What are the facts you remember for no specific reason
Does anyone else find themselves recalling random facts for no apparent reason? Like,
Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest and lost
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Comments134Does anyone else find themselves recalling random facts for no apparent reason? Like,
Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest and lost
White green, green, white blue, orange, white orange, blue, white brown, brown.
T568A White green, Green, White orange, Blue, White blue, Orange, White brown, Brown
T568B White orange, Orange, White green, Blue, White blue, Green, White brown, Brown
Are you making a crossover cable or installing it for the government? Those are the only places that I know of that A is used regularly. Nearly everywhere else uses B in my experience.
Are you making the assumption I am from North America?
Every place I have worked in Australia and Europe uses green first.
Really? I wasn't sure which one I "should" use so I looked at a cable that I had laying around (probably came with a cable modem or something?) and was able to see the wire colors through the connector and it was A. So that's what I've been using when making patch cables or wiring my house.
I guess my question is what's your experience with where B is used? Mostly I'm just curious, it probably doesn't really matter for me since I only do networking work in my house.
I guess it doesn't really matter as long as you stick to one for both ends of the cable
It shouldn't actually matter. It's strictly by convention that the US (and probably North America; unclear about beyond) almost exclusively uses B. The big risk is that people will assume it's B, and the other end is B, which can cause issues when they e.g. replace a receptacle and make all of your connections crossover. But even that shouldn't matter much these days.
There's also some very limited issues switching from A to B on the same line (A in wall, B in patch cable), but this is very rare. If you saw A, it was probably either a crossover, or you live in a place that uses A.
So I learned all this almost 2 decades ago so the details may be off...
There's crossover cables, which are a-b and used if you want to connect one computer to another-the tx and rx are flipped from one side to the other, so two "client" devices (like 2 computers) don't speak and listen on the same line
There's rollover cables, which are flipped on one side, that were used to connect to the console port of a router
Aside from that, nothing about the configuration really matters except being standard. The reason they're not just in stripe-color color order is to separate the tx and rx to minimize interference
I'm pretty sure all of this became moot after hundred gigabit Ethernet became a common thing anyways - they multiplex electrical signals across each of the wires, so they have to negotiate the method or fall back to a simpler protocol from the start. I'm not sure how robust it is to randomly shuffling the order on each side individually (I wouldn't try it on hardware I wasn't willing to risk)
So really, all that matters is that it matches. And since we've been doing it a certain way for so long, doing it differently is a bad idea. A vs b makes no difference, but you could make green the split pair and it'd be identical. You could use the same arbitrary order on each side and you'd probably not notice much difference, although you might get a lot more errors from minute interference
And FWIW, I think b is the more common standard across the world... But any advantage or disadvantage probably died back when we stopped using those trunk lines with dozens of pairs split out on a punch down block that goes to a bunch of different homes
California Cows Don't Dance the Fandango
Steps for laser printing:
Cleaning, Charging, Drawing, Developing, Transferring, Fusing
I've known this for over 20 years and never used it. Thanks catchy mnemonics!
I managed to memorize it for a test in networking class. The teacher was surprised someone actually managed to get it right.
T568-A guy I see
I'm a B guy myself.
Today I Learned!
So any sex position where the balls are higher than the penis could be called "kangy style"?
And that's now my fun fact too lol
The little piece of plastic at the end of a shoe lace is called an aglet.
I learned that from Phineas and Ferb.
IT DOESN'T MATTER!!
In what way?
That was just a quote from that episode. Candace repeatedly yells that at the boys as they celebrate aglets.
Sorry that it came off like I was screaming at you. I should have put it in quotes.
I haven't seen the episode in a decade, but reading it again in her voice made me laugh.
Thank you Terraria for this useless piece of info
Pretty sure it was the movie Repossessed with Leslie Nielsen that taught me this one.
Their true purpose is sinister
I was gonna correct you and say aiglet, but turns out it's both correct
Laser is an acronym and doesn’t have a god damned Z in it.
