Useless Facts

I suspect there's a massive layer of nothing but anvils in all the old landfills.

 

Probably not. Iron and steel are really easy to recycle, even rusty just melt them down and turn them into whatever else you need. I'm sure that a couple hundred pounds of good-quality Fe would be worth hauling away.

 

I think this guy has them all. Don't worry, though—he's a super genius.

 

In 2014 the congress of Bolivia changed the clock on the facade of their building to run in a counter-clockwise direction. Why? It turns out clocks were based so closely on sundials that the hands simply move in the same direction as the shadow of a sundial. That direction is what we call clockwise--in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, the shadows move counter-clockwise around a sundial. Thus, the "clock of the south".

 

Nice. My barber has a clock that runs counterclockwise, and the numbers are all backwards. It's so when he's cutting your hair and looking in the mirror it appears rightways.

 

Michigan's state-record fish are recognized by weight only.

 

Quoting from Wikipedia:

 

At least 84,000 websites and apps featuring pirated movies and TV shows make about $1.3 billion from advertising each year.

 

Even Hollywood's illegitimate children are well-off.

 

I'm drinking water.

 

That's a fish's house you freak?!/s

 

FIFY

 

EXTREMELY NERDY LINGUISTICS FACT INCOMING but I really like the language feature Arabic and some languages like it have called nonconcatenative morphology. The basic concept is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle word formation. Or strangely like Mr. Potato Head, to make a cruder comparison.
You have collections of consonants and vowels like a gutted word. And in Arabic at least, in my understanding, you usually fit together a set of vowels with a set of consonants. So as an example from Literary Arabic: "the word for 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root k-t-b 'write' with the pattern -a-a-tu 'I Xed' to form katabtu 'I wrote'."
I think that's very interesting. It's totally different from the linear runs of sound we use in familiar European languages. It's a great demonstration of the variability of languages. There's a lot of creative potential for doing things in many different ways.

 

My apologies if someone else has already posted the math.

A fart lasts, on average, about 2 seconds and produces 375 ml of combustible gas (yes, farts can burn). That means a 6-year, 9-month long fart would produce 39,868,200,000 ml of combustible gas. One fart of 375ml produces 154 joules of energy so that extended fart would produce 6139 gigajoules of energy. The smallest atomic bomb, the B54, produced only 42 gigajoules of energy, so one can easily see the useless fact is, in fact, fact.

 

And also quite useless!!

 

The cost to produce the first atomic bomb was $2 billion, about $23 billion today.

The cost to feed one person for a year is around $3,000. Multiplied by 6.75 years the cost of the raw material for a fart bomb would be $20,250.

Maybe, if my head stops hurting, I'll find the information and do the calculations for what the other costs of a fart bomb are. It might turn into a useful fact if the government sees the cost savings over the current nuclear arsenal.

Until then, yes, they are all useless facts.

 

As we move towards being carbon-neutral, we have to switch back to old ways of doing things to some extent. I don't know what the environmental impact of a 7 year fart is, but that's surely going to be a lot of methane. So bizarrely, a good old-fashioned nuke is likely to be more environmentally-friendly than unleashing Johnny Fartpants as a weapon.

 

So true if the exchange was limited to just one small nuke from each side.

 

All right. I now have encountered people who are even odder and off the wall than I am.

 

Useless fact: At the rate I am reading this thread I won't be done for nearly a month.

 

The Nokia 9000 Communicator, arguably the first 'smartphone' ,was introduced this week 25 years ago.

 

The probability that I will ever finish writing a novel is higher than that of a large asteroid hitting Earth by the year 2200

 

That's the spirit! Keep thinking positive like that!

 

You bet!