Facts that shocked you

[legless]

Matt_E_Mulsion said:

Boom78 said:

Truckosaurus said:

Edinburgh is West of Bristol.

Something I’d never have believed, just checked a map and is pretty much bang on north of Cardiff

That is a something I never knew and had to look at a map to check too!!!

The one I didn't believe until I checked is that the westernmost end of the Panama canal meets the Atlantic ocean.

[Doofus]

legless said:

The one I didn't believe until I checked is that the westernmost end of the Panama canal meets the Atlantic ocean.

It doesn't. It meets the Caribbean Sea.

[President Merkin]

Auschwitz was, for a while at least, also used as an ordinary prison. People went in & came out when their sentences were served. I was blown away to discover that. Can't imagine the recidivism rates were much.

[Skyedriver]

ChocolateFrog said:

There a things moving away from us at faster than the speed of light.
.

The asking price for a Lancia integrale?

[Gargamel]

In Europe for nearly 500 years (11c to 15c) a popular and widely used remedy for illness was a product called Mumia. Which was made from the corpses of ancient Egyptian mummified remains.

In Victorian times there where a number of private parties where the unwrapping of a mummified corpse was the main event of the evening.

[oddball1313]

If you spin Norway 180 degrees from its southern most point it stretches as far down as the middle of Tunisia.

[Turtle Shed]

Scabutz said:

Hub said:

toasty said:

It would be far more likely for someone to find a hidden grain on sand anywhere on earth than it would to have a random deck of cards repeat the same sequence as any dealt before it.

When you say 'far more likely', what are the odds of a person finding a specific grain of sand hidden anywhere on earth then?

There are better ways of describing that fact. Quite simply if you shuffle the deck and deal the cards the order the cards are in has probably never been seen before and never will be again.

There number of possible orders is 8×10^67, 8 with 67 0s after it.

The odds being described here are immense beyond description and there are some very good Youtube videos on the subject. Forget grains of sand, the number of those on earth is, to all intents and purposes, zero in this context. Good article on The Guardian website:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/...

The author gives a figure of 10^27 grains of sand on earth, that's ten with 27 zeroes. 10^40 times fewer than the card combinations.

Or put another way, take all of the grains of sand on 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 earths. The odds of shuflling a deck of cards the same way twice are the same as picking the same grain of sand twice in a row,at random, from that many planet earths.

Alternatively, Google tells us that there are 10^20 atoms in a grain of sand. So all of the grains of sand on earth contain 10^47 atoms, that's just one one hundred quantillionth (10^20) of the number of ways to shuffle a deck of cards.

Want more madness? Watch this video about Tree 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P6DWAwwViU

[Turtle Shed]

If we're talking weird ages of actors, Dick Van Dyke and Lionel Jeffries starred in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Jeffries played Van Dyke's grandfather, even though Van Dyke was a year older than him.

Edit - My mistake, he played his father, not grandfather.

Edited by Turtle Shed on Monday 26th June 08:50

[CT05 Nose Cone]

Turtle Shed said:

If we're talking weird ages of actors, Dick Van Dyke and Lionel Jeffries starred in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Jeffries played Van Dyke's grandfather, even though Van Dyke was a year older than him.

Max Von Sydow was 43 when he starred in The Exorcist as well

[Scabutz]

CT05 Nose Cone said:

Max Von Sydow was 43 when he starred in The Exorcist as well

What??????? He looked about 68 in that film.

Makes me feel better, I'm 43 and don't look like that

[Wacky Racer]

Milkyway said:

Wacky Racer said:

And Reg Varney was the first ever person in the UK to use a cash machine.

I thought that it was Morcambe & Wise...

https://londonist.com/2016/01/why-was-london-s-fir...

[jdoubleu]

Doofus said:

It doesn't. It meets the Caribbean Sea.

Hoping that's just a bad joke!

[Doofus]

jdoubleu said:

Doofus said:

It doesn't. It meets the Caribbean Sea.

Hoping that's just a bad joke!

?

No.

[NMNeil]

Puggit said:

Greenland is further North, East, South and West of Iceland.

Alaska is the US state which is the furthest North, East and West of the USA.

Mainland Alaska is only 55 miles from mainland Russia.

[996Type]

All the information stored digitally within the internet weighs as much as a strawberry….

[CT05 Nose Cone]

Scabutz said:

CT05 Nose Cone said:

Max Von Sydow was 43 when he starred in The Exorcist as well

What??????? He looked about 68 in that film.

Makes me feel better, I'm 43 and don't look like that

Well they did use make up, but it was a pretty good job considering it still looks convincing today. He also played the old king in Conan the Barbarian, giving the impression he was someone who stayed the same age for about 40 years.

[Super Sonic]

toasty said:

The moon is much, much further away and far bigger than it looks.

Thought that was cows!

[Silvanus]

Doofus said:

jdoubleu said:

Doofus said:

It doesn't. It meets the Caribbean Sea.

Hoping that's just a bad joke!

?

No.

Caribbean sea is part of the Atlantic ocean, this is where the western end of the canal meets the sea. The eastern end meats the Pacific

[and31]

GetCarter said:

Only 17,410,742 of 46,500,001 of the entire (entitled to vote) electorate voted to leave the EU, and we still got screwed.

Yes but only 16,141,241 voted to remain….

[Super Sonic]

If you cut diagonally through a cone you get an ellipse.
Every prime above 6 is a multiple of 6, plus or minus 1
Cows are bigger and farther away than they look.