Used to do this in payphones as a kid. The numpads were disabled when no coins were inserted, effectively disabling tone dialing. But pulse dialing still worked.
In case anyone is wondering, this is how old phones with rotary dials worked: you wound the dial to the digit you needed and the built-in mechanism would automatically wind it back; as it did it would momentarily disconnect the line as it passed each digit generating pulses that the exchange would count. If you still live somewhere where landline phones exist odds are this still works because the exchange maintains backwards compatibility with pulse dialling.
Up until about twenty years ago virtually every supermarket had a phone by the checkouts with a single pre-programmed button for a local taxi company; we used this trick all the time to call home, our mates, etc.
The "brat" in "bratwurst" doesn't come from "braten", which means to fry. It actually comes from the old German word "brät", which means finely chopped meat.
A compound word that enters another language via direct translation of its parts.
As an example, "loanword" comes from German "Lehnwort", with Lehn = loan and Wort = word.
I'm convinced people that "can't" just don't know how.
It's the same movement as closing your throat off so you can open your mouth underwater, and you just push "up" past that till it puts pressure on the eustachian tubes, and the rumble is your muscle fibers contracting against that which resonates on your eardrums.
That's a minor sound when I do it if I understand correctly. Audible but light. I can flex the muscles in my jaw/tongue as one would to attempt to pop ears, but pushing out from the back of the mouth and pulling my jaw backwards. I think it slightly restricts blood flow and makes it turbulent past the ear. Sounds like pulsar tinnitus (probably not relatable) but constant as long as I hold it.
I think some people just do the "water lock" thing to close their jaw off naturally to try and stop a yawn, and that's how they "discover" they can do it.
Ooh, I can make a little rumble thunder happen if I do that! But why would anyone want to? And weirdly, just yawning doesn't really do it, but squeezing the eyes while yawning does. Huh.
Grostesques are mythical or fantastical creatures carved into the sides of building. If they have been designed to drain water away from the building, they are called gargoyles .
Fun fact 1: Polish people are honoraribly black after they fought alongside the Haitians against the French (they switched sides as the only reason they were there was because France sent them there)
Fun fact 2: Alaska was almost purchased by Lichtenstein
Fun fact 3: Singapore was given independence against their own wishes
Fun fact 4: Abraham Lincoln read some of the works of Karl Marx as he wrote for his favorite newspaper
For 27 years I have been singing this as "at least it settles in a _fun_location", like "you guys may get the sun rise but of course it wants to settle down in California" and I thought that was such a clever line.
The Hawaiian Island chain is a lot bigger than most realize and stretch for miles and miles but the Alaskan Island chain actually goes over the International Date Line. That is what makes it the “eastern” most state.
The definition of a second is the time it takes for a caesium-133 atom to fluctuate between its two hyperfine ground state 9,192,631,770 times (I did not look the number up).
Are you this person who, at the family gathering, will loudly decline words in a long dead language they forced you to learn 50 years ago, just to call it useful?
I can’t 100% give you facts. I just go off of the rough estimate of fossil records for both mammoth and sabertooth tigers roughly and this is just a random thing I like to tell people when I was younger to kind of blow their mind.
Another really good random “did you know” When the battle of Little Bighorn, a.k.a. custard‘s last stand happened the Brooklyn Bridge was just being completed in New York, and there were Native Americans who fought in the battle who were still alive to see Neil Armstrong step on the Moon so in the span of one lifetime we went from custard‘s last stand to one giant leap for all mankind.
There are several rivers in England called the Derwent.
One of them flows into the Ouse in Yorkshire, another flows into the Trent in Derbyshire, both of which later combine to form the Humber estuary, so the Humber has two Derwents in it
Forza Horizon 4 has an awesome open map based on several disparate areas of England and Scotland pushed together. It includes the Derwent Reservoir and damn, which drains into one of the Rivers Derwent, which leads to Derwent Water - none of which are actually connected in real life. I thought that was a neat Easter Egg.
