Trivia

[MidnightFlyer]

I'm always one for strange facts, and I know many others can find them interesting too, so here's so I know:

Pollen last forever
At any given time, an average of 61,000 people are airborne over the US
Birmingham has 22 more miles of canals than Venice
28% of Africa is wilderness.

Anyone else got some more interesting facts?

 

[DarloRich]

Robbie Earnshaw is the only person to have scored a hat trick in leagues 2,1, Championship,Premier leagaue, FA Cup, League Cup and at International level.

Premiership, West Brom vs Charlton, 19 March 2005
Division 1, Cardiff vs Gillingham, 13 September 2003 and Nottingham Forest v Leicester City, 5 December 2009
Division 2, Cardiff vs Q.P.R., 29 November 2002 and Tranmere Rovers 14 March 2003
Division 3, Cardiff vs Torquay United, 2 December 2000
FA Cup, Cardiff vs Bristol Rovers, 19 November 2000
League Cup, Cardiff vs Boston United, 11 September 2002, and Leyton Orient, 12 August 2003
International, Wales vs Scotland, 18 February 2004

 

[90019]

Birmingham has 22 more miles of canals than Venice

There are more shopping trollies in the canals of Birmingham than Venice

 

[Mvann]

Custard powder is more explosive than dynamite. As seen on "For schools and colleges."

 

[The Barlow Boy]

I'm always one for strange facts, and I know many others can find them interesting too, so here's so I know:

Pollen last foreverAt any given time, an average of 61,000 people are aairborne over the US
Birmingham has 22 more miles of canals than Venice
28% of Africa is wilderness.

Anyone else got some more interesting facts?

You've lost me there pal.

 

[MidnightFlyer]

Pollen lasts forever... It will never cease to be?

 

[90019]

When stored in large quantities, pistachios are prone to spontaneous combustion.

 

[valenta]

It is impossibe to sneeze without closing your eyes!

 

[DarloRich]

Ghosts appear in 4 Shakespearian plays; Julius Caesar, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth.

 

[LE Greys]

Pollen lasts forever... It will never cease to be?

You can dissolve coal (very carefully) with acid to identify Carboniferous pollen, i.e. that from over 300 million years ago.

OK:
There was no such thing as Brunswick Green paint on GWR locos (it was Middle Chrome Green)
The Class 153 is not a train (when running alone anyway)
There have only ever been two tied Test matches in over 2,000 in cricket history, Australia vs WIndies at the Gabba in 1960 and India vs Australia at Chennai in 1968. Despite Australia being involved in both, no player played in both matches.

 

[ralphchadkirk]

The Class 153 is not a train (when running alone anyway)

Why not?

 

[OxtedL]

Why not?

One carriage.

 

[ralphchadkirk]

One carriage.

Hmm... maybe in the literary sense it isn't, but the Rule Book treats it as a train.

 

[OxtedL]

From a pedant's point of view (and therefore, strictly speaking) it isn't a train in the literal sense of the term, but honestly it's one of those things that doesn't matter in day to day life.

 

[HST Power]

Your skin is an organ.

 

[ralphchadkirk]

Your skin is an organ.

It's also your largest organ

 

[HST Power]

It's also your largest organ

Indeed so.

And a group of owls is called a parliament.

 

[ralphchadkirk]

The total length of airways in both your lungs is 1,500 miles. There are 300 - 500 million alveoli and the total surface area is about 70m2.

 

[Eagle]

Two of the men who drafted of the US Declaration of Independence died on the fiftieth anniversary of its adoption.

 

[Hydro]

It's also your largest organ

Maybe for some. Arf.

 

[Crossover]

There are more shopping trollies in the canals of Birmingham than Venice

And considerably less Gondolas too (I think we may both be coming from the same place here...)

You can dissolve coal (very carefully) with acid to identify Carboniferous pollen, i.e. that from over 300 million years ago.

Sounds like something that Sheldon on TBBT would say!

