Useless Facts

If you click on multi quote on one or more messages when you go to the reply box there will be an " Insert Quotes" button below it. Click that and you can add as many or few of the messages as you selected.

*also, you're welcome Maddy, but it's Iain with an I, the long spelling of names like Ian Fleming, Ian Mckellen and such.

 

TIME FOR CRAB!!

 

TIL there is a crater called the Darvasa Crater in Turkmenistan that leaks gases after the massive gas pocket underneath it was disrupted by mining, and it has been burning continuously since 1971. It is sometimes called the Door to Hell.
The craziest thing is that it appears to have been lit on fire intentionally by the Soviet miners in an attempt to burn off the methane supply so it wouldn't leak into the surrounding region. But they vastly underestimated the longevity, as they expected it to last only a few weeks. Woops.
Well, they accidentally created a tourist attraction.

 

Blasted Soviets.

Speaking of Soviets...

In light of the HBO series Chernobyl, there were responses from the actual survivors of the incident. One humorous anecdote occurred between two surviving miners, according to Sky News Report:

Andrey Nasonov: (laughing) Look, they're drinking vodka! No one ever drank vodka while we were working...

Vladimir Naumov: Andrey, you can't be so picky about this, it’s just a film.

Secondly, Vasily’s wife, Lyudmilla Ignatenko, really hated the film chiefly due to how it depicted her husband after he was exposed to the radiation. In the film, he’s shown screaming and wailing whereas the real life Vasily was said to have faced his death calmly and was very brave about it.

 

The M101A1 105mm howitzer has a range of seven miles.

 

In Centralia, Pennsylvania there's another coal mine that's been burning for 50 years now.

https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town

 

The basis for Silent Hill.

 

Because of the difficulty and expense of refining aluminum from bauxite ore, there was no significant commercial production of it until the 1930's when aircraft performance started exceeding the structural capabilities of wood, and metal lighter that steel became necessary.

 

I have always wondered why planes were made from wood for so long.

 

This was one of the fastest wooden airplanes ever built. It was basically an engine with wings, and two men were killed flying it due to structural failures while racing. One of the men to survive flying it was an army lieutenant named Jimmy Doolittle.

 

hubby was firing off a howitzer (not sure about the model or whatever) while training in Oklahoma. he's the guy who receives the orders and then tells the other guys where to aim...at least, that's my understanding of it. they were aiming off into the mountains and a herd of deer just happened to be walking through when they fired.
he said he felt so bad!

 

Scariest novels of set in each state!

for some reason, I always though In The Lake Of The Woods was somewhere in upper Michigan...

Alaska and DC were obvious to me lol. I actually made the Alaska joke this morning when a friend asked why Alaska was taking so long to count votes

 

Seven string is just adding a +10 to the thickest gauge for a standard six.
So if it's 42, then the lowest string is 52.
Which is all opposite to piercing and electrical wire gauges. Granted even
tabs are written opposite the way the instrument is strung.

 

Titanium is used for dental implants and joint replacements, not because of it's strength, but because of its good bio-compatibility; low risk of rejection.

 

The model for the Grizzly Bear pictured on the California flag was a stuffed specimen at a San Francisco museum. It was painted right around the time, 1920ish, that the last wild grizzly in the state was hunted and killed near San Diego.

 

The first use of an aircraft in war was by the rebels in the Mexican Revolution in 1913.

 

Apparently Batman was real. He was an ancient Mayan. With this knowledge I can't help but long for a Mayan Batman comic book series.

 

Call me skeptical, but why does it say "Fiction!" right above the headline? That being said, I'm totally onboard for a Mayan Batman adaptation. With the oversaturation of comic book and superhero stuff these days, I'm surprised there aren't more takes on ancient/historical superheroes. Or do I just not know about them?

 

Okay, maybe it's not 100% historical fact. But I'm still holding out hope for Mayan Batman.

 

W.E. Garrett and Sons Scotch Snuff was trademarked in 1870, and was one of the first ten trademarks in US history (number 7), and is the oldest trademark still in use in the US.

 

I was driving home from work when I heard of the death of John Lennon, at very nearly the same spot where a sensational murder happened just a few years later, where the killer turned out to be a California Highway Patrol officer.
32°56'19.39"N, 117° 6'39.83"W
Crime scene. 32°56'39.18"N, 117° 6'27.80"

Related useless fact. The job I was driving home from was at a factory that made Sony Trinitron CRT's. The patented Sony Trinitron was intended to greatly reduce the production cost of the tube. As a positive side effect, the illuminated surface was almost 100% greater, but a down side was that the screen, which was dome shaped on other manufacturers CRT, had to be cylindrical on the Sony, which made them structurally less strong. The reason for that would take a rather long and technical explanation.

That plant was torn down in 2012.
33° 0'56.03"N, 117° 5'18.95"W

(if you copy and paste those coordinates into a search engine, like Google, it will call up a map of the spot. I am a bit of a geography nerd.)
(if you plug in the coordinates in my avatar, it will not go to my home-I'm smarter than that. It is a nearby community college I spent way too many years at.)

 

Already did.

I misspent my youth in military intelligence, finding coordinates for others to rain down fire upon.

 

I joined the Navy to see the world, and saw it as it really was, 2/3 water. My biggest fight was boredom and cabin fever.

 

That's why you're so into grid coordinates.

"Where am I at? Well, I'm between one wave and...nope, that one just left. Okay, so there's this wave coming after the one that I was talking about, see?"

 

We've run aground, captain.