The "Did you know" thread.....

[Estreeter]

Did You Know.......

There is not a single post in the Wank Club thread dedicated to Prince Charles

[rosestone]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

But on the other side, one day, I listened to the Bouddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who said that he was very impressed by the huge memory of Asian people. He observed that they often are able to remember very long texts by heart.
Maybe it results of the way to remember all their words?

In his book 'Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell cites some very interesting research which demonstrates that the reason asian people tend to be better at maths than westerners is because of how the different languages deal with numbers - asian people can on average hold more 'pieces' of information in their minds, because the 'pieces' are smaller.

For example, in French, to articulate the number 96, you say "four twenty sixteen". In English, we say "thirteen", we don't say "ten-three". Asian languages don't do this.

He also says that this has a lot to do with agriculture, that in China, one farmer will tend a rice paddy, an extremely small piece of land, where if s/he is precise enough and works harder, the crop yield will be much higher. In European agriculture, you need large amounts of land, and it doesn't matter how much you know or how hard you work, you still need to regularly leave a field fallow.

Apologies if I've mangled the arguments a little, but it was very interesting to read about, anyway.

[chris chunt]

Did you know
You can cut off your own nose to spite your face by having a lynch mob mentality to an exceptionally gifted actor who may or may not have tried it on with someone of the same sex thirty years ago and getting his series cancelled .

I'd hate to think of what some of the girls who I dated then shagged and quickly dumped decades ago might do if I was famous and they sensed revenge .
And a few quid compo .

Harvey Weinstein sounds like a complete sleazeball but let's not just make every clumsy attempt at seduction sound like rape

[rosestone]

Originally Posted by chris chunt

Did you know
You can cut off your own nose to spite your face by having a lynch mob mentality to an exceptionally gifted actor who may or may not have tried it on with someone of the same sex thirty years ago and getting his series cancelled .

I think people are upset because the person he allegedly tried it on with was 14, not because they are of the same gender. Although I agree that this whole 'shaming' thing is a double-edged sword, as it's obviously an extremely good thing that women (and men) who are sleazed on now feel they can talk about it, equally it will encourage some unscrupulous people to make false or deliberately misleading statements just in order to 'make them suffer'.

Anyway, on the subject of movies, did you know that for the Tarantino movie 'The Hateful Eight', the production was lent a priceless vintage 1870 acoustic guitar by a museum. The guitar is played by actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, and in the script, Kurt Russell's character was to snatch the guitar from her, and smash it. Several fakes were made of the guitar, but when it came to shooting that particular scene, nobody communicated to Russell that the guitar being played was the real thing. So when Russell's character takes the guitar and smashes it to pieces, Jennifer Jason Leigh's shocked reaction is completely genuine, as she was aware that he really was destroying a priceless antique (you can even see her look off camera in the direction of Tarantino).

(and this is my second 'did you know' about Kurt Russell in the space of about a week. Maybe I should write a biography of him or something).

[Melchior]

Did you know that the Australian band The Seekers is the only surviving chart-topping band from the 60s, anywhere in the world, with all the original founding members ...
… and still performing and recording after half a century!

The Seekers are also the only concert artists to ever draw a crowd of more than 200,000 people to a concert in the southern hemisphere!

[SanteeFats]

Yes i do know.

[DTravel]

Did you know...

...that Google added the Faroe Islands to Street View using sheep mounted cameras?

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2...-sheep-cameras

[tsunamiSD]

I ran into this when I was checking on something completely different at a comic strip site...

NASA's Ambitious Plan to Save the Earth From a Supervolcano

Lying beneath the tranquil settings of Yellowstone National Park in the US lies an enormous magma chamber. It’s responsible for the geysers and hot springs that define the area, but for scientists at Nasa, it’s also one of the greatest natural threats to human civilisation as we know it: a potential supervolcano.
Following an article we published about supervolcanoes last month, a group of Nasa researchers got in touch to share a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat – and what could be done about it.
“I was a member of the Nasa Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for Nasa to defend the planet from asteroids and comets,” explains Brian Wilcox of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology. “I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.”

There are around 20 known supervolcanoes on Earth, with major eruptions occurring on average once every 100,000 years. One of the greatest threats an eruption may pose is thought to be starvation, with a prolonged volcanic winter potentially prohibiting civilisation from having enough food for the current population. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that food reserves worldwide would last 74 days.

[MaxJoker]

Frank Sinatra was offered the role Bruce Willis eventually nabbed in Die Hard. Because was contractually obligated to be offered it. He turned it down of course. But what if he`d accepted it and they`d actually gone ahead with it.
I`d have loved to have seen a seventy three year old Sinatra barefoot , wearing a singlet playing Detective (Near retirement age ) John McClane taking on the baddies.

[Greenman]

American tourists once mistook the insurance company Scottish Widows for a high class call girl agency!!😀
Some also asked what Piccadilly Circus started and where the ferry was to cross the Mersey...in London.