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 some examples — There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, say technology analysts.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."

Comments

Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The Egg

[Citizen of Earth]

BullShit! The Rooster came first.....

Yes, but, the father of the first "chicken" wasn't quite technically a chicken. And neither was the mother.

stat on everest

[vingilot]

For every 10 successful attempts to climb Mount Everest there is one fatality.

This is per expedition. See:
http://www.americanalpineclub.org/pdfs/aaj/HueyEve restAAJ_03.pdf

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.

Re:Duh

[Cadallin]

Generally, Yes you'd measure it at 1atm. I'm actually surprised it isn't more than 400L. Note that one mole (6.0223x10^23 molecules, or atoms) of ideal gas (almost all normally encountered gases are close enough to be considered ideal) occupies 22.4L at 1atm. Noting that 1 mole of substance has a mass equal to the substance'as molecular weight in grams, which is 16g/mol for methane. That means that a Cow produces on average about 285 grams of methane per day. Which isn't all that much really.

Taking this further, by rough guesstimate, you'd need around 4000 grams of methane to substitute for a gallon of gas (This one is pretty rough, I'm using 4L is approximately 1 gallon, and ignoring that methane is significantly less dense than water, on the other hand, methane is also less energy dense than octane, so there you go), giving about 2 cow-weeks to produce the equivalent of a gallon of gas (assuming no loses). On the basis of this, I'd say you should take suggestions to run your car on cow methane with a huge grain of salt.

Urban birds and 'rap style'

[GrumpySimon]

Dear god that's just stupid - It's got absolutely nothing to do with rapping or urbanisation, just communication. The more I see of science reporting, the more depressed I get (hence I'm trying to do it better myself).

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:

Worldwide urbanization and the ongoing rise of urban noise levels form a major threat to living conditions in and around cities. Urban environments typically homogenize animal communities, and this results, for example, in the same few bird species' being found everywhere. Insight into the behavioral strategies of the urban survivors may explain the sensitivity of other species to urban selection pressures. Here, we show that songs that are important to mate attraction and territory defense have significantly diverged in great tits (Parus major), a very successful urban species. Urban songs were shorter and sung faster than songs in forests, and often concerned atypical song types. Furthermore, we found consistently higher minimum frequencies in ten out of ten city-forest comparisons from London to Prague and from Amsterdam to Paris. Anthropogenic noise is most likely a dominant factor driving these dramatic changes. These data provide the most consistent evidence supporting the acoustic-adaptation hypothesis since it was postulated in the early seventies. At the same time, they reveal a behavioral plasticity that may be key to urban success and the lack of which may explain detrimental effects on bird communities that live in noisy urbanized areas or along highways.

From Current Biology here and you can even listen to the songs yourself.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs translation

[SystematicPsycho]

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

Re:Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs translation

[dreddnott]

Hexekonta seems to be the way 60 was written in Greek of biblical times, at least that's how I learned it and how it shows up in my Greek texts of the new testament.

For an extra bit of trivia, the number of the Beast is abbreviated in my Greek 'Textus Receptus' as the three letters Chi Xi Sigma, or for short.

Very true

[mangu]

These are the POTUS who died in office, with the years of their last election and dates of death:

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...