post something Quite Interesting..

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banned for what..? confused fudo is confused

oh really? i figured since the site has an adequate disclaimer etc it was ok
besides, everybody loves pirates nowadays
well, i hope i at least get a warning first, if it is indeed against the rules..

Excuse me for not having read the whole thread. Here are some facts. (Or "facts". I haven't checked them, at least not recently.) Some may well have been filched from QI itself!

To make a black hole, the Earth would have to be compressed into a ball of radius (or diameter?) about 2 cm.

A thimbleful of neutron star material weighs over 100 million ton[ne]s.

For 1 second, a supernova puts out more energy than all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe.

We share 95% of our DNA with the gorilla, 53% with the cabbage. (Or so it seems to say here. My notes are a bit cryptic.)

90% of the living cells in a human body are bacteria. (Really? Or am I just very gullible? I suppose it's just that bacteria are very small? It can't be by weight!)

There are no recorded instances of a healthy wolf attacking a human being.

The tallest tree ever is (was?) a 435 foot Australian 'mountain ash' (eucalypt).

12% of hospital costs in the UK are caused by alcohol-related problems

About 250,000 mathematical theorems are proved (in published papers) every year.

In 2001, "up to half a million" children [but what does that mean, exactly?] in the UK were robbed of their mobile phones.

A blue whale's tongue is heavier than an elephant, and a male blue whale's penis is 16 feet long.

More U.S. soldiers committed suicide after serving in Vietnam than were killed in the war itself.

Poor people in Britain donate 3% of their income to charity, rich people 0.7%.

Ronald Reagan walked up to his own son at his high school graduation, failing to recognise him, and introduced himself as the President.

By melting ice, Herschel accurately estimated the Sun's power output at about a billion billion billion (i.e. 10^27?) watts, 1 second of which would satisfy the Earth's power needs for a million years.

The core of the Sun is so dense that the speed of light is less than 1 millimetre per second, and light can take over 200 years (I think they said) to reach the surface.

Samuel Johnson started out by believing that no word in English could have more than 7 applications, but found from his survey that many words could have many more; for instance, he found the one verb "take" to have 134 different applications, which altogether took him about 8000 words to explain. Difficult verbs (e.g. to "bear") started with the letter "B"! (There are apparently no difficult ones beginning with "A".) Johnson was very disappointed with the printed volumes for "A" and "B", but it was too late to change them. The OED began life as a revision of Johnson's dictionary, and still contains 1700 of his original definitions.

Richard Dawkins says that if he held his mother's hand, and she her mother's hand, and so on right back to our common ancestor with the chimpanzees, 5 to 6 million years ago, the line would stretch about 300 miles.

Richard Leakey points out that we and the chimpanzees are more closely related than horses and asses, who can interbreed, which suggests that we might be able to interbreed with chimpanzees.

The variable star Rho Cassiopeiae is a yellow hypergiant, 450 times the diameter of the Sun, and 550,000 times as bright.

No society in history has imprisoned as high a proportion of its population as the US. There are more 17-year-old black males in prison than in college. Prisons are run as businesses, and produce a very high proportion of all goods in certain sectors.

A survey of a quarter of a million South African schoolchildren showed that 63% of schoolboys think that forcing sex on a person is not an act of violence. ('Dispatches', Channel 4, Sun 23 May 2010.)

If all the DNA in your body were joined together and stretched out in a straight line, it would be one tenth of a light year long.

wow, thanks Twirlip
i definitely recognise quite a few from the show.
'save some for the rest of us'
"There are more 17-year-old black males in prison than in college." reminds me of what stephen went on to say, if you're a black male from compton or similar areas, on death row, you have a higher life expectancy than if you're still out on the street. very sad, but quite interesting.

*teacher's pet fanfare* for Twirlip

On the surface of a neutron star, the force of gravity is about two hundred billion times as strong as it is on Earth.

(I don't think dieting would help much.)

Reading through the thread ...

I had never, ever heard of lolcats!

(Yes, I do live under a rock.)

Have you ever seen the birth of a chimpanzee?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bF_T3wBE14[/youtube]

While you watch that, here are some facts about the reproductive habits of the great apes:
1. The typical gestation period of the great apes is about 9 months.
2. Apart from humans, orangutans have the longest childhoods of the animal kingdom. Females often live with their mother into their teen years.
3. A typical male chimp reaches sexual maturity at around 8 or so but is not a fully grown adult until they are 13-15. Females mature faster and usually have their first offspring at 12.
4. Female bonobos keep their large genital swellings for most of their ovulation cycles unlike chimpanzees who only have theirs for a couple of weeks or so. Also a chimpanzee would usually have her first swelling at 7-8 years old, but captive chimps tend to be earlier bloomers than their wild counterparts.
5. Non-human ape babies develop faster than human babies and are more independent, it takes human babies 1 year to reach the level of a newborn chimp.
6. Great apes typically only give birth to one child at a time, twins are rare but do occur.
7. Young male orangutans have been known to travel to different territories and rape females while the larger males aren't there.
8. Bonobos are one of the very few animals (including humans) that have sex for other reasons than just procreation, it is used for recreation, to strengthen bonds and friendships, to relive tension and conflict in a group, to celebrate an abundance of food and also just as a friendly gesture.
9. Bonobos also French kiss like humans do.
10. The orangutan has a very slow breeding rate and a typical orangutan has a child only every 7 or 8 years. This makes it extremely difficult for a dwindling population to repair itself.

thanks Monkey. i'm hesitant to watch the video but the facts are great
Bonobos also apparently engage in 'penis-fencing' i won't elaborate as it's a bit rude.
from the show.

Yeah I've read about that fencing thing. It's usually the youngsters that do that funnily enough.

would be quite interesting if all fencing was like that
ahh doesn't take much to amuse fudo.