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

[SunlitZelkova]

The term "fun fact", has origins dating back to 1853, when "tidbits" were published in newspaper columns titled Fun, Fact, and Fancy. Tidbits themselves date to the mid-1700s.

"Fun" and "fact" remained virtually independent of each other (usually listed with a third item) until the 1970s. There are two known isolated instances from the 1950s, one from a newspaper (albeit bearing bearing a typographical oddity in the form of a period after the word "fun") published three times between 1950 and 1951, and one from the name of a game at a club party in the same town in 1957. In the second instance, it should be noted it is unknown whether Fun Facts the game actually involved pieces of information called "fun facts".

The first true "fun fact" likely originates in a Sunday colored comic called Wrigley's Fun Facts: Fun Facts to Know & Tell, probably first published in 1970. It was presented by Wrigley's Chewing Gum.

Source with more info (a good read btw)- https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333745/origin-of-the-term-fun-fact

Unfortunately, unless anyone has a Sunday newspaper from 52 years ago lying around, we will probably never know what it was.

It should be noted that this research entirely pertains to the English speaking world. We don't have "fun facts" in Japanese, the term is 豆知識 (mamechishiki, translated better as "tidbits"), which can be fun, but aren't necessarily.

As fun facts are technically a Cold War cultural development, it would be interesting to know if the Eastern Bloc had any counterpart or equivalent.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

19 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

t should be noted that this research entirely pertains to the English speaking world. We don't have "fun facts" in Japanese, the term is 豆知識 (mamechishiki, translated better as "tidbits"), which can be fun, but aren't necessarily.

That's quite interesting.  OTOH, I've heard that Japanese tend to delight in puzzles, hence Sudoku et.al. 

[SunlitZelkova]

5 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

That's quite interesting.  OTOH, I've heard that Japanese tend to delight in puzzles, hence Sudoku et.al. 

I don't think it is a rejection of "fun facts" so much as it is just happening to not align with English.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I don't think it is a rejection of "fun facts" so much as it is just happening to not align with English.

Oh I get that; wordplay, puns and other 'fun things' exist across cultures and languages, even if the exact word-phrase doesn't translate. 

Humor is both specific and universal.  (I recall a Chinese-American comic talking about the struggles he had being funny in China after finding success in the US; self-deprecating humor isn't well received there.  However, once he 'cracked the code' on what Chinese folks do think is funny, he enjoyed gigs in his mother's homeland).

[kerbiloid]

Cuz Asia are plain and simple guys, and two-faced things are foreign to them.

[Beamer]

"T minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal... twelve, eleven, ten..."

Most of you will instantly recognize the quote as being from the audio feed of the Apollo 11 launch. Or maybe from the many times it was sampled and used in music pieces. But did you ever wonder what it really means? And even if you did and have some idea as to what it pertains to, did you ever realize it was... well... wrong?

When the Apollo rockets were on the launch pad, the gyroscopes for its inertial guidance system were locked in position. An inertial guidance system is used to determine your orientation in space relative to some fixed baseline orientation. Coupled with information from accelerometers this allows you to calculate your current position in space. Of course when you're standing on the launch pad, and that launch pad is attached to a medium sized planet which is constantly rotating around its axis and in orbit of a star that is in orbit around a galactic center, your orientation in space is constantly changing. Just before the launch, these gyroscopes were finally unlocked and from that point forward, the guidance computer would start keeping track of the rocket's actual orientation in space (as opposed to it's orientation on Earth, which if everything goes according to plan should be roughly 'upright' since some time before launch). Internally this event is typically referred to as "Guidance Reference Release".

So why did he say "guidance is internal"? This seems to imply that there is some sort of external guidance system and that around T minus 15 they switched from this external to the internal guidance system. This is not the case. The fact of the matter is that the announcer (Jack King I believe his name was) misread the script, or perhaps he read it right but simply misspoke. At T minus 17 the gyroscopes of the guidance system were unlocked, and what the script called for was the announcement that "Guidance is inertial".

Some time after Apollo 11 (for the Apollo 16 launch) this announcement was changed to read "Guidance release". Whether that was the result of this misreading of the Apollo 11 script I do not know, but it doesn't seem entirely implausible. By the time Apollo 16 launched, 2 years and 9 months (to the day) after Apollo 11, that quote would have been broadcast thousands of times around the world. It would have been used in the opening leader of virtually every slightly space or science related TV show and documentary that had been produced since then. I can well imagine that some people at NASA were really annoyed with constantly hearing that and decided to change it to something that made more sense, and had less chance of being misread or misspoken.

 

[SunlitZelkova]

6 hours ago, Beamer said:

The fact of the matter is that the announcer (Jack King I believe his name was) misread the script, or perhaps he read it right but simply misspoke.

In his defence, he was watching human beings get launched to land on the freaking Moon!

I have read the Apollo 11 launch transcript, annotated by NASA. It mentions he fumbled his words another time, too.

[Beamer]

13 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

In his defence, he was watching human beings get launched to land on the freaking Moon!

I have read the Apollo 11 launch transcript, annotated by NASA. It mentions he fumbled his words another time, too.

