Useless Gems of Information

Not all information is necessarily useful, but is interesting all the same. Well, some of it is anyway. Here are some examples:

1. Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

2. An ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.

3. Butterflies taste with their feet.

4. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain (I know some people like that)


Do you know some other useless gems of information? If so please share them here. We could become the most well informed people on the net! KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, etc, etc.

Men cannot go through life without providing there own sound effects. (sample 1: Place a dowel rod in most men’s hands and they will almost instantly make the light saber sound.)

and if knowledge is power in today’s world, then stupidity is death. My Modern Theory Of Natural Selection: Anyone dumb enough to do something stupid deserves the consequences... Stupid is an active choice.

[evil_genius_180]

Originally Posted by dfalconet

1. Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

First, that's not useless info. I now know I've burnt a lot of calories over the years.

Here's a useless tidbit I learned watching the news earlier; Elephants can mimick some human sounds when they stick their trunks in their mouths. This elephant in Korea speaks 8 Korean words. Now, useless as that may be, it was important enough news to reach me in the U.S.

I wonder if anyone has done a government study on how many ridges there are on the edge of a quarter. This would be a useless gem and would also use up some of our tax dollars. That should be worth 2 points!

Hey... here's one. EG180 can not go a month with out changing his avatar. :laugh:

[evil_genius_180]

There have been government-funded studies on how fast ketchup flows, so why not the quarter question? I'll have to Google some ketchup results, see what I can find. ;D

Originally Posted by morganzacd5p

Hey... here's one. EG180 can not go a month with out changing his avatar.

I tried that once, didn't like it.

[evil_genius_180]

Nothing on ketchup studies (don't cry) but I did find some fun stuff nobody ever needed to know.

*There are approximately ten million bricks in the Empire State Building.

*Did you ever wonder what the WD in WD-40 stands for? The name was lifted right out chemist Norm Larsen's laboratory notebook. Way back in 1953, he was trying to concoct an anti-corrosion formula, which worked on the basic principle of displacing water. On his 40th try, Larsen finally got it right. Hence the name WD-40. It literally means Water Displacer, 40th try.

*The phrase "Often a bridesmaid but never a bride" actually comes from an advertisement for Listerine mouthwash. The text was written by Milton Feasley and first appeared in 1925. The advertisement was so successful that it ran for more than ten years.

*A South Korean movie theater owner decided that the movie The Sound of Music was too long. His solution? He shortened the movie by cutting out all of the musical scenes!

*The most common invention of the 19th century was the washing machine. Between 1804 and 1873, at least 1676 patents were issued by the United States Patent Office for various forms of this device.

*From space, the brightest man-made place is Las Vegas, Nevada.

*"Weird" Al Yankovic received a Bachelor's degree in Architecture in 1981. He also served as valedictorian of his high school at age 16.

[evil_genius_180]

But wait, there's more. (I love Google)

*Less than 3% of Nestle's sales are for chocolate.

*More than 2,500 left handed people are killed every year from using right handed products.

*More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.

*It is estimated that at any one time, 0.7% of the world's population are drunk.

*During an average lifetime, a man will spend 3,350 hours removing 8.4 meters of stubble. (That's why I hardly shave. It takes so long!)

*The average woman consumes 6 pounds of lipstick in her lifetime.

*It only takes 7 pounds of pressure to rip your ear off.

*Termites eat through wood 2 times faster when listening to rock music.

*13 people are killed each year by vending machines falling on them.

*The average smell weighs 760 nanograms.

*314 Americans had buttock lift surgery in 1994.

*A can of SPAM is opened every 4 seconds.

*In chess, there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the first ten moves.

*From space, the brightest man-made place is Las Vegas, Nevada.

That is nicely balanced by the brightness of a lot of the people there.

"Termites eat through wood 2 times faster when listening to rock music."


What a choice.......Down with rock music or down with your house! Loved your list, evil genious.

Here's a new one: It is physically impossibile to lick your own elbow. 93% of those who read this will try just to be sure.

[evil_genius_180]

Yeah, I've heard that also.

Originally Posted by evil_genius_180

*Termites eat through wood 2 times faster when listening to rock music.

