Strange... Unusual... And Interesting Facts...

[Ludwig Venter]

I have a group of my old school friends... (class of 1970) ... and.. we are in daily Skype conversation with each other.....

Since 20 October of last year (2013) ... I have committed myself to provide a daily "Fact of the day"... and... it started off well... as plenty of interesting facts are available on Google and on General internet... but... of late... I really do some serious surfing.. to come up with something new, which I have not previously mentioned....

Anyone have some interesting material that I can use??.... even if it is just one-liners.... My standard early morning post is... "Hi... good morning everyone.... Did you know.....???.... "....

Anyone??....

 

[sawickib]

Did you know a bald eagles nest can weigh up to 1 ton.

 

[Ludwig Venter]

That is a very interesting fact... and.. certainly one that I will use... Thanks Sawickib....

 

[EllieJellyEllie]

The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters.
 
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".
 
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
 
A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue!
 
Porcupines float in water.
 
The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.
 
Elephants are the only mammals that can't jump.
 
Starfish don't have brains.
 
Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.
 
A cockroach will live nine days without it's head, before it starves to death.
 
Butterflies taste with their feet.

 

[Ch4rlie]

Did you know :
 
= Should there be a crash, Prince Charles and Prince William will never travel on the same airplane as a precaution!
 
= There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos!
 
= Tablecloths were originally meant to be served as towels with which dinner guests could wipe their hands and faces after eating!
 
= A Boeing 747 airliner holds 57,285 gallons of fuel!
 
Thats all can find or think of for now! 
 
Hope that helps 

 

 

[TallTree01]

The largest Greek population in the world beside Athens in Greece can be found in Melbourne Victoria.
The largest cattle station in the world is Anna Creek Station in South Australia at over 34,000 square kilometres is the world's largest cattle station. It is even larger than Belgium
Despite having a convict colony history, Australia's homicide rate is 1.2 per 100,000 population compared to the 6.3 per 100,000 in the United States.
Australia has the highest rate of gambling in the world with over 80 percent of Australian adults engaging in gambling of some kind and 20 percent of the pokie machines in the world are found in Austr
Canberra was selected as the capital because Sydney and Melbourne could not stop arguing which city should be the capital of Australia.

 

[Ludwig Venter]

Thanks TallTree... I used your Canberra fact this morning...

 

[TallTree01]

Thanks TallTree... I used your Canberra fact this morning...

 

[the_lock_man]

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.

 
A "sporange" is a botanical term, a part of a fern or similar plant.
A "chilver" is a female lamb
To "hirple" means to walk with a limp
 
http/www.oxforddictionaries.com/ if you wish to confirm that they are genuine, albeit rare, words in the English language.
 
The is also, I believe the word "curple", meaning the hind quarters of a horse, but this does not appear in the above site.
 
Month sort-of has a lots of rhymes - in fact, you could say it has an infinite number of rhymes. In mathematics, if you divide a whole into 101 pieces, each piece can be called a "one-hundred-and-oneth" of the the whole (a "one-hundred-and-first" is also correct). From there, you can see that you could also have a twenty-oneth, or a thirty-oneth, and so on ad nauseum
 
Anyway, Ludwig, Portsmouth FC is the only football team of the 92 teams in the top four English football divisions whose home ground is on an island (as opposed to being on the mainland UK, which is itself an island).
Portsmouth FC is also the only team who have held the FA Cup for 7 consecutive years. We won the cup in 1939, and it was not contested again until the 1945-46 season (for obvious reasons).
The first professional football game played under floodlights was at Fratton Park, Portsmouth (Portsmouth v Newcastle United)
 
Portsmouth is the UK's primary naval base. Portsmouth, New Hampshire USA is also known as naval base for the US Navy, however the naval base, known as Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, is not actually located in Portsmouth NH, it is in Kittery, Maine. Conversely, Norfolk Naval Shipyard is not located in Norfolk, but is in Portsmouth Virginia.

 

[Ch4rlie]

Anyway, Ludwig, Portsmouth FC is the only football team of the 92 teams in the top four English football divisions whose home ground is on an island.
 

 
Really? 

 
Trying to work that one out!

 

[the_lock_man]

 

Anyway, Ludwig, Portsmouth FC is the only football team of the 92 teams in the top four English football divisions whose home ground is on an island.
 

 
Really? 

 
Trying to work that one out!
 

 
Yes, the majority of the city of Portsmouth is an island. There are only 3 bridges from the island to the mainland, meaning traffic congestion is huge. The population is pushing 200,000, making Portsmouth the second most densely populated city in the UK (second only to central London) and 13th (IIRC) in Europe.

 

[Tongue_Flicker]

Did you know:

- That the most predominant religion in Antartica is Catholic.

- that shrews will die if they can't eat every 2 hours

- that civet cats will die if they are fed the same diet in the course of less than two weeks

- that Japanese emperors celebrate two birthdays

- that hedgehogs are immune to scorpion venom

- that the eyes of a giant squid is as big as a dinner plate

- that the metal ring connecting the wood of a pencil and the eraser is called a ferrule

- that the human stomach's gastric acids can melt rubber tires

- that flamingos can stand on hot water without getting burned

- that the Tuvalu islands are paid millions of dollars due to misconceptions regarding the web domain name .tv

- that bluetooth was discovered and invented by an actress

- that the modern Filipino language is the only spoken language that has incorporated english, spanish, chinese, japanese, arabic, indian as well as invented gay lingo, gang slang and monthly made-up gibberish words

 

[the_lock_man]

I would take issue with the Bluetooth one - it was invented by Ericsson, AIUI.
 
It was called Bluetooth by an Intel engineer, who was reading a novel about the Vikings, and in particular King Harald Bluetooth, who united all the various Danish, Swedish and Norwegian viking tribes, as Bluetooth was supposedly invented to provide a single wireless communication protocol.
 
THe Bluetooth logo is an amalgamation of the Norse runes for the letters H and B - after Harald Bluetooth.
 
EDIT
 
Did a bit of digging. My assertion is correct, Bluetooth was indeed invented by Ericsson.
 
HOWEVER
 
Austrian actress Hedy Lemarr did come up with the concept of spread-spectrum transmission, aka "Channel Hopping", transmitting radio signals at a frequency which changed throughout the transmission. If you varied the frequency, anyone trying to intercept or jam the transmission would not know what frequency to target their efforts at.
 
She came up with the idea in the 1940s, but it was ignored until the late 50s, early 60s. The principle underpins virtually all secure radio transmissions today, including Bluetooth, as well as cellphones and Wifi.

 

[Ludwig Venter]

Thanks guys for the response.... I was hoping to get another fact for tomorrow morning.... Actually... I got enough material here to keep me posting for the next 2 months!!!,,, Thanks, but... keep them rolling... I like to learn new things every day!!!

 

[daizeUK]

Here's a gem from the QI twitter feed today:
Most primates host 1 kind of louse, gibbons and orangutans have none, but humans have 3; head, clothing and pubic lice.