Laser is no longer an acronym. It's now an anacronym, which means it's its own word (despite originally being an acronym)
Source: Wikipedia
Well TIL!
TIL - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
That reminds me, so is SCUBA, RADAR and MODEM...I miss the old History Channel shows, especially Modern Marvels
SCUBA: Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (Blew my mind for some reason when I learned that)
RADAR: Radio Detection and Ranging (I've watched alot of WWII documentaries)
MODEM: Modulation Demodulation (I've worked in tech)
So is Tuba: Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus
Also, Lithuania is really good at making the fancy ones, like ones for research, variable frequency ones, femtosecond ones, etc.
I had to look it up, but we're #13 by global export value (not counting laser diodes)
Seth McFarlane slept in one morning and missed his plane home. Little did he know that this exact plane hit the World Trade Center.
Orcas are a natural predator of the moose
Orcas are a natural predator of everything that his the ocean. Fun fact, orcas have been known to toy with seals by catapulting them with their tails. I believe I remember seeing at least one baby seal got seventy feet in the air before returning to the sea (and its inevitable death).
I hate to break it to ya, but moose aren't in the ocean.
All cases known to have happened are in Alaska, where moose were swimming across straits and between islands. Orcas are opportunistic hunters and nearly anything swimming in water deep enough for them to swim in has a chance of being eaten. Most of them keep their distance from humans but if you were swimming in their territory away from civilization and boat traffic you might be stalked and hunted.
oh that's interesting! Thanks I didn't know that!
Ohio is the only state that doesn't share any letters with mackerel
obvious proof for ohio not being real
Sharks have existed on earth longer than trees have.
2 facts about the CMOS battery on a motherboard: CMOS stands for "complimentary metal oxide semiconductor". Its a 2032 watch battery.
Also, the 2032 numbering indicates its physical size: it's 20mm x 3.2mm. There are for example 2025's (like in my car remote) that are 20mm x 2.5mm.
And CMOS refers to what the battery was powering on the motherboard (a small amount of CMOS static RAM) rather than anything about the battery itself. I don't know if motherboards still use any static RAM, the batteries might only be there to power the clock these days, making the name just a historical convention.
It goes beyond button batteries too. Lots of batteries use the same system. For instance, many flashlights run off of 18650 cells.
How to get all kremkoins in Donkey Kong Country 2, through a cheat:
In no moment you can touch the two lone bananas close to the entrance of the cabin.
...it has been decades since I played this game, and I almost never used the cheat above (it's less fun than finding all bonus stages). Why do I still remember this?
I still remember the cheat for the first game. Down Y Down Down Y when cranky appears in the title to play bonus stages.
I remember this one too! There was also B A↓B↑↓↓Y (bad buddy) to switch when you wanted in 2P, instead of waiting until the arsehole playing with you to switch it.
Plus LRR LRR LR LR for DKC3. Then you'd insert a cheat and... I don't remember them. Damn.
-All of the planets in the solar system can fit between the earth and the moon -Stoplights detect your presence with an electromagnetic field using wires and not pressure -There is a receiver above stoplights that EMS vehicles can trigger to change the light red for everyone -We left astronaut poop on the moon -The numbers on a toaster are not always in minutes -Most common mold is not dangerous when ingested or inhaled unless you are allergic -Celeste Tea was founded and made by a cult, maybe still is -Christian Science had laws passed in the majority of states in the 80s that prevented prosecution of child abuse due to religious practices -The statistical value of a human life in the US is 10 million at dollars -Jellyfish reproduce and are birthed as polyps on the ocean floor -The chiral version of the sugar molecule would taste identical to sugar but is indigestible, we have no practical ways to produce it though afaik -Only one president has failed to release his tax documents -There are multiple US presidents who were likely gay
I’ll stop there, and yes these facts do rotate through my head for no real reason, they’re just fun!
Male bedbugs have a knife-like penis. To have sex, they stab the females in the thorax with it because the females don't have genitalia. The semen is then injected directly into the female's main body cavity for insemination
This goes by the pleasant sounding scientific name of "traumatic insemination".
I don't like you
Okay?
