Random Facts

[Bebop Man]

Sesquipedalophobia: the irrational fear of long words.

[Gap Filler]

Cenosillicaphobia: the fear of an empty glass.

[viscomica]

The bacteria found in yogurt is the same bacteria found in women's private parts. (Creepy fact of life)

[Elomin Sha]

That fact has now made me feel really creepy about how I eat yoghurt now. I haven't used a spoon in 15 years. Thanks for that.

[Bebop Man]

That fact prompted the Google search "yoghurt vagina". Never again.

[viscomica]

See? I bet y'all will be eating more ice-cream rather than frozen yoghurt as off now.

[Elomin Sha]

I don't freeze my yoghurt, I'm not an asshole. I treat yoghurt with respect.

[MinniChi]

A First Person view version of Pokémon Gold/Silver exists.

[Bebop Man]

A First Person view version of Pokémon Gold/Silver exists.

What.

[Robo4900]

Sesquipedalophobia: the irrational fear of long words.

*Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

The answer to "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" depends on your opinion as what constitutes a chicken. If you consider the distant ancestors of chickens to count as chickens(Which I personally lean towards), then the chicken most likely came first(Because of evolution), but if not, then it's the egg, since the ancestors of chickens laid eggs.

[Amake]

I always assumed the question implies the modern form of the chicken - the one bearing the current chicken's chromosomal distinctiveness. And by extension also the modern form of the chicken egg. But I realized just now it's a ridiculous question when you think of it that way, since it depends entirely on what you mean by a "chicken egg": Is it an egg containing a chicken, or an egg laid by a chicken? If, before chickens existed, the first egg laid by a chicken-minus-one-generation predecessor containing a current-generation chicken counts as a chicken egg, then the egg came first; if that chicken had to hatch and mature and lay eggs on its own before chicken eggs existed, then the chicken came first.

I've got rhetorical proof defining the sound of one hand clapping too, if that random fact would interest the thread. . .

[Bebop Man]

Sesquipedalophobia: the irrational fear of long words.

*Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

That's the one.

[Robo4900]

I've got rhetorical proof defining the sound of one hand clapping too, if that random fact would interest the thread. . .

I think it would.

[Amake]

I'll take it! The answer is "None".

See, the question "What is the sound of one hand clapping" poses as an unsolvable philosophical riddle when it's really just relying on misdirection, because the number of hands involved in the procedure is irrelevant. Hands clapping do not make a sound, although the way the question is phrased makes you falsely attribute the sound to them. The sound is made by the contact between the hands, not the hands themselves.

[My pseudonym is Ix]

To paraphrase QI, who were themselves quoting an evolutionary biologist, 'Anyone who thinks the chicken came first doesn't understand evolution properly'

[Ptangmatik]

A lone tree falling in the forest goes eeeeEEEEEEEEEEEE

KA KA KA

SKRASHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhh

Even when there's no one around to hear it.

[Phailhammer]

Who let Ptang out of the Hijack thread?

[plummeting_sloth]

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of that most aural of communication devices, had deaf family members and participated in Eugenics campaigns to stamp out the teaching of the teaching of sign language... as it countered Eugenic efforts to eliminate deafness through proper breeding.

[goatprince]

i am incredibly saddened to hear that Mr. Bell was kind of terrible, because he's one of the Famous Canadians we use as people to showcase Canada's qualities. just TERRIBLE.

relatedly, plastic garbage bags were invented by canadians. don't they smell nice? this is our legacy, people. you better appreciate it.

[Ptangmatik]

You should hear the controversy over how he got the patent for the telephone.

Oh, also: The bacteria in blue-veined cheese is a breed of penicillium.

[Darkobra]

Alexander Graham Bell's Scottish. Not Canadian. He was born in Edinburgh.

[Robo4900]

i am incredibly saddened to hear that Mr. Bell was kind of terrible, because he's one of the Famous Canadians we use as people to showcase Canada's qualities. just TERRIBLE.

The telephone was invented by an Italian man who had almost no money, and therefore couldn't afford a patent. Alexander Graham Bell heard about this, and quickly filed a patent for it so that he could get the credit instead, which makes him nothing more than a petty theif.
It's actually a lot more complicated than this, IIRC, but this is just a forum thread, and if you're interested in it, you can look it up yourself.

[Ptangmatik]

The way I heard it is that he allegedly bribed a patent clerk to give him access to the other guy's application so he could fix the bits of his design he had wrong, then forge the dates on his application so that it looked like he submitted first.

[Dutch guy]

The difference between an aeronautical flight and an astronautical flight (Or an aircraft and a spacecraft) is defined by the maximum altitude attained. Any flight whose maximum altitude lies above the Kármán line is define as a spaceflight by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

The Kármán line is the altitude at which an aicraft would have to fly at the minimum orbital speed to maintain its altitude through aerodynamic lift alone.

[AdmiralMemo]

That story about Bell, if true, is just another fine example of how people can be simultaneously awesome and awful. You shouldn't accept that someone is completely awesome due to something good they've done, nor should you accept that they're completely awful due to something bad they've done.

Take, for example, Hans Reiser. He created the ReiserFS file system, which was popular and useful on *nix computers that dealt with small files, before the rise of ext3 as a de facto standard. Also, he killed his wife.

People can be a bundle of seeming contradictions.