Totally useless information/trivia

[mjmooney]

"Little" Tom Daley is currently the tallest competitive diver in the world.

I think you'll find that Ashley Young is taller by 4cm.

I knew somebody would do that.

[colhint]

During the war, bicycles were hard to come by and became very expensive. Alan Turing of Enigma fame had a bike with a loose chain. He calculated that the chain would come off every 23 revolutions (i cant remember if it was 23 or 24) anyway rather than fix it, and to stop any thief getting to far away with it, he calculated that if he pedaled backwards every 18 revolutions it would reset itself.

[The_Rev]

A film is currently being made about Alan Turing's life. He was an amazing bloke and his contribution to the war effort and 20th (and even 21st) century life cannot be understated. He should be as famous as Einstein and Hawking but he is a relatively unknown figure. The government should be **** ashamed of how they treated him. At least Gordon Brown had the balls to apologise on their behalf a couple of years back.

I came in to post this though:

[MrDuck]

Well I never. I just read the snopes entry for it. I didn't think a zebra's stripes would actually disappear on a B&W telly but they do. In some small way, you've just changed my childhood

:shock:

Wow.

And there was me thinking they'd just taped a bunch of cats together.

[BOF]

Prompted by Mike in the religion thread. The origin of the phrase 'by and large' which also mentions 'taken aback'.

I've also realised the 'problem phrases' thread has been pruned :cry:

[BOF]

BASF, Agfa & Bayer were part of a larger company (Farben) that created the Zyklon B pesticide that was used in Nazi gas chambers.

[Chindie]

BASF, Agfa & Bayer were part of a larger company (Farben) that created the Zyklon B pesticide that was used in Nazi gas chambers.

They held the trademark for the name 'Heroin' until WW1 too.

[mjmooney]

The SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss.

[Stevo985]

Engelbert Humperdinck is older than 20 of the countries who entered this year's Eurovision.

[LondonLax]

Well I never. I just read the snopes entry for it. I didn't think a zebra's stripes would actually disappear on a B&W telly but they do. In some small way, you've just changed my childhood

I'm not buying it.

That snopes entry is full of shit IMO.

This episode has a zebra in it with the horse at 16 mins, they look nothing like each other:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc8KDWHNs8E

The wikipedia entry says it was a horse called "Bamboo Harvester"

EDIT: The link at the bottom of the snopes Mr Ed page has this.

[Stevo985]

Well that's a shame. Or is it?

[roonst83]

"Little" Tom Daley is currently the tallest competitive diver in the world.

I think you'll find that Ashley Young is taller by 4cm.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

Funny things I have found out this week, probably known by most of you but I thought they were good :-

Snottites - Are what they say, snotty little things that hang in caves but they have acid coming out of them (Sulphuric iirc) (Bit like the Alien in the films) - which is pretty cool.

Bees - They get drunk and have bouncers that stop the proper pi55ed ones entering the hive, repeat offenders get battered, maimed or even killed. I think the proportion of pi55 heads is about th same as humans.

[Troglodyte]

Is pi55 anything like piss?

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

Is pi55 anything like piss?

I am really glad you asked, yes and no. The aging process in oak means it really can stand on its on 2 feet as a brand but the ingrained use of piss will over time (hopefully) be replaced with the radical and forward thinking pi55 theory. We can only hope eh ?

(Its habit for Sp@m filters and that)

[mjmooney]

I believe there used to be a bicycle cleaning product called "P155 Easy" - which has now been renamed "Muc Off".

[BOF]

All my own work here. Useless info coming up. This forthcoming season will be the first in Premier League history (read - 20 years) where there is no team beginning with 'B' involved.

The last time that happened was the year before the PL started - 1991/92.

[mjmooney]

All my own work here. Useless info coming up. This forthcoming season will be the first in Premier League history (read - 20 years) where there is no team beginning with 'B' involved.

The last time that happened was the year before the PL started - 1991/92.

Except for Bastard Man Utd.

[mjmooney]

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual - no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands - but they regularly indulge in "attempted rape flights" when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. "Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards," explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. "I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer)."

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. "When one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback - well, didn't get any feedback," he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest - especially in Britain for some reason - but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

Guardian

And it's not just ducks. Penguins are dead boring as well:

'Depraved' sex acts by penguins shocked polar explorer

By Matt McGrath

Science reporter, BBC World Service

Accounts of unusual sexual activities among penguins, observed a century ago by a member of Captain Scott's polar team, are finally being made public.

Details, including "sexual coercion", recorded by George Murray Levick were considered so shocking that they were removed from official accounts.

However, scientists now understand the biological reasons behind the acts that Dr Levick considered "depraved".

The Natural History Museum has published his unedited papers.

Mr Levick, an avid biologist, was the medical officer on Captain Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910. He was a pioneer in the study of penguins and was the first person to stay for an entire breeding season with a colony on Cape Adare.

He recorded many details of the lives of adelie penguins, but some of their activities were just too much for the Edwardian sensibilities of the good doctor.

He was shocked by what he described as the "depraved" sexual acts of "hooligan" males who were mating with dead females. So distressed was he that he recorded the "perverted" activities in Greek in his notebook.

Graphic account

On his return to Britain, Mr Levick attempted to publish a paper entitled "the natural history of the adelie penguin", but according to Douglas Russell, curator of eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum, it was too much for the times.

"He submitted this extraordinary and graphic account of sexual behaviour of the adelie penguins, which the academic world of the post-Edwardian era found a little too difficult to publish," Mr Russell said.

Pages from Dr Levick's notebook with some sections coded in Greek

The sexual behaviour section was not included in the official paper, but the then keeper of zoology at the museum, Sidney Harmer, decided that 100 copies of the graphic account should be circulated to a select group of scientists.

Mr Russell said they simply did not have the scientific knowledge at that time to explain Mr Levick's accounts of what he termed necrophilia.

"What is happening there is not in any way analogous to necrophilia in the human context," Mr Russell said. "It is the males seeing the positioning that is causing them to have a sexual reaction.

"They are not distinguishing between live females who are awaiting congress in the colony, and dead penguins from the previous year which just happen to be in the same position."

Sexual coercion

Only two of the original 100 copies of Mr Levick's account survive. Mr Russell and colleagues have now published a re-interpretation of Mr Levick's findings in the journal Polar Record.

Mr Russell described how he had discovered one of the copies by accident.

"I just happened to be going through the file on George Murray Levick when I shifted some papers and found underneath them this extraordinary paper which was headed 'the sexual habits of the adelie penguin, not for publication' in large black type.

"It's just full of accounts of sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, non-procreative sex, and finishes with an account of what he considers homosexual behaviour, and it was fascinating."

The report and Mr Levick's handwritten notes are now on display at the Natural History Museum for the first time. Mr Russell believes they show a man who struggled to understand penguins as they really are.

"He's just completely shocked. He, to a certain extent, falls into the same trap as an awful lot of people in seeing penguins as bipedal birds and seeing them as little people. They're not. They are birds and should be interpreted as such."

BBC

[leviramsey]

If you looked like

you'd probably have to resort to necrophilia, too...