Stuff you didn't know and probably don't care about

[Thebobo]

Philly company digitizes 25,000 old records and they're free to download

https://archive.org/details/georgeblood

 

[tynopik]

U.S. Naval Institute @NavalInstitute 2 hours ago

#funfactfriday In 1989, Pepsi briefly had its own navy when it accepted a payment of 17 submarines from the USSR

https://news.usni.org/2015/04/30/fr...a-wars-a-brief-collection-of-non-state-navies

 

[Charmonium]

That's a pretty interesting story.

 

[Charmonium]

Why Long Island isn't really an island.

Technically, the East River, the body of water that separates Long Island from Manhattan and the Bronx (on the New York mainland), is a tidal strait, rather than a river. Since the East River is relatively shallow, difficult for ships to navigate, and not an outlet to the sea, it doesn’t count, the Court essentially argued. Newsday points out that scientific experts don't support this argument—geologically, the two islands are made of very different kinds of rock that formed at millions of years apart. But, as a matter of political expediency, it’s more convenient for Long Island to be a peninsula so New York can exercise jurisdiction over it (and reap whatever natural resources it can from that).

http://mentalfloss.com/article/76297/sort-bogus-reason-long-island-isnt-considered-island

 

[lxskllr]

This was the image that inspired the linux mascot tux...

The concept of the Linux mascot being a penguin came from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Tux was created by Larry Ewing in 1996 after an initial suggestion made by Alan Cox[2] and further refined by Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list.[3] Torvalds took his inspiration from an image he found on an FTP site,[4] showing a penguin figurine looking strangely like the Creature Comforts characters made by Nick Park. The first person to call the penguin "Tux" was James Hughes, who said that it stood for "(T)orvalds (U)ni(X)".[5] However, tux is also an abbreviation of tuxedo, the outfit which often springs to mind when one sees a penguin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux

 

[Red Squirrel]

Ahhh FTP sites, those were the days. It's where I got a lot of "appz". I actually ran one myself for a bit on my dialup connection lol. This was before 25 year jail sentences for piracy and mass surveillance. The simple times.

 

[Charmonium]

Australia's version of the Easter Bunny is the Bilby

There are only about 600 bilbies left in the deserts of Australia. These big-eared marsupials, also known as rabbit-eared bandicoots, thrived Down Under until European settlers arrived in the late 18th century, bringing with them rabbits, which were released into the wild for hunting. These days, the bilby is endangered, a victim of the foxes and feral cats that prey on them, and the rabbits that drive them from their burrows. Australians have tried to help, and in recent years the bilby has become a symbol of Easter, with chocolate bilby treats preferred by many, instead of chocolate bunnies. A portion of the sale of chocolate bilbies goes toward their preservation.

Hopping down the bilby trail:

• The idea to replace the Easter Bunny began in 1968 when a 9-year-old Queensland girl wrote a story called “Billy the Aussie Easter Bilby,” which she went on to publish as an adult.
  
• The story sparked the public's interest in saving the bilby, and by 1991, the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia had begun a campaign to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby.
  
• Wild rabbits are a serious problem in Australia. Unsuccessful control attempts have included building fences (rabbits jumped over, or burrowed under) and releasing a deadly virus in 1950, which worked until genetic resistance foiled the plan.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-australias-alternative-to-the-easter-bunny.htm

 

[Thebobo]

Australia's version of the Easter Bunny is the Bilby

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-australias-alternative-to-the-easter-bunny.htm

Is it Bilby Bigly? I can't tell the scale.

 

[lxskllr]

Hawks Act as Unwitting Muscle for Hummingbirds

Conservationists often point out that, in nature, everything is connected. Remove a certain species from an ecosystem, and other seemingly unrelated ones might suffer.

Such an invisible thread ties together hummingbirds and hawks. In Arizona, black-chinned hummingbirds situate their nests around those of northern goshawks and Cooper’s hawks. While the diminutive hummingbirds escape the notice of the large raptors, the hummingbirds’ key nest predator, the Mexican jay, does not—and hummingbirds seem to recognize this.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/hawks-act-unwitting-muscle-hummingbirds-180956506/

 

[Charmonium]

Is it Bilby Bigly? I can't tell the scale.

