An interesting facts thread.

[GrimTuesday]

I love making threads like these, and we haven't had one in a while, so lets have one. So, just to clarify, tell me a few interesting facts, feel free to debate whether or not what someone said, though if you are doing this, perhaps provide a source.

I'll start:

The character Ermac in Mortal Kombat is actually the result of a programing error in the first game that would produce a red ninja (all the ninjas are palette swaps) and would, in the fight audits appear as ERMAC, which was an abbreviated form of Error Macro.

The City of Vancouver in Canada was actually named Vancouver a number of years after the city of Vancouver, Washington, however both were at least tangentially named after Captain George Vancouver.

Portland, Oregon got its name when the two founders of the town flipped a coin to decide whose hometown to name it after. Had the coin landed the other way, it would have been called Boston.

The skyline of Seattle that you can see from Frasier's apartment in Frasier isn't actually visible from any buildings in Seattle, but rather from a hill just outside the city.

Now tell me your facts.

 

[Tanis]

Evolution is real.

Klonoa is neither a cat nor a rabbit.

The infamous story of Ozzy biting the head off a bat is TRUE.
However, he thought it was a RUBBER bat because he used to bite the head off one as a way of teasing his friend, Randy Rhoads, due to his fear of bats.

 

[White Lightning]

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove.

All porcupines float in water.

All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.

I made up all of these facts.

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt."

Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.

 

[GrimTuesday]

The biggest problem with threads like these, is that people often can't differentiate between opinions and facts.

Hence why I said to not be afraid to argue someone's fact if you know otherwise. I figure we are smart enough as a group to know the difference between the two.

 

[Basement Cat]

It is possible to pop your eyes out of your skull if you sneeze very hard while managing to keep your eyes wide open.

 

[Johnny Impact]

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Lobsters don't have blood vessels. Their blood just sloshes around inside them.

The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

Human bone is stronger than concrete.

Elephants cannot run. (To run, you must have all extremities off the ground at once, even if only for a moment. Elephants can't do this, they only have two feet off the ground at any time. The technical term for what they do is ambling.)

A starfish eats by barfing its stomach onto its food.

I just wasted twenty seconds of your life.

 

[hazabaza1]

I'm not wearing a shirt as I'm posting this!

That's all I got.

 

[Radoh]

There are muscles in the average penis that, if trained, can allow a man to go hands free.

Dogs aren't actually completely color blind, as they can see shades of Blue.

Sharks don't have a single bone in their entire body, they are completely composed of Cartilage.

Luke Skywalker was originally supposed to be cast as a midget.

The OP has misspelled the word 'Thread' in the title as Tread.

hazabaza1 is both a scoundrel and a scholar.

 

[EHKOS]

Luke Skywalker was originally supposed to be a midget.

Also his original name was to be "Starkiller". But it didn't sound heroic enough.

 

[Renegade-pizza]

There are no muscles in your fingers.

 

[C. Cain]

Abraham Lincoln was, in fact, not a vampire hunter.

Strawberries aren't berries in the botanical sense. They are aggregate accessory fruit.

 

[DJjaffacake]

Viggo Mortensen almost died twice while filming The Lord of the Rings. First when a knife was accidentally thrown at him (yeah, that badass moment at the end of Fellowship of the Ring wasn't meant to happen), and again when he was almost sucked under by the currents in a river.

Your TV remote controls your TV using radiation (it's safe though, calm down).

E numbers are not especially harmful, they're just an easy way of identifying various chemicals. Vitamin C and the red pigment in tomatoes, for example, are both E numbers.

The hottest place in the Solar System is Oxford, UK (they have an experimental fusion reactor).

Fascist regimes survived in Portugal and Spain until the mid 1970s.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Did you know that when you kiss, you are exchanging 200 millions germs per second. A little peanut told me that-

 

[Spambot 3000]

Uh ... Your ears are in line with your nipples.
That's all I got.

 

[SckizoBoy]

Em... can't really think of anything that doesn't relate to my current history nerdism, so I'll go with this one:

Snakes native to the desert sidewind, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do so because the sand is hot.

Though one stunning and rather recent revelation: no-one knows for sure who Sun Tzu was, when he lived and whether he actually wrote 'the Art of War'.

 

[Quaxar]

To quote myself from that Egyptian d20 thread: the oldest "non-regular" (d6) die ever found was a Sumer d4 from around 2600 BC.

There are muscles in the average penis that, if trained, can allow a man to go hands free.

I am not sure what you mean by that but what I can say with certainty is that in an average penis there are no muscles whatsoever.
It's all corpus cavernosum plus connective tissue, the only muscles associated with the penis are M. bulbospongiosus and M. ischiocavernosus. They help erections by compressing veins and the latter does a bit of stabilization at the base but nothing major.

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

Blueberries aren't blue. They're purple. They also stain purple.

Black cherries aren't black. They're a purple color, too, with a hint of maroon.

In fact, black people aren't black. They're all varying shades of brown. All of them. No one is completely black and stays that way after a good shower.

White people aren't white, either. More like a light beige or something. Eggshell, cream or even ivory, perhaps. Not quite white.

Albinos? Now THOSE people are fuckin' white! These people can give Casper a run for his money in the pale department. BUT WE DON'T CALL THEM WHITE!

Why do I think the entirety of humanity is color blind?

 

[GundamSentinel]

There are only 22 countries in the world [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9653497/British-have-invaded-nine-out-of-ten-countries-so-look-out-Luxembourg.html] that have never seen an invasion by the British.

Sorry, that's all I've got right now.

 

[catalyst8]

Rabbits eat their own shit, if they didn't they'd die.

Marijuana has been extensively linked to the development of sometimes extreme psychological disorders, especially in users in their pre 20s; LSD has a history of use in psychiatry & may be reintroduced in psychiatric treatment in the near future.

Most of the famous biblical myths were stolen from much earlier Mesopotamian mythology e.g. the Flood Myth of Noah is pre-dated by hundreds of years by the Mesopotamian epic poem Gilgamesh; the mythical origin of Moses was taken from Sargon of Akkad, again pre-dating its biblical imitator by hundreds of years; the same with the Genesis myth & the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in the English dictionary, however it's a scientific word used to describe 'black lung' disease & as such is described as an 'artificial' word.

Richard III may indeed have been a hunchback. The University of Leicester is currently conducting DNA tests between recently discovered remains believed to be the monarch's & his descendants.

There are only 22 countries in the world [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9653497/British-have-invaded-nine-out-of-ten-countries-so-look-out-Luxembourg.html] that have never seen an invasion by the British.

The definition of 'invasion' used by the author of that claim also includes the invitation by nations for Great Britain to send supporting forces, & even in some instances includes British trading stations.

EDIT: While we're on the subject of Great Britain however, Champagne was invented by the English years before Perignon had even arrived in Hautvillers. The French didn't even have the technology to create sufficiently strong glass to contain it.

 

[Dethenger]

Uh ... Your ears are in line with your nipples.
That's all I got.

Holy shit, it's true.

Your hair and fingernails don't grow after you die, they just appear longer because the flesh around it is rotting away.