You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.
You can tell by the way it is!
And the name of that shape is a chevron.
When a drug company in the 80s scaled up production they accidentally created seed crystals that spread around the entire Earth’s atmosphere that prevented other companies from manufacturing a generic drug without it attaching to the seeds and converting to the patented drug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph#Paroxetine_hydrochloride
Ok, that’s absolutely bonkers
And it’s merely a hypothesis, there is no proof. Also we can assume that chemical plants are aware and have taken precautions, but it still happens. Back in the day it was speculated that chemists caried microcrystals around in their beards. This problem has been around for a while. One of the coolest hypothesis has been put forward by Rupert Sheldrake. He thinks that there is something in nature akin to memory. A force of nature as you will.
I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.
But I’ll give you one of my favourite obscure-ish fact instead: baby sloths are so inept, they sometimes mistake their own limbs for tree branches, grab hold of them with one limb, let go of the actual branch, and fall out of the tree
Naw. Steve, the FBI agent assigned to you, and Dave, my roomie, were just discussing it.
I think Steve kinda likes you…
Darwin drank tortoise piss and, according to his documentation, didn’t hate it.
Ancient Egypt was ancient before it ended. The time when Cleopatra ruled is about as close to today as it was to the first pyramids.
It’s actually even wilder than that.
The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it’s name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that’s pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.
One of my favorite facts is that while the first pyramids were being built, there were still Mammoth roaming some northern European regions (never checked whether this is true or not but I’ve heard it so many times that I want to believe it is true)
Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.
What is GSM?
The thickness of the cloth
What does the acronyms stand for?
Grams per square metre
Americans probably want in trucks per square football field. Anything but metric.
I misstated the definition a bit, although in real world terms a higher GSM does often manifest as a thicker cloth. GSM stands for grams per square meter. It measures how much fabric weighs in a given area. It is a weight rating, not a thickness rating.
Higher GSM means denser, heavier fabric. Lower GSM means lighter, more breathable fabric.
General guide:
120–140 GSM = lightweight (summer sheets, thin shirts)
150–170 GSM = medium weight (jersey sheets, linen duvet covers)
180–250 GSM = heavier weight (flannel, winter bedding)
GSM helps compare feel and durability across materials, but thickness will vary by fiber type.
Thanks!
Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.
I was about to say that it’s usually the right paw I see my cat slowly inching towards my face to slap me for not getting food ready yet while I pretend to be asleep but then realized that you specified male and that she is not.
Why? Are they… alright?
No, half left
Fun fact, you can, in fact, make sourdough with the yeast from a yeast infection, and bake with it.
:(
The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.
Diabetics piss has so much sugar in it that you can make high end whiskey with it.
Wouldnt it be low end whiskey? For various reasons.
I don’t want to think too deeply about it that I consider taste.
So…
How does it taste?
I said you COULD… not that anyone had… Or should.
Someone needs to tell NileRed
So I quickly gave myself diabetes…
Who’s that?
A chemistry YouTuber who is into converting weird things into weird things
Lol. I’d watch somebody try it but I wouldn’t be brave enough to try it myself.
There are no extant recordings of George Orwell’s voice
Also, the word doublespeak isn’t from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.
Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.
Eric Blair was a Trotskyist who wrote
Animal Farm and 1984 to spite Stalin,
as Stalin turned on Trotsky,
as Trotsky was a one-world-government proponent,
(with Moscow as its capital),
with the argument that capitalist nations would do anything
to isolate and destroy socialist nations,
whereas Stalin thought that socialism would bring the
Soviet Union enough success to defend itself.
This had far-reaching consequences for
Eric Blair who was participating in the
Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939,
having joined the Trotskyist resistance group
and saw the Stalinists resistance group turn on them
and outright attacked them.You should read Grover Furr’s book on Trotskty’s collaboration with the Nazis.
If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called ‘tonic immobility’.
Here is a photo from Wikipedia:
OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.
I found a paper from 1928 titled “On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates” written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).
In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:
OK, but, that’s still not it… The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:
Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them… Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.
Like you’d see crazy evangelical pactors do to people on tv?
Ha, maybe! I don’t remember if I ever saw a 180 flip. This is the closest I could find from a quick search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpIglVnYuY
If you have a video with the 180 degree flip I would really like to see it. This context seems like a plausible place to see such a move in modern days. I would imagine that in some martial arts this effect would be well known.
I don’t think anyone was bent over at 90° in the video?
Regardless, that video is incredible; sending it to my ex-Evangelical partner immediately.
2” x 4” construction timber is 1.5” x 3.5” because of industrialisation (not shrinkflation)
Because of universe expansion. (I guess industrialisation also works)
Much as a 12oz steak won’t weigh exactly twelve ounces when served to you after cooking them a 2x4 piece of wood was nominally that measurement prior to the kiln drying process.
It’s more that they used to be shipped 2x4 unfinished, and would be planed smooth on site. Once the equipment and distribution was able to do the planing before it got to the customer, they had so much established practice that the installed timber would be smaller, they had to keep to what people were used to.
the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 3⁄32 in railway in the world.
…honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as “obscure”.
so, bonus:
the siljan area of sweden has a history of building observation towers:
the tower in the black-and-white photo, which started this trend, was financed by a man who made a fortune making and selling multiplication books. basically like books of logarithm tables but only for multiplication. 1×1 to 9999×9999.
also that entire area is europe’s largest meteorite crater:
For a minute I thought that meant the railway was ~3ft long
