Totally useless information/trivia

[Rds1983]

17 minutes ago, Seat68 said:

Penguin fan here. Calling bullshit on this one as if I recall, Penguins don’t pee. 

Fine, be a party pooper. Instead of bullshit, how about penguin shit? Which is in piles so big that it can be seen from space.

[chrisp65]

4 hours ago, Rds1983 said:

Fine, be a party pooper. Instead of bullshit, how about penguin shit? Which is in piles so big that it can be seen from space.

Given that your lie about penguin pee was outed so quickly and categorically, I’m not inclined to believe any of your other anti penguin propaganda.

[Chindie]

Penguins aren't penguins*. 

*This is actually true.

[mjmooney]

5 minutes ago, Chindie said:

Penguins aren't penguins 

This is a shocking revelation on a par with the discovery that William Shakespeare's plays were not written by him, but by another man of the same name. 

[BOF]

9 minutes ago, Chindie said:

Penguins aren't penguins*. 

*This is actually true.

 

And Manta rays aren't Manta rays, kind of.

 

 

[Chindie]

2 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

This is a shocking revelation on a par with the discovery that William Shakespeare's plays were not written by him, but by another man of the same name. 

Perhaps.

**** it, it fits the topic. 

The original penguin was a creature also known as the great auk, which looked a bit like what we now call a penguin. The great auk was a found throughout the Northern Atlantic coasts, but only bred in places with very specific conditions - isolated rocky islands with high food supplies and easy access to the sea, which are surprisingly rare. They were hunted for meat, and their eggs were also popular food sources. By the 16th century they had started to disappear from Europe, driven largely by the discovery their down was excellent, and by the mid-19th century they'd been wiped out. 

What we know today as penguins, which only live in the southern hemisphere, were named so because they looked like the original penguin, the great auk, but they actually aren't closely related at all.

[il_serpente]

 

[T-Dog]

15 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

Jose is the other (living) non italian to win Serie A, if anyone was wondering

Absolute Grade A trivia that.

There's some mad data out there that is begging to be discovered, but I've a couple of ciders so I'll allow the convo for tonight.

[Chindie]

You know when you go to an old fashioned arcade or amusements and they have the 2p machine (or the 10p if your rich), well in America they've taken the humble 2p pusher and made it into high stakes. This game here, the bloke has paid $100k to play, which got him 50 'plays', aka 50 quarters, and whatever he wins can also be out back in as tokens essentially. 

Except... It's not real. Obviously the whole thing doesn't make any sense, but there are versions of this very game in a few places in the US (and many more where is explicitly banned). But for some reason there's a thriving community online that, well... watches people play. And the ones that 'play the biggest stakes' do the biggest views. They make up narratives and storylines - the manager tried to ban me, we paid to reset the machine, etc etc. They talk about having big days in prior games and how good a return they're making. They edit in generic casino noise. But all it is is they've got a coin pusher machine and a camera. And they get paid for this. People donate to help them 'clear debts' and whatnot. Videos get hundreds of thousands of views.

The internet is weird.

[Nor-Cal Villan]

7 minutes ago, Chindie said:

You know when you go to an old fashioned arcade or amusements and they have the 2p machine (or the 10p if your rich), well in America they've taken the humble 2p pusher and made it into high stakes. This game here, the bloke has paid $100k to play, which got him 50 'plays', aka 50 quarters, and whatever he wins can also be out back in as tokens essentially. 

Except... It's not real. Obviously the whole thing doesn't make any sense, but there are versions of this very game in a few places in the US (and many more where is explicitly banned). But for some reason there's a thriving community online that, well... watches people play. And the ones that 'play the biggest stakes' do the biggest views. They make up narratives and storylines - the manager tried to ban me, we paid to reset the machine, etc etc. They talk about having big days in prior games and how good a return they're making. They edit in generic casino noise. But all it is is they've got a coin pusher machine and a camera. And they get paid for this. People donate to help them 'clear debts' and whatnot. Videos get hundreds of thousands of views.

The internet is weird.

People are more weird

Edited September 8 by Nor-Cal Villan

[Seat68]

32 minutes ago, Chindie said:

You know when you go to an old fashioned arcade or amusements and they have the 2p machine (or the 10p if your rich), well in America they've taken the humble 2p pusher and made it into high stakes. This game here, the bloke has paid $100k to play, which got him 50 'plays', aka 50 quarters, and whatever he wins can also be out back in as tokens essentially. 