[startrekfan001]

elephants easily climb up a stair, but they cant come down afterwards...

[evil_genius_180]

I didn't know that. It's the same with horses.

[startrekfan001]

most people call black people "colored", but think of it this way:
white people are pink when they're born,
orange/yellow in the rest of their lives,
green when they're sick,
red when they're angry,
blue when they're cold.

But black people are
black when they're born,
black in the rest of their lives,
black when they're sick,
black when they're angry,
black when they're cold.

So who's the colored one here? (im colored by the way. white.)

Someone told me that at any given time you are never more than 8 ft from a spider.

[startrekfan001]

did you HAVE to say that!? im afraid of spiders! now ill never sleep again...

Did you know that cat urine glows under flourescent light?

Maybe you didn't want to know that-------------Oh well...............

[evil_genius_180]

Yeah, on the need to know factor, that one comes in around the same place as any and all facts relating to bodily functions of any kind.

Here's on I really never needed to know (but it explains a lot a Quentin Tarantino gory effects.):

The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet (9 m).

Did you know that a mosquito has 47 teeth. Who would have thought? I wonder why the odd number.......this must surely qualify for a government study..........

[evil_genius_180]

Originally Posted by dfalconet

Did you know that a mosquito has 47 teeth. Who would have thought? I wonder why the odd number.......this must surely qualify for a government study..........

They did the study. That's how they found that out. Their findings as to why are filed under "need to know." :cylon:

Ahaaa! another conspiracy to keep us from knowing vital information.

[evil_genius_180]

Brings to mind thoughts of Roswell, 1947.

[startrekfan001]

Originally Posted by evil_genius_180

The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet (9 m).

who tried THAT out?

[Kai]

pass a knife and we'll have a practical demonstration....

[evil_genius_180]

Originally Posted by startrekfan001

who tried THAT out?

I put nothing past the U.S. Government, I used to work for them. If it's useless information, there has been a study for it.

And I was trying SO hard to make my first five posts nothing but quality posts . . . . then I found this thread.

Elephants can "hear" low frequency sounds through their feet up to ten miles away. They can also communicate with each other, much as whales do, via subsonic vocalizations. (Thank you, National Geographic.) Elephants, like chimpanzees, pass the "mirror test" by being intelligent enough to figure out that the mirror is just a reflection of themselves and not another elephant. And while their brain is a bit small for their size, at the size of a football, it's still the largest land animal brain. And lastly, while I don't remember the exact numbers, an elephant's trunk has some 44,000 muscles in it. This is approximately 43,000 muscles more than the entire human body.

A freshly fertilized ostrich egg, at nearly one quart, is the largest single cell in the world.

Well, there went my bid to make nothing but quality posts. [wry grin]

[evil_genius_180]

If that wasn't a quality post, I don't know what is. I just learned more about elephants in the 30 seconds it took me to read that than I've ever known, I think.

And, welcome to the site.

'The mature [Turtle Dove] has the head, neck, flanks, and rump blue grey, and the wings cinnamon, mottled with black. The breast is vinaceous, the abdomen and under tail coverts are white. The bill is black, the legs and eyerims are red. The black and white patch on the side of the neck is absent in the browner and duller juvenile bird, which also has the legs brown.'

Thank you wikipedia

Originally Posted by evil_genius_180

If that wasn't a quality post, I don't know what is. I just learned more about elephants in the 30 seconds it took me to read that than I've ever known, I think.

And, welcome to the site.

[chuckle] I confess that National Geographic's "In The Womb", which I recently saw, had a lot of that information, plus much else that was of interest. They followed a golden retriever, a dolphin, and an elephant as they developed. Watching a dolphin fetus start to grow legs, then change its mind was pretty interesting . . .

Hehe all this time I didn't know about the 5 post rule, cause I never asked! :P
(I can never get into Colonial Fleets either, looks like same software)

I got no pearls of wisdom, but I have to ask. If Nestle only get 3% sales from Chocolate, what's the other 97%? Weapons of Mass Destruction?

And dfalconet, your avatar would be a good squad logo for a game you would probably never play...