I bet you didnt know that

Greybottle

If you ever want to know how much space a fully printed version of the English edition of Wikipedia is then click on this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes

It's currently at just under 2,600 volumes of 1,000 pages each.

Or around 5.6 million articles.

Or around 3.52 billion words.

For comparison, the final print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and 44 million words.

Oldtree

Greybottle wrote: »

If you ever want to know how much space a fully printed version of the English edition of Wikipedia is then click on this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes

It's currently at just under 2,600 volumes of 1,000 pages each.

Or around 5.6 million articles.

Or around 3.52 billion words.

For comparison, the final print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and 44 million words.

I wonder what that is in terabytes?

Oldtree

Oldtree wrote: »

I wonder what that is in terabytes?

I clicked in the link and it looks like 27.5 terabytes.

Esel

Oldtree wrote: »

I clicked in the link and it looks like 27.5 terabytes.

Says 27.5GB! Figure in parentheses is TB though.

Greybottle

Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, died in 1997. A portion of his remains were placed on New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in July 2015 on its way out of our solar system.

Oldtree

Esel wrote: »

Says 27.5GB! Figure in parentheses is TB though.

Thought the full stop was a coma as you don't usually see somthing exressed like 27.535 GB,
My bad

Realt Dearg Sec

Greybottle wrote: »

Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, died in 1997. A portion of his remains were placed on New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in July 2015 on its way out of our solar system.

He must have been turning in his grave when the Horizons craft was instructed to destroy Pluto on the recommendation of the astronomers who were tired of counting to nine. (Or something like that, my recollection of the whole thing is a bit hazy)

Junkyard Tom

CruelCoin wrote: »

The Hubble deep field experiment was essentially a reaaaaaly long exposure shot taken of a tiny patch of sky.

To give you a sense of scale, the Hubble focused on a patch of sky so small, that if you held a grain of sand on your fingertip and held it at arm's length, the sky it covered in the same size.

The image that came out of that tiny patch is stuffed with galaxies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#/media/File:NASA-HS201427a-HubbleUltraDeepField2014-20140603.jpg

It never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly small a grain of sand is.

Markgc

Best thread ever. Still think I'll manage to get through the 391 pages tonight.

A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and nobody can figure out why.

steddyeddy

When bees fly they shed electrons from their wings, generating a positive charge. Pollen has a negative charge. Opposite charges attract and the pollen sticks to the bee's wings for easier collection.

thesandeman

Markgc wrote: »

A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and nobody can figure out why.

Somebody else said that a few pages back but I think it was disproved.

job seeker

There is an Island near New Zealand named Disappointment Island. I went there after I graduated! (only joking, about visiting it)

Realt Dearg Sec

job seeker wrote: »

There is an Island near New Zealand named Disappointment Island. I went there after I graduated! (only joking, about visiting it)

My wife lives there.

MuffinTop86

The actor who played Robbie Gould in Dirty Dancing died only a few years later of a heroin overdose, which he became addicted to while researching a role about heroin addiction.

Duckworth_Luas

To the west of New Zealand lie the Chatham Islands. When discovered by the Royal Navy around 1800, the islands were inhabited by the Polynesian Moriori people.

Their ancestors had arrived from mainland New Zealand some 300 years earlier. Due to the harsher climate of their new home, they ceased the cultivation of crops and reverted to a hunter-gatherer society.

The lack of resources on the small islands meant that building traditional Polynesian sea-going craft became impossible. These people were now trapped on the Chatham Islands and over time developed into the Moriori culture.

Their precarious position led to a rather enlightened outlook. Warfare was banned, as it was seen as a waste of resources. Cannibalism was outlawed. Disputes between individuals were settled by a ritual form of dueling which were ended at the first sight of blood.

The Moriori developed into a pacifist society where resources were not wasted. This prevented the self-destruction of their society as had happened on Easter Island. However, it also meant they were totally unprepared for what was to come.

In 1835 two groups of displaced Maoris from New Zealand hijacked British ships and made for the Chatham Islands. They began to murder, cannibalise and enslave the inhabitants.

A council of Moriori elders was held to discuss what to do about the invasion. Some wanted to suspend their tradition of pacifism to defend their society. However, it was agreed that non-aggression was the only morally correct way to respond, despite now knowing what the heavily armed Maori were capable of.