With decimal you have 10 digits 0-9 and each digit place represents a 10^n*digit, binary is 0-1 digits with each digits place represents 2^n*digit. Binary requires fewer digits to memorize than decimal, but more places to represent the same value compared to decimal. If you are trying to find the most efficient base for balancing the number of digits to memorize vs the number of places a value requires to represent you get a graph like this showing the minimum approaching e (~2.718):
That comes into play when you're doing something like picking a base for computer architecture. Almost all computers theses days are binary, but some were base 3 trinary for a bit. But you don't need to pick an integer value and can pick pi or e as a base too. Here's a better write up with an explanation of radix and bases:
The Moon is much further than you'd intuitively assume. In fact, you can fit every other planet in the solar system between the Earth and the Moon. At the same time.
Working only from memory here: Maine is the US state with the least intense sunshine, as measured in W/m². And it is STILL above the European country with the most intense sunshine, Spain.
In the 5th century AD, Chinese mathematicians approximated π to seven digits, while Indian mathematicians made a five-digit approximation, both using techniques.
So it looks like they were all approximations, but it actually is much longer like I was always taught.
Uh, I mean I could probably write a 30 or 40 page manifesto explaining it, but what it boils down to is the main bottleneck in human society is resource management combined with a lack of vision and purpose.
Anything above the level of the family has resources, needs, and uses that are being managed by people that are ultimately too selfish, too greedy, and not interconnected enough to work together.
If presented with an old 1970-2000 era landline phone, I can call someone by rapidly hanging up in the pattern of their phone number.
Used to do this in payphones as a kid. The numpads were disabled when no coins were inserted, effectively disabling tone dialing. But pulse dialing still worked.
I am pretty sure I could do it sans phone and only the handle, by rapidly pulling the plug out of the socket and putting it back in.
Never thought to try it when I had the chance.
Often the rj-12 handset cabling would not plug directly into the rj-11 jacks. If they did, I'd be surprised to learn they'd work on the wire as-is.
Yeah, you'd have to change the plug.
In case anyone is wondering, this is how old phones with rotary dials worked: you wound the dial to the digit you needed and the built-in mechanism would automatically wind it back; as it did it would momentarily disconnect the line as it passed each digit generating pulses that the exchange would count. If you still live somewhere where landline phones exist odds are this still works because the exchange maintains backwards compatibility with pulse dialling.
Up until about twenty years ago virtually every supermarket had a phone by the checkouts with a single pre-programmed button for a local taxi company; we used this trick all the time to call home, our mates, etc.
You're welcome to dial into my Modem on which Doom is listening for a connection at 40c3 :3
The "brat" in "bratwurst" doesn't come from "braten", which means to fry. It actually comes from the old German word "brät", which means finely chopped meat.
That's so brät
You are telling me Wurstsalat Crew did lie to me?
"Loanword" is a calque, and "calque" is a loanword.
Whats a calque
It's a loanword from the French "calque"
A compound word that enters another language via direct translation of its parts.
As an example, "loanword" comes from German "Lehnwort", with Lehn = loan and Wort = word.
Like 15% of people can rumble their ears and make a sound only they can hear
I always just assumed this was a thing anyone could do, Is there some other name for this i can look into?
Voluntary control of the tensor tympani muscle.
Auto-Earatic Affixation
I'm convinced people that "can't" just don't know how.
It's the same movement as closing your throat off so you can open your mouth underwater, and you just push "up" past that till it puts pressure on the eustachian tubes, and the rumble is your muscle fibers contracting against that which resonates on your eardrums.
Anyone can do it, it's just hard to explain
That's a minor sound when I do it if I understand correctly. Audible but light. I can flex the muscles in my jaw/tongue as one would to attempt to pop ears, but pushing out from the back of the mouth and pulling my jaw backwards. I think it slightly restricts blood flow and makes it turbulent past the ear. Sounds like pulsar tinnitus (probably not relatable) but constant as long as I hold it.
Yeah, that's it.
I think some people just do the "water lock" thing to close their jaw off naturally to try and stop a yawn, and that's how they "discover" they can do it.
That's odd, I can do either of those things independently. Maybe it's just wired that way for some people?
It also makes several values in EEG charts go up
Oh thats interesting, i wonder what causes it, the thinking of doing it or actually doing it
Mine sounds like a snare drum.
@ascend it's easier for me to do when I squeeze my eyes shut and yawn. I don't know why
Ooh, I can make a little rumble thunder happen if I do that! But why would anyone want to? And weirdly, just yawning doesn't really do it, but squeezing the eyes while yawning does. Huh.
