- The likelihood that you'll be lactose intolerant is greatly dependedent on the overall diet and habits of your ancient ancestor's.

- The last recorded case of Bubonic (Black) Plauge was 2 years ago in Chicago.

- The United States of America is the #1 exporter of horse-meat for the purpose of human consumption. (Even though the thought of consuming such meat would disgust and horrify most American citizens)

- Human beings are genetically less complicated than domesticated corn.

ozoneocean
As for million people cities, what about those in south Asia? -China, Japan...?

Ah! Good point, good point. There were probably cities in South Asia with populations that high/higher but I don't believe there were ever censuses to take count of exactly how many people there were. I'll add a note about 'recordedness' to my post. :kitty:

The movie "Tron", the first movie to utilize computer animation, was not nominated for an oscar for Special Effects because they were accused of "Cheating" for using computer graphics.

Swedish history time!

- Eric XIV of Sweden, eldest son of Gustav Wasa, died from arsenic poisoning after eating a bowl of pea soup.

- Way back in the day, Sweden had a king called Magnus Ladislaus, but Swedes were unable to properly pronounce his name, and so twisted it into Magnus Ladulas - and "Ladulas" means "Barn-lock". He also earned the nickname because he freed the yeomen from the responsibility of feeding nobles and priests ("Peasants! Lock your barns!" )

- In the fine tradition of being disrespectful of our kings, Sweden has had many kings with less... flattering nicknames. On the list is Sverker I Clubfoot, Eric XI the Lisp and Lame and Blot-Sweyn.

- Queen Christina, in the same vein as above, was called Kung Byxlos - which means King Trouserless.

- Sweden has throughout history had a larger international role than is widely believed. Some years back, a cache of silver coins was found on Gotland - containing 67 kilograms of silver coins from as far away as Iran and Syria. The coins got there through the wide trading system established by the Vikings (who made it as far as halfway through Russia and almost all the way to India in their shallow little long boats.)

- Related to Swedish history - in that Stockholm, our capital city, is over 700 years old - is a fact I got from a newspaper the other day. If we were to work at our current pace, replacing all the pipes (gas and water) in Stockholm would take 250 years.


Other interesting stuff!

- The pirate Ching Shih is quite possibly the most successful female pirate in history - if not the most successful pirate period - and one of the most ruthless. She commanded a fleet of over two hundred ships and seventeen thousand men, and ruled with an iron fist - if you were caught stealing from the pirate treasury, you would be execured. If you were caught having consensual sex while you were supposed to be on duty, you were executed, and the lady you were getting it on with was tied to a cannonball and chucked overboard.

She repeatedly defeated both the Chinese and the Dutch navy in naval battles, and not only that - she managed to wrangle a full pardon from the Chinese state, and went ashore and made a fortune running a brothel/gambling den, dying peacefully in her bed aged 69.

- During WWII, the Polish 22nd Transport Artillery Supply Company had a 6-foot Iranian brown bear named Wojtek on their payroll, enrolled with the rank of private. The bear was not only an acting mascot to the company - a mascot that smoked cigarettes and drank beer, mind you - but also carried ammunition across the battlefield at Monte Cassino (one of the bloodiest battles of the war) and assisted his "comrades" in breaking through Nazi defences.

Yes. This is all true.

Famous actress Hedy Lamarr, who was the first woman to film a nude scene in a major motion picture (in 1933), helped develop the concept of frequency hopping, leading to modern spread spectrum communications technology like cell phones and wi-fi.

Sun radiation is a cause of skin cancer.

90% of the worlds internet is used for searching porn.

Flys taste with their feet.

In Greek mythology, there actually is a goddess of protstitutes.

Back in Medieval times waaaay back, some countries made their armour from dog crap.

someone died from playing WoW.

zaneeba_slave
someone died from playing WoW.

....
HoW?

Punctuation: the difference between "I helped Jack off a horse" and "I helped jack off a horse"

crocty

zaneeba_slave
someone died from playing WoW.

....
HoW?

There's been a few reports:
Baby dies of neglect while parents play WoW

Diehard gamers perish while playing

But I would say that in no case has anyone actually died "from playing WoW". They might have died while playing WoW, but the cause of death is exhaustion or neglect. As the story in the first link pointed out, if the baby had died while the parents were at a ball game, nobody would be blaming baseball for the death.

If you stay up 86 freakin' hours playing golf, you'll probably keel over dead too... it isn't playing a game that will kill you, it's the not sleeping/eating right/taking care of yourself for over three days that will kill you.

noooo
i disagree wholeheartedly
it's being a dumbass that kills you.

kinda like a squirrel who crosses when a car is in front of him

- Charlemange, though his actions helped established the first universities and constantly strived to make improvements to education systems throughout his reign, was himself never fully literate.

- The oldest city to be constantly and continuously populated is Jericho which is estimated to have been originally settled around 9,000 BCE.

