50 Interesting Facts (1 Viewer)

Interesting stuff.... some of them seem true as far as I can say...

Fun "facts" to play with.

But #26 is wrong. The actual term is googol. (Which is on Google's web site.)

And I'm pretty sure I read that #32 is wrong. Hair and fingernails appear to grow afer death because the surrounding tissue contracts.

And 9 and 42 are inconsistent. If people laugh between 15 and 100 times a day than the average must be above 13...

What's the source of this list?

Not only wrong, but self-evidently wrong. "Versus" means "against", and the "v" doesn't have a different meaning in criminal and civil proceedings.

Maybe it's the same people who write those Snapple bottlecap things which I've heard are sometimes incorrect...

Jay

Nope. I am pretty sure there is another one (and probably a few others), I am this close to recalling it. Aaaaaaaargh! I was struggling to write somethign and it occured to me that this stupid word could meant the exact opposite depending on the context. Looked it up and sho'nuff, there it was.

EDIT: Never mind, I misunderstood the claim made in #21. I was rather thinking of words that mean opposite things depending on the context. Maaaa baaaaad.

EDIT: Now if any of the words I am thinking of (and desperatly failing to remember) had synonyms for both their meanings, then I guess they would qualify for the original claim. So I wasn't completely wrong

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H

TO SANCTION!

Man, that was driving me nuts.

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H

isn't the sound in a shell to your ear the air flowing in and out of the shell.

No, that one is true. There are others which are definitely wrong and some which are dubious at best.

And one -

48. Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.

- that's nothing more than a news item (or an anectdote).

The Titanic one seems to be untrue:

SOS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- and -

snopes.com: Titanic First Ship to Use an SOS

Cites 6 uses of SOS before Titanic.

3. Is just wrong.

24. The first Harley-Davidson engine was built in 1901 (you attached it to your own bicycle). The first factory assembled H-D motorcycle wasn't sold until 1904. (By contrast you could buy a Hildebrand & Wolfmuller motorcycle in 1894)

32. No, the skin retracts

40. Not including some 10,000+ varieties of fish and 1,000,000+ varieties of insect.

49. Just an urban legend that won't die.


But I do have a pretty good fact myself.

51. Restaurant's around the world sell Mahi-Mahi, This unusual hawaiian name is used because people wouldn't order 'Dolphin Fish' because it is often confused with 'Dolphin' (the adorable sea-mammal)

The best way I've found in all the years of working in professional kitchens is to refrigerate the onions before cutting them.

That's so we can undress eath other!

I think the only "Fact" seen here is that silly internet lists of "Facts" are probably not "facts" at all.

To paraphrase Disraelli - "The parts that are interesting are not facts, and the parts that are factual are not interesting."

You can also cut it in a bowl of water, but yours is probably more practical.

Or you can just suck it up like a man. Good grief.

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H

Dear God, we should just rename the thread "Fifty things we can all pick apart":rolleyes

If it were British in origin, then it would be correct: assuming we (in Singapore) inherited the convention from the Brits, together with their common law and most of our legal system, we do indeed refer to civil and criminal cases differently, as stated, so the "v" does notionally mean different things. And we don't actually use the word "versus" in referring to case names.

I defer to your knowledge of the British system, although I'd be curious to learn the distinction between criminal and civil case names.

I was speaking of the American legal system, which, despite descending from the British system, differs from it in ways both great (e.g., the American rule on attorneys' fees) and small (we do use the word "versus" in case names).