Weird things you never knew

Kilgore

olafgarten said:

There is no such thing as purple light. 

Colour doesn't actually exist as an intrinsic property of light or objects. The perception of colour happens through the eyes and the brain. 

hywelg

rogd said:

Try folding a piece of paper 8 times.

To be pedantic you need to add the words "in half" otherwise it is very easy to fold a piece of paper  8 times. 

chillidoggy

viz said:

As the earth spins, making the moon appear to orbit around it, the moon’s gravity gently pulls at the earth’s water. The water is pulled horizontally ever-so-slightly towards the point of the earth closest to the moon. The accumulation of this causes a bulge of water just a few metres high, and due to the spinning earth slipping beneath this bulge, the bulge moves around the surface, which in turn (haha) causes the high tide to travel across the earth. 

However there are two high tides every day, not one, whereas the earth only spins once. Therefore there must also be a bulge of water on the opposite side of the earth to the moon. 

What can possibly be causing that bulge? What is pulling the water away from the moon?

The answer is that the earth isn’t fixed in space with the moon going round it. The two objects are loose and free, ‘connected’ to each other by gravity. A bit like a bolas or two conkers on a string, they are actually orbiting slowly around each other. This mutual orbiting takes 29 days to complete. Due to the fact that the earth is much more massive than the moon, the centrepoint around which it orbits is actually within its boundary. So it doesn’t really ‘go round the moon’ but it does wobble round and round. 

 

This wobble tends to want it to fling water off itself. The water on the side of the earth that is facing the moon is more affected by moon gravity than by earth-wobble-fling-off-force; on the side of the earth facing away from the moon, the earth-wobble-fling-off-force is greater than the moon’s gravitational force, so causing the 2nd, equal and opposite, bulge. Therefore there are two bulges of water over the earth all the time. 

https://i.imgur.com/VFjxner.jpg

I hope I’ve explained that well - many many sailors don’t understand this, and many models of planetary motion assume the biggest object to be fixed, but the fact is that everything in the solar system (and universe) is free, loose and wobbling about. 

All of which is utter nonsense because as we all know the Earth is flat.

Nitefly

TheMarlin said:

The Rocky Horror Picture show is the only film in the Rocky series not to feature Silverster Stallone. 

Is that the one with Rocky and Bullwinkle?

mendy

 

axisus

There is a technical name for the "fear of long words"

It's called "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

axisus

You're twice as likely to be killed by a vending machine than a shark

http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/08/how-are-sharks-less-dangerous-than-vending-machines-an-exercise-in-conditional-risk/

thecolourbox

There was apparently no such thing as the colour blue in ancient civilisations - Romans and Greeks etc considered it basically a shade of green or "wine red" as quoted from Homers Odyssey when he was describing the colour of the sea.

The Egyptians were the first to have a word for blue, as they were the only civilisation that could produce the colour in dyes or paint.

It's not known whether people could even see the colour blue - there was an experiment with the Himba tribe in Namibia, who have no word for blue, where they showed them loads of green squares and one obviously blue square, and they could not tell which one was blue. 

The comedian Dave Gorman once had an idea for a novel called Hugh's Hew, whereby Hugh discovered a new colour but was unable to describe it to people as they had no concept of the colour this it's impossible to describe it (if you've seen/read his Googlewhack adventure you'll have heard him on about this). Perhaps this is what happened with blue?

Tannin

JerkMoans said:

If you place a chameleon onto a tartan rug, it will explode.

The chameleon? Or the rug?

Tannin

Sassafras said:

I learnt only recently that the male duck billed platypus has got a venomous claw on one of its back legs and that being an egg laying mammal that bears milk, it can make its own custard.

Made me laugh:)

[NITPICK]
Actually, it isn't a "duck-billed platypus", it's simply Platypus. There is only one species (though there were quite a few others in the past). It is actually a spur, not a claw. By the way, the correct plural is "Platypuses", not "platypii". People often get that wrong.  There are three other mammals which can make their own custard - well, which lay eggs and produce milk. They are the Short-beaked Echidna (moderately common in most of Australia) and two other echidna species found only in New Guinea.
[/NITPICK]

Curiously enough, nobody knows what purpose the spur serves. The Platypus is reasonably well-studied but it remains a rather mysterious little creature. They are generally very shy and quite hard to see. If you spend a lot of time in the bush, you might see one a few times a year (or might not). Most people  never see one in the wild. In Tasmania, they are often less shy - possibly because there are no foxes here, but one again, no-one really knows why.  I took this picture 20 metres from my back door and see this one often. He doesn't seem to mind me in the least.


    

scrumhalf

If all of the members of this forum were laid end to end...








... I wouldn't be in the least surprised. 

AK99

olafgarten said:

There is no such thing as purple light. 

Next you'll be telling us there's no purple rain either.. 

thecolourbox

AK99 said:

olafgarten said:

There is no such thing as purple light. 

Next you'll be telling us there's no purple rain either.. 

You normally know if it's going to purple rain, because the hills are covered by a purple haze

crosstownvamp

Ducks have dicks

(other birds don't)

JerkMoans

The correct plural of ‘octopus’ is neither ‘octopuses’ nor ‘octopi’ but is, in fact, ‘octopodes’. 

So there’s one for the pub quiz. And sounding like a know-it-all cock.

thecolourbox

JerkMoans said:

The correct plural of ‘octopus’ is neither ‘octopuses’ nor ‘octopi’ but is, in fact, ‘octopodes’. 

So there’s one for the pub quiz. And sounding like a know-it-all cock.

I thought that octopuses was also technically correct, that the octopodes thing was only because of the word origins and not because that's what the ancients called them? Therefore the anglicised plural is also ok to use as it's a made up word

axisus

JerkMoans said:

The correct plural of ‘octopus’ is neither ‘octopuses’ nor ‘octopi’ but is, in fact, ‘octopodes’. 

sorry, but I'm only ever going to use Octopi, by far the coolest.

thecolourbox

If I recall correctly, an octopus does not have 8 legs. It has 6 arms and 2 legs

Neill

Another geophysical fact that I wasn't aware of until recently is that Mount Everest (which should really be pronounced "eevrest" apparently) isn't technically the highest point on the earth's surface.  The mountain known as Chimborazo in Ecuador is actually the furthest point from the centre of the Earth.  

viz

Waitrose isn’t wai-chrose, it’s “wait” “rose” with a proper t in the middle.