f13.net

Observation: Geeks love Trivia
Observation: This site is full of geeks.
Observation: We love our 'useless' threads.
Conclusion: Useless Trivia.  A thread for exactly that, not necessarily meant to spark discussion. You may want to cite your source if its something that's way out there.

My starter: American Myths.

Manhattan Island
The Myth: In 1626, Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Canarsee Indians for $24-$26 worth of beads and other trinkets.

The Truth: Minuit did give 60 guilders (~$24)  worth of beads, knives, axes, clothes and rum to Chief Seyseys of the Carnasee tribe "to let us live amongst them" on Manhattan Island - but the Canarsee actually got the best of the deal because they didn't own the island in the first place.  They lived on the other side of the East River in Brooklyn, and only visited the southern tip of Manhattan to fish and hunt. The Weckquaesgeeks tribe, which lived on the upper 3/4 of the island, had a much stronger claim to it and were furious when they learned they'd been left out of the deal.  They fought with the Dutch settlers for years until the Dutch finally paid them, too.

The Liberty Bell
The Myth: The Liberty Bell has always been a precious symbol of American heritage.

The Truth: The bell, installed in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in 1753, was almost bartered off as scrap metal in 1828 when the building was being refurbished.  According to one account, "The Philadelphia city fathers... contracted John Wilbank, a bell maker from Germantown, Pennsylvania, to cast a replacement for the Liberty Bell.  He agreed to knock $400 off his bill in exchange for the 2,000-pound relic  When Wilbank went to collect it, however, he decided it wasn't worth the trouble.  'Drayage costs more than the bell's worth,' he said."  The city of Philadelphia actually sued to force him to take it.  Willbank just gave it back to them as a gift, "unaware that he'd just bartered away what would become the most venerated symbol of American independence."

Charles Richter was an avid nudist, so much so that his wife divorced him over it.  He also invented the Richter Scale.

There is so much vitamin A in polar bear liver that it's poisonous to humans.

Spider muscles only pull in one direction.  Internal body pressure causes the joints to bend the other way when muscles relax.

Shrimp can only swim backwards

Hotel Industry Data: Generally, men leave their hotel rooms cleaner than women do.

The elephant is the only animal with four knees.

I'm not buying this. Maybe kneeCAPS but knees? That doesn't jive with me. How are we defining Knee? Is the presence of a kneecap necessary? I know lots of housecats that would disagree.

I believe they are defining 'knee' as bending the forelimb toward the posterior rather than the anterior side of the creature.  The forelegs on cats have elbows, as they bend forward, not backward.

The sodium laurate sulfate in toothpaste makes our sweet tastebuds numb and also dissolves fatty molecules on our tongue. The result is that our bitter tastebuds are more receptive/sensitive and the sweet are less receptive/sensitive, this is why drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth tastes bitter and nasty since we can't taste the sweetness of it.

The human head weighs eight pounds.

My cat's breath smells like catfood.

The Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center is the fourth largest building by volume in the world, and the largest single story building in the world.  The interior is so vast, rainclouds can form inside the building below the ceiling.

Rats have amazing physical stamina and can tread water for up to three days before becoming tired.

If more than a pea-sized amount of toothpaste is swallowed during tooth brushing, poison control should be contacted (this is why letting little kids have candy-flavored toothpaste with their favorite cartoon characters on the tube is kind of a terrible idea). It says so on the back of the tube, if you don't believe me!

Whale sharks have a longer average lifespan than humans. Unless you hit them with a boat. I guess that goes for both species though.

So does the desert tortoise.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/95/Desert_tortoise_tds.jpg/230px-Desert_tortoise_tds.jpg)

My superpower makes me impervious to boats. That's it.

Most mammals have a life expectancy of 1 billion heartbeats (300 BPM shrews live 3 years, 30 BPM elephants live 30 years).  The exceptions: Humans, their popular pet species (when not feral), and marine mammals, all of which have an expectation of 3 billion.

--Dave

Does that mean jogging will actually decrease your lifespan?  :ye_gods:

Edit for useless trivia:  My heart skips a beat regularly.  This means I'm actually conserving beats, and will live longer than you normal heart beating pansies.

Elephants live longer than 30 years, though. African elephants are like 50+ in the wild. They're one of the only things out there that dies *sooner* in captivity.

Regular exercise lowers your resting heart rate so...it depends.

Marie Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia related to radiation exposure. Her husband and fellow researcher, Pierre, had died 28 years earlier... run over by a horse-drawn carriage while crossing the street on a rainy night.

The housefly will do a one-and-a-half (loopty loop) before landing on the ceiling.

If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.

A Boeing 747's wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.

Mel Blanc was alergic to carrots.

In an ironic moment during Doolittle's Raid, one of the bombs dropped on the naval base at Yokosuka destroyed a submarine tender in drydock. The unharmed drydock beside it contained two submarines: I-25 and I-17... these would later be the only two Japanese submarines to launch successful attacks on the American mainland.

When a frog throws up it throws up it's stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it's mouth. Then the frog uses it's forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

On a related note:   If a frog keeps its mouth open too long, it will suffocate.

Toads don't have teeth, frogs do.

That internal pressure in spiders is blood pressure, forced (on command) into sacs in their joints like hydraulics. It's an efficient enough system that it can propel jumping spiders into their impressive leaps. When a spider dies, this pressure collapses. That's why they, and many similar arthropods, curl up their legs when they die. The contraction caused by rigor mortis pulls only one way.

When Thomas Edison died Henry Ford captured his last dying breath in a bottle.

People whose zodiac sign is cancer are actually 75% less likely to die from cancer than those born under any other sign.

The reclaimed sewage water used to fill Disneyland's lakes and rivers comes from Sea World.

