Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

[Codraroll]

30 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

In Norwegian army an M-72 was an lightweight single use RPG, M-71 was an standard army field jacket. Do not confuse the two. 

That has been changed now. The field jacket is now the M-1 or M-2.

However, M-77 remains the designation for field boots. People frequently confuse M-72 and M-77.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

The US in WWII had a lot of various very different M1s.

During WWII, Soviet lend-lease stevedores spread the myth that every Sherman came with a bottle of whiskey stuffed down its (plugged-up) barrel.

Saw an YouTube video about that, in peacetime soldiers would troll officers crazy with that one. 
But leaving an vodka bottle in the breach would been nice. 
And in the M-72 incident had the guy suspected it held contraband he would shut up but it was an incident s me years before with an dude M-72 some idiot took back, as the door of the room closed the M-72 fell down triggering both the rocket and the warhead or perhaps the warhead armed 0.1 second later but it wrecked his room and the room below. 
 

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, DDE said:

The US in WWII had a lot of various very different M1s.

It means "MyProject1".

Also, why are the Deutsch submachineguns called MP#?
For the same reason. Just they prefer accuracy, while the Americans prefer economy and save money on a letter stamp.

9 hours ago, DDE said:

Galil

Interesting, when WonderWoman was serving in army in 2004, didn't they miss the opportunity to mock at her in the "Gal's Galil" way.

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

In Norwegian army an M-72 was an lightweight single use RPG, M-71 was an standard army field jacket. Do not confuse the two. 

3M vs M-4

Spoiler

 

6 hours ago, DDE said:

During WWII, Soviet lend-lease stevedores spread the myth that every Sherman came with a bottle of whiskey stuffed down its (plugged-up) barrel.

every went != every came

Edited April 19, 2023 by kerbiloid

[steve9728]

CNSA was not the first one made secret spacewalk. And I don't think it would be last.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/secret-space-shuttles-35318554/

[DDE]

On 4/16/2023 at 6:20 AM, steve9728 said:

In Qingdao, people use plastic bag to hold the fresh beer

https://shanghaimetalcorporation.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/only-in-china-drink-beer-straight-from-a-plastic-bag/

Sorry I'm a little late to this battle of vessels.

[TheSaint]

9 hours ago, DDE said:

Sorry I'm a little late to this battle of vessels.

There are four acceptable ways to drink beer....

[SunlitZelkova]

It’s sad fact Saturday.

Just a few days ago, a rocket launch occurred on the Korean Peninsula.

Apart from the public broadcaster, every major Japanese TV network waited for their commercials to end before airing the government message warning people to take shelter.

Spoiler

We’re doomed.

 

Edited April 22, 2023 by SunlitZelkova

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

every major Japanese TV network waited for their commercials to end before airing the government  warning

ZOMG! 

... 

Ofc - I think the warning is... Premature?  Political gamesmanship? 

Better to ignore the chubby troll 

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

every major Japanese TV network waited for their commercials to end before airing the government message warning people to take shelter.

After Godzillas, Titans, Evangelion, and countless others under-attack movies, I wonder if anyone in Japan would still take those warnings not as a part of the next movie commercials.

Spoiler

 

(A cartoon movie after which I was looking at a lemonade bottle suspiciously.)

[steve9728]

7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

It’s sad fact Saturday.

Just a few days ago, a rocket launch occurred on the Korean Peninsula.

Apart from the public broadcaster, every major Japanese TV network waited for their commercials to end before airing the government message warning people to take shelter.

  Hide contents

We’re doomed.

 

Did TV Tokyo play anime at that time?

[SunlitZelkova]

9 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

ZOMG! 

... 

Ofc - I think the warning is... Premature?  Political gamesmanship? 

Better to ignore the chubby troll 

There is a danger of falling debris so they do it just in case.

9 hours ago, steve9728 said:

Did TV Tokyo play anime at that time?

Don’t know, the YouTube video that showed what happened only had it from the commercials.

