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"It Is a Very Sad Thing That Nowadays There Is so Little Useless Information"
Oscar Wilde
I don't necessarily agree with that; I think there's loads!
Mind you, nowadays to Oscar is considerably different to nowadays to us.
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Comments
Duck's quacks don't echo.
'Jaws' is the most common name for goldfish.
"Stewardesses" is the longest word in the English language that is typed using only the left hand.
I would get a duck just to see if it's true.
I do admit that it's not firsthand knowledge! If ever the opportunity presents itself I shall listen with interest!
The first product ever to have a barcode was Wrigley’s chewing gum.
Honey is the only food that will never expire.
The longest word that you can type using the top row of a standard keyboard is 'typewriter.'
The longest monosyllabic word is 'squirrelled.'
Well, as long as you have a Canadian accent...
PO, that's Ducks' quacks
... and I've never heard any justification for that one.
As far as I know, “plague” is the only monosyllabic word that becomes bisyllabic if you remove letters from it—the disease known as “ague” is actually pronounced “ay-gyoo.”
Good one, Iyp! Thanks, Finrod. One day I swear it'll sink in!
"Cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: separate and adhere.
On tuesdays I take the long way home.
Deers can't eat hay
Edison may have missed the boat on this one. Why use the standard incandescent and fluorescent bulbs that we are so familiar with when we could be lighting our homes with pickle power? I am not kidding here... The guys at Digital Labs actually did research on this. And, the pickles really do glow!
Taken from uselessinformation.com
I think there was a pickle shortage back in the late 1870's. That's probably why he didn't invent the pickle bulb
ah yes, the great pickle famine. Tough times man, tough times…
Kiwis lay the largest eggs; they practically fill the mother's body cavity.
And PO, here's some cutting-edge info from the University of Salford that I've just found.
Oh, excellent work, sir! Fantastic stuff. Still, the knowledge that ducks' quacks do echo is still useless information, so it's all good!
Malhershalahashbaz is the longest word in the Old Testament.
I don't like being called Sir, except when teaching or at Tesco.
Needless to say, neither seems to happen very often...
The astronomer John Herschel observed and noted the planet Neptune long before it was 'discovered'; he mistook it for a star, because it moves so slowwwwly against the stellar background (Found that in Scientific American many years ago).
Duly noted, Finrod, apologies for any offence caused!
The dot over the letters 'i' and 'j' is called a tittle.
Children grow fastest in the springtime.
Well Finrod, what would happen on the offchance that you were to be knighted? Just thought I’d ask…
Anyway, to contribute more, dogs, pigs and rabbits don’t sweat. But while the dogs pant and the pigs roll in mud to remedy this, I have no idea what the rabbits do! =(
None taken, PO.
The sound ř is unique to Czech. The Slovak language doesn't have it, so there never was any such language as 'Czechoslovakian.'
Don't ask me how it's pronounced. I used to fake it with 'r' + 'zh.'
Hey iyp, watch out! You nearly crashed into me there!
Very droll comment. I might accept if there was money involved. Otherwise it's worth nothing.
(Might get you a better seat at restaurants…)
But anyway, this is too good a topic to drag off-topic.
The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards; this technique has proven invaluable to the design of helicopters.
My back hurts
That might be true in London, iyp, but in the grim and drear province where I live, that hardly applies.
A lobster thought extinct since the Triassic (=early dinosaurs, c. 200 000 000 years ago) has been discovered alive and well, living on one of the intriguing volcanic 'black smokers' on the ocean floor.
If anyone can point me in the direction of this one, it's annoying me that I know I read this in my newspaper - but I cannot find any trace of it on the Web.
