Facts of the Day!

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Did you know?

Over half of the world's population is under 30 years old.

The word zapomni means “to remember” in Russian and “to forget” in Polish.

Diana Ross, who sang "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," lost her ex-husband to a mountain climbing accident years later.

Rio de Janeiro means "January River" and it was called that by mistake. A Portuguese explorer thought the bay was the mouth of a river.

Google prefers dogs to cats. Their official code of conduct specifically states they are a dog company.

Spiders are scared of ants due to the formic acid they contain.

Now you know!
 
Did you know?

It would take the average person walking nonstop approximately 347 days to walk around the world.

The jars of Nutella sold in a year could cover The Great Wall of China 8 times.

Parrots parents name their chicks, and the names follow them for life.

Most married couples are happiest in their third year of marriage

52% of Americans can't afford the house that they are currently living in right now.

Mosquitoes prefer blood type "O" to any other.

Now you know!
 
mcmasterdonia:
Did you know the most powerful pirate of all time was a Chinese prostitute who had approximately 80,000 men working for her? :P
Click to expand...
And she died aged 69, which rubs in the prostitution part.

Did you know that the tallest tsunami ever was over 1700 feet tall? It was in Lituya Bay, when over 30 million cubic meters of rock plunged 3000 feet into the Gilbert Inlet.
 
The TNP flag symbolizes the UPPERCUT, a fighting technique. The UPPERCUT-er is symbolic of the TNP, and the UPPERCUT-ee is symbolic of the rest of NationStates.
 
Did you know in 2006 someone tried to sell New Zealand on eBay. The price got up to $3,000 before eBay shut it down.
 
From https://www.quora.com/

Take an ordinary deck of 54 cards.

Shuffle it thoroughly.

main-qimg-2bdc71c4fb1380ae505609ffc6647b0b-c

(photo: Wikimedia Commons)

That’s all. The order of the cards in the deck you are now holding is (barring a vanishingly small probability) absolutely unique. Nobody has ever held a deck with cards in the exact same order, and nobody ever will. (Except if you record the order to recreate it later, of course.)

An ordinary deck of cards do not seem much, but each card is unique, which means that there are 54!'>54!54! possible orders. 54! expands to 230843697339241380472092742683027581083278564571807941132288000000000000 A number with 72 decimal digits.

If all currently living humans lived forever and started doing nothing else than sequentially explore all the possible orders of decks of cards, and took an average of five seconds to try an order, they would still take 3.5×1044'>3.5×10443.5×1044 times the age of the universe to explore all possible orders.

That’s a simple illustration of what is a combinatorial explosion.

Edit: A lot of people commented about decks of cards containing 52 cards and not 54. All the decks I bought contained 54 cards - the 52 regular cards + the two jokers. Still, if you want to omit the jokers and use a 52 cards deck, you just have to divide all numbers in this answers by 53×54=2862'>53×54=286253×54=2862. This reduces the expressions by three orders of magnitude, but does not fundamentally alter the results.

Edit 2: You can also ask the “birthday problem” version of the same question, i.e. if it is plausible that two people ever shuffled a deck the exact same way, in general (which is a distinct, and much more probable event that reproducing a specific order). The probability is complicated to compute exactly due to very large numbers, but an approximation for a small number of shuffles (compared to 54!'>54!54!) would be 1−e−n22⋅54!'>1−e−n22⋅54!1−e−n22⋅54!, where n is the number of shuffles (see the birthday problem wikipedia article). Even with the current world population continuously shuffling decks, at a rate of 5 per second, since the beginning of the universe (6.19×1026'>6.19×10266.19×1026 shuffles), the probability is only about 8.3×10−19'>8.3×10−198.3×10−19. Less than one chance in one billion billions. That’s absolutely huge compared to the other probabilities mentioned here, but it’s still vanishingly small.
 
Same source. I like 'em.