[steve9728]

Just a little explain about the TV Tokyo for anyone don't know: that's the strangest TV station I've ever seen. This station is famous in East Asia for being the only one to show something else when all of Japan is showing breaking news. Such as: the massive earthquake in 2011, when Emperor of Japan issues speech on nuclear power plant crisis, while all the other TV stations were broadcasting the Emperor's speech live, only TV Tokyo was showing a TV programme teaching people how to make sushi. When last time DPRK was launching 4 missiles towards Japan direction in 2017, it was also only the TV Tokyo:

"It's okay, things aren't particularly big if TV Tokyo is still showing the anime... Wait?"

"The day the special broadcast on TV Tokyo is the day the earth will end."

Edited April 23, 2023 by steve9728

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, steve9728 said:

"It's okay, things aren't particularly big if TV Tokyo is still showing the anime... Wait?"

"The day the special broadcast on TV Tokyo is the day the earth will end."

Typical day in Tokyo.

Spoiler

 

Would something smaller impress these people?

[kerbiloid]

On 4/22/2023 at 8:40 AM, TheSaint said:

There are four acceptable ways to drink beer....

Maybe four, but it took almost four centuries since the Stevin's studies and Torricelli's experiment to use the science for practical needs.

Spoiler

[Maria Sirona]

That boy does also be buzzing

[DDE]

The Soviets, all the way back in 1930s, began harvesting mopedantte from river sand as a potential source of thorium/uranium-233. In 1953, Kurchatov made the final decision to drop this line of inquiry, but something had to be done about 82000 tons of refined material.

This something was Mailbox №118 in Krasnoufimsk - a strategic stockpile area of 19 wooden grain barns (with four more added in the process). Starting 1960, the mopedantte was brought in by rail, packaged in sealed bags inside wooden boxes, and then largely forgotten.

Surprisingly, the shoddy WWII-era buildings and the somewhat slapdash packaging approach worked well enough to contain the radiation hazard. Mopedantte isn't too mobile, so no environmental contamination whatsoever has been detected over 25 years of surveillance; the threat comes mostly from the all-penetrating gammas, and radon-220 gas. The barns ultimately had sheet-metal mini-Sarcophagi built around them in the 2000s. The only real problem was utterly indirect - locals near the harvesting sites used the still thorium-rich refuse sand dumps for construction materials, necessitating a cleanup effort.

Starting around 2020, the mopedantte is being repackaged and sold to China for rare earth element harvesting.

https://tnenergy.livejournal.com/147073.html

[kerbiloid]

3 minutes ago, DDE said:

mopedantte

mona'zite

Tested in the Tolkienuke thread.

Edited April 26, 2023 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

59 minutes ago, DDE said:

Mopedantte

ROFL

[steve9728]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

The Soviets, all the way back in 1930s, began harvesting mopedantte from river sand as a potential source of thorium/uranium-233. In 1953, Kurchatov made the final decision to drop this line of inquiry, but something had to be done about 82000 tons of refined material.

This something was Mailbox №118 in Krasnoufimsk - a strategic stockpile area of 19 wooden grain barns (with four more added in the process). Starting 1960, the mopedantte was brought in by rail, packaged in sealed bags inside wooden boxes, and then largely forgotten.

Surprisingly, the shoddy WWII-era buildings and the somewhat slapdash packaging approach worked well enough to contain the radiation hazard. Mopedantte isn't too mobile, so no environmental contamination whatsoever has been detected over 25 years of surveillance; the threat comes mostly from the all-penetrating gammas, and radon-220 gas. The barns ultimately had sheet-metal mini-Sarcophagi built around them in the 2000s. The only real problem was utterly indirect - locals near the harvesting sites used the still thorium-rich refuse sand dumps for construction materials, necessitating a cleanup effort.

Starting around 2020, the mopedantte is being repackaged and sold to China for rare earth element harvesting.

https://tnenergy.livejournal.com/147073.html

The info I can got is "this company has over 82,000 tonnes of mopedantte concentrate stored in its warehouses in central Russia and the division currently has a supply capacity of 1,200 tonnes per month (in two-tonne bulk bags)." And that's from 2020.

When I saw these crates, reminds me a strange rumour from Russia I had heard from somewhere. It says that around the 1970s some Chinese speculators went to Soviet to buy a lot of broken glass because it was packed in wooden boxes made of good pine wood. The Soviets at the time didn't think too much of it until the group of Chinese placed too many orders. Only then did they react to the fact that the gang's intentions were not pure. This is because although pine was common in the Soviet Union, not much of it was available as wood in China. "To this day, you can still see the broken glass on the beaches of Shanghai."