The Moriori were obliterated. The invaders began killing men, women and children indiscriminately. Any who survived were enslaved. Morioris were prevented from marrying other Morioris. Their language was forbidden. By 1862, when their enslavement was outlawed, only 101 Morori were left, out of an original population estimated at 2000.

Today there are no Moriori of unmixed ancestry left. However, there are some 800 inhabitants who identify as Moriori.

ittakestwo

Nearly all Georgian houses in Ireland have no foundations.

cdeb

The three main islands of New Zealand - North Island, South Island and Stewart Island - were known from 1840 to 1853 as, respectively, New Ulster, New Munster and New Leinster. (New Leinster was technically merged into New Munster in 1846)

There is no place called New Connacht.

Greybottle

A T-Rex needed about 40,000 calories a day to get around.

If they were alive today that would mean eating a bit less than half an average human per day. The average 80 Kg human has about 110,000 calories in them, skin, bones and all.

Or a 10 year old child.

Or about 80 Big Macs per day.

Duckworth_Luas

cdeb wrote: »

There is no place called New Connacht.

The original is just too awesome.

Chancer3001

Greybottle wrote: »

A T-Rex needed about 40,000 calories a day to get around.

If they were alive today that would mean eating a bit less than half an average human per day. The average 80 Kg human has about 110,000 calories in them, skin, bones and all.

Or a 10 year old child.

Or about 80 Big Macs per day.

Afaik they haven't definitivelyanswered whether a t rexand other such dinosaurs were cold blooded or warm.blooded.

If they were cold blooded they'd need much much less calories

Ineedaname

Chancer3001 wrote: »

Afaik they haven't definitivelyanswered whether a t rexand other such dinosaurs were cold blooded or warm.blooded.

If they were cold blooded they'd need much much less calories

It's likely they were somewhere in between the two. That said Dinosaurs were diverse and lived for millions of years so it would have varied between each species.

Bird like theropods for instance likely leaned more towards warm blooded. Modern birds are descended from dinosaurs and they're warm blooded so they definitely evolved towards it at some point.

cdeb

Duckworth_Luas wrote: »

The original is just too awesome.

This is a thread for facts, not blind rumour.

timthumbni

JFK asked a friend to get him 1000 of the finest cuban cigars. The friend got him 1200 and on handing them over jfk smiled and signed a piece of paper banning Cuban products from the us.

A man of the people was jfk.

Kat1170

Markgc wrote: »

Best thread ever. Still think I'll manage to get through the 391 pages tonight.

A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and nobody can figure out why.

Under 'Thread Display Options' change the setting to 40 posts per page and you'll only have to read 118 pages, much quicker :D:D:D:D

Buford T. Justice XIX

After years of charting the decline of Adelie penguins over decades, a recent survey in Antartica discovered a colony of over 1.5 million Adelie penguins on the Danger Islands, easing fears of their demise.

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/supercolony-of-15-million-penguins-discovered-on-remote-island-in-antarctic-36664363.html

Greybottle

In Chad, on the southern outskirts of the Sahara, there’s valley called the Bodélé Depression. It was once a lakebed, and the dry dust in the valley floor is full of nutrient-rich matter from the microorganisms that lived there.Its bottom lies about 155 meters above sea level.

From October to March, winds coming in from the east are pinched between two mountain ranges, the Tibesti and the Ennedi.

When the surface winds climb over 35 km/h, which happens about 100 days a year, they start picking up dust from the valley. In winter, the depression produces an average of 700,000 tonnes of dust each day. This dust is blown westward, all the way across Africa, and out over the Atlantic.

That dirt—from one small valley in Chad—supplies over 50% of the nutrient-rich dust that helps fertilize the Amazon rainforest.

There@s a lot more reading on it in these two articles:

Part 1: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/dust-creates-deserts-sky
Part 2: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/how-ancient-african-fish-feed-todays-amazon

New Home

mzungu

Paleontologist Dale Guthrie and colleagues ate the meat of a 36,000 year old bison they excavated from the ice in Alaska. While prepping the steppe bison for display, they stewed and ate extra neck tissue . The meat was tough and had a strong aroma, Guthrie wrote in the book "Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe" .

ittakestwo

Swans mate for life. If one is killed or dies it's partner will live the rest of their life looking for it.

Chancer3001

ittakestwo wrote: »

Swans mate for life. If one is killed or dies it's partner will live the rest of their life looking for it.

First sentence maybe.

2nd one. No