Useless Facts

I'm staring at a Coke can right now...maybe it's just me but it doesn't look pink. What is the technical definition of pink?

 

And I think that depends on your background. As an artist I see it as a tint of red, but I think a designer would see it very differently.

 

In 1989, the state fossil of Illinois was named as the Tully monster, Tullimonstrum, a bizarre creature known only from the Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois which I need to tell you all about because of how truly wacky it is.



The Tully monster is notable for being genuinely quite alien-looking and famously hard to assign to any known group of organisms. It has been suggested to be a primitive lamprey-like fish, a basal chordate (the group that includes vertebrates, perhaps related to tunicates or acorn worms), a mollusc, an arthropod (insects and co), and more.





But what is particularly strange about the Tully Monster is that other cryptic, hard to classify species are known mainly from very early in the fossil record when the major recognisable groups of life were yet to evolve, but while the Tully Monster is still tens of millions of years older than the dinosaurs, it existed at the same time as a variety of recognisable insects, fish, and amphibians, and the same time the first reptiles were beginning to evolve. The fact then there is so little to compare the Tully monster to is particularly strange. While life around it seemed to be slotting into a more orderly assignment of groups, the Tully monster remained like a relic of a more experimental era that hadn't got the memo. Since the Tully monster was as recent as it was, it must have had a number of close relatives for it to have evolved from, but where are they? And what happened to this lineage, did they survive for much longer after the Tully monster, were they the ancestors of any modern groups?
The Tully monster represents something of the complexity of the evolution of life on earth, showing how some species don't easily fit into the classification schemes of taxonomy or the larger patterns of development we've inferred, and how many more odd pieces there might be that we have yet to learn about or perhaps never will. It is only thanks to the exceptional preservation within the Mazon Creek site that we have good quality remains of the soft-bodied Tully monster. It is possible the Tully monster and its relatives also occurred in other fossil beds around the world, but simply never preserved, leaving the details of their history lost to time.

 

I think they meant that as a separate option for favourite colour.

 

The idiom ‘Pay through the nose’ has its origins in ninth century Ireland, when the invading Danes took a consensus for tax collections by counting the noses of the inhabitants.

 

I just ran across this somewhere and don't remember what war it was or who was involved, but in order to tally the number of dead enemies they would literally cut off noses and keep them. I immediately thought wouldn't it be easier to cut off a finger or something.

Now I'm wondering about phrases like "Let's do a head count" or "A show of hands". And how about "Getting a foot in the door", or "Put your nose to the grindstone"...

 

One nose per customer, everyone has one. With fingers you could inflate your tallies eightfold, and the other option doesn't allow counting of dead women.

 

To quote Wikipedia:

"Pink is a color that is a pale tint of red."

It's not just a colour, but a basic colour; if someone points at something pink and calls it red or white, then they're wrong. That's different to how something could correctly be called both pink and fuchsia. Berlin and Kay proposed an order to the way that basic colour terms are added to a language. English is in the last phase of adding basic colours (stage 7), where it has picked up the terms purple, pink, orange and grey. Russian is also in stage 7, but it doesn't have a word that is the equivalent of blue, because it has advanced further than that. It has performed a similar split as English did into red and pink, so it has words to represent dark blue and light blue, but not something to cover the full range that blue does in English. It makes me wonder if English will end up with a similar split, with blue covering just the light or dark shades in future.

 

I suppose you can compartmentalize too. Think of colors however you want at other times, but if you're mixing paint you need to think in clear functional terms—know which are tints/shades, which primaries and secondaries etc. Otherwise you're going to be lost in a trackless sea of meaningless words that don't help. And you'll have to buy lots of tubes of paint!

 

I consider it a separate color. I'm just being silly.

 

I believe you mean 'lunch'.

 

It's a myth you can see the Great wall of China from space

 

It is not a myth that the world's largest beaver dam was discovered in remote Alberta via satellite images in 2007.

 

Play it again Sam...is one of the most famous lines in movie history that was never uttered..

 

And "Beam me up, Scotty" is similar for TV.

 

In all those shows not once.... weird

 

Mythith ith a married female moth.

 

Wisdom tooth extraction can be rough, but it's usually for the best. Just stick to fluids like your doc said

 

"Luke, I am your father" is another example. With this and the Scotty one it appears that the person's name has been added to the real line to make the context clearer.

 

Screenwriters take note....

 

St. Dymphna is the patron saint of mental illness and anxiety.

She was martyred at age fifteen when her father, a widower, cut off her head because she refused to take her mother's place in his... life.

 

The first crime against her was naming her Dymphna. No wonder she developed issues!

 

Comes from Irish, means a young fawn. Those Gaelic speakers have extra muscles in their tongues so it's not so hard for them to say.

 

Los Angeles’s full name is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula”.

No wonder its abbreviated as L A