Useless Facts

Apparently what would happen was he would, like the famous quote from Francis Bacon, have a few books he obsessively reread, some he read with only mild interest and might not have read all the way through, and some he didn't bother reading at all but reviewed anyway - apparently it was common in early American criticism for critics to do this.

 

I stumbled upon an interesting fact today.

When the Universe first came to be, it had its most prolific epoch. It balloned during a time of cca. 0,000000000000000000000001 SECONDS from a size smaller than an atom, to a size of 1 billion light years.
Comparison: our galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 light years.

And here is a useless fact:
Human eye is not capable of perceiving this kind of speed/process.

 

Methamphetamine is FDA-approved for the treatment of ADHD. And it's technically still legal for that purpose.

 

Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is now known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder predominantly inattentive (ADHD-PI). Similarly, someone who would once have received a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome would now be grouped under the umbrella of mild autism spectrum disorder.

 

That's actually really useful to know. Thanks a lot.

 

@Lemex

That's going by the American Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, though. I'm not sure what the ICD says at this point, and people still use both of the old terms informally.

 

My wife's ICD is silent on this point.

 

I'll have to look into that myself because I sometimes teach vulnerable students - it can be vital having a sense of what they've been diagnosed with to combat barriers to learning.

 

The International Classification of Diseases.

 

An implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD)...

 

When she was being fitted with it, she kept referring to it as an IED...

 

Bill Paxton is the only actor in Hollywood to have been killed by an Alien, a Predator, and a Terminator over the course of his career.

 

I'm a guy.

How's that for useless??

 

Most commercial locks can be easily bumped.

Oh wait, that's probably something you should all look into to avoid being burglarized.

 

If you use Dr. Bronner's soap as a shampoo and body wash, and if you have a bucket in the shower, even though the bucket water is murky it is totally safe to use on your garden. On stuff you're gonna eat. Fact from a water-wizard I know who does gray-water installation systems for a living.

 

Jeez. Maybe he should get out of Hollywood - everything keeps killing him!

 

Tell that to Sean Bean. Even in video games and TV shows, he's not safe. Fact is, you can name all the media he doesn't die in with one hand; two at most.

 

What I find even scarier is over 30,000 people died due to automobile accidents in 2013 in the US.

3 x the gun deaths.

But noone craps on about making cars illegal or banning them or...

 

Yeah, I'm bailing out of this thread. It's getting too political.

#UselessFact

 

The last US war that was declared by Congress was at Japan following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

 

Technically we declared war in Vietnam, in order to issue a draft. Since then everything has been combat operations. Congress has cleared the CinC ever since without actually declaring war.

Edited to add: Oh, looks like I'm wrong. That was a military operation as well. No wars for 70 years then.

 

The practical implications of banning cars versus banning guns are not nearly equivalent.

On to a useless fact: Much of the Mayan population in Guatemala believe in both western and folk illnesses. One of the most common folk illnesses is called mal de ojo, wherein a person becomes sick by gaining too much body heat disrupting their body's equilibrium. Although its exact diagnosis varies from group to group, generally it is diagnosed by rubbing an egg on the person and cracking it open to see if the egg was "cooked" by the person's body heat.

 

My neighbor had the need to tell everyone on our neighborhood web site:
"Extreme heat warning in affect in Bellevue."

That was it, that was her message. Does she think we didn't know? What would drive someone to post that unnecessary warning to a neighborhood full of middle class or better residents, all of whom have access to the Internet (or we wouldn't have seen the post) and access to the outside (d'uh!)?

Can anyone explain that to me? She doesn't have anyone she can discuss the weather with? She had an urge to warn someone, anyone? She was amazed global warming had reached WA State?

I have news for her on that last one, 92F is not reason to panic.