Things you did not know

[the monopoly guy]

Shut the hell up about glass!!

Greenland holds 1/4 of the worlds' freshwater surface ice.

etleast he wasn't talking about its state.

chuck norris is 68...and not a god

 

[Niccolo]

it's not from above tho, you won't see a rainbow if you're in the sky looking down, you can if you are flying

the only way it can be behind you is if you turn your back on it but then it disappears

Hokay... this has gone on long enough without a physicist butting in.

A rainbow that you see normally is, in fact, already a circle. Just the rest of it is below ground. The reason we never see a full circle is 'cause we don't get to the right altitude. We have stumpy little bodies that top out at about five to six feet (ignoring tall bastards getting into the ten foot range) and aeroplanes normally fly above the cloudline.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

Hokay... this has gone on long enough without a physicist butting in.

A rainbow that you see normally is, in fact, already a circle. Just the rest of it is below ground. The reason we never see a full circle is 'cause we don't get to the right altitude. We have stumpy little bodies that top out at about five to six feet (ignoring tall bastards getting into the ten foot range) and aeroplanes normally fly above the cloudline.

actually i got my info from a science guy

there's also the fact that only you can see the rainbow and no one else, another person sees a totally different one if they see one at all

so if we're taller we wouldn't be able to see it if we were taller

 

[TheKnifeJuggler]

The new Indiana Jones movie has a scene with a lot of ants in it. Suxafu to be exact.

These ants are nasty things considering they can RIP FLESH OFF YOUR BONES AND EAT SAID FLESH.

Gyehh...

 

[cleverlymadeup]

A Sailor's Answer: The earth is divided into 360 degrees, as is every other sphere... Each Degree is equal to a time-part of the Earth's Rotation When you get down from Degrees (Each Degree is equal to 15 minutes of rotation) to minutes and seconds, it all adds up. A ship at 0 degrees Longitude but at 136 Degrees West Latitude will see the sun rise Fifteen minutes later than the ship at 0 Degrees Longitude and 135 Degrees West Latitude... It has to be that way or else everything else about the Geometry of Circles will have to be changed... It just isn't worth messing with...

actually it's 366 they changed it to 360 to be more of a round number

it actually was meant to correspond with the days in the year, there is 365.25 to be exact

here's a description of it

http://www.robertlomas.com/megyard/index.html

 

[Tatter]

2nd thing: Why didn't they change time into a base 10 system like everything else? Menu costs too high? Or is it that the "hour" means something more to us than 60 minutes each consisting of 60 seconds, deep in our brains?

simply put the 60 minute thing is tied to circumference of the earth and is one of the non-metric things that is actually pretty sane

i forget what the full explanation is but it does have something to do with the earth

A Sailor's Answer: The earth is divided into 360 degrees, as is every other sphere... Each Degree is equal to a time-part of the Earth's Rotation When you get down from Degrees (Each Degree is equal to 15 minutes of rotation) to minutes and seconds, it all adds up. A ship at 0 degrees Longitude but at 136 Degrees West Latitude will see the sun rise Fifteen minutes later than the ship at 0 Degrees Longitude and 135 Degrees West Latitude... It has to be that way or else everything else about the Geometry of Circles will have to be changed... It just isn't worth messing with...

They tried to impose a metric "degree" called grads in Europe... 100 grads per right angle, 400 grads in a circle. Radians are more useful than either, though. The length of the arc of 1 radian = the length of the radius of the circle. Makes translating linear motion to angular motion and back again a breeze.

Why degrees? Once again, it's easier to divide everything by twos and threes, including circles, without using any measuring tools at all. Human brains are able to naturally divide things in half with reasonable accuracy, and by a happy quirk of integer division, dividing in thirds is nearly as easy; just make your division so one side is half the size of the other, and you've cut off a third. Then divide the remainder in half, and you have your other two thirds. Applied multiple times to a circle, with increasingly fine precision until you have values you can steer a primitive boat by, and you end up with degrees. Applied to the sphere of the Earth, and like Darth Mobius said, you have hours, minutes, and seconds.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

Wasn't it a priest that first came up with 6,000 years by adding up the ages of all the patron saints? I may be remembering that wrong.

st augustine in the book city of god

reading a breif history of time and it mentioned it

 

[the monopoly guy]

the mission was supposedly accomplished on May 1st, 2003...how that workin out Dubbya?
the troop level in Afghanistan is below 1,200
237 days left

 

[TheKnifeJuggler]

An ancient cure for acne was to rub vasoline and hallucinogens on your face.

