The Random Facts thread

The people sitting in 5000 cinemas, theaters and concert halls worldwide are producing the same amount of energy as a nuclear power station.

 

If only we could harness that.

 

That is certainly true.
When I annoy Jane enough to make her hair stand on end, it is time to run for the hills

 

Hahahaha - Soon be Halloween. lol

 

I have to design refrigeration plants that USE energy in order to dump all that heat.
In one London theater, I harnessed some of the energy. to heat water for the bathrooms and staff areas, avoiding the need to run huge boilers in summer.

 

I am coming to meet you and Jane. That is a brilliant idea.

 

The heart of a shrimp is located in its head.

 

Hot water rises to the top of a tank, but ice floats.
This is because at 3 degrees centigrade the cubical coefficient of expansion of water reverses. Therefore the bed of a river never falls below 3 degrees.
In 1953, when the Royal Festival Hall was built to celebrate the festival of Britain, evaporating tubes were laid in the bed of the Thames that extracted the resultant energy to heat the building. The system was very complex, because if the tubes fell below zero, the water froze and blocked them.
As the design team retired, the system was allowed to fall apart and boilers were installed in the early 70's.
My late father was one of the design engineers and I was their helping him most of the time. You can only imagine the reaction of the construction team when a 5 year old boy explained to them how the system worked.
No wonder I grew up to become a nutty professor.

 

In the Victorian and Edwardian era, hair was sometimes singed instead of cut to trim split ends. A lighted taper (candle) was used to burn off split ends.

 

I guess this is a fact. It is certainly true

 

The human nose can detect about 1 trillion smells.

 

3 Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About Your Dog’s Sense Of Smell

Dogs have long been used for their unique scenting abilities, but just how incredible they are might surprise you. We know that dogs can track and discriminate between various scents and locate people and substances among millions of distractions, but how they’re able to do this is just as impressive. So just how awesome is a dog’s sense of smell?


#1 – Parts Per Trillion
James Walker, former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, estimates that a dog’s sense of smell 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than ours. Putting this into perspective, we’ll assume that a dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 times better. If we apply this to vision, it means that what we can clearly see at 1/3 of a mile a dog can see at 3,000 miles. Dogs can also detect certain odors in parts per trillion. Say we notice a teaspoon of sugar in our coffee; a dog would notice a teaspoon of sugar in one million gallons of water. That’s pretty amazing!

 

• There are over 1 billion sheep in the world.
• China has the largest number of sheep in the world.
• Adult female sheep are known as ewes.
• Adult male sheep are known as rams.
• Castrated adult male sheep are known as wethers.
• A group of sheep is known as a herd, flock or mob.
• Young sheep are called lambs.

 

the speed of light has never been tested for anything larger then an atomic nucleus.
we simply have yet to develop the technology to do so.

all of the planets we've discovered around other suns have been larger then our earth.
this is not because smaller one's aren't likely to be there,
but rather our methods of detecting them can't yet detect anything smaller.

nuclear accelerators require a week or more to be shut down, before residual radiation levels are low enough to perform routine inspection and maintainence.
(within the actual accelerator containment, other parts of their facilities remain mostly cool, but still require dosimeters as a standard precaution)

most rail vehicles are twice or more as wide as the gauge of track they run on. principal exceptions are contractor's fieldbahn and broad gauge high speed lines.
most rail vehicles are also even taller then they are wide, with again the except being those designed specifically for high speed operation.
their stability is attained by keeping most of their mass as low as possible. this is one of the reasons fully laden freight vehicles cannot be safely operated at speeds as high as those favored for passenger service. the other is of course their mass itself.
a train that is a quarter of a mile long or longer, still takes a quarter of a mile or longer, to stop in its own length.

the scale thickness of the earth's atmosphere on a globe small enough to fit on your desk is approximately that of your fingernail.
even the height of mt everist, would be too small to feel with your fingers.

before vegitation emereged onto dry land, earth had a methane+nitrogen atmosphere.
it is only thinks to the existence of photosynthesis that we have an oxygen+nitrogen atmosphere
that makes it possible for out own species, and the majority of others we are familiar with, to exist.

 

if only the little grey cells were more like a herd of buffalo, and less like a herd of lemmings. and mind altering substances behaved more like a pack of preditors.

 

Bournemouth Latest Facts - Bournemouth

• Bournemouth experiences 7.7 hours of summer sunshine a day
• Ice creams sold on a busy weekend - approx 30,000
• Every year an average 750,000 ice creams are bought on the seven miles of Bournemouth seafront
• Deckchairs hired out on a busy weekend - 3,000
• In the summer the beaches are raked by the tractors every morning and manually litter picked twice a day
• Bournemouth Pier has the world’s first and only pier-to-shore zipline
• Bournemouth Mayor Merton Russell-Cotes is said to have received his knighthood for his discretion when King Edward VII regularly visited the Russell-Cotes with his famous mistress, Lily Langtry
• Bournemouth was the first place in the UK to have purpose-built beach huts, built in 1909 and marked with a blue plaque near to the east of Bournemouth Pier
• Bournemouth’s renowned beach has four Blue Flags – Durley Chine has held the accolade for every one of the 30 years since the scheme’s inception
• Fisherman’s Walk Cliff Lift in Southbourne made it into the 2015 Guinness World Records as the world’s shortest funicular railway
• From 1st April until 17th September 2017 Bournemouth sold approx. 18599 souvenirs!! That’s an average of 775 items a week.