Slashdot Mirror
100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year
gollum123 writes "The BBC news magazine is running a compilation of the interesting and sometimes downright unexpected facts that we did not know last year, but now know. some examples — There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, say technology analysts. Urban birds have developed a short, fast 'rap style' of singing, different from their rural counterparts. The lion costume in the film 'Wizard of Oz' was made from real lions. Online shoppers will only wait an average of four seconds for an internet page to load before giving up. Just one cow gives off enough harmful methane gas in a single day to fill around 400 litre bottles. For every 10 successful attempts to climb Mount Everest there is one fatality. Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs is the term for people who fear the number 666. The egg came first."
Just one cow gives off enough harmful methane gas in a single day to fill around 400 litre bottles.
That doesn't sound very surprising, given that a gas always fills its container, just like a liquid always takes its container's shape.
Oh, and by the way, if, like me, you went straight to the bird one, you couldn't but snicker at the picture's caption: "There are an estimated 1.7million great tit pairs in the UK."
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Of course it did! Dinosaurs existed millions of years before birds. I knew that last year.
Ok maybe I have super-intellect or something but some of those things I knew last year. "The egg came first" ... how the heck is that news? Dinosaurs laid them well before chickens were running around... ugh idiocy.
I like basketball!!1!
Though the 666 term of 'Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs' is true, in 2005, "a fragment of papyrus was revealed, containing the earliest known version of that part of the Book of Revelation discussing the Number of the Beast. It gave the number as 616, suggesting that this may have been the original."
FYI: Port 616 is officially registered to SCO System Administration Server.
Eggs were around a long time before chickens.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
I thought The Devil Wears Prada.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
BullShit! The Rooster came first.....
facts that we did not know last year
Sure, but I knew I didn't know these facts last year. I'm interested in things that I didn't know that I didn't know.
Known unknowns just aren't that interesting.
The research focused on great tits in ten major European cities, including London, Paris, Amsterdam and Prague, and compared them to forest-dwellers.
I'd be singing faster rap style songs too rather than longer melodies if it attracted mates with great tits.
We know the egg came first because it was the first to light up its cigarette and ask "how was it, baby?"
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
43. There is only one cheddar cheese maker in Cheddar, even though cheddar is the most popular hard cheese in the English-speaking world.
Not 'round here, sir.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
While what you say is true, I expect that they are talking about it filling the bottles at sea level pressure.
And having visited the UK in 2002, I can vouch for there being quite a lot of great tit pairs.
In the old days, people would scream "the Devil!" when they pronounced the number 666. These days we have a long word to wrap our tongues around to pronounce the number 666. I guess Word Nazis rule hell.
Why is this considered 'science'?????
Gah, what is next? "Barbara Streisand Just Dyed Her Hair" on the front page?
Yes, but, the father of the first "chicken" wasn't quite technically a chicken. And neither was the mother.
They say that last year we didn't know that... Panspermia is the theory that life came from other planets???
I scanned down the list for a bit, but when I saw that, I just had to reread it in surprise, then close that browser tab. I knew that a long, long time ago, as did a lot of other science or science-fiction fans. The wikipedia article on panspermia cites its usage as early as 2000.
I was kind of disappointed.
10. Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth originated on another planet.
Yea, never ever heard about that idea before 2006.
For every 10 successful attempts to climb Mount Everest there is one fatality.
e restAAJ_03.pdf
This is per expedition. See:
http://www.americanalpineclub.org/pdfs/aaj/HueyEv
1 in 54 climbers dies. 1 in 10 expeditions will experience a fatality.
For any climbers out there the above reference has good statistics of risk, including vs denali and k2.
*sarcasm on*
"The egg came first."
read and weep evolutionists:
"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."
See ??? first god created the chicken, then the chicken laid the first egg!
it's so clear now, isn't it ?
*sarcasm off*
What ? Me, worry ?
"The lion costume in the film 'Wizard of Oz' was made from real lions." This was in a documentary in the mid 90's. Maybe the BBC needs to watch more TV.
Flushing a toilet costs 1.5p, but the cost of requiring flushing is, of course, only 1p.
The one I found most useful was:
79. The best-value consumer purchase in terms of the price and usage is an electric kettle.
I wonder what the worst is?
I guess I'll just have to wait until next year to see which is better, vi or Emacs.
'Nuff said.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Ok some of these are really dumb but some of them are actually quite interesting.
For one I didn't realize that the fatality rate on Everest was so high, that's pretty scarey. I guess there goes my Everest attempt, my wife was never in favor of it anyway.