Oh I certainly don't fault him for it, the fact that he could keep his composure at all is remarkable enough. If it had been me in his seat I would have sounded like a British footy commentator after seeing the winning goal in the World Championship finals. Which is probably about as long ago come to think of it

 

[cubinator]

55 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

In his defence, he was watching human beings get launched to land on the freaking Moon!

I have read the Apollo 11 launch transcript, annotated by NASA. It mentions he fumbled his words another time, too.

Yeah, even Charlie Duke fumbled "Twan - Tranquility Base" right after the landing.

[Br0wnie007]

fun fact: you can buy uranium-238 on amazon

[kerbiloid]

fun fact: ,,, and be added to the watch list.

[DDE]

[DDE]

In rocket design, this is known as a "nonleak coupling".

 

[Admiral Fluffy]

Today is the one year anniversary of the Perseverance rover!

Ingenuity is still going too.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

The seven-day week has been around since the 21st century BC. 

 

https://www.livescience.com/45432-days-of-the-week.html

 

[StrandedonEarth]

On 2/13/2022 at 6:54 PM, StrandedonEarth said:

 

 

[StrandedonEarth]

Also (source unknown):

Edited February 20, 2022 by StrandedonEarth

[DDE]

Meanwhile just outside the borders of Rome

 

[kerbiloid]

Quote

believe they found evidence of specific ranks, with 350 iron shield bosses, 30 bronzed ones, and 5 of silver or gold

So unexpectedly!

350 : (30+5) = 10:1

They call it "foreman", and could anyone imagine that they were wearing some cheap luxury as insignia.

I bet, there is a chieftain pack somewhere around, with a golden chain, crimson jacket, and an ancient cellphone.

Spoiler

 

Edited February 21, 2022 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

On 2/20/2022 at 4:54 PM, StrandedonEarth said:

Also (source unknown):

Yes remember seeing them then I visited NASA some years ago, and knew Curiosity was car sized, still thought I could nicked Sojourner if I had my suitcase with me  
Now its not much to indicate size and you think remote controlled car. 
The rover 3d model who is obviously based on Spirit I downloaded and used in my first contact render was not scaled so yes. 

But this was not set on Mars and centuries later

Edited February 21, 2022 by magnemoe

[kerbiloid]

On 2/20/2022 at 6:54 PM, StrandedonEarth said:

Remember, how it began and the original data loading method.
 

Spoiler

 

 

 

[magnemoe]

We can not with reasonable predict the orbit of comets many orbits into their trajectory, the reason is pretty obvious for long term KSP players. 
With an very eccentric orbit tiny changes around Pe will have much larger impact on the Ap who change the orbit and the Pe next time, repeat this. 
Noticed this during my last game, building most major stuff on Minmus dropping them down theto LKO at the launch angle from an targeting proble, doing an timing burn adjust time for burn you save 8-900 m/s and you get an much better profile than burning from LKO, just add kerbals and food
But the point is that changing the Pe velocity with less than 001 m/s will change the Ap time with hours. 

Edited February 21, 2022 by magnemoe

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Alcohol and gunpowder... what could go wrong?

Quote

 

drink seems to have played its part in the creation of early gunpowder but there is one more link between alcohol and gunpowder worth recalling and that’s the origins of ‘Gunpowder Proof’ spirits.

The term goes back to the 16^th century when distilled spirits were becoming popular as a drink rather than the sole preserve of physicians and alchemists for use in their concoctions and such.

As ever, the government quickly moved to tax spirits with the rate dependant on their strength. To test the alcoholic level, it is said, a pellet of gunpowder (no doubt a larger ‘corn’) would be soaked in the spirit and set light to.

If the gunpowder still ignited then that meant the spirit was ‘over-proof’ (57% or higher today) and therefore in the higher tax band.

 

Strange Tales: Gunpowder and ‘the urine of a wine drinking man’ - The Drinks Business

Quote

Another early method for testing liquor's alcohol content was the "gunpowder method." Gunpowder was soaked in a spirit, and if the gunpowder could still burn, the spirit was rated above proof. This test relies on the fact that potassium nitrate (a chemical in gunpowder) is significantly more soluble in water than in alcohol.^[3] While less influenced by temperature than the simpler burn-or-no-burn test, gunpowder tests also lacked true reproducibility. Factors like the grain size of gunpowder and the time it sat in the spirit impact the dissolution of potassium nitrate and therefore what would be defined as 100 proof. However, the gunpowder method is significantly less variable than the burn-or-no-burn method and 100 proof defined by it is traditionally defined as 57.15% ABV.

Alcohol proof - Wikipedia

(Yeah, I know - referenced already, but fun facts deserve being presented in the correct forum)

[kerbiloid]

This is one more idea on what will we do with a drunken sailor.

[Hyperspace Industries]

South Africa has a load of uranium, the whole north cape province is basically one giant uranium ore deposit. There are over 20 uranium mines there.

This allowed us to in (I think,  (the only time reference my dad gave was during apartheid)) the 80’s build our own nukes, from our own uranium!