Karl Marx got drunk one night and, after being kicked out of a bar in London where he got drunk, went around London and almost got arrested sabotaging the lamp posts with rocks with his colleagues who were also drunk.
They're them at the glowing bit until it's dark.
Throwing rocks at the glass part that emits light, taking out the bulb.
There are approximately π x 10^7 seconds in a year. It differs by less than 0.4%).
If I was able to remember them on cue I would probably be a lot more interesting of a person.
The topic has to seed first and then all of the information I know about it rushes in.
The buttons on suit jackets are a holdover from a time that buttons were new, and therefore fashionable. Well to do sorts had buttons all over their suits, even in places that would be considered silly these days.
When buttons were new and therefore fashionable? I feel like buttons predate suits by a wide margin.
Maybe it was for a new kind or material of button? This factoid is from long ago and is half remembered.
Similar fact - ties, as in neck or bow, are the only common men's clothing item that serve no practical purpose.
Tegucigalpa is the capital of Honduras. No idea where I learned that
About 30-some years ago I borrowed a book of facts from the library, and the two I remember are:
I have no idea if they're true, but they're burned into my brain.
The Moon is moving away from the Earth by approximately one inch per year. Which also means that millions of years ago it was much bigger in our sky.
I believe it's closer to 1,5cm per year.
And if you reverse extrapolate that some 65 million years, you'll see that the real reason why the dinosaurs ied out was because they all got hit in the head with moon!
If this is true, then 97.5 million cm = ~600 miles. Or, 0.25% of the distance to the moon....a small difference.
It's not funny anymore if you prove me wrong by math :-)
To add to this, the sun will expand into a red giant in approximately 5 billion years, which is likely to consume both Earth and the Moon. This will happen before the Moon is able to leave Earth's orbit, so it'll shrink in the sky but odds are it won't leave the Earth's orbit before both are destroyed by the expanding sun in the future.
On top of that, the sun is slowly getting hotter as it gets older, so in approximately 1 billion years, the sun will have gotten hot enough to render most, if not all of the Earth uninhabitable for life as we know it.
Space is fascinating.
aha, I knew it! climate change is a hoax! the sun is just getting hotter, it's all natural! /s
So, possibly stupid question:
Will the sun's gravity change as it expands, pulling things out of current orbits, or will it just change in size & not in mass?
Great question!
No, the Sun's diameter will expand greatly but it's mass will remain mostly the same, if anything it'll be ejecting significant amounts of stellar matter when it turns into a red giant and will be losing mass.
Mass is what dictates the gravity of a given object. If you replaced the sun with a black hole of the exact same mass, everything in the solar system would retain its exact same orbit outside of those few unfortunate objects that were very close to the sun (much closer than Mercury) when it got swapped out for a black hole of the same mass.
So even though the Sun will eventually swell up into a red giant and eat most, if not all of the inner planets, it's gravity will remain the same despite its massively increased diameter, and its gravity will get weaker as the red giant ejects stellar matter over its relatively quick life. Eventually it'll eject its outer layers, creating a new nebula thanks to the star ejecting all of its outer layers and leaving behind the dead core of a star called a white dwarf. These dead stars are often similar in size to the Earth but typically have a mass close to that of our sun.
Stanislav Petrov's name, for some weird reason. Lots of people can tell the story but just refer to him as 'a radar operator'.
The only guy to shoot down an F-117? Lazerpig just mentioned him in a video a week ago
You are thinking of Zoltán Dani? That is another good story. Petrov was famous for not being aggressive.
Yes, thanks for the clarification!
rats can't vomit
This is why rat poison works. There's no way to get it out quickly once it goes in.
Platypuses hunt underwater using bioelectric sensors in their bills. Also, you cannot beat the final boss in X-Men for Sega Gamegear unless you are using Iceman.
The solar system is
99.98%99.86% (see thread) sun. The rest is comparable to a blood draw from a human.The earth is a blood smear on a slide.
The sun is about 1000 times the mass of Jupiter. You're off a decimal place.
