Random Facts

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I thought "Hybrid" animals were sterile as they had odd number of Chromosones.

[Prospero101]

Al Capone, perhaps the most famous mobster of all time, had nothing whatsoever to do with the traditional Sicilian Mafia. He was a Neapolitan/Sicilian mix, a "mutt." There was no way he'd be allowed to work in any family of that time period.

His was referred to rather condescendingly as the "Chicago Outfit" by the organization, and treated with the same respect earned by your common street gang. His ancestry and constant flaunting of his criminal wealth irked the members of the Mafia so badly that they tried to have him killed more than once.

[Master Gunner]

I thought "Hybrid" animals were sterile as they had odd number of Chromosones.

They are...mostly.

Life finds a way.

[Hepheastus]

Why did I expand that picture?! WHY?! I don't like spiders on the best of days! And I don't like fungi either!

WHYYYYYYYYYY?!?!

Hehe, sorry Deedles*

*Is not actually sorry

[viscomica]

The Indian firm Everest Branding Solutions designed this ceiling art for a smoking room:

[plummeting_sloth]

Bibloburro... FACT

[viscomica]

That's really inspirational

[empath]

Thread of Hope material, there.



Did You Know...™

...that fifty-five years ago today, citizens of the crown possession of Newfoundland (which had ceded independent Dominion status from England due to the economic collapse of the Great Depression) voted in a referendum to narrowly decide to join the Confederation of Canada.

Because the U.S. had made arms trades with the U.K. of materiel in exchange for military bases on U.K. soil - including several on Newfoundland - during World War 2, Canada feared the U.S. influence on their neighbours and campaigned to annex the island to stem a perceived 'creeping Manifest Destiny'. The U.K. concurred with this, and when the referendum was drafted, only the two options of joining Canada and resuming independent rule, despite a strong campaign by prominent (read wealthy merchant families) Newfoundlanders to join the U.S.

So on April 1, 1949, people were unsure if the 52.3% Confederation with Canada results were legit, or an April Fool's joke.

[My pseudonym is Ix]

A Chinese fleet had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan and were the source of the maps that guided European explorers across the Atlantic. This does not appear in official records as all were systematically destroyed as China entered its 'closed off' period in which it conducted no foreign trade and showed precisely zero interest in the world beyond its borders.

[Master Gunner]

Are you talking about Zheng He? My understanding is that he only only sailed around the Indian Ocean, reaching to East Africa and the Persian Gulf, in order to "diplomatically" assert China's dominance over trade in the region. The claims that his fleet circumnavigated the globe come from a 20th century author who also wrote about Atlantis being a real place.

[My pseudonym is Ix]

I am indeed talking about Zheng He, and I'm reading that guy's book currently (have not yet finished). The one piece of evidence that makes me believe him is the opening bit, in which he tells us of a map owned by the Portuguese that features a group of islands the Portuguese had never been to (as evidenced by the fact that a subsequent king's edict requested they go & find them). The Chinese navy was the only one at the time capable of making such a voyage. This is not, of course, definite proof- the islands are described as being those which 'erupt', and could merely be the Canaries heinously mispositioned (as the same guy points out, the challenge of correctly determining longitude wouldn't be solved for several hundred years by westerners), but it's nonetheless a nice theory and one I will be better able to evaluate once I've finished reading.

Plus, there are plenty of people who theorise that the story of Atlantis came from a totally real place- some have suggested the story is a historical game of Chinese whispers that originally told of the destruction of the Minoan civilisation on Crete, whilst others have proposed that a society destroyed by a volcanic destruction of their island could well have been living on one of the Canaries (again- as volcanically active islands in a conveniently 'out of the way' location, they have frequently been used as locations of seemingly mythical islands. Or, as some have boldly suggested, the story could have been more literally true; the Mediterranean does, after all, lie on a plate boundary and being such a relatively shallow sea there are a few candidates of particular shallowness that particularly imaginative geologists have suggested could once have been islands.

That particular theory is, I will grant, the least plausible by quite some way.

[viscomica]

If you take any wikipedia article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat. You will eventually end up at "Philosophy"

[RedNightmare]

If you take any wikipedia article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat. You will eventually end up at "Philosophy"

Unless you get stuck in a few other loops that are in there

[madrak_the_red]

Today marks the 70th Anniversary of D-Day, the largest invasion ever undertaken in human history.

[Hepheastus]

Today marks the 70th Anniversary of D-Day, the largest invasion ever undertaken in human history.

Not to be pedantic but D-Day was the largest Naval invasion in History. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, was the largest land invasion in History and I'm fairly sure the largest invasion in history

[plummeting_sloth]

While very useful in ensuring that a sailor never served the same watch 2 nights running, dog watches share a similar conundrum with the word 'Dog' itself... nobody seems to be sure there the name actually came from