The things that need to be clarified are firstly that I don't know if this has ever happened, and secondly that there really isn't a huge amount of broken glass on the beach in Shanghai. The last thing is that there is a similar story in a Chinese historical fable from 3000 years ago called buy a case and return the pearl. 

Edited April 26, 2023 by steve9728

[Codraroll]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

This something was Mailbox №118 in Krasnoufimsk - a strategic stockpile area of 19 wooden grain barns (with four more added in the process). Starting 1960, the mopedantte was brought in by rail, packaged in sealed bags inside wooden boxes, and then largely forgotten.

Wasn't that pretty much the strategy they ran with for the decomissioning of nuclear reactors for the Arctic fleet as well? "Place spent fuel rods in barrels - place barrels in warehouse - forget warehouse exists". And then, when the threat of catastrophe started being too big to ignore anymore, a clean-up project that was every bit as nightmarish as one can imagine.

Edited April 26, 2023 by Codraroll

[AckSed]

1 hour ago, Codraroll said:

Wasn't that pretty much the strategy they ran with for the decomissioning of nuclear reactors for the Arctic fleet as well? "Place spent fuel rods in barrels - place barrels in warehouse - forget warehouse exists". And then, when the threat of catastrophe started being too big to ignore anymore, a clean-up project that was every bit as nightmarish as one can imagine.

Picking up spent fuel rods with shovels. What the actual, factual hell?

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Codraroll said:

every bit as nightmarish as one can imagine.

What an amusing sci-fi horror with blue flashes and suicide squad.

While the actual description from participants is so dull...

https://www.atomic-energy.ru/smi/2013/09/13/43735

That's like the Western mass-media telling about thousands of deads in Kiev on April, 26 in 1986.

Edited April 27, 2023 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

What an amusing sci-fi horror with blue flashes and suicide squad.

Were E.T.s from Area 51 involved? This would be par the course for stories that began to gush forward when the Russian press gaine dthe freedom to pursue readers and sensations. And so Vasili Arkhipov went from merely executing a pre-set procedure to literally fighting all of the Kremlin to avert WWIII.

18 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Wasn't that pretty much the strategy they ran with for the decomissioning of nuclear reactors for the Arctic fleet as well? "Place spent fuel rods in barrels - place barrels in warehouse - forget warehouse exists".

Actually this was the strategy they arrived to as part of the cleanup project.

To recap: the Northern Fleet had a facility with above-ground spent fuel storage pools. It wasn't well-designed to begin with, e.g. the filtration system for water in the pool was never installed, and any further rectifications was impossible because responsibility for the facility's maintenance slipped through the cracks of an organizational shuffle. And so, at one point, the pools began to leak, forming that mythical icicle of death. The real scandal for you should be that the icicle of death was not an emergency - Soviet Navy SOP was to simply dump any and all liquid radioactive waste into the environment... at worst, Andreev Guba would double their usual annual output.

Here's the twist, though - the Navy had been gradually becoming aware that their civilian contractors had overstated the thermal emissions by 100 times, and the pools had been unnecessary in the first place! And so the entire cleanup effort with all the "shoveling of fuel rods" involved an emergency transition to dry storage while slapping together filtration systems to limit the radioactivity of leaking water; the pool with piles of loose rod caskets was simply plated over with steel and lead, before, a few years later, its contents were fished out and shipped to Mayak for reprocessing. A 2011 survey found a mere six fuel fragments that escaped the cranes. Other, less problematic pools were  transitioned to concrete storage cells.

[SunlitZelkova]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

And so Vasili Arkhipov went from merely executing a pre-set procedure to literally fighting all of the Kremlin to avert WWIII.

I’ve never heard that one, most accounts simply say the officers thought about launching a nuclear torpedo and he protested. No government involved.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I’ve never heard that one, most accounts simply say the officers thought about launching a nuclear torpedo and he protested. No government involved.

Bummer, mixed him up with Stanislav Petrov.