Edit: That in and of itself is a quotable fact. The real number rounds to 1053. So it's about 5% off. It's a meaningless coincidence.
Better ones include that our moon can produce both total and annular eclipses, and (geometrically) all the other planets fit between the earth and moon, but not by much.
Not a decimal place, a tenth of a percent. The sun is 99.86% of the solar system.
Wikipedia has a fine pie chart featuring Jupiter and Saturn (which is 90% of the Solar System mass not in the sun)
0.14% of a 90KG human is still only 126ml so still about a blood draw.
The proportion is about 0.998, and the parent post had it at 0.9998. You move the decimal point by adding 9s. There was one too many. It was off by a decimal place.
Whether you would call that "off by decimal place" or not, it is certainly larger than being off by "a tenth of a percent". That would mean the error bars of number 0.9998 ± 10% [edit: oops, did i miss a decimal place there. i'll leave it] would just close the gap.
I like the proportion of the smear, aka, the whole point of your post. I never heard it in those terms. It reminds me of the one where if the earth were a basketball, the moon would be a tennis ball about 9 feet away. I'll calc out the percent errors if anyone cares.
Eh. It's fixed now. I appreciate the data correction regardless.
Yeah, come to think of it, "moving the decimal" is wrong too. There must be a term for moving the decimal in the "one minus x" complement.
Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.
Aibohphobia is the (unofficial) fear of palindromes
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words.
That is just as cruel as forcing speech impaired people to pronounce the word speech-language pathologist.
Bananas are 4011 when buying them.
What
4011 is the PLU code for bananas. This is the number the cashier types in to weigh and sell them to you. Bananas are usually one of the cheapest items per pound in a grocery store, so I've "heard rumors" from a "friend" that if you type this number into a self checkout machine, whatever you weigh is charged as bananas instead of saffron or black truffles or whatever.
most grocery stores have a number system so that a cashier can punch in a number to ring up a certain product. this is especially useful for fruit and vegetables, as often times it doesn't have packaging and doesn't have a barcode. the vast majority of groceries use 4011 as the number for bananas.
I'd imagine it's because the number 4011 is already used in production and logistics of bananas, so the grocery stores just stick to the barcode/number that bananas already have on their box when they get delivered. that's just a guess though.
Like this, except it's operated by the cashier?
kinda. the device in your image only does the job of weighing product, and applying a price per weight to the measurement and printing a barcode label based on that. the 4011 will probably only be used by cashiers, who usually have a number pad to enter those numbers into the point of sale system, instead of a button for each possible number. the device in your image is probably designed like that because it's for customers and easier to operate. there is probably a chart somewhere out of frame that translates those numbers into products.
Pretry much. Not on a chart, but on the price label of the product you'd be buying. I don't think any store here does weighing at the cashier.
I see, interesting. thanks for that insight.
Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
The USS Texas in WW2 partially sunk itself (flooded watertight compartments, if I remember correctly) to gain a higher elevation to shoot fortified bunkers farther inland than it could reach otherwise. I learned this on Reddit and never forgot it, oddly enough.
Octopi have three hearts
Don't they also have nine brains (one little one in each tentacle, and a larger central brain)?
My understanding is that it's not that simple. By your logic, humans also have several brains. for example, your spine is doing some processing on the signals from your limbs. it's how that reflex works when the doctor hits your knee with a hammer. the signal travels to your spine, the spine recognizes some pattern, and returns a signal to jerk your leg. the signal doesn't need to reach your head to trigger the reflex. basically, your whole nervous system is the brain, it's just that the vast majority of your nervous system is inside your head.
it's the same for octopi, but much more extreme. I think they have like 50% of their nervous system in their 'brain', and the rest is distributed across their tentacles.
feel free to correct me, I wrote this entirely based on my memory so I might be off.
This is one of those complex topics that we don't truly understand well yet
We've called them a distributed intelligence, because they do basically have a core brain and auxillary brains - but is there really any other kind?
It seems to be to be something like their core brain is in control, and the auxiliary brains are a combination motor cortex/occipital lobe (vision is our primary sense, but even though their eyes are better they have taste+smell+touch+em sense? All over their tentacles).
