Diamonds aren’t stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon’s more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.
Oh, here’s another good gemstone related one!
Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.
hexagonal molecular structure
You know, I think I’ve heard something about hexagons on the internet before …
So if i bake a piece of amethyst in my oven i get cutrin, or we are talking about much greater temperatures?
Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.
However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up “between” pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.
The Ti-83 Plus Silver Edition and early models of the Ti-84 Plus Silver Edition had 128K of RAM, upgraded from the typical 28 or 48 that the 83 Plus or 84 Plus had. But the additional RAM was impossible to use as the OS had not been altered to address it.
What an absolutely egregious waste of resources.
They did later reduce the Ti-84 Silver to 48K. Still…idiots.
I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.
But I’ll give you one of my favourite obscure-ish fact instead: baby sloths are so inept, they sometimes mistake their own limbs for tree branches, grab hold of them with one limb, let go of the actual branch, and fall out of the tree
Naw. Steve, the FBI agent assigned to you, and Dave, my roomie, were just discussing it.
I think Steve kinda likes you…
You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.
You can tell by the way it is!
They do it for efficiency, like ducklings after their mother. Have you ever seen a large boat from above? The wake spreads out behind it, in this v-shape. It’s like a wave following the boat, and the ducklings can “surf” on the v-shaped wave, after their mother, and they don’t have to paddle as hard.
And the name of that shape is a chevron.
Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.
What is GSM?
The thickness of the cloth
What does the acronyms stand for?
I misstated the definition a bit, although in real world terms a higher GSM does often manifest as a thicker cloth. GSM stands for grams per square meter. It measures how much fabric weighs in a given area. It is a weight rating, not a thickness rating.
Higher GSM means denser, heavier fabric. Lower GSM means lighter, more breathable fabric.
General guide:
120–140 GSM = lightweight (summer sheets, thin shirts)
150–170 GSM = medium weight (jersey sheets, linen duvet covers)
180–250 GSM = heavier weight (flannel, winter bedding)
GSM helps compare feel and durability across materials, but thickness will vary by fiber type.
Thanks!
Grams per square metre
Americans probably want in trucks per square football field. Anything but metric.
There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.
…. There’s only 1 star in our solar system, the Sun.
I assume you meant the Milky Way galaxy, or perhaps the Universe?
EDIT: ah ok it’s a play on words a bit. Yes 2 > 1
H2O
lol ok I get it now. It is indeed a bit of a play on words.
😇
Opossums have 13 nipples
Additional fun fact about nipples:
In mammals, a species’ typical litter size is one less than their normal number of nipples.
So do tri-nipped women have twins more often? Inquiring minds want to know!
&
This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.
That’s how it got its name. People would say “X,Y,Z, and, per se, And”. (And “sort of” an and). Thus, “And per se And” became Ampersand.
per se means on its own
And in Finnish ”perse” means ass
nice
Nice perse
the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 3⁄32 in railway in the world.
…honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as “obscure”.
so, bonus:
the siljan area of sweden has a history of building observation towers:
the tower in the black-and-white photo, which started this trend, was financed by a man who made a fortune making and selling multiplication books. basically like books of logarithm tables but only for multiplication. 1×1 to 9999×9999.
also that entire area is europe’s largest meteorite crater:
For a minute I thought that meant the railway was ~3ft long
There are no extant recordings of George Orwell’s voice
Also, the word doublespeak isn’t from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.
Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.
Newspeak was inspired by Esperanto, because George Orwell had an annoying Esperantist roommate. “bad” in Esperanto is “malbone,” literally “un-good.” “terrible” in Esperanto is “malbonege,” literally “very ungood.”
Also Esperanto at the time was hoped to be the universal second language of the working class. That did not mean esperantists were any less annoying then though
they meant well! honestly Esperanto has a really positive community, even still. but I can see how it’d get on someone’s nerves.