- There is archaeological evidence that a number of Homo sapiens neandertalinsus (Neanderthals) not only buried their dead, but honored the dead annually by laying flowers on their graves. Also, the popular belief that they were dim-witted is unsound. Mousterian stone tools, the most complicated of the lithic technologies, are almost exclusively found in context with Neandertals.

- The top two exports of Poland are ham and golfcarts.

a coward used to mean a person who wards cows. the disney movie with the most deaths was in finding nemo, 401 died. nemo's siblings and mother.

The correct plural form of "Platypus" is "Platypode"

jagular
a coward used to mean a person who wards cows. the disney movie with the most deaths was in finding nemo, 401 died. nemo's siblings and mother.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word "coward" comes from an Old French word coart (modern French is couard), a combination of the word for "tail" and an agent noun suffix. It would therefore have meant "one with a tail" — perhaps one in the habit of turning it, or it may be derived from the dog's habit of putting its tail between its legs when it is afraid.

Well "Slut" originally just meant a dirty girl or serving woman- Slattern. An untidy woman. Later it acquired the popular meaning it has today (loose sexual habits), but still retains the older meaning as well to many people.

there's a protein named after sonic the hedgehog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog [en.wikipedia.org]
in the animorphs series, K.A Applegate made up most of her made up alien names by mixing the words in street signs and other names

If, assuming we lived until the year 2000, there was no decomposition on earth,it would be larger than jupiter with all the dead bodies, poop and pee piling up.

- The same man (Doctor, man, that is.) That wrote The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and several other (brilliant) works of literature was fluent in Old English, and was a massive player in reconstructing the Gothic language.

- Split infinitives are considered poor grammar because of, strange as it is, grammatical dogma. In the Latin language infinitives are formed by using a single word which, clearly, could not be split by an abverb like it can in English. However the invention of split infinitives is a progressive adaptation of the English language and helps describe situations in a clearer detail. (That is to say "To go boldly" means something different than "To boldly go" )

- Biologically speaking, there is more variation in any random geologically defined population than there is between two races. Less than 7% of human variation is due to their race.

- The word "Cattle" comes from the Old Norman-French word "Chatel" (or Chadel), meaning 'property'.


-* I bet you can't guess by now my interests! ;D

Puff_Of_Smoke
If, assuming we lived until the year 2000, there was no decomposition on earth,it would be larger than jupiter with all the dead bodies, poop and pee piling up.

I'm not getting this? Year 2000 was 8 years ago... Are you talking about living for 2000 years?

The problem with that idea is that humans don't create mass from nothing, like magic. The Earth is actually a pretty closed system, very little leaves and very little enters... Compared to the Earth's mass we're talking minuscule amounts, like if you were the earth the amount of changeable mass would probably be the size of a piece of dust.

We can only increase in mass if material falls on us from space... As for just increasing size and not mass, well you can only pile detritus so far, it has no internal support structure. the best you could get would only ever be a few brown hills and a sludgy mess in places. Think about it: all the millions of years gigantic dinosaurs roamed with all those monstrous forests being there even longer and all that's left is oil that seeped down below the surface. And a few scattered fossils.

ozoneocean

Puff_Of_Smoke
If, assuming we lived until the year 2000, there was no decomposition on earth,it would be larger than jupiter with all the dead bodies, poop and pee piling up.

I'm not getting this? Year 2000 was 8 years ago... Are you talking about living for 2000 years?

The problem with that idea is that humans don't create mass from nothing, like magic. The Earth is actually a pretty closed system, very little leaves and very little enters... Compared to the Earth's mass we're talking minuscule amounts, like if you were the earth the amount of changeable mass would probably be the size of a piece of dust.

We can only increase in mass if material falls on us from space... As for just increasing size and not mass, well you can only pile detritus so far, it has no internal support structure. the best you could get would only ever be a few brown hills and a sludgy mess in places. Think about it: all the millions of years gigantic dinosaurs roamed with all those monstrous forests being there even longer and all that's left is oil that seeped down below the surface. And a few scattered fossils.

I think he meant if nothing ever decomposed.
Then stuff would pile up!

ozoneocean

Puff_Of_Smoke
If, assuming we lived until the year 2000, there was no decomposition on earth,it would be larger than jupiter with all the dead bodies, poop and pee piling up.

I'm not getting this? Year 2000 was 8 years ago... Are you talking about living for 2000 years?

The problem with that idea is that humans don't create mass from nothing, like magic. The Earth is actually a pretty closed system, very little leaves and very little enters... Compared to the Earth's mass we're talking minuscule amounts, like if you were the earth the amount of changeable mass would probably be the size of a piece of dust.

We can only increase in mass if material falls on us from space... As for just increasing size and not mass, well you can only pile detritus so far, it has no internal support structure. the best you could get would only ever be a few brown hills and a sludgy mess in places. Think about it: all the millions of years gigantic dinosaurs roamed with all those monstrous forests being there even longer and all that's left is oil that seeped down below the surface. And a few scattered fossils.

It's just something I read on wikipedia...