I was thinking about it the other night and I had an idea, they need to put a fire escape type of tube on Everest, the kind you see installed on some high rises. Just a super long one on Everest, that way if someone is having a problem just pop them into the tube and let them slide down to advanced base camp, no rescue operation necessary and no endangering further lives in trying to evacuate an incapacitated climber.
Would something like this actually work? Could it be done in stages? A tube stretching from one camp to the next?
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
The original report said that the urban birds have shorter songs with an upshift in frequency, all the better to compete with traffic noise. You can read a more sciency report on it at Science Daily. The paper's abstract:
From Current Biology here and you can even listen to the songs yourself.
henry -- the human evolution news relay
Like others have said on here, we knew their argument before we saw them say it. But it didn't/doesn't "settle" the question. It only shows their lack of understanding of the question.
Their argument is that some animal that was very close to, but not a chicken (ie, the animal lacked certain chicken defining characteristics) must have laid the first egg (consisting of mutated genes different than it's own) that produced a chicken.
But, what if one defines chickens as animals capable of laying chicken eggs (which is the whole reasoning behind the asked question).
Yeah some chickens are barren, but you can't necessarily cite the lack of a certain feature(s) making it not a chicken. For example, chickens are not blind. Yet there are chickens born that are blind, and we still call those chickens.
So, then. What if a chicken was birthed. That's right. That's right crawled out of it's momma. Dinosaur gets laid. Embryo gets hit by X-rays and mutates gaining egg making technology. Chicken fetus forms in womb. Chicken gets birthed. That's right crawled out of it's momma.
Then the chicken would have totally 100% chicken characteristics and go and lay the world's first egg.
Anecdote: Cave man watching this whole thing is mesmerized and forgets to write this story into stone tablet, instead, he adds eggs and chicken to his grocery list.
Damn liberals fear mongers... So you are calling them liberal fear mongers based on the fact that they called methane gas harmful? OMG maybe we should call the U.S. Army to shut them down since we are in an overreacting mood and all. Now that I think about it... all of these inane comments are always made by AC's. I wonder why that is?
Ouch. You'd think they could've phrased it a little better.
Oh, sorry...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Let me be the first to make the obligatory comment about how that sound you just heard was a joke flying over your head.
At least, 10, 11, 27, 28, 42, 43, 44, 90 and 99 are well established.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
When the news came that 616 was the actual number of tha beast, Dutch radio was very concerned and asked a spokesman of the church of satan wether they had to change all their books.
"Nah..." was the reply. "As long as number 666 annoys the hell out of christians, we're perfectly happy with it."
This article would more accurately be captioned "100 Interesting Things". Perusing the entire list, there are more than a few factoids therein that I did know.
Come to think of it, the name "100 Things That Some People Might Not Know" would be even more accurate.
uh...you're a little late there genius...
This isn't "100 things no-one knew last year", it's "100 things we didn't know last year". The "we" doesn't refer to the human race, it refers at the very most to "the average person in the street", and quite possibly only to the person(s) who pick the things that go in the articles.
This isn't meant to be a list of 100 new discoveries, so can everyone stop commenting on it as though it is?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"30. The brain is soft and gelatinous - its consistency is something between jelly and cooked pasta."
Not to jump on the bandwagon late, here - but I'm pretty sure that's NOT something we didn't know last year...
Let me be the first to inform you that I did get the joke, which is why I said "Yes, but" instead of "No, you're wrong". I was changing the subject from a joke to a slightly more literally serious discussion of evolution. Perhaps I should have emphasized the word "first".
Seems like a pretty odd definition; why would anyone use it? What if we define chickens as animals that normally of launch monkeys out of their butts?
I say if you're laying chicken eggs, you're bloody well a chicken.
"BullShit! The Rooster came first....."
I really don't understand how on Slashdot of all places we end up spending funny mods on cock discussions.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I suppose it would depend on how you define a "chicken egg".
Is it an egg layed by a chicken? Or an egg from which a chicken hatches?
At one point on the evolutionary scale, there had to be an egg that that was the latter, but not the former. If you use the first definition, the chicken came first. If the second, the egg.
This is, of course, all assuming that by "the egg" you are referring to a "chicken egg". If you mean any kind of egg, then, of course, the egg came first, as there were many creatures laying eggs for aeons before the chicken came along.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
"You must be new here."
home
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs -
translated in Greek -
Hexakosio - 600
hexekonta - 60, but I don't know if this is a spelling mistake, should be hexenta.
hexa - 6
phobia - fear of
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
I've suspected this for a long time, but I hope it soon becomes common wisdom:
In certain situations, no amount of military might can force peace.