The Class 153 is not a train (when running alone anyway)

Train or not - not really a multiple unit either :P

 

[TGV]

Lightning:

The ionised channel of air that forms the return stroke of a lightning bolt (the bit you see) is only ~10mm in diameter. Most lightning bolts (~75%) are intra-cloud and never touch ground. Of the remaning 25%, most are negative strikes (the base of the cloud is negatively charged relative to the ground), but there are rare positive strikes that carry an estimated 6 to 10 times the energy of a negative ground strike - these are the ones that wipe out power grids, explode trees and kill fields of animals in about 30 microseconds. (0.0003s). The voltage depends on the length of the ionized return stroke, but can be in the order of hundreds of thousands to several MILLION volts and several thousand amps - again positive ground strikes tend to have higher currents based on existing data.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is the most lightning prone nation on earth. In the UK, Cambridgeshire is the most likely place you'll find a thunderstorm.

Some myths and truths:

- Lighting DOES strikes the same place twice - very often.
- Your car protects you by being made from a conductor and becoming a Faraday cage.. Anyone who tells you it's the rubber tyres needs to re-sit basic physics.
- Likewise, rubber shoes will not protect you in a thunderstorm. If the lightning has managed to track it's way through a couple of thousand meters of air (which is a good insulator), it's not going to be troubled by 1" of rubber (that's probably wet anyway).
- You CAN predict when it's going to strike, but it's doubtful if the couple of seconds (at best) you'll get is going to do you any good.
- Harnessing lightning is almost certainly never going to happen as it's VERY difficult to do and probably useless anyway. Massive amounts of power is present in even a modest lightning strike, but this does not mean massive energy. Most of it is lost in heat dissipation and creation of thunder. In other words, it can blow a tree apart like a high explosive, but enery that can be harnessed from this after all losses are taken into account may only power a single lightbulb for a few months.

Finally a joke: What do you do if caught on the golf course during a thunderstorm?

Hold up a 1 iron. Because not even God can hit a 1 iron.

 

[ainsworth74]

There have only ever been two tied Test matches in over 2,000 in cricket history

[Cricketing Pedant] Getting a bit ahead of ourselves there seeing as the current England v Sri Lanka test is number 1995 [/Cricketing Pedant]

 

[The Barlow Boy]

All Polar Bears are left pawed.
A Polar Bear's liver contains so much vitamin E that eating it would almost certainly kill you.
A Polar Bear's skin is black.

London zoo acquired it's first Gnu in 1879
The second Gnu came along in 1880.
They bred and a calf was born in 1883.
Unfortunately the original one died in 1884
The second one died in 1886
The calf that had been born in 1883 died in 1888.
Well, that's the end of the Gnus, here's the weather...........

 

[LE Greys]

All Polar Bears are left pawed.

Not sure whether this is true.

A Polar Bear's liver contains so much vitamin E that eating it would almost certainly kill you.

Same for all Carnivores. This actually killed a polar explorer who had run out of food and started eating his dogs. Whether his companion ate him has never been established.

A Polar Bear's skin is black.

Very much the case. A Tiger's skin is stripy and a Leopard's is spotty. That's why you can still see spot patterns on a black Leopard in the right light.
Other cat ones:
The Cheetah is the only cat that cannot retract its claws
Pumas cannot roar, they meow
Lions and Tigers purr, as do all other cats
There are more Tigers in Dallas than in India

London zoo acquired it's first Gnu in 1879
The second Gnu came along in 1880.
They bred and a calf was born in 1883.
Unfortunately the original one died in 1884
The second one died in 1886
The calf that had been born in 1883 died in 1888.
Well, that's the end of the Gnus, here's the weather...........

for Gnus

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Cockroaches are stated to have survived after atomic bombs were tested in the Southern Hemisphere.

 

[HST Power]

There is an Island North of Russia called Novaya Zemlya, which was the site of the October 30, 1961 explosion of the Tsar Bomba, the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.

 

[ainsworth74]

There is an Island North of Russia called Novaya Zemlya, which was the site of the October 30, 1961 explosion of the Tsar Bomba, the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.

At 50Mt (Megatons) it is comfortably the biggest ever that's for sure, indeed it's 3x more powerful that the largest US test which was Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll which yielded 15Mt. Castle Bravo it's self is interesting as the size of the yield was an accident, it was only expected to yield in the region of 6Mt.

(For comparison to the above the yield of the Hiroshima bomb was in the region of 15-20Kt (kilotons)).

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Nettle Beer is made and sold in Heysham