The tiniest park in the USA is located on a city street corner in Portland, Oregon. Mill Ends Park
Edit: I fell down a rabbit hole. Corrected myself having posted it originally as “world’s smallest park” which is how I knew it - apparently it carried that distinction until Feb this year when a tiny space on a Japanese street (which was created in 1988) formally applied for, and was awarded the Guinness book of records title of World’s Smallest Park.
Also this one just popped into my head - the Guinness Book of Records was originally conceived as a means of settling arguments by compiling factual “records”. The original argument related to a shooting trip in England which the Managing Director of Guinness Breweries partook, where a missed shot led to a disagreement about the fastest game bird. The realisation that arguments such as this would be commonplace, and that no resource existed to settle such matters - the niche for capturing these types of facts was identified and the book was born.
The older editions are lot more encyclopaedia like too, some super detailed descriptions of things like cars - right down to the gear ratios.
If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called ‘tonic immobility’.
Here is a photo from Wikipedia:
OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.
I found a paper from 1928 titled “On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates” written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).
In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to flip animals quickly and get them into this state. They look kind of like torture devices:
OK, but, that’s still not it… The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:
Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them… Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.
Excellent fact, and bonus points because the fact is only recorded in a footnote of a writeup about an already moderately obscure fact.
That reminds me of a “game” kids would (try) to play when I was young at school. The kids would say to do just that “bend over, take a deep breath” and the other one would try to lift them up really quickly. I never saw it work. I guess you were supposed to pass out. Idk
Some of these ‘games’ do trigger real physiological mechanisms. A well-documented example is the Valsalva maneuver, where forcefully exhaling against a closed mouth and nose affects heart rate and blood pressure.
In some games, this maneuver (or similar) is combined with a second action that normally increases blood flow demand to the brain. The mismatch between reduced blood pressure and sudden demand can cause dizziness or brief loss of consciousness due to insufficient oxygen reaching the brain.
Actually, there is a similar effect sometimes seen during heavy deadlifts, suddenly releasing can sometimes make people pass out. There are many “deadlift passing out” videos online.
So, those ‘games’ can work. I have known of kids breaking their teeth after face-planting against the floor while playing those games. Not a very smart thing to do.
Yup did that as a kid. Totally passed out. Later found out it’s kind of dangerous.
I’m glad nothing went awry. I was always skeptical about it because no one figured it out. It’s crazy what we do especially as kids with our innocent bliss
You got that right. Lost my eyebrows once designing “custom rocket engines” with my best friend. Ahhhh, good times.
You can also do this with rabbits.
Like you’d see crazy evangelical pactors do to people on tv?
Ha, maybe! I don’t remember if I ever saw a 180 flip. This is the closest I could find from a quick search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpIglVnYuY
If you have a video with the 180 degree flip I would really like to see it. This context seems like a plausible place to see such a move in modern days. I would imagine that in some martial arts this effect would be well known.
I don’t think anyone was bent over at 90° in the video?
Regardless, that video is incredible; sending it to my ex-Evangelical partner immediately.
Yeah, I’m still looking. This is the closest I found so far
Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.
Why? Are they… alright?
No, half left
Sinister!
I was about to say that it’s usually the right paw I see my cat slowly inching towards my face to slap me for not getting food ready yet while I pretend to be asleep but then realized that you specified male and that she is not.
The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.
Chinese scientists worked to create the “humanzee,” a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.
This sounds like a bunch of b***shit so I had to look it up. Seems like you’re actually right… 😳
Seriously find a source. a three month pregnant chimpanzee, pregnant with a humanzee, died of neglect? Sure, Humanzee experiments were attempted but because of how biology works, two species as different as a chimpanzee and a human cannot make children.
Peking (KNT) -Chinese at one time experimented with fertilizing a chimpanzee with human sperm in an attempt to create a “near -human ape,” and they may try it again. The chimp was three months pregnant before the first experiment was halted, one of the original researchers claims. Western science long has scoffed at such an experiment as medically impossible, but Dr. Ji Yongxiang says the research, if it ever resumes, has the potential to develop creatures with higher animal intelligence who could speak and perform simple tasks. A second researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science said there were plans to resume testing.