 

[black_roses_93]

Volkswagen was invented by the Nazis and was going to 'Germanize' the vehicle industry

 

[Anarchemitis]

The world's longest distance Sniper shot that made target was by a Canadian.

 

[Geoffrey42]

A Sailor's Answer: The earth is divided into 360 degrees, as is every other sphere... Each Degree is equal to a time-part of the Earth's Rotation When you get down from Degrees (Each Degree is equal to 15 minutes of rotation) to minutes and seconds, it all adds up. A ship at 0 degrees Longitude but at 136 Degrees West Latitude will see the sun rise Fifteen minutes later than the ship at 0 Degrees Longitude and 135 Degrees West Latitude... It has to be that way or else everything else about the Geometry of Circles will have to be changed... It just isn't worth messing with...

They tried to impose a metric "degree" called grads in Europe... 100 grads per right angle, 400 grads in a circle. Radians are more useful than either, though. The length of the arc of 1 radian = the length of the radius of the circle. Makes translating linear motion to angular motion and back again a breeze.

Why degrees? Once again, it's easier to divide everything by twos and threes, including circles, without using any measuring tools at all. Human brains are able to naturally divide things in half with reasonable accuracy, and by a happy quirk of integer division, dividing in thirds is nearly as easy; just make your division so one side is half the size of the other, and you've cut off a third. Then divide the remainder in half, and you have your other two thirds. Applied multiple times to a circle, with increasingly fine precision until you have values you can steer a primitive boat by, and you end up with degrees. Applied to the sphere of the Earth, and like Darth Mobius said, you have hours, minutes, and seconds.

Radians would appear to be something I can get behind. There's a reason for that unit that goes beyond our planet.

Thank you for the general explanations though. The other thing I ran across, in the wikipedia article, was the whole idea of [a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal]sexagesimal[/a] bases for number systems. One of its primary benefits is that it has so many factors (meaning that you can divide it evenly in a multitude of different ways). This gets back to Tatter's thought of it just being easier to do mental division, but in this case, rather than just 2 and 3, you can take 60 and cut it up many, many different ways, without having to deal with remainders. This almost makes sense.

 

[Tatter]

Radians would appear to be something I can get behind. There's a reason for that unit that goes beyond our planet.

Thank you for the general explanations though. The other thing I ran across, in the wikipedia article, was the whole idea of [a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal]sexagesimal[/a] bases for number systems. One of its primary benefits is that it has so many factors (meaning that you can divide it evenly in a multitude of different ways). This gets back to Tatter's thought of it just being easier to do mental division, but in this case, rather than just 2 and 3, you can take 60 and cut it up many, many different ways, without having to deal with remainders. This almost makes sense.

Not just so many different ways, but in ways that can be used for basic distance calculations. A 30-60-90 degree triangle has the interesting property that the shortest side is always exactly half the length of the longest side. Various applications of Pythagoras's theorem and 30 or 60 degree angles no doubt had a lot to do with the tradition of dividing circles in sexagesimal ways.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

Volkswagen was invented by the Nazis and was going to 'Germanize' the vehicle industry

actually no it was so that everyone in germany could get an affordable car, it was originally made by porche

the literal translation of the name is people wagon

the beetle is the long production car ever, it has never gone out of production since they nazi's started to make it

 

[Whitto]

Apparently if you view a rainbow from above (in a plane) it is a ring/circle.

no that's not true you can't see a rainbow from above

Lies, I SEEN one over Holland! With me very own two peepers. It was all round and circular and everything!

 

[cleverlymadeup]

Apparently if you view a rainbow from above (in a plane) it is a ring/circle.

no that's not true you can't see a rainbow from above

Lies, I SEEN one over Holland! With me very own two peepers. It was all round and circular and everything!

LIES and as they say on fark, here comes the science

http://eo.ucar.edu/rainbows/

 

[Gahars]

Odontophobia is the fear of teeth.

 

[Anarchemitis]

Can we stop arguing and make things we did not know?

 

[Tatter]

Can we stop arguing and make things we did not know?

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