Useless Information Thread

[trekkie]

Casablanca was based on an unproduced stage play called Everybody Come to Rick's.

[Amazee Dayzee]

The infinity sign is properly known as a "lemniscate."

[tsMKG]

Hey! I found that there's a comic called "Maxwell the magic cat" (Just like the HP! Character)

[kurowolfe]

Lemurs are native and are only available at Madagascar. No penguins though

[Amazee Dayzee]

The lemur that played Zoboomafoo on the show of the same name, Jovian died on November 20th, 2014 from kidney failure.

And there goes another piece of my childhood.

[Hlaoroo]

There is no word in English that means the object pictured below. Every word we have is a euphemism.



The word "lavatory" comes from the French word "laver" meaning "to wash" and the Latin words "Lavatorium" meaning "place for washing" and "lavatorius" meaning "pertaining to washing".
The word "toilet" comes from the French "toilette", later adopted into English as "toilet" meaning "the act of dressing or grooming oneself, including bathing" or "the dress or costume of a person".

[Amazee Dayzee]

The Pokemon Azurill is a Normal-type instead of a Water-type like its evolved form Marill and Azumarill because it can't swim. It was one of the few Pokemon who changes their type completely upon evolving until generation six where it became a Normal/Fairy-type and Marill and Azumarill became a Water/Fairy-type.

[Sleet]

I just use "load gaper," Furrhan.

[Render]

The word "lavatory" comes from the French word "laver" meaning "to wash" and the Latin words "Lavatorium" meaning "place for washing" and "lavatorius" meaning "pertaining to washing".
The word "toilet" comes from the French "toilette", later adopted into English as "toilet" meaning "the act of dressing or grooming oneself, including bathing" or "the dress or costume of a person".

Then there us the term water closet, but I think closet means "small and private room"...
Funny thing is that we use the abbreviation WC in Germany, despite the fact that there is no C in Wasserklosett. xD

[tsMKG]

We use "Inodoro" for toilet but is a bit contradictory because "Inodoro" also means without smell xD

[Amazee Dayzee]

Oh how you got to love those trolls and their terminology.

[Liam]

In 2005 a new dwarf planet was discovered and provisionally dubbed Xena, its moon going by Gabrielle. After the International Astronomical Union accepted the proposed official name Eris, its moon received the name Dysnomia, a Greek term translating as lawless after Lucy Lawless, lead of Xena: Warrior Princess.

[RashallVetkay]

In October of 1961 Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb, was test detonated by the USSR and still stands as the most powerful man made explosion in history.

[CosmicCoyote]

In October of 1961 Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb, was test detonated by the USSR and still stands as the most powerful man made explosion in history.

It was originally designed to be a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb, but was scaled back after Soviet weapon designers realized that:
a.) the enormous amount of atmospheric fallout would adversely affect huge portions of the Soviet Union.
b.) no plane could safely drop the bomb without being caught up in the ensuing explosion.

The design was otherwise considered feasible, though it should be noted that even the 50-megaton bomb needed the bomber to be heavily modified to be capable of handling the weapon.

[Amazee Dayzee]

Don't tease the jaws of a Venus flytrap. Each jaw can only close a few times before the plant dies.

[tsMKG]

In VGchartz , Resident Evil 4 is depicted having a Sega 32X version
http://www.vgchartz.com/game/71190/resident-evil-4/

[Amazee Dayzee]

Houseflies younger than four days old don’t react to light and therefore won’t be attracted to your bug zapper.

[Furryface18]

Scientists finally concluded that the chicken came first, not the egg, because the protein which makes egg shells is only produced by hens.

[Sleet]

In 1999, Pepsi jokingly advertised on a commercial that you could get an AV-8 Harrier II for 7 million Pepsi Points. Pepsi point deficits could be compensated for by paying 10 cents each, so a man tried to redeem 15 Pepsi Points and sent Pepsi a check for $699,998.50.

[RandomGeekNamedBrent]

and that's why commercials have to make clear when something like that is a joke now. he sued them for false advertising.

[Sleet]

Well they won... They still added "just kidding" to the commercial.

[kurowolfe]

The total amount of student debt in the US as of year 2013 is $1.2 trillion. This is equivalent to the size of South Korea's economy on the same year. And South Korea has some of the largest economic growtsh in recent times, so it's a substantial amount

[RandomGeekNamedBrent]

pencils use graphite, not lead.
but much more interestingly and probably not known by everyone is that they never used actual lead. When graphite was discovered, people just thought it was some form of lead, and that's why we call graphite lead

[Saturn381]

The tree sliding scenes in Disney's Tarzan were inspired by Tony Hawk.

