Fascinating Facts and Trivia

Viruses are literally raining on us from the sky all of the time. In fact hundreds of millions of viruses are deposited per day above the lowest level of the atmosphere.

About bloody time someone else posted here it was getting like a ghost thread

Washington DC harbours the highest concentration of psychopaths in the entire United States!

In Australia, birds of prey deliberately start forest fires, wielding flaming sticks to do so.

This is a killer one: 29th May is officially “Put a Pillow on Your Fridge Day”. This strange holiday spans back to the early 1900’s, where families would place a piece of cloth in their larders. It’s celebrated in Europe and the U.S.A to bring luck & wealth to the household. Here we'd do that on a very hot night when we couldn't sleep and needed cooling down!

Bananas are curved because they grow towards the sun. Bananas go through a process called “negative geotropism.” Instead of growing towards the ground, they start growing towards the sun. The fruit grows against gravity, which gives the banana its familiar curved shape.

Billy goats urinate on their own heads to smell more attractive to females. Billy goats, or bucks is the name given to male goats. Generally they urinate on themselves in late summer through fall, and for humans, it’s not a pleasant smell.

The inventor of the Frisbee was cremated and made into a Frisbee after he died. Walter Frederick Morrison invented the Frisbee in 1948, which was originally called the Pluto Platter. In 2010, at age 90 he died and his family cremated him and turned his ashes in to the Frisbee.

In 1974, the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis published a paper titled ‘The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of Writer’s Block’.

It contained a total of zero words.

During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools. An average human produces between 1 to 2 liters of saliva each day, which is a maximum of 730 liters per year. The average life expectancy is just over 70 years, which gives a maximum of 51,100 liters of saliva produced in an average lifetime. This is more than enough to fill two swimming pools.

Polar bears could eat as many as 86 penguins in a single sitting...if they didn’t live at opposite ends of the earth! Polar bears live in the arctic, whereas penguins usually live in Antarctica.

King Henry VIII slept with a gigantic axe beside him. This wasn’t the only lethal weapon he owned. King Henry VIII had a huge collection of weapons, which included 6,500 handguns.

Now this IS fascinating and true.
It sounds like an urban myth. The forward-facing guns of HMS Belfast are permanently positioned to score a direct hit on the London Gateway service station at Scratchwood.

It is no myth. The target is intentional. If the six-inch guns were loaded with shells, they could deliver an awesome pounding to the M1 cafe and toilet stop. Each shell weighs 112 pounds, similar to a sack of coal, and much more explosive. The forward guns could fire eight rounds per minute, meaning that Scratchwood could be obliterated in seconds.

But why this target in particular? It has nothing to do with the exorbitant price of its cappuccinos. The imperilled service station sits neatly on the radius of the guns' comfortable range (about 18.5 km at 45º elevation, but the artillery could stretch to 23 km if pushed). A point anywhere within that band might have been chosen for the resting formation of the six forward guns. According to the ship's Chief Yeoman, Kevin Price, Scratchwood was picked on because it was a well-known landmark on the M1 motorway. "We could also hit Cheshunt, or Gidea Park, or fall just shy of Dartford," he tells us. Scratchwood, though, has a certain quotidian monotony that invites comparison with Betjeman's "come friendly bombs" prejudice.

The targeting was decided as long ago as 1971. This was the year HMS Belfast was first moored in the Pool of London to serve as a museum ship, following decades of distinguished service as one of the Royal Navy's most powerful light cruisers. It goes without saying that the Belfast would never have cause to bombard the motorway — but the guns had to point somewhere, and targeting a famously humdrum location could only help with press and popular attention.
The other guns on the ship have not been so deliberately targeted, and are often swivelled. The numerous four-inch guns along the vessel's sides would probably hit surrounding buildings, making short work of the More London complex. If they could clear the skyline, they'd have a maximum range of about 18 km. This is precisely the distance to Sutton town centre.

Incidentally they were fired today to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of D-Day but I don't think it was the main guns otherwise no more service station!

From Brian Cox's The Planets:
A day on Mercury is longer than a year.
Still trying to get my head around that one.