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moodyskydiver

miscellaneous facts

By moodyskydiver, in The Bonfire

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moodyskydiver    0

moodyskydiver
Things you never really wanted to know but will be
fascinated by when you find out...

The first couple to be shown in bed together on primetime TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000.B|

The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:
Spades - King David,
Hearts - Charlemagne,
Clubs -Alexander, the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar.

Q. What occurs more often in December than any other month?
A. Conception.

Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laserprinters all have in common?
A. All invented by women.

In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress was secure.Hence the phrase "goodnight, sleep tight".

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years
ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's
father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead
he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month or what we know today as the honeymoon.

In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts.
So in old England, when customers got unruly, the
bartender would yell at them mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase mind your P's and Q's.

In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden.... and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.

In ancient England a person could not have sex unless you had consent of the King (unless you were in the Royal Family). When anyone wanted to have a baby, they got consent of the King, the King gave them a placard that they hung on their door while they were having sex. The placard had F.*.*.*. (Fornication Under Consent of the King) on it. Now you know where that came from.

Heh! Can ya tell I was bored?;):P


"...just an earthbound misfit, I."

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Enrique    0

Enrique
Quote

Things you never really wanted to know but will be fascinated by when you find out...***

All polar bears are left-handed

A sattelite with an equatorial orbit will appear stationary in the sky

Chocolate was discovered by the Olmecs

Chewing gum was discovered by the Mayans

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Zennie    0

Zennie
Quote

the King gave them a placard that they hung on their door while they were having sex. The placard had F.*.*.*. (Fornication Under Consent of the King)



I thought it was a punishment... For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

- Z
"Always be yourself... unless you suck." - Joss Whedon

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Zennie    0

Zennie
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*cough* Read Snopes *cough*



Yep. We were both wrong...

[Fuck] is a very old word, recorded in English since the 15th century (few acronyms predate the 20th century), with cognates in other Germanic languages. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (Random House, 1994, ISBN 0-394-54427-7) cites Middle Dutch fokken = "to thrust, copulate with"; Norwegian dialect fukka = "to copulate"; and Swedish dialect focka = "to strike, push, copulate" and fock = "penis". Although German ficken may enter the picture somehow, it is problematic in having e-grade, or umlaut, where all the others have o-grade or zero-grade of the vowel.

AHD1, following Pokorny, derived "feud", "fey", "fickle", "foe", and "fuck" from an Indo-European root peig2 = "hostile"; but AHD2 and AHD3 have dropped this connection for "fuck" and give no pre-Germanic etymon for it. Eric Partridge, in the 7th edition of Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Macmillan, 1970), said that "fuck" "almost certainly" comes from the Indo-European root *peuk- = "to prick" (which is the source of the English words "compunction", "expunge", "impugn", "poignant", "point", "pounce", "pugilist", "punctuate", "puncture", "pungent", and "pygmy"). Robert Claiborne, in The Roots of English: A Reader's Handbook of Word Origin (Times, 1989) agrees that this is "probably" the etymon. Problems with such theories include a distribution that suggests a North-Sea Germanic areal form rather than an inherited one; the murkiness of the phonetic relations; and the fact that no alleged cognate outside Germanic has sexual connotations.

- Z
"Always be yourself... unless you suck." - Joss Whedon

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billvon    3,120

billvon
>A sattelite with an equatorial orbit will appear stationary in the sky

Equatorial orbit just means it has an inclination of zero degrees. If it's low it will appear to be shooting across the sky. Maybe you meant geosynchronous? A geosynchronous satellite is high enough so that it orbits at the same speed the earth spins, so it looks like it never moves relative to a ground observer (thus making them very useful for communications.)

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Enrique    0

Enrique
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>A sattelite with an equatorial orbit will appear stationary in the sky

Equatorial orbit just means it has an inclination of zero degrees. If it's low it will appear to be shooting across the sky. Maybe you meant geosynchronous? A geosynchronous satellite is high enough so that it orbits at the same speed the earth spins, so it looks like it never moves relative to a ground observer (thus making them very useful for communications.)

***

I guess we are both wrong, because if a satellite travels at the same speed as the earth rotates, and is stationary, then it does NOT really orbit, does it?

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billvon    3,120

billvon
>I guess we are both wrong, because if a satellite travels at the same
> speed as the earth rotates, and is stationary, then it does NOT
> really orbit, does it?

Sure it does! It's like sitting on a merry go round and looking at someone closer to the edge. He's definitely orbiting around the center of the merry go round but it doesn't look like it to you, because you're orbiting too.

As an aside, I always thought it would be cool to build a high-gee training center, basically a hotel/gym that had different floors where you could live and train in anything from 1.1G to 2G's. Athletes train at high altitudes all the time to get their oxygen transport rate up; why not train at higher gravities to get your strength and reaction time up? It would also be the ultimate fat farm; even if you just stayed in your room all day, getting around at 2 G's would take a lot of calories.

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Enrique    0

Enrique
Sure it does! It's like sitting on a merry go round and looking at someone closer to the edge. He's definitely orbiting around the center of the merry go round***

If that were the case WE would also be orbiting the earth.

What I meant to say was that the satellite does not orbit AROUND the earth. Sure, it follows a pattern (orbit), but from the viewers' perspective, the satellite is not in motion (orbiting).

P.S. Until today, I never believed my girlfriend when she said that I am a nerd. ;)

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