Strange Facts

[King 277]

I thought this might be a fun thread, so post any strange facts you know.I just saw this one.

 

Eight of the ten largest stadiums in the United States are home to college football teams.

[Guest Yodahew]

New malden in surrey england is home to the largest population of koreans outside of seoul.

[Omega 354]

Elephants are the only animal to have 4 knees.

[Guest Yodahew]

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time. 1/100th of a second.

[etz 78]

Reputedly, the "Golden Mile" in Leicester is the largest concentration of Indian ethnic shops outside of India. The Diwali celebrations in the same area are also the largest outside India. But the interesting fact is how it got it's nickname from a string of yellow-amber traffic lights strewn down the road in the late 60's.

[The Fury 65]

Got taught this one at work

 

Drinking grapefruit juice after having paracetamol can kill you

[Guest Edgehead]

Apparently the most popular name in the world is Mohammed.

[King 277]

125,000 golf balls a year are hit into the water at the famous 17th hole of the Stadium Course at Sawgrass.

[Evil Gringo 279]

Elephants, despite having four knees cannot jump.

 

Also the Mortal Kombat character Ermac started out as an urban legend in the original Mortal Kombat game were players believed that he was an unlockable character they could play as due to macro appearing on a screen that was spelt ERMACS on the audits screen for Reptile's appearance.

 

As a result, due to this and a campaign of trolling by Electronic Gaming Monthly people believed he was a real character and spent months of their lives searching for him until the creator of Mortal Kombat added him into Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

[Guest John Hancock]

Everyone pronounces "Dr. Jekyll" wrong. It's "Gee-kall", rhymes with "treacle", not "Jek-al" rhymes with "speckle". It's a real name, and the pronunciation we all use comes from the fact that one of the original films of the book got it wrong, and the wrong pronunciation stuck.

[DC 536]

On a similar note (i.e movies defining how we regard something), "pirate speak" is a fictional thing that was created for the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island. Robert Newton, the actor portraying Long John Silver, played on his West Country roots and exaggerated that accent into the "Aaarh, mateys" accent / figures of speech we associate with all pirates of that era.

[Omega 354]

hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words.

[Guest John Hancock]

Following that trend, ithyphallophobia is the morbid fear of getting an erection.

[DC 536]

There are some fascinating officially recognised phobias.

 

Automatonophobia is the fear of things that represent sentient beings, but are not in themselves actually sentient. There's also a fear of gravity (which must make like hard), a fear of music and a fear of the Pope (in general, not a specific one).

 

People are strange folk.

[Guest John Hancock]

The technical term for the fear that the Pope is going to make horrific things happen to you is "Judaism".

[etz 78]

Automatonophobia is the fear of things that represent sentient beings, but are not in themselves actually sentient.

 

Like creepy ventriloquists dolls, or stuffed animals, or that horrid Japanese robot girl.

 

Strange fact, people with symmetrical faces are routinely judged to be more attractive than people with non-symmetrical faces, but only to a point. If they're too symmetrical, the observers brain will lump them into the same group as Chucky and those ventriloquists dolls.

[Guest John Hancock]

Strange fact, people with symmetrical faces are routinely judged to be more attractive than people with non-symmetrical faces, but only to a point. If they're too symmetrical, the observers brain will lump them into the same group as Chucky and those ventriloquists dolls.

 

Someone did a cool thing with that, photoshopping people's faces so they were perfectly symmetrical, and they instantly looked less human, but in a really subtle way where, if you didn't know what had happened, you wouldn't be able to describe it.

[King 277]

If you were to watch all of the SAW movies, it would take you 666 minutes.

[DC 536]

If you were to watch all of the SAW movies, it would take you 666 minutes.

That's a myth, unfortunately.

 

All seven movies run for a total of 669 minutes, with up to an additional 23mins if you go for the various special editions.

[King 277]

Ah is it?, Yeah it sounded to good to be true.

[DC 536]

It's just one of those things that, as you said, sound just plausible enough to be true, but isn't.

 

It's along the lines of feeding rice to pigeons will make them explode, the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure, that can be seen from space, people only use a small percentage of their brain, that Napoleon was short (when he was average height for the time), "Let them eat cake", your tongue is separated into different taste zones, NASA spending millions on a space pen when Russia used pencils, people thought the world was flat until semi-recently (when in fact most of the scholars from the earliest days of sea-travel were aware it was round) and water doesn't flow the other way in the Southern Hemisphere.

Edited July 6, 2014 by DC

[Evil Gringo 279]

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on August the 6th 1945 on a business trip... surviving the blast of the first ever atomic bomb used in anger he travelled back to his home town, arriving there at work on the 8th of August... in Nagasaki. Both times he was around 2 miles away from the blast and despite suffering burns, burst eardrums and temporary blindness he survived and didn't even get cancer or even use it as an excuse to miss work!

[Maxximus 353]

The technical term for the fear that the Pope is going to make horrific things happen to you is "Judaism".

 

Well played, sir. :lol

[King 277]

Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton are the only two actors to face off against a Terminator, an Alien and a Predator.

[Guest Ciaran The King]

When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second!