygen is a blue colour.

If you hold a bullet in one hand and a gun horizontally in the other at the same height, drop the bullet and fire the gun simultaneously, both bullets will hit the ground at the same time

Urban myth. If nothing else the curvature of the Earth means the fired bullet has further to drop.

‘Nuclear war’ in Samoan is ‘taua faaniukilia’

The 2 atomic bombs dropped on Japan were dropped 3 days apart.

In every glass of water there will be molecules that Jesus was washed with.

This one felt unbelievable:

The air within the Eifel Tower weighs as much as the steel it’s built with.

But it too is sort of correct. Apparently to be properly accurate, the statement is the mass of air contained within a cylinder large enough to contain the Eifel tower but that’s a bit wordy.

Related, the air inside the Millenium Dome weighs more than the dome itself.

https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/what-do-civil-engineers-do/millennium-dome

Mary Queen of Scots had a polo mallet made from a narwhals tusk.

She never lost a match.

If you run a rope on the ground all the way around the world (it floats in the sea dunnit) and back to the start, and then run another rope directly above it at waist height (say 1m) all the way around the world (this one just floats dunnit), the second rope is only 6 and a bit metres longer than the first. No replies about oblate spheres please.

In every glass of water there will be molecules that Jesus was washed with

Bollocks, he was just a bloke in a story.

When Stonehenge and the Pyramids were built. There were still woolly mammoths living in Alaska and Russia.

Speaking of Pyramids.

Whilst Egypt is known for “The Pyramids’, Sudan has nearly twice as many. In fact there are a LOT more Pyramids around than most people think. Thousands of them, big and small have been discovered, lost, destroyed and reclaimed by nature in the last few hundred years.

The oldest Pyramid is from around 2630BC, the ‘newest’ probally around 900AD. The Woolly Mammoths lived from around 1.8 million years ago to about 10000BC, but indeed 2 small groups survived until about 2000BC, so for a ‘short’ 600 year ish period whilst some humans were fitting up early Pyramids, there were a Mammoths roaming the frozen north of Earth.

If the entirety of the internet was weighed, it would weigh approximately 2 ounces.

The human brain is the only organ to have named itself.

Every day someone unwittingly does the longest poo in the world for that day.

There are more plastic flamingos in the world than real ones.

My Kid is off with Covid, so weve been listening to a bit of cebeebies radio this afternoon.
This afternoons great fact:

The inventor of Braille, (Louis Braille) started on it when he was 12 and was finished perfecting it by the time he was 15.

if you’re elbows weren’t in the middle of your arms, you couldn’t feed yourself.

if you’re elbows weren’t in the middle of your arms, you couldn’t feed yourself

You could, just not as easily with you hands, but still not hard.

Science has proven you can change the outcome of something that has already happened.

Whilst Egypt is known for “The Pyramids’, Sudan has nearly twice as many. In fact there are a LOT more Pyramids around than most people think.

The reason there are so many pyramids in Egypt, South America and elsewhere is because they are all to heavy to carry to the British Museum.

The reason there aren’t more Egyptian Mummies in museums in Egypt, the British Museum  or anywhere else in the world is because between the 16th and 19th centuries is was more fashionable in Britain to eat them than put them in a museum – and we ate thousands.

We also ground them up to make paint and you’ll  more likely see an Egyptian mummy in an art gallery than a museum as it was a key ingredient in brown paint from the 1800s. ‘Mummy Brown’ was still for sale in uk art shops into 20th century – Robertsons of London was still selling it in the 1960s.

an Egyptian mummy – mmmmm – looks good enough to eat.

In every glass of water there will be molecules that Jesus was washed with

Bollocks, he was just a bloke in a story.

In every glass of water there will be molecules that Jesus washed his bollocks with.

Another pyramid one, the Great Pyramid of Giza used to be the tallest building in the world.
Lincoln cathedral took the title from it, 3,500 years later!