I often do it to dampen unpleasant noises. Car alarm? Siren? I make my ears go Frrrrrrrrrrrr. It helps a lot.
Grostesques are mythical or fantastical creatures carved into the sides of building. If they have been designed to drain water away from the building, they are called gargoyles .
That's not useless! I'm totally using this to impress someone, someday.
The English horn is neither English nor a horn.
rats can't vomit
flamingos are pink due to diet. otherwise they'd be grey
If they didn't diet they'd be fat and fall over
This is also the reason they sleep with one leg up. If they raised both, they'd fall.
An electric eel is not an eel.
A mountain goat is not a goat.
A maned wolf is not a wolf.
A mountain chicken is not a chicken.
Also, there is an animal called the Headless Chicken Fish.
Rocky Mountain oysters are not oysters
I'd argue that's a useful thing to know.
Let me guess; it's a species of antelope.
A koala is not a bear.
It is a marsupial which is a different branch of the mammal tree.
Toilet duck is not a duck
Spanish fly is not a fly
Spruce goose is not a goose
Capitalist pig is not a pig
The sun will explode. Eventually. Interesting and fascinating, yes. Useful? Nope.
None, because knowledge and the search for it is an end unto itself, so all facts are useful to learn and know.
Fair enough, but what is the least useful fact you know?
My newly least useful fact is that knowledge and the search for it is an end unto itself, so all facts are useful to learn and know.
One of the people that worked in Turkish translation of the "alice in wonderland" for Zambak magazine has the cool birthday "January 1st, 1969."
Damn that's useless! Also, nice!
The synths that were used in the first doom reboot's music were made from samples of an actual chainsaw running.
Fun fact 1: Polish people are honoraribly black after they fought alongside the Haitians against the French (they switched sides as the only reason they were there was because France sent them there)
Fun fact 2: Alaska was almost purchased by Lichtenstein
Fun fact 3: Singapore was given independence against their own wishes
Fun fact 4: Abraham Lincoln read some of the works of Karl Marx as he wrote for his favorite newspaper
Alaska is the eastern most state of the USA.
Yeah, but it settles in its final location to the south...
I am not sure what that means. Does that mean it is also the southern most state?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlUKcNNmywk
The joke being if Alaska is "The east" it's where the sun rises, then goes 99% around the planet to Cali
Pretty sure it's "a finer location".
Probably.
I hate how unreliable lyrics website have become.
Used to be some random human bothered copying it from the CD insert, now it's automated closed captioning half the time.
For 27 years I have been singing this as "at least it settles in a _fun_location", like "you guys may get the sun rise but of course it wants to settle down in California" and I thought that was such a clever line.
Now I don't know how to feel.
A lot of 90s music sounds deep because we attribute meaning to it and our memories of the times...
Then you see the lyrics and nope, it was just the heroin
Canada is simultaneously to the north, south, east and west of the US.
That is awesome!
What about Hawaii?
The Hawaiian Island chain is a lot bigger than most realize and stretch for miles and miles but the Alaskan Island chain actually goes over the International Date Line. That is what makes it the “eastern” most state.
The definition of a second is the time it takes for a caesium-133 atom to fluctuate between its two hyperfine ground state 9,192,631,770 times (I did not look the number up).
Congrats 😃👍 btw in that time light in vacuum will travel 299,792,458 metres (didn’t look that up either)
If you put enough energy in one place it will cause a black hole. This type of black hole is called a Kugelblitz.
Current graphics cards do not yet use enough energy to worry about a kugelblitz occurring in the 12-pin connector.
This is the most interesting new fact I've learned today.
The dog that played specks girlfriend in Pee Wees big adventure is also the same dog that played precious in silence of the lambs.
This feels like one of those fun facts that theatres would have on screen with cheesy background music if you showed up to a movie too early
The guy who played Cowboy Curtis on PeeWees playhouse also played Morpheus in the Matrix.
Television is one of the few words combined by one greek part and one latin part.
But wouldn't it be useful if I can use it here?
Are you this person who, at the family gathering, will loudly decline words in a long dead language they forced you to learn 50 years ago, just to call it useful?
when the great pyramids were being built, there were still mammoths and sabertooth tigers walking the earth.
and Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landings than to the building of the pyramids
I knew about the relict popularion of mammoths that was still around. Wasn't aware of the tigers. Can you please tell me more?