Conversely, we also have a brain worth of neurons in our gut and a lot of capacity to learn reactions at the spinal cord. Our brains could also be described as several brains clumped together... Personally, my fingers know a ton of things I don't know consciously.
We also have the capacity to "run" two human level intelligences - server the link between the hemispheres and you can get an auxiliary person who can have different opinions, understand language independently, and even communicate separately through writing
We really don't know how brains work, they're black boxes to us. We know that "if I destroy this region, it will impact that capability", but in a more fundamental sense? We've barely scratched the surface
Hyponatraemia occurs when sodium levels in the blood stream drop below 135 mmols/L.
I work in IT and this in no way applies to any aspect of my life (so far)
I have experienced this, would not recommend
Bicycle wheels with quick release axles have 9.525mm diameter, rounded up to 10mm. This is because the sizing is not actually metric, but 3/8 inch so imperial.
This is why it's most commonly called 9mm qr (quick release) /facepalm
To be fair, 0.5mm is a good clearance foe that application
2.2lbs to a KG
Should probably make an effort to know so many as a Canadian but only know the one conversion
5cm to 2 inches. It's slightly off but good to a 30cm = one foot.
Useful when converting penis measurements.
If you try to use the god mode code from Doom in Heretic, it kills you and tells you not to cheat.
IDDQD
Forever remember it
I think the 2nd Descent game worked in a similar fashion. Entering a cheat code from the first Descent game would reduce you to 1% shields and health.
male otters have a pocket to store their favourite rock. They use this rock to bash females unconcious and rape them.
The Roman names for the three fates are Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.
Actually, I suppose there is a reason I remember this, it's because of Golden Sun.
in Earthbound, there's an exploit where you can have technically infinite PP if you put a Magic Truffle to the last slot of your inventory and buy a good amount of Ketchup Packets.
When you use the Magic Truffle in a battle, only just a Ketchup Packet will be consumed but not the truffle - you still gain 90 PP.
This is an urban legend
Can we have a citation please?
From what I can tell,every account that people have cited as evidence for Charlie Chaplin losing a look a like contest are anecdotal and cant be verified.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9423/did-charlie-chaplin-lose-a-charlie-chaplin-look-alike-contest
But Dolly Parton really did lose in a Dolly Parton lookalike contest - and the winner was a drag artist (pretty sure it was a drag competition, and Dolly entered it for a laugh).
Dolphines are whales. People keep doubting me, whenever I bring that up :D
Why do people keep doubting you?! They are the exact same but a little bit smaller. Nobody bats an eye when we say that lions and tigers are cats... people are dumb.
Aren't dolphins, whales and orcas all part of the cetacean group?
XcQ, link stays blue
Scots have 421 words for "snow"
Name three.
Snow
Shite snow
Fookin snow
Nobody in Scotland has ever unironically said "fookin".
Snow, sleet, slush. Those aren't really Scots words though, I think they were mixing it up with the (also not really true) factoid that Inuits have hundreds of words for snow.
Did we aye
Away an shite
I before e but not after c
Don’t forget the rest:
“…and in long “a” such as neighbor and weigh.”
That's weird.
I have a lot of specifications stuck in my head from previous jobs. A fun one is that precast concrete bridge beams aren't just concrete and rebar. They typically have a bunch (20-30 or more depending on size) of 13 mm steel cables that are each under about 13,000 kg of tension. The cables are pulled to a specific tension in the concrete form, the concrete is poured around them, then the cables are cut at each end.
Carrots are good for your eyes. I learned it from the movie Shoot'em Up where Clive Owen plays an assassin and he eats carrots because it's good for his eyes.
I've heard this is not true, but it was a lie by the UK government to cover up the invention of radar and the cracking of the enigma code.
While the US uses the imperial system for most things the pharma/medical industries use the metric system
As does the auto industry, aerospace...
Outside of construction and plumbing plenty of stuff is metric here. Even our weird imperial units are based on metric units.