Apparently there is a greater and lesser Bilby. The one pictured here I'm guessing is the Greater Bilby.

 

[Kaido]

This was the image that inspired the linux mascot tux...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux

 

[Cappuccino]

did you know that the internet is the number 1 cause of suicide?

 

[Charmonium]

Here are the oldest recorded jokes we know of - dating to roughly 4000 years ago.

Born from cultures we can only read about and making fun of customs we don’t always understand, many of the world’s oldest jokes, to a modern audience, simply aren’t that funny. That said, humans being humans, with the oldest joke that has survived through today, it would appear little has changed in the interim- it, naturally, being a fart joke. To wit, recorded on a Sumerian tablet somewhere between 1900 and 2300 BC, the first known joke is as follow:

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart on her husband’s lap.

The second oldest documented joke moves away from potty humor in favor of a sex, recorded about 1600 BC on the Westcar Papyrus: “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

more at link
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/oldest-known-joke/

 

[IronWing]

 

[shortylickens]

Katerina Hartlova is a 34FF.

 

[OutHouse]

only one ship in the US Navy has sunk an enemy ship



USS Constitution

umm i think you read that wrong. The USS Constitution is the only ship in the fleet to have sunk a ship. meaning all the other ships that have done so have been retired and no longer in the fleet. The USS Constitution is still manned by active duty sailors and officers.

 

[R0H1T]

This is easy, imagine the market when oil was near $150 per barrel. That'd be roughly $5 trillion at those production levels

 

[tynopik]

umm i think you read that wrong. The USS Constitution is the only ship in the fleet to have sunk a ship. meaning all the other ships that have done so have been retired and no longer in the fleet. The USS Constitution is still manned by active duty sailors and officers.

yes, that is exactly the meaning

the statement was designed for maximum impact while being technically (the best kind of) correct

it is still interesting that there are no other active ships that have sunk another

 

[KMFJD]

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/

High tech agriculture, very interesting

(almost exactly the same shelving as we use for growing mushrooms)

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Phylicia Rashad, best known as Clair Huxtable, Bill Cosby's Wife on the Cosby show was once married to Victor Willis, best known as the lead singer and police officer of The Village People.

It turns out that not only is Willis straight, most of the rest of the band is too. Only cowboy Dave Forrest and Indian Felipe Rose are actually gay. The other members were closet heterosexuals who kept their preferences on the down low so as not to mess with the bands popularity in the LGBT community.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

In the 1940's south popular liquors like bourbon, scotch and whiskey were in very short supply and very expensive, but rum coming from the Caribbean was cheap and plentiful. The problem was that nobody wanted to drink rum. In order to raise sales of the unpopular rum distributors forced bar owners to buy a lot of rum just to be allowed to order the rare brown liquors. It was essential to come up with a popular drink that used rum to be able to move the inventory. Pat O'Brien hit upon a winning recipe. In prohibition he had run a speakeasy with the password "Storm's brewin'". He mixed rum with fruit juice, used his old password for inspiration, served the new cocktail in a distinctive glass shaped like a Hurricane lamp to appeal to the sailors who were the best customers in New Orleans at that time and the rest is history. Necessity is the mother of invention.

 

[KMFJD]

Ann Hodges, hit by meteor strike in 1954

 

[KMFJD]

Guy drives his Jeep from Calgary, ALberta to Prudhoe Bay and then down to the tip of South America, Ushuaia

Great photo's

https://imgur.com/a/YYmsk

 

[Red Squirrel]

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/

High tech agriculture, very interesting

(almost exactly the same shelving as we use for growing mushrooms)

I've always said they should do this. Then it becomes location independent and you could have these everywhere instead of having to ship food from down south. They could have it run partially off alternative energy too.

 

[Cappuccino]

All eye drops expire in 28 days. I did not know that and I've been using OPTREX dry eyes for 3 months... I hope I don't go blind lol.