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Totally useless information/trivia


RunRickyRun

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Useless but amusing.

I never knew the terms "moron", "imbecile"* & "idiot" were originally genuine psychological terms attributed to people based on their IQ. 0-25 being an idiot, 26-50 being an imbecile and 51-70 was a moron :D But psychologists stopped using the terms when they became generic/popular insults for stupid people.

* I did have a vague idea that imbecile was a psychological term

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New figures released to day show rail travel continues to grow in popularity, with the highest number of passengers on the railway in Q1 of 2011 since the 1920s.

So, what are the busiest stations in the country for number of passengers? Latest figures:

Started or ended their journey at the station

01] London Waterloo - 89.4m journeys last year.

02] London Victoria - 70.2m

03] London Liverpool Street - 51.5m

04] London Bridge - 48.7m

05] London Charing Cross - 36.4m

06] London Euston - 30m

07] London Paddington - 29.1m

08] Birmingham New Street - 25.2m

09] London Kings Cross - 24.8m

10] Glasgow Central - 23.8m

Used station to change trains at

01] Clapham Junction - 20.5m

02] East Croydon - 7.1m

03] London Bridge - 7m

04] London Waterloo - 5.4m

05] London Victoria - 5.1m

06] Birmingham New Street - 3.95m

07] London Kings Cross - 2.8m

08] Reading - 2.6m

09] Finsbury Park - 2.5m

10] Glasgow Central - 2.3m

Figures dont include London Underground, and yes, London is by far and away the busiest place for trains in this country. People living south of the Thames and south of London are more likely to use the train than anywhere else (four of the top five busiest stations and all five of the busiest interchanges are for south and south of London) and you probably already knew this but New Street is easily the busiest station in England outside of London. Clapham Junction is impressively busy, as depending on the time of day it has between 110 and 120 trains an hour stopping. New Street has about 45 trains an hour.

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I'm going to suggest that that one is doubly useless since the percentage is almost certainly wrong.
It's in Wikipedia, so it must be true

Through evolution, new species arise through the process of speciation—where new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological niche—and species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Most extinctions occur naturally, without human intervention: it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.
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I don't see why that wouldn't be true to be honest, or at least close. Of the illions and millions of years the mind baffles as to how many species have come and gone.

How they'd ever work it out is beyond me, but it doesn't really surprise me.

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And also, there was almost surely greater speciation in the early period of life because some crazy shit was being tried and died out.

The NHL's Prince of Wales Trophy (currently held by the Boston Bruins, as winners of the Eastern Conference) was at one point awarded to the winner of the NHL's American Division (which never in its history had a Canadian member) and has only been held once by a Canadian club in the past 17 seasons.

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But how many Canadian players are in the teams who win the trophy? I read about the Vancouver riots following Vancouver's game with Boston and ended up looking at the squads of both clubs. Boston only had one American player (their goalie) in their squad of twenty one. They had fifteen Canadians.

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For the 2009-10 season (most recent data from Wiki)

Canada: 53.9%

USA: 21.5%

Sweden: 5.4%

Czech Republic: 5.0%

Finland: 4.0%

Russia: 3.4% (in recent years, as the money in the mostly-Russian Kontinental Hockey League has grown, more Russians are deciding to play closer to home)

Slovakia: 1.9%

Germany: 1.0%

Denmark: 0.6%

Latvia: 0.5%

Austria: 0.3%

Belarus: 0.3%

Kazakhstan: 0.3%

Switzerland: 0.3%

Ukraine: 0.2%

Bahamas: 1 player

Brazil: 1 player

Brunei: 1 player

France: 1 player

Italy: 1 player

Japan: 1 player

Lithuania: 1 player

Northern Ireland: 1 player

Norway: 1 player

Poland: 1 player

Slovenia: 1 player

South Korea: 1 player

(many of the less-obvious countries are probably immigrants to Canada... the figures follow the Hockey Hall of Fame's convention of assigning national origin based on place of birth)

Steve Thomas is the current statistical leader among English-born NHL players (and probably moved to Canada as a child)

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Couldn't be arsed to find the rubbish claims to fame thread, but a colleague of mine is the Grandson of the Villa keeper who kept goal in the 57 cup final.

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