I can’t 100% give you facts. I just go off of the rough estimate of fossil records for both mammoth and sabertooth tigers roughly and this is just a random thing I like to tell people when I was younger to kind of blow their mind.
It's f'in neato. I'll be looking into it.
Another really good random “did you know” When the battle of Little Bighorn, a.k.a. custard‘s last stand happened the Brooklyn Bridge was just being completed in New York, and there were Native Americans who fought in the battle who were still alive to see Neil Armstrong step on the Moon so in the span of one lifetime we went from custard‘s last stand to one giant leap for all mankind.
There are several rivers in England called the Derwent.
One of them flows into the Ouse in Yorkshire, another flows into the Trent in Derbyshire, both of which later combine to form the Humber estuary, so the Humber has two Derwents in it
Forza Horizon 4 has an awesome open map based on several disparate areas of England and Scotland pushed together. It includes the Derwent Reservoir and damn, which drains into one of the Rivers Derwent, which leads to Derwent Water - none of which are actually connected in real life. I thought that was a neat Easter Egg.
Nipples can't operate heavy machinery.
Not with that attitude
This is true.
This statement is false.
The most efficient base is the number e
On diesel? With its time management? Efficient how!?
With decimal you have 10 digits 0-9 and each digit place represents a 10^n*digit, binary is 0-1 digits with each digits place represents 2^n*digit. Binary requires fewer digits to memorize than decimal, but more places to represent the same value compared to decimal. If you are trying to find the most efficient base for balancing the number of digits to memorize vs the number of places a value requires to represent you get a graph like this showing the minimum approaching e (~2.718):
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=beta%2Flog%28beta%29+from+1.5+to+5
And the derivative approaching e:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=derivative+beta%2Flog%28beta%29
That comes into play when you're doing something like picking a base for computer architecture. Almost all computers theses days are binary, but some were base 3 trinary for a bit. But you don't need to pick an integer value and can pick pi or e as a base too. Here's a better write up with an explanation of radix and bases:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160324100419/http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2001/11/third-base/2
Wombats shit is cubic.
Cheese is unhealthy for mice.
Especially when attached to mousetraps.
I am like 90% sure mice are immune to unhealthy.
I am currently naked.
me2
The PC I had as a teenager had teal trim.
Snakes have two penises. Or at least pythons do.
For all our differences we still have so much in common.
The sun accounts for more than 99.99% of the mass of the solar system
The Moon is much further than you'd intuitively assume. In fact, you can fit every other planet in the solar system between the Earth and the Moon. At the same time.
The closest US state to Africa is Maine
Working only from memory here: Maine is the US state with the least intense sunshine, as measured in W/m². And it is STILL above the European country with the most intense sunshine, Spain.
That REAL Pi actually ends at 7 digits. Discovered by a greengrocer named Dennis.
There's been an easy say to calculate it since 1800s using an abacus.
Edit: thought the /s was implied with, you know, "Dennis." I knew I should have gone with "Humperdink."
I would like to learn more about this. Wiki says:
So it looks like they were all approximations, but it actually is much longer like I was always taught.
What makes it "real"? Pi is an irrational number, by definition it doesn't end
Physiologically, rats can't vomit. (Not to brag or anything, but I also know somebody who claims they saw it happen once)
the fact that it is useless
A sperm whale penis is 14 feet long.
I know how to fix the entire world.
Everything flawlessly. Human satisfaction at all time highs.
So much so that the largest problem that humanity would face is the ennui of not knowing what to do with itself.
As to why this is a useless fact:
Even if I'm 100% correct, nobody wants to hear it.
No one will work with me to accomplish these things.
All this knowledge does is add misery to my own life, knowing that I could make things better if only.
Ok, I'll bite. What's the quick summary of your idea?
Of course I'm skeptical, I think there must be at least one major issue keeping it from having happened already, but also curious.
Uh, I mean I could probably write a 30 or 40 page manifesto explaining it, but what it boils down to is the main bottleneck in human society is resource management combined with a lack of vision and purpose.
Anything above the level of the family has resources, needs, and uses that are being managed by people that are ultimately too selfish, too greedy, and not interconnected enough to work together.
Sure, but what do you propose to manage said resources?
So far planned economies haven't gone well in practice. (Not that the unplanned type is great either)
Like I said, it would take a manifesto to explain it.