I'm not going to try and make it any more specific or broad than that. But I really hope that somewhere in the collective pscyhe we let go this idea that enough force can make everyone behave. It can't. If a people are really burned up about something, you'd have to kill them all to control them.
But all hope is not lost -- the alternative is to understand the underlying causes and use military might where appropriate, and negotiation and even *gasp* appeasement where it is not. There is no simple answer to all the conflict in the world. Military might is just one tool in the kit, and a highly overrated one than that.
Cheers.
haha !
No, seriously, they're joking right ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
William Henry Harrison --- elected 1840, died April 4, 1841 at Washington, D.C.
Zachary Taylor --- elected 1848, died July 9, 1850 at Washington, D.C.
Abraham Lincoln --- elected 1864, died April 15, 1865 at Washington, D.C.
James Garfield --- elected 1880, died September 19, 1881 at Elberon, New Jersey
William McKinley --- elected 1900, died September 14, 1901 at Buffalo, New York
Warren G. Harding --- elected 1920, died August 2, 1923 San Francisco, California
Franklin D. Roosevelt --- elected 1944, died April 12, 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia
John F. Kennedy --- elected 1960, died November 22, 1963 at Dallas, Texas
Of 42 people who were elected, 8 died in office, almost one in five...
Yeah, but that was before Lucas bought the rights to a remake ;-)
And the hen didn't come at all
Occupying Iraq?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
How come you locked in on one sentence without reading the entire post?
My point is that their argument fails if a chicken could have been born some other way (live born) besides from an egg. The people who are sure that the egg came first expect us to accept THEIR definition of a chicken that it must be born from an egg. How come we have to accept THAT?
Their basic premise in "settling" the question is that a chicken MUST come from eggs. Which is not something we should assume.
I am saying, if THAT assumption is acceptable, then how come other assumptions aren't.
All I am saying is that, contrary to their claims, their argument does not SETTLE the question. It's more plausible than alternative theories. But it's not proof since it is making unverifiable assumptions.
In summary: The question of which came first is not settled since either "solution" makes assumptions.
5. Standard-sized condoms are too big for most Indian men.
;-)
I'll outsource my big wanker for them on an H-1Big visa
Table-ized A.I.
My favorite dumb sentence was:
Urban tits consistently experimented with between one and five note calls, while those in forests close to the cities stuck to more normal combinations of two, three and four note tunes, the research found.
My first thought was that someone should explain to this writer that two, three and four are all between one and five.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"The lion costume in the film 'Wizard of Oz' was made from real lions". That destroys the credibility of the whole list. The movie was made in 1939. *Someone* must have known - the costume manager, the supplier of the material...
If one could travel back in time and show people this list would the world benefit.
:-) )
If one would go back 1 year.
What about 5 years? or 10? ( for all you smart asses, Yes i would bring a copy of the latest linux kernel sources
with me when i go back offcourse
kind regards,
Robin
If you don't like my sig then don't read it.
73. George Bush's personal highlight of his presidency is catching a 7.5lb (3.4kg) perch.
You cannot sensibly define chickes as the things that lay eggs since you would then have to accept that crocodiles are chickens. I hope you are not prepared to go that far.
The basic idea is that eggs must have appeared before chickens because crocodiles are born from eggs and lived before the first animal that sensibly be called a chicken.
I'm like, mad at numbers. There's too many of them.
"In the 1960s, the CIA used to watch Mission Impossible to get ideas about spying."
They seem to have no original ideas themselves these day - outside of what the NSC tells them (that being the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Defense). And we all know where their advice has gotten us so far. Could Tom Cruise be any worse?
>> animals that normally of launch monkeys out of their butts?
Weeellll.... after a bowl of **my** chili, ANY animal is gonna' be capable of launching monkeys out of it's butt!
Interesting read...
I CLE_ID=44169
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ART
that killing people is just about the only diplomatic skill Americans have.
We are famous throughout the world for arrogance, breaking our word (on every treaty!) and ignoring any other point of view apart from our own.
We rewrite history to claim that we are continuously successful, so we don't need to learn anything from anyone. The current wars are just the latest example of this, and until we educate our population properly we cannot expect to elect anyone who thinks different.
We have a track record of theft and hypocrisy when it comes to industry and culture.
Can you wonder that we prefer killing people to any other form of interaction?
What? Didn't dinosaurs hatch out of chickens in your science textbooks?
This list is UK-Centric - what about us American readers??? Slashdot is far to oriented to the UK these days.
"Harmful methane gas"?
What, no proof of that statement?
Rejected as pure conjecture.
BWilde