Random Trivia

[Fierce_LiNk]

No, that's Venus.

 

Daaamn, you're right. Just doubled checked. I've always thought it was Venus.

 

To make up for it, here's a fact that I love: Andre Kanchelskis is the only player to score in a Manchester, Merseyside and Glasgow derby. This will save my life one day, and it may save yours.

[Cube]

Daaamn, you're right. Just doubled checked. I've always thought it was Venus.

 

Check my last post.

[Fierce_LiNk]

Check my last post.

 

I spent a few minutes checking, and this is what I found:

 

Planet - - -Period of Revolution around the Sun - - - Period of Rotation

 

Mercury - - - 87.96 Earth Days - - - 58.7 Earth Days

 

Venus - - - 224.68 Earth Days - - - 243 Earth Days

[Cube]

I spent a few minutes checking, and this is what I found:

 

I copied the wrong thing. Still, you're kind of right with Mercury.

[Chris the great]

drawing a penis on the back of your hand does not usualy get you laid

[Jav_NE]

Okay, direct quote for the Dan Brown Venus thing as i'm bored...

 

"Langdon decided not to share the pentacle's most astonishing property - the graphic origin of its ties to Venus. As a young astronomy student, Langdon had been shocked to learn that the planet Venus traced a perfect pentacle accross the ecliptic sky every eight years. So astonished were the ancients to observe this phenomenon, that Venus and her pentacle became symbols of perfection, beauty, and the cyclic qualities of sexual love. As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her eight-year cycle to organize their Olympic games. Nowadays, few people realized the four-year schedule of modern Olympics still followed the half-cycles of Venus. Even fewer people knew that the five-pointed star had almost become the official Olympic seal but was modified at the last moment - its five points exchanged for five inter-secting rings to better reflect the games' spirit of inclusion and harmony."

[jayseven]

a pentacle is a pentagram within a circle. Hence the 'cle' :P You don't seriously believe the planet revolves around the sun via straight lines and 35 degree turns do you?

 

I still don't grasp what this 8 year 'cycle' is supposed to be. Is that how frequently it is visible from earth? Or what? Tsk tsk tsk.

[Supergrunch]

The point being that for every 8 times the Earth orbits the Sun, Venus orbits the sun around 13 times, meaning that if we plot the points relative to the stars where Venus lines up between the Earth and the Sun (known as an inferior conjunction, which happens about every 1.6 years in this case), we get five points that form what is almost a perfect pentagon, and so you can join them up to make a pentagram or whatever if you so desire. This is shown here:

 

 

This is by no means a perfect pentagram (indeed, it rotates by about 1.5 degrees for each 8 year cycle), although it is fairly accurate, but is really just a geometrical coincidence - nothing as exact occurs with any of the other planets. This is unrelated to the shapes of the orbits themselves (which are broadly circular for both the Earth and for Venus, but these too aren't exact for various complex gravitational reasons), but is a result of the ratio of one orbit to the other.

 

Edit: This applet might help you to see why these funny curly patterns result when we're looking at the behaviour of another orbiting object. It also shows more ancient methods for accounting for these observations in a heliocentric worldview know as epicycles, which are fun, but wrong for interesting reasons.

Edited April 9, 2009 by Supergrunch

[jayseven]

AH! Now that truly is awesome. Apologies for doubt, Javster!

[Pyxis]

Dinosaurs did not eat grass as it evolved after their death.

 

I think this one is incorrect.

 

Edit: yep, here is an article from 2005:

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4443696.stm

 

A study of fossil dinosaur dung has for the first time confirmed that the ancient reptiles ate grass.

 

Grass was previously thought to have become common only after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

 

But grasses were probably not a very important part of dinosaur diets - the fossilised faeces show the big beasts ate many different types of plants.

 

However, the Science journal study suggests grass was possibly an important food for early mammals.