Excerpt from: https://www.quora.com/Who-was-the-worst-man-in-history


Vazhalae Nenyan, History is the story of our past, and one that I will attempt to master.
Answered Jul 10, 2016

"In my personal opinion, those who try to destroy knowledge, are narcisistoc, and in positions of power are evil (because they can act on it). I don’t know every evil man in history, but the few that I can list are

Emperor Bai Qi - After a battle in 260BCE, the enemy army surrendered, so he buried them alive, all 450,000 of them

Emperor Qin - Killed millions, founded an amazingly totalitarian state and burned centuries of Chinese books

Nero - Histories greatest narcissist who killed his family, purged Rome, and possibly burned it to the ground to confiscate the land

Caligula - Mentally insane, given the control of the most powerful nation in the world…

Caracalla - Killed his bother in front of his own mother and made her watch before going on purges and mass killings

Stalin - Twisted communism into a totalitarian state and killed and oppressed millions

Hitler - no description needed

Mao - Killed the most people, ever

*But I don’t see conquers as evil because I see it more as being successful at their job"


I would've guessed Hitler.
 
Some fungi create zombies, then control their minds
02-Incredible-Facts-About-Practically-Everything-760x506.jpg
Tatiana Ayazo/Rd.com, Shutterstock

The tropical fungus Ophiocordyceps infects ants’ central nervous systems. By the time the fungi been in the insect bodies for nine days, they have complete control over the host’s movements. They force the ants to climb trees, then convulse and fall into the cool, moist soil below, where fungi thrive. Once there, the fungus waits until exactly solar noon to force the ant to bite a leaf and kill it.


I'd like to point out that human zombies, though they don't actually die, do exist. Haitian voodoun can raise them:

Zombies
 
From: https://www.ellopos.com/blog/376/plato-archetypes-ideas/


Plato – Archetypes, Ideas


Here is a message that I received from Suzanne Gieser about Plato:

I have read in several places that Plato was one of the first authors to use the term “archetype”. But I cannot find this concept in his works. I can find concepts like model, pattern, ideas and form. What would be the exact greek words that would correspond to the word “Archetype” and which passage in Plato’s texts could be refered to as using a concept like “archetype”?

Dear Suzanne, the word archetype comes from the Greek words arche (start, beginning, principle, origin) and typos (imprint, form, species, kind). The word is not used by Plato, although it appears already (at least) with the Lyric poet Simonides (Jac. 16, fr. 204 – not available online, so far as I know; the word appears in the first two lines, “Πραξιτέλης, ὃν ἔπασχε, διηκρίβωσεν ἔρωτ’ ἐξ ἰδίης ἕλκων ἀρχέτυπον κραδίης…” i.e. “Praxiteles discerned well the love that he was suffering, from his own heart drawing its archetype…”).

The first massive use of the word, whence it becomes a philosophical term, is with Philo. The closest match with Plato, which was also the basis of archetype, is Idea, usually translated in English as Form. Both Idea/Form and Archetype are more than rational schemes or logical abstractions. You can study this concept by [URL='https://www.ellopos.net/search/search.php?query=forms&search=1']searching Plato’s works[/url].
 
What was socially acceptable in Medieval times but would be horrifying today?


Pieter Buis, Read a lot of works concerning the Middle Ages

It wasn’t uncommon for kings (perhaps more so from the 16th century onward) and great nobles to use the ‘close-stool’ in the presence of dozens of people.

Montaigne mentioned it

I have often been moved to pity rather than envy [at a king who has] a swarm of courtiers prating at him and a mob of strangers staring at him eat. King Alfonso said in this respect the asses of his kingdom were better off than he, for they could feed at their own ease and pleasure. And it has never struck my fancy that it could be any benefit to a man of sense to have twenty people babbling at him while he sat at stool.

The Emperor Maximilian had a humor quite contrary to that of other princes, who for the dispatch of their most important affairs convert their closestool [that is, their toilet] into a throne of state. He [Maximilian] permitted no one to see him in that posture, and stole aside as scrupulously as any virgin to make water. I myself, who have an imprudent way of talking, am naturally so modest in this respect that, unless it is a case of necessity or pleasure, I hardly ever communicate the sight of these parts and actions custom bids us conceal.

Can you imagine these guys sitting in Windsor castle dropping a nice duce while conversing with twenty people?
 
The first oranges weren’t orange


The original oranges from Southeast Asia were a tangerine-pomelo hybrid, and they were actually green. In fact, oranges in warmer regions like Vietnam and Thailand still stay green through maturity.
 
Did you know that the shortest recorded battle in history didn’t even last an hour?
It was the British against a Zulu Chieftan.
Now you know!
 
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