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 some examples — There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, say technology analysts.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.
It's not "things we didn't know last year," it's "factoids the Beeb's own magazine liked from their lists this year."
Still interesting, tho, even with a misleading headline.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
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.
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.
Highly misleading.
30. The brain is soft and gelatinous - its consistency is something between jelly and cooked pasta.
You mean that we didn't know that years prior?
31. The Mona Lisa used to hang on the wall of Napoleon's bedroom.
You mean they found it 'this year?'
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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.
30. The brain is soft and gelatinous - its consistency is something between jelly and cooked pasta.
You mean that we didn't know that years prior?
Well, they didn't know how well it was cooked. It was previously thought to be al dente. They've now confirmed that it is closer to Kraft Dinner.
--sugarman--
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.
I thought the cock came first.
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 ?
Ok Mr Smartypants, Which came first, the Dinosaur or the Egg?
Well, yeah. The previous misconception was that it was hung on the ceiling over his bed.
testing out my trending skills
There are *some* genuine discoveries on that list, but most of it is garbage.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
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
There is no "debate" between Creationism and the theory of evolution. And to bring that into the scope of the article discussed does it an injustice. The article, by the way, did no treat the "chicken or egg" question as a philosophical/rhetorical one, but as a scientific one.
I like basketball!!1!
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
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."
Of course, implied was that they mean a chicken egg. So: Which came first: the chicken egg or the chicken? Technically, you're mostly correct, but it's a lot less 'duh' than you yourself imply.
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...
Not to mention that the costume designers knew it when they made the film.
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".
But what do you define as the pre-chicken ancestor? Evolution is a slow process and the "pre-chicken ancestor" is likely not that different from a chicken.
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.
The egg was shown to come first, via evolution, long ago -- the chicken-like pre-chicken laid a mutated and/or cross-bred egg that hatched into a chicken. Arguments like this one just end up looking exactly like arguments for creationism.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
"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
Most of it is meant in fun, which is very much a tradition amongst news outlets at this time of year throughtout the English speaking world (yes, even the Australian-English speaking world)
That doesn't make it "garbage" - just not meant to be taken seriously, and if you look at the rest of the site, you'd soon realize that was the case!
I'm just surprised that there wasn't an explanation for 42 in other than Douglas Adams' words in the list! Oh well, next year, perhaps.
WRT the 400 liters of methane a day, a number of years ago I watched with interest a documentary of an experimental house in India, which was built with a huge bladder under the floow, said bladder being filled with cow dung on a regular basis, and the resultant gas was being used to cook the family meals. looked like a good use for this by-product, and helped to prevent the release of methane into the atmosphere, which must be a good thing IMO.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
"misleading headline"
Yes, perhaps it should have been titled "100 things beeb magazine didn't know last year".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
6. The late Alan "Fluff" Freeman had trained as an opera singer.
Because it was a non-story? Or did people really care?
7. The lion costume in the film Wizard of Oz was made from real lions.
I'm assuming they knew this when they made it.
9. Fathers tend to determine the height of their child, mothers their weight.
Maybe scientists didn't know this, but tall men have probably known it for a while.
11. An infestation of head lice is called pediculosis.
An infestation of inaccurate headlines is called ridiculosis.
15. Donald Rumsfeld was both the youngest and the oldest defence secretary in US history.
I'm guessing someone figured that out three years ago when he surpassed George Marshall as the oldest.
17. Coco Chanel started the trend for sun tans in 1923 when she got accidentally burnt on a cruise.
Does that even warrant a comment?
20. Sex workers in Roman times charged the equivalent price of eight glasses of red wine.
Even assuming "things we forgot" counts as things we didn't know, that brothel was discovered in 1862.
24. One third of all the cod fished in the world is consumed in the UK.
Only 1/3?
28. More than 90% of plane crashes have survivors.
If you count the crashes that don't involve falling out of the sky. Anyway, the story appeared on CNN in 2005, and the report is from 2000.
32. Barbie's full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts.
This is from 2003..
35. There were no numbers in the very first UK phone directory, only names and addresses. Operators would connect callers.
Someone just finally got around to opening the very first UK phone directory?
37. Pavements are tested using an 80 square metre artificial pavement at a research centre
You mean they test materials now?
41. Some Royal Mail stamps, which of course carry the Queen's image, are printed in Holland.
Insert prior evidence here.
42. Helen Mirren was born Ilyena Lydia Mironov
2004.
48. Allotment plots come in the standard measure of 10 poles
2001
49. When filming summer scenes in winter, actors suck on ice cubes
1978
50. There are 60 Acacia Avenues in the UK.
Didn't know, or didn't care to know?
I'll let someone else do the last 50.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Agreed with the "most of it is garbage". See the Language Log for informed debunking of 45 and 57 (btw, the Language Log is highly recommended. In the best Reithian traditions, it manages to "inform, educate and entertain" - something the BBC website would do well to take note of). The quality of science and technology reporting on the BBC (and this goes for all news organisations that I'm aware of) is just pitiful.
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...
See here for why that doesn't mean anything.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Yeah, but that was before Lucas bought the rights to a remake ;-)
> 48. Allotment plots come in the standard measure of 10 poles
Good, I much prefer my land measured in poles than russians
*queue loss of karma*
ba dump bump!
I wonder if the tin man costume was made from real tin men...
Occupying Iraq?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
...And weight in stones.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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.
In certain situations, no amount of military might can force peace.
I saw an interesting piece of graffiti when I was in high school that read:
Fighting for peace is like f***ing for celibacy
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...
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?
Heh... Troll. Guess we haven't learned this lesson yet :)
Cheers.
Amusing :) But I do think it's a little more subtle than that. There are many cases where military intervention is the best way to peace. The classic example would be WWII. But it is unfortunate that we think we can always make peace, or make people behave, with force. It just doesn't usually work. Until someone comes up with a good theory about when to apply force, we're just going to keep making these foolish mistakes over and over.
Cheers.
Still interesting, tho, even with a misleading headline. They meant with 'we' not 'the public', but the BBC-people. Things not known to mankind, is something different than 'things we at the BBC-office didn't know'.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
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.
No. The suit was made from tuna cans.
Live forever, or die trying.
The egg rolls off the chicken, sweat rolling off his brow. He reaches to the bedside table, takes out a cigarette and lights it. He turns to the egg and says, "Well, I guess we settled THAT question!"
Godless heathen.
some of those things I knew last year
The paper is using the editorial "we." The title does not mean "Things no one knew last year," it means "Things we, the editorial staff of this news organization, did not know last year."
Well I'm American and I certainly don't prefer killing people. But yeah, broadly speaking, you're right.
I guess I shouldn't be, but I'm fairly surprised that my original post was moderated as a Troll since it's a fairly innocuous statement. Just trying to get people to think a little about how our Iraq plans haven't gone as well as we'd hoped. Not even blaming anyone... but I even the idea that we can't machine-gun and atom-bomb our way to a better tomorrow is still too tough to swallow. Even here on Slashdot where the populous is a hair sharper than average. Oh well... maybe in another 1000 years.
Cheers.