Something Interesting Thread

The Revolutionary War was fought during a mini ice age. The Delaware River doesn’t normally have icebergs floating down it in winter…

 

According to Abe Lincoln, there were giants buried in those big mounds along the Ohio River.

 

If you are in Stamford, CN, you can go north, south, east, or west, and in all four cases, the next state you will enter is New York. Funny fact - look at a map.

 

Not from all parts of Stamford...I've stayed there when I flew for 1st and 2nd rounds at Bridgeport some years back. There are certainly some northern parts of the area where it is sort of true...but you would have to go northeast from far North Stamford to accomplish it.

Caveat: This presumes you mean CT.

 

HHD
Now I got to look at a map.

 

Copy that!

 

Perhaps if you keep going due East, you end up in Lone Guyland Sound then eventually back on land around Montauk at the far Eastern end of Lone Guyland—that island slants up slightly to the North and it’s over 100 miles long.

 

At a time when he was the world’s richest man, J Paul Getty installed a private pay phone at his castle/mansion he was renovating in England so the construction workers would have to pay him $ to make phone calls.

 

Abu Simbel - One of my favorite places to visit.

 

Right you are - I fat-fingered when typing.

 

@UTexasEquipment

 

I want custom fit capes too.

 

"Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal—the hedgehog—as a means of predicting weather. Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition, although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State."


First Groundhog Day

 

Bread flavored soda

 

James Harrison is a blood donor whose unusual plasma composition has been used to make a treatment for Rhesus disease. He made over 1000 donations throughout his lifetime, which are estimated to have saved over 2.4 million unborn babies from the condition.

Mr. Harrison, also known as the Man with the Golden Arm, made his last blood donation — number 1,173 — on May 11, 2018. It was his last because Australian policy prohibits blood donations from those past age 81.

In 1951, at the age of 14, he underwent major chest surgery, requiring a large amount of blood. Realizing the blood had saved his life, he made a pledge to start donating blood himself as soon as he turned 18, the then-required age.

I salute you, Mr. Harrison.

 

In the 1400s, a law was set forth in England that a man was allowed to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Hence we have "the Rule of Thumb."

 

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

 

Wow. Some serious numerology in that one.

 

The Sweden Solar System
wikipedia | Atlas Obscura | swedensolarsystem.se

The Sweden Solar System is the world’s largest model of our planetary system. The Sun is represented by the Globe in Stockholm — the largest spherical building in the world — and the planets are lined up in direction north from there.

Distances and sizes are scaled according to 1:20 million, with the inner planets all in the Stockholm area. The outer planets follow in the same direction with, for instance, Neptune in Söderhamn and the dwarf planet Pluto in Delsbo, 300 km (186 mi) from the Globe.

SSS is a pedagogical instrument and conveys a direct feeling of the enormous distances in space, and how small the planets are compared to the Sun. At each “planet” a small exhibit provides information about astronomy and the mythological figure after whom each planet is named.



The Sun
Aviici Arena, “the Globe” in Stockholm, represents the sun.
Diameter: 71 m (233 ft)



Mercury
The model of Mercury is heated to symbolize its closeness to the Sun. Craters are depicted, and on the support structure various symbols are seen, like for the orbital drift in accordance with Einstein’s theory of relativity. The right image shows its present location.
Diameter: 25 cm (~10 inches)
Distance from Globe: 2.9 km (1.8 mi)



Earth & Moon
The models of our planet Earth and the Moon are located outside the entrance of the space theatre Cosmonova at the Natural History Museum (in the ticket hall). The model of the Moon is situated on a pillar 20 m (65 ft) away from the model of the Earth.
Earth’s diameter here is 65 cm (2 ft), the moon’s is 18 cm (7 inches).
Distance from the Globe is 7.6 km (~4.5 mi)



Neptune
Neptune, symbolizing the god of the water and the sea, is located in the central park of Söderhamn, a coast town with long traditions of fishing and sailing. The model is lit from inside by blue light in the night.
Diameter: 2.5 m (8 ft)

 

Many years ago, in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rims or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get service. This practice led to the term "Wet your whistle."

 

Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert of Kern County, California is also famous for the world’s largest compass rose painted into the lakebed. With a diameter of more than 1,220 meters, the compass is used by aircraft to test navigation equipment.

It is the bed of a lake that formed roughly 2.5 million years ago. It is 12.5 miles (20.1 km) long and 5.5 miles (8.9 km) wide at its greatest dimensions. The bed of the lake is unusually hard, capable of withstanding as much as 250 psi without cracking. This is sufficient to allow even the heaviest aircraft to land safely.

wikipedia

 

Dion
We need an "interesting " emoji to indicate we think it is in fact interesting.
Btw I have been trying to come up with something "interesting" and so far I got nothing.
I miss those old "Fun fact for the day calendars

 

The Like emoji will do

 

Aurora and Light Pillars over Norway
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220208.html

On the left, the night sky is lit up by particles expelled from the Sun that later collided with Earth’s upper atmosphere — creating bright auroras.

On the right, the night glows with ground lights reflected by millions of tiny ice crystals falling from the sky — creating light pillars.

The light pillars are vertical columns because the fluttering ice crystals are mostly flat to the ground, and their colors are those of the ground lights. The auroras cover the sky and ground in the green hue of glowing oxygen, while their transparency is clear because you can see stars right through them.


Image Credit & Copyright: Alexandre Correia

 

^Great post, Dion. One of the items remaining on my bucket list is to see the Northern Lights - maybe one of these days COVID will subside so we can resume travel.

 

Canada’s two largest, frostbitten cities, Toronto (43 degrees 42 minutes north) and Montreal (45 degrees 30 minutes), both lie well south of Seattle (47 degrees 36 minutes north), as does the federal capital of Ottawa. The southern tip of Ontario, in Lake Erie, lies at 41 degrees 40 minutes north — roughly the same latitude as the redwoods country south of Crescent City, Calif.

Canada, Seattle’s neighbor to the north? Nope, better check your map.

 

I just realized that this is my second post involving Norway. The first one was about that crazy boulder suspended between the rocks on that Norwegian mountain. I am forced to conclude that Norway is interesting.

 

The natural concentration of fissionable uranium is so high in certain places in Gabon (that's in West Africa for any lurking Sooners), some of the concentrated uranium has undergone spontaneous fission in a sort of "natural nuclear reactor." Either that, or these are the waste fuel of nuclear reactors of Atlantis, or something...

The average power of these natural reactors was around 1,000 kw (much, much smaller than today's commercial nuclear power plants).

Nature's Nuclear Reactors: The 2-Billion-Year-Old Natural Fission Reactors in Gabon, Western Africa

 

I'm too laze to read what happens when the natural nuclear reaction occurs. A small explosion?

 

No, just a thermal reaction. A fission explosion only occurs when you have a chain reaction, where atomic material from the fission of the atoms goes out and breaks the nuclear bonds of other atoms.

To achieve this, you need to combine two sub-critical mass sections of uranium or plutonium quickly. The Hiroshima bomb used a donut shaped mass with a "bullet" that plugged the hole, fired down sort of a gun tube. The Nagasaki one was an implosion method, where conventional explosives' were used to implode and drive together several sub-critical masses. This was what was tested at the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, as the implosion method was tricker and not considered a sure thing like the gun and bullet method.