Except... It's not real. Obviously the whole thing doesn't make any sense, but there are versions of this very game in a few places in the US (and many more where is explicitly banned). But for some reason there's a thriving community online that, well... watches people play. And the ones that 'play the biggest stakes' do the biggest views. They make up narratives and storylines - the manager tried to ban me, we paid to reset the machine, etc etc. They talk about having big days in prior games and how good a return they're making. They edit in generic casino noise. But all it is is they've got a coin pusher machine and a camera. And they get paid for this. People donate to help them 'clear debts' and whatnot. Videos get hundreds of thousands of views.

The internet is weird.

I watch a lot of slot videos and some of them have at home slots with edited in casino sounds. Thankfully they are easy to spot. 

[Chindie]

This is a good YouTube channel, but this is a particularly fun and interesting video they've done, on some of the weirder ways animals procreate. Suffice to say nature is weird and brutal. 

Includes a particularly interesting bit at the end about how human sex is odd - in that we're one of the few species were both the male and female have pronounced secondary sexual characteristics, resulting from both having (differing) pressures in reproduction.

[BOF]

15 hours ago, Chindie said:

This is a good YouTube channel, but this is a particularly fun and interesting video they've done, on some of the weirder ways animals procreate. Suffice to say nature is weird and brutal. 

Includes a particularly interesting bit at the end about how human sex is odd - in that we're one of the few species were both the male and female have pronounced secondary sexual characteristics, resulting from both having (differing) pressures in reproduction.

Love Clint's Reptiles. He managed to completely demystify snakes for me, which IINM is why I started watching the channel in the first place. I really was not a fan of them at all. But now I quite like them. He has a great manner about him and everything he does is very watchable.

 

[Chindie]

1 hour ago, BOF said:

Love Clint's Reptiles. He managed to completely demystify snakes for me, which IINM is why I started watching the channel in the first place. I really was not a fan of them at all. But now I quite like them. He has a great manner about him and everything he does is very watchable.

 

Indeed. His stuff on phylogenies is exceptionally good, he's very good at explaining fairly big concepts and fairly complicated understanding on a way that will allow anyone to follow. And of course those in turn throw up lots of interesting and funny quirks of nature, which he's also very good at pointing out and explaining, particularly things like the odd relationships between species that are counter intuitive but proven by their DNA.

[Chindie]

New Zealand is unique in that it has no native mammals besides bats and marine mammals. As a habitat the only mammals that could get there naturally could either fly or swim. This is why New Zealand has particularly diverse bird species - essentially the niches that everywhere else got filled by mammals instead got filled by birds, hence why so many bird species there became flightless. The national bird, the kiwi, is a key example - they basically fill the same niche that hedgehogs do. 

It's also a large part of why the introduction of invasive mammals to New Zealand has been quite so devastating. The species there evolved in a world without the threat mammals represent, and without competition.

[BOF]

So they've finally found George Mallory's climbing partner, Sandy Irvine, after 100 years.

For those who don't know the significance of that. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay are currently recognised as the first people to get to the peak of Mt. Everest.

But there has always been the unanswered question of whether George Mallory managed to do it 3 decades earlier. We know where he perished but they don't know whether he was on his way up the mountain or descending at that point.

Cue Sandy Irvine. The man with the camera, who they quite reasonably reckon would have taken pictures of the 2 had they reached the summit.

So I guess we'll know soon enough. One of, if not the most enduring mountaineering mysteries.

 

Quote

When they spotted it, there was no mistaking what they were looking at: a boot melting out of the ice. As they drew closer, they could tell the cracked leather was old and worn, and the sole was studded and bracketed with the diamond-patterned steel hobnails of a bygone era of climbing.  

In September, on the broad expanse of the Central Rongbuk Glacier, below the north face of Mount Everest, a National Geographic documentary team that included the photographer and director Jimmy Chin, along with filmmakers and climbers Erich Roepke and Mark Fisher, examined the boot more closely. Inside, they discovered a foot, remains that they instantly recognized as belonging to Andrew Comyn Irvine, or Sandy, as he was known, who vanished 100 years ago with the famed climber George Mallory. 

“I lifted up the sock,” Chin says, describing the moment, “and there’s a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it.” Chin says he and his companions recognized the significance of the moment in unison. “We were all literally running in circles dropping F-bombs.” 

Plenty more in the link...