Some facts are completely unimportant. Here's one.
Geraldine McGee Rosenthal, the real life inspiration for Sharon Stone's character in Casino, lived exactly the same number of days as John F. Kennedy. 16,978 days each from birth to death.
Post your own worthless true facts!
Honey is the only natural food made without destroying any life.
sharemilk?
shareCows eat grass.
shareGrass is alive.
shareYes, hence why a living thing is harmed to make milk
Sheesh.
This was just supposed to be a fun bit of useless trivia. I didn't make it up, I just read it somewhere awhile ago.
I was just teasing. Some others:
salt
spices
coffee
tea
nuts
I think that reason why it's honey and not those that you've mentioned is that all of those occur naturally. There is no process to "make" them. Bees actively make the honey, so it's naturally processed. Milk, is naturally processed as well, but the argument is that cow eat grass, therefore killing the grass.
None of what you mentioned (as far as I am aware) is processed. Coffee, spices or salt are ground, and/or roasted, but none of that happens naturally. A coffee bean is a still a coffee bean.
As in it never goes bad?
shareHoney can never go bad because Nothing can grow in it. It is toxic to all microorganisms.
shareFine
shareHoney has been used in wound healing for thousands of years. It went out of fashion for a while when antibiotics came in, but now modern, scientific, peer-reviewed research has shown that it's the best thing going for some kinds of chronic wounds.
Honey! It's tasty, and it's also supposed to help with allergy symptoms! it's good for what ails you*!
- - -
* Except diabetes.
Yup, it's the only thing that doesn't scream when you bite it.
sharePanama is the only place in the world where you can see the sun rise on the Pacific Ocean and set on the Atlantic Ocean.
shareGeneral Eisenhower never served in combat.
shareThe only guy in ZZ Top who doesn't have a long beard is Frank Beard.
shareAnd Billy Gibbons claims that the name ZZ Top in no way refers to rolling papers (Zig Zag and Top).
Yeah right. And Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds refers in no way to LSD (as John Lennon claimed). Again, yeah right.
lucy in the sky with diamonds is actually about evil skypeople who have kidnapped lucy and now the protagonist songwriter (elvis john?) has to go into the clouds and take his love bakc, who has been transformed into a skyperson. and diamonds are involved.
read the lyrics next time you dummy
Napoleon's native language was Italian.
shareCorsican, maybe?
sharehis parents were of italian origin
shareBut Corsican going back several generations. It's not clear to me what language was spoken in the home; it seems likely from what I know that it was Corsican.
shareCorsican is basically Italian.
shareI also just ran across this: Corsica was ruled by the Republic of Genoa from 1284 to 1755, when it became a self-proclaimed, Italian-speaking Republic. Napoleon was born in 1769, so it is still not clear to me what language was spoken in the home.
"As for Corsican, a bone of contention is whether it should be considered an Italian dialect or its own language. Some scholars argue that Corsican belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects and is closely related to Italy's Tuscan, if not reputed to be part thereof. Mutual intelligibility between Italian and the dialects of Corsican is in fact very high."--Wikipedia (Emphasis mine) If mutual intelligibility is quite high, that tells me that saying it is basically Italian is close to the truth.
He would have spoken Corsican and Italian at home. He didn't start to learn French until he went to school at age 9 and he had a Corsican accent for his whole life.
shareDid his family invent that lovely, tasty pastry with that distinctive pattern on top?
sharefrom the movie Amadeus?
sharesteel produced before the detonation of the first atomic bombs is required for the production of sensitive equipment like geiger counters & medical apparatus due to its lack of contamination.
it is called low background steel, & is commonly sourced from old german ships & railway tracks.
that isn't entirely useless, but it is interesting.
i would have thought you could readily obtain ore & coke sources that had been adequately sequestered.
i am far from an authority on this, so giant heaping of salt & all that...
but my understanding is that it isn't the ore that's mined that causes the difficulty with low level radiation, but rather the small amount of background radiation in the atmosphere that exists since the start of nuclear testing. the methods of producing steel all require application of air/oxygen, & there's enough persistent radiation to make that new steel produced have enough radiation to affect highly sensitive equipment.
good summary here!
https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/low-background-steel/3009874.article
totally makes sense. you can't make steel without air. i should've thought of that.
edit: i suppose the re-working process avoids blasting.
Why would that be? What is the reasoning there?
shareif you read the article linked above, it does a really nice job of laying out why this is the case in a not overly technical way. very interesting!
shareWhat article? I don't see any link?
shareah, you must have an ignore list with at least one person on it...
i linked this above to someone else who responded to my post.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/low-background-steel/3009874.article
I probably had half the site on my ignore-list. I've been refreshing it and taking some people off for a while. Some of the crap comments here are so blatant I figure I can judge from just one comment that certain people are not worth paying attention to. Thanks for the link.
Apparently they use air to purify steel, and radionuclides from nuclear bomb blasts are in the air and have changed background radiation levels. Interesting.
Today, air contains radionuclides – radioactive isotopes of elements, such as cobalt-60 – remnants of 502 nuclear bomb detonations.
Since the Victorian era, steel has been mass-produced by two processes:
first, the Bessemer process, which blowing air through the molten iron
later by the BOS process, which uses pure oxygen instead
Both processes require huge quantities of atmospheric gas – and that means the radionuclides left over from nuclear blasts contaminate the steel.
When you are constructing a Geiger counter to measure radiation levels you need low-background radiation steel and that means recycling.
Wow, I had no idea. Interesting stuff.
I've got a chunk of uranium, and a cheap Geiger counter that attaches to a USB port. I use it to generate random numbers I use for some things. The Geiger counter was about $175, far cheaper than most such devices. I wonder if they bothered with low background steel for this? The product page says it's been discontinued, but here it is: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/11345
just my guess, but for something like that sold to the general public, i'd imagine it's probably just run of the mill steel. they probably only use the low background stuff for mechanisms intended for labs, govt facilities & so on. just the relative rarity of that kind of steel would make putting into into something meant for general use prohibitive, i'd think. minimal supply, high demand equates to a high price, so it doesn't seem likely they'd use it for something that's sort of 'off the shelf' like that.
don't know that, but that would be my guess.
Yeah, my guess too. The thing is more of a toy than anything else, but it works well enough for what it does. It doesn't register anything unless it's near the uranium, but on the other hand that doesn't necessarily mean anything -- you can see that it's not very big, the whole thing is on a small circuitboard, and so there's not very much metal in it at all which would emit radiation.
share is commonly sourced from old german ships & railway tracks.
I'd heard about this too. Wasnt sure if steel lying around in the atmosphere would qualify
(even though its the air used in production)
Hence the fleet of German warships scuttled at Scapa Flow (just north of scotland) towards the end of ww2 is a big pile of suitably pure steel.
Interesting to hear someone recall Scapa Flow.
But it is really not the steel, it is the processing.
You can use any iron, just don't purify it by blowing air/oxygen though it, that's just more expensive.
Delicious trivia!
share