Carnival ride operators are 600% more likely to be murdered by a serial killer than by a killer who claims just that one victim.

Approximately forty percent of persons who attempt to commit suicide by holding their breath fail.

Liberace fathered more than 40 illegitimate children.

Because a grown adult's stomach contains two distinct compartments -- one which processes liquids, and another which digests solid foods -- everyone who drinks does so on an "empty stomach."

New Mexico was once part of Alaska.

The most effective method used to train a dog to detect concealed narcotics is to foster an addiction by the dog to the drug it is trained to detect.

In Sweden, pigs do not say "oink, oink," they say "nöff nöff" (pronounced like "nerf, nerf.")

The Irish New Testament edition known as the Book of Kells was hand drawn and written on calfskin. About 185 calves surrendered their skins to provide sufficient writing space.

Bodies which are cryogenically frozen are suspended upside down, so as to delay the thawing of the brain should a leak occur.

Albanians celebrate St. Julian's feast day by drinking shots of vodka with dead grasshoppers at the bottom of the glass.

The so-called "space junk" left behind by commercial satellites and discarded refuse from American Space Shuttle missions continues to orbit the Earth in a band which is currently almost 40% as large as the single largest ring around Saturn.

While attending college in Whittier, California, Richard M. Nixon once won $25 by taking the grand prize at an open mic competition in a Los Angeles comedy club.

Every state in the U.S., except Minnesota, outlaws the killing of praying mantises.

It takes about six months for an Indonesian marble clam to turn a grain of sand into a glass marble.

Senator John Edwards made his fortune largely as a trial lawyer who specialized in suing flu vaccine makers. That is, he did so until his lawsuits left all of the U.S. based vaccine makers bankrupt.

In sushi-loving Japan, the soft spot on the head of a baby eel is considered a delicacy.

Horseshoes are always sold in packs of 5, according to the traditional formula of  “Two pair and a spare.”

Robert Fulton invented the steam-powered banjo in 1843.  The instrument could play all five verses of “Oh, Susannah!” on the steam pressure generated by one cord of wood.

The monocle worn by Planters spokesman Mr. Peanut is only for show.  He has 20-20 vision.

On pianos in England, Wales and South Africa, the low-pitched keys are on the right.

Real money, when placed in water, gets wet.  Counterfeit money stays dry.

In morticians’ parlance, a “butterball” is a corpse with an all-over tan.

Some of those seem pretty iffy. Are you just making stuff up?

 :grin:

I should have read more carefully before commenting. I read a couple that might be true through some form of trickery then responded.  :oh_i_see:

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826 exactly fifty years after their signing the Declaration of Independence.  One of Adams last requests was to tell Jefferson he had managed to outlive him, only Jefferson had died earlier in the day.

The other day I was eating swedish meatballs at Ikea. I was about to eat the last one when an arm reached of my shoulder and stabbed it with a fork. I turn around to see who would steal my last meatball and there stands Bill Murray. He stares at me as he puts the meatball in his mouth, gaze never averting. He finishes chewing, uses a napkin to wipe around his mouth and looks me right in the eyes and says "No one will ever believe you."

The battle for Gettesburg took place becasue of shoes. It was a storehouse for Shoes wheich were always in short supply in the confederate army. If It had not been for Shoes, the battle would never have taken place. The last thing Lee wanted was to fight a battle there.

So when a woman tells you that shoes are a matter of life and death, sometimes they are right.

The Ozone layer smells faintly of geraniums.

Ever wonder why we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

For the first one (parkway), blame Robert Moses. He created the early highway system on Long Island (New York, little nub hanging east of Manhattan) that connected Brooklyn and Queens with the beaches and parks to the east. Those streets became the way to the park(s).

The driveway is simpler: it's the way you drive to a house, which around the same time on Long Island, was a fair distance from the main road.

Today I learned that John Tyler, 10th President of the United States, has two still living grandchildren.

That's very cool.  Do you have a link?

Edit: Used my Google-fu.  Snopes has a write-up here. (http://www.snopes.com/history/american/tylergrandsons.asp)

On similar notes: The Great Pyramid was older than Cleopatra during her time than she is during ours, the Stegosaurus had been extinct for more years when Tyrannosaurus Rex roamed the earth than Tyrannosaurus Rex has today, and Oxford University predates both the Inca and the Aztec empires.

The Maya, on the other hand, had been around for 2000 years when the Spanish conquered the last of their cities in 1697... but their empire had fallen to civil war in the 10th century, just as the Umayyad Caliphate was beginning to shatter into the warring kingdoms that would eventually be reunified into what we think of as Spain in 1492. In fact, the founding of the Roman Province of Iberia in 218 BCE was only a smattering of decades from the founding of the first Mayan city in ~250 BCE.

In historical terms, Spain and the Maya were contemporaries.

The United Kingdom has had the same queen for at least 300 years. 

No it just feels that way to her son.

On a point of fun trivia, during the 19th century the British Navy, due to it's dispersed nature, fell into the habit of basically allowing Captains to be gods on their own ships with no oversight unless there was a more senior officer actually on the ship. This led to hilarity such as naval uniforms depending entirely upon the the whims of said captain, some ships had lots of gold braid, some didn't have any. One ship had officers wearing white top hats.

Another captain also had to conduct a burial abroad but lacked consecrated ground. He appointed one of his men as a bishop in the Church of England in order to consecrate it and then demoted him back to the laity after the burial. It's unclear what role this had in the apostolic succession. Another ship kept a bear as a pet, which only ended when the bear woke up and rolled out the wrong side of it's net while the ship was under way and the Captain didn't feel he could justify turning round to try and rescue it.