 

Caroline Strömberg from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and her colleagues studied phytoliths (mineral particles produced by grass and other plants) preserved in fossil dinosaur dung from central India.

 

Theory dumped

 

The 65-67 million-year-old dung fossils, or coprolites, are thought to have been made by so-called titanosaur sauropods; large, vegetarian dinosaurs.

 

Fossil grass phytoliths were found in the dinosaur dung

 

"It's difficult to tell how widespread [grass grazing] was," Ms Strömberg told the BBC News website, "Dinosaurs seem to have been indiscriminate feeders."

 

The study also sheds new light on the evolution of grass. Grasses are thought to have undergone a major diversification and geographic proliferation during the so-called Cenozoic, after the dinosaurs had gone extinct.

 

But the researchers found at least five different types of grass in the droppings.

 

This suggests grasses had already undergone substantial diversification in the Late Cretaceous, when the giant beasts still walked the Earth.

Edited April 9, 2009 by Pyxis

[Chris the great]

fuck sake, is everything i wrote wrong

[Molly]

Pound for pound, there's more sugar in a lemon than a strawberry

[Chris the great]

the value of the copper in 2p coins is slightly more then 2p, theoreticaly, emlting down 2p coins would yeild a profit, but the cost of melting the coins would outweigh any proffits made

[Jav_NE]

Wow, cheers Supergrunch, i'd only imagined it in my head but that picture brought it all to fruition. Amazing.

 

AH! Now that truly is awesome. Apologies for doubt, Javster!

 

Hehe, not needed. I didn't explain it very well initially. I knew i was right though 'cause Dan Brown is the man.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

I'm surprised to see that the Venus orbit thing was correct, but that being said, you shouldn't trust everything Dan Brown tries to put into his books as "facts". A lot of them are correct, I'm sure, but several have been proven wrong.

 

The generally accepted idea that a human being eats 8 spiders in his or her sleep is actually an example made by some dude or dudette to prove that people would believe almost anything they read on the Internet.

[Goafer]

The generally accepted idea that a human being eats 8 spiders in his or her sleep is actually an example made by some dude or dudette to prove that people would believe almost anything they read on the Internet.

 

Was that in Front Magazine recently? I'm sure I read that somewhere and that's the only thing I really read.

 

And reguarding the Da Vinci Code facts: This clears them up a bit

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Was that in Front Magazine recently? I'm sure I read that somewhere and that's the only thing I really read.

 

And reguarding the Da Vinci Code facts: This clears them up a bit

I can't even remember from where I got it, but it seems a lot more likely than the spider "fact" being true.

[MoogleViper]

the value of the copper in 2p coins is slightly more then 2p, theoreticaly, emlting down 2p coins would yeild a profit, but the cost of melting the coins would outweigh any proffits made

 

Not always true. This is only true for 2p coins that were made before a certain year. Not sure when that year was though.

 

EDIT: 1992

[Paj!]

"Rapture" by Blondie was the first song to be successful in the pop charts that prominently featured rapping. (Approx. half the song one long rap)

[Jav_NE]

Was that in Front Magazine recently? I'm sure I read that somewhere and that's the only thing I really read.

 

And reguarding the Da Vinci Code facts: This clears them up a bit

 

Oooh, interesting. I dont see why he would lie about the Olympics though. Seems like a fact you'd only include if it were true. Still, he was right (or at least fair to presume) about the other things.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Oooh, interesting. I dont see why he would lie about the Olympics though. Seems like a fact you'd only include if it were true. Still, he was right (or at least fair to presume) about the other things.

Well, the problem with Brown is (and don't take this the wrong way - I really like him as an author) that he doesn't always do his research well enough. This thread is proof that you can't trust everything you hear, and Brown has a tendency to include "facts" in his books that fit his storylines - even if they're not always as factual as he thinks they are.

[Goafer]

The guy who played Uncle Phil in the Fresh Prince of Bel Air did the voice of Shredder in the 90s Turtles cartoon.