[Punchy]

Pink Moon (1972) is Nick Drake’s most acclaimed album and the title track is the most recognizable. The placement of this song in a Volkswagen commercial in 1999 gave Drake instant fame and massive record sales 25 years after his death.

[Cesco]

Every 28 years, there's a February with 5 Mondays. That's not cool, eh?

[Hlaoroo]

Believe it or not there is a species of frog known as the "Mountain Chicken".

[TwoManyTwos]

The number"4" is considered an unlucky number in japan because their word for it is pronounced the same as their word for death. Coincidentally 13 is considered an unlucky number in other places, and if you add its digits you get 4.

[Sleet]

More on that!

Like many Western hotels skip floor 13, many Eastern hotels skip floors 4, 14, 24, etc.

Some hotels that have a large amount of Eastern and Western visitors, such as in Hong Kong, will skip right from 12 to 15.

[kurowolfe]

This is especially true for countries with Chinese communities like mainland China, Taiwan and Malaysia. In fact, for housings in Malaysia where the expected buyers would be mostly Chinese, the houses would be numbered as [1, 2, 3A, 3B, 5...] to avoid having 4. 6 is generally okay here. The number 8 is very lucky, and when Chinese New Year season comes in, almost everything sold has a price that ends with 8s. Like $888.88, or just $xxx.88

Here's another related fact. While the Malay community in Malaysia do not believe in numerology, it is generally advised to do something in an odd number, like when buying a bunch of fruits, or when washing rice before cooking. This custom stems from religion, as in Islam (Malays are almost exclusively Muslims), God is said to prefer odd amounts. This custom also stems from the belief that you should always give one extra in anything that you do in an act of charity and generosity, similar to the baker's dozen.

[Cesco]

In Italian culture, the number 17 is considered unlucky. When viewed as the Roman numeral, XVII, it is then changed anagrammatically to VIXI, which in the Latin language it translates to "I have lived". The 17th of Friday is the day considered unfortunate. In Alitalia planes, the seat rows number 13 and 17 are missed.

[RandomGeekNamedBrent]

There was an animated series made by Filmation called Ghostbusters in 1986, unrelated to the 1984 movie, so the animated show that was related to the movie was called The Real Ghostbusters.

However, that name is actually more accurate for the first series, because it was based on a children's sitcom from 1975 made by the same company. Columbia Pictures even paid Filmation for the rights to use the name for their movie.

[tsMKG]

the oldest post on Usenet (or internet) that has been archived.
11st May 1981:

Won't we need to change the .ngfile also? Also is ALL an acceptable newsgroup
on the left side of the dot such that ALL.ALL will catch everything?


Rusty is right (or is that "Rusty is Wright"?) - we have ALL in our .ngfile
so I tend to forget this. ALL.ALL may or may not work, but ALL certainly does.
Mark

I plan to make the change on Tuesday unless something horrible happens.

I hope nothing horrible has happened.

Link to thread (you can actually reply to this thread): https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!top ... 151-175%5D

[kurowolfe]

ZUN's full name is Junya Ota, and he works for the gaming company Taito.

[Tola]

I didn't actually get this from online, but it's wonderfully useless.

Want to know where we got unicorn myths from? Vikings. There's insufficient hard data to call it proven, but the old burn & pillagers were known to enjoy scamming gullible Europeans they weren't targeting for coastal raids, and they were in a much better position to know about narwhals than some random baronet. Narwhals? Yes, those strange toothed whales: the vikings reportedly started belief in unicorns by killing a few of the poor things, lopping off and carving their horns (I guess the carved spiral was to decrease the odds their marks would recognize them), then going off to nice inland regions where they could swear this mystical horn was off a rare forest animal and could cure diseases, clear poisoned water, etc, etc. The vikings got rich off people too dangerous to simply rob outright, the Europeans got a fancy addition to their mythology and the narwhals, to this day, are often dismissed as myth. Even by people who want to believe unicorns are/were real.

[Seth Shepherd]

Rubik's Cubes actually sparked a great deal of mathematics. Namely, it gave a lot of direction and knowledge in the field of abstract algebra.

[Sleet]

The shortest grammatically complete sentence in the English languages is "Go." The command tense has an implied subject ("you"), and the predicate is the verb "go."

[tsMKG]

The shortest grammatically complete sentence in the English languages is "Go." The command tense has an implied subject ("you"), and the predicate is the verb "go."

As for Spanish, I think that the the shortest is "Vé." wich means absolutely the same as "Go." xD
Also have "Ve." which means "(He) sees."

[Sleet]

Kermit the Frog plays the banjo left-handed.

[RashallVetkay]

From what I've found, Yugoslavia is the only nation to have downed a USAF F-117 Night Hawk in 1999. This is said to be the only reported downing of a Stealth Aircraft.