I'm guessing its one of those hypotheticals. Like, if you stood every barbie made in a year on top of one another, it would reach to the moon (or whatever that statistic is). Sure, you can't really do it. But that's just a roundabout way for Mattel to brag about production.

Puff_Of_Smoke

ozoneocean

Puff_Of_Smoke
If, assuming we lived until the year 2000, there was no decomposition on earth,it would be larger than jupiter with all the dead bodies, poop and pee piling up.

I'm not getting this? Year 2000 was 8 years ago... Are you talking about living for 2000 years?

The problem with that idea is that humans don't create mass from nothing, like magic. The Earth is actually a pretty closed system, very little leaves and very little enters... Compared to the Earth's mass we're talking minuscule amounts, like if you were the earth the amount of changeable mass would probably be the size of a piece of dust.

We can only increase in mass if material falls on us from space... As for just increasing size and not mass, well you can only pile detritus so far, it has no internal support structure. the best you could get would only ever be a few brown hills and a sludgy mess in places. Think about it: all the millions of years gigantic dinosaurs roamed with all those monstrous forests being there even longer and all that's left is oil that seeped down below the surface. And a few scattered fossils.

It's just something I read on wikipedia...

Ha, well even with no decomposition, and even if you could actually stack all that waste it still wouldn't happen because the earth is a closed system (virtually): you're inventing the mass from nothing, that's impossible to do as far as we know. lol!

With Ink's idea of a hypothetical, well... This one is a lot more way out than Barbies to the moon.
-OK, if people lived, bred, excreited, unrinated, and threw rubbish out, living constantly for 2000 years, none of it decomposed, AND all the extra people born, food and water used just magicked itsef from nothing constantly for them to use during that time; we would pile up. But considering that the entire planet Earth is half the size of Jupiter's red spot, it would probably take more than 2000 years to reach the total volume of that planet. :)
------------------------------------

That'san interesting fact though:
You could fit two or three Earths in the Great Red Sopt on Jupiter. Hypothetically. lol!

ozoneocean

Puff_Of_Smoke

ozoneocean

Puff_Of_Smoke
If, assuming we lived until the year 2000, there was no decomposition on earth,it would be larger than jupiter with all the dead bodies, poop and pee piling up.

I'm not getting this? Year 2000 was 8 years ago... Are you talking about living for 2000 years?

The problem with that idea is that humans don't create mass from nothing, like magic. The Earth is actually a pretty closed system, very little leaves and very little enters... Compared to the Earth's mass we're talking minuscule amounts, like if you were the earth the amount of changeable mass would probably be the size of a piece of dust.

We can only increase in mass if material falls on us from space... As for just increasing size and not mass, well you can only pile detritus so far, it has no internal support structure. the best you could get would only ever be a few brown hills and a sludgy mess in places. Think about it: all the millions of years gigantic dinosaurs roamed with all those monstrous forests being there even longer and all that's left is oil that seeped down below the surface. And a few scattered fossils.

It's just something I read on wikipedia...

Ha, well even with no decomposition, and even if you could actually stack all that waste it still wouldn't happen because the earth is a closed system (virtually): you're inventing the mass from nothing, that's impossible to do as far as we know. lol!

With Ink's idea of a hypothetical, well... This one is a lot more way out than Barbies to the moon.
-OK, if people lived, bred, excreited, unrinated, and threw rubbish out, living constantly for 2000 years, none of it decomposed, AND all the extra people born, food and water used just magicked itsef from nothing constantly for them to use during that time; we would pile up. But considering that the entire planet Earth is half the size of Jupiter's red spot, it would probably take more than 2000 years to reach the total volume of that planet. :)
------------------------------------

That'san interesting fact though:
You could fit two or three Earths in the Great Red Sopt on Jupiter. Hypothetically. lol!

I meant all the poop, pee and corpses until the year 2000 A.D., actually...

William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, invented the lie detector.

And, no, it wasn't a golden lasso!

When costumers at MGM put together the Wizard's wardrobe for The Wizard of Oz, they shopped at thrift stores to find clothes that projected "shabby gentility". In an incredible coincidence, the costume coat's previous owner was L. Frank Baum, writer of The Wizard of Oz!

I have one (two really)
Caligula, A roman emperor, made his favorite racehorse a Consul, but later had both the horse and the other consul(his uncle Claudius) evicted from office for treachery.

Editor Bennett Cerf challenged Dr Seuss to write a book containing exactly 50 words. The result? Green Eggs and Ham.

Fenn
Editor Bennett Cerf challenged Dr Seuss to write a book containing exactly 50 words. The result? Green Eggs and Ham.

You mean only 50 different words? Because Green Eggs and ham is more than fifty actual words, but easily only uses 50 different ones.

The reason that helium gives you a squeaky voice is because the speed of sound is faster through it. It's less dense than normal air ^_^

If you inhale a gas that's denser than normal air, you'll get a deeper voice.

Inhale too much helium (or any other non oxygen gas), and you'll suffocate. x_x