Tantalum is a greyish silver, heavy, and very hard metal. When pure, it is ductile and can be drawn into fine wire, which can be used as a filament for evaporating metals such as aluminium. Tantalum is almost completely immune to chemical attack at temperatures below 150°C, and is attacked only by hydrofluoric acid, acidic solutions containing the fluoride ion, and free sulphur trioxide. The element has a melting point exceeded only by tungsten and rhenium.
useless
I did an X-ray diffraction study on tantalum once. It's the only time I've ever held a piece of it.
That doesn't look quite right, PO... any 'Jurassic' shrimp would have to have been thought extinct for more than a mere 50 million years; the tag line on Jurassic Park posters was 'An adventure 65 million years in the making', and that only takes you (accurately, amazingly for Hollywood) to the end of the Cretaceous.
Nitpicking apart, it was something very close to that, and you've given me a time to search around, so thanks very much. Now, the trivia...
Some stick insect species are parthenogenetic - females lay female eggs. In some species no males are known at all; in others they can be about one in a thousand individuals.
OK… Somehow this thread feels like "scholastic useless information". The one about ducks was cute though ;)
I could have been famous yesterday, if I were in the right place at the right time…
Golf was banned in England in 1457, due to its interference with the 'serious' pursuit of archery.
Approximately 16 Canadians have their appendices removed unnecessarily everyday.
The longest Monopoly game played in a bathtub lasted 99 hours.
The reason why golf balls have dimples on them is because it helps in the ball to move a farther distance by reducing drag.
Every year, more than one million miles of Twizzlers licorice is made.
The capital of Vermont, Montpelier is the only state capital in the United States that does not have a McDonalds.
The oldest major soft drink in America is Dr. Pepper, which originated in Waco, Texas in 1885.
Baskin Robbins once made ketchup ice cream. This was the only vegetable flavoured ice cream produced. However, they discontinued it since they thought it would not sell well.
There's a temperature scale where the freezing point of water is zero degrees and the boiling point (of water) eighty degrees. It's called the Réaumur scale.
Never saw the point of that one. Dafter than Fahrenheit's...
Is that the average human's stride?
The only animal, besides humans that can get leprosy is the Armadillo.
Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
If you spray an antiseptic spray on a polar bear, its fur will turn purple. Doesn't seem true...dut does anyone really want to try it???
A chicken with red earlobes will produce brown eggs, and a chicken with white earlobes will produce white eggs.
Seiva, considering that’s been an impossibility ever since the Panama Canal was constructed, how would that be measured?
Walk on water, of course! I've heard a guy did that once...
Non-academic "useless information" of the day: Nicole Kidman is left-handed.
Number systems are only possible in one, two, four and eight dimensions.
1 out of 350,000 Americans get electrocuted in their life.
27% of female lottery winners hid their winning ticket in their bras.
3% of pet owners give Valentine's gifts to their pets on Valentine's Day.
31% of employees skip lunch entirely.
45% of Americans don't know that the sun is a star.
Half any given human population is below average intelligence.
Based on my experience living in one of the least educated states in the US, I would guess that 80% of the Americans that don't know the sun is a star, live in urban areas and do lots of drugs.
I find it fascinating that most people group all drugs together, the recreational marijuana smoker, the depressed self-medicating housewife, the crackwhore on the corner… they all do 'the drugs'. shit is funny to me.
I agree, MastaKink. I collect my mother's drugs - sorry, medication - on a monthly basis.
The square root of two is irrational but not transcendental.
If I seem closed-minded, I assure you that I don't consider nutritional suppliments and multi-vitamins to be generally destructive to the mind, and thus do not lump those in with all the others in the "drug" catagory.
Useless (?) Information:
In Portuguese --> Illicit drugs = drogas; precribed medication = remédios.
I guess we don't have that problem here...
Well, I'm a bit of a homeopath, so I frown upon pretty much any kind of drug.
The one-billionth digit of Pi is a 9.
Lipstick contains fish scales (herring, apparantely.)
Spat out food is called chanking. (I love that!)
Oh, and a can of Spam is opened every four seconds.
An office desk has 400 times more bacteria than a toilet.