Absolutely useless facts...
Sometimes we just learn absolutely useless facts... here is one I learned today...
Ptolemy used "pars minuta prima" ("first small part") for "one sixtieth of an hour", which got abbreviated to "minute", and "pars minuta seconda" ("second small part") for "one sixtieth of a minute", which got abbreviated to "second".
Ptolemy used "pars minuta prima" ("first small part") for "one sixtieth of an hour", which got abbreviated to "minute", and "pars minuta seconda" ("second small part") for "one sixtieth of a minute", which got abbreviated to "second".
10
Comments
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A moment is a real measurement of time lasting about 94-96 seconds depending on the source.
In some ancient Central American countries, only the elderly past working age were allowed alcohol. Beign caught drunk under age was punishable by death.
Chewing gum was used as an indentfier for prostitiutes in certain civilizations.
I fear dementia, and think that losing joy of these would be a terrible symptom.
My heureka moment: "China in Your Hand," a magistral pop song by T'Pau, is about Mary Shelly Wollstonecraft and her writing of Frankenstein.
"It was a theme she had on a scheme he had
Told in a foreign land "
The werewolf you see in the 1922 horror movie Nosferatu is actually a striped hyena.
The first published translation of J.R.R Tolkien's writing was the first Swedish translation of The Hobbit in 1947. It changed "hobbits" to "hompar" and gave Bilbo Baggins the questionable name Bimbo Backlin. It's partially because of this translation that Tolkien later gave pretty strict instructions as to how one should translate his books.
Charles Manson once called Ted Bundy a "poopbutt."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyena_butter
abhors, almost, begins, chimps, chintz
share a unique distinction. Can you figure it out (without google)?
During World War 2 British intelligence took the corpse of a dead male civilian, dressed it up in a marines uniform, put a bunch of fake documents/nicknack's in the uniform (letter from a lover, etc) to make it seem legitimate, and then in the dead of night they dropped it off the coast of Spain using a submarine. The plan being that Spain (or someone connected to the Germans) would find the corpse, read the documents, copy them, and the head of Spanish intelligence would bring that copy straight to Hitler (the British in the meantime would pretend to scramble to retrieve the documents/corpse to keep up appearances).
The documents contained information about the Allies plan to invade Sardinia and Greece. The Allies had no plans to invade them of course, but they were hoping that Hitler (who they knew from reading intercepted German messages was paranoid about the Allies invading the Balkans) would read this and shift his forces around to cover those areas - leaving the Allies free to attack Sicily. Which is what happened. The operation of course was not the only reason Hitler chose this action (the Allies actually had a number of operations to deceive Hitler about this) but it is a series of useless facts that you now know.
A perhaps not totally useless fact: absinthe does not cause hallucinations. The persistent rumor that it does comes from the late 19th century when people would sell cheap knock-offs that contained copper salts to mimic absinthe's characteristic green color. And that is not healthy. The green color in real absinthe comes from chlorophyll from the herbs that have been soaking in it.
Useless fact: my autocorrect insists that Grass should be a capitalized word.
is-autocorrect-evil-or-just-chaotic-neutral
Also, J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote an article about Esperanto. Like Tolkien, I learned some Esperanto once for fun, but I have forgotten most of it.
Well... the image says it all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
I always thought the blue light looked pretty.