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Child Item

I bet you didnt know that

Cartouche

As people here work in various jobs / professions they might know things from work or study no one here knows yet. this is what this topic is about.

what do you know that we have never heard of?

Eg: you don't need to be great at maths to be an architect

this is obvious to me but everyone says to me "i wanted to be an architect but i was bad at math,i can barely add"

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IvyTheTerrific

There is a rare mental illness called the Cotard delusion (or informally as Walking Dead Syndrome) in which the sufferer thinks they are dead.
It can happen due to some sort of brain damage such as an accident or a stroke.
There are successful drug treatments now, but people in the past with the syndrome have died of starvation through thinking that they don't need to eat because they are dead...

mzungu

It is thought that the origin of “Spilling the Beans” dates back to ancient Greece where black or white beans were placed in a jar to cast votes. If someone spilled the jar of beans, the election results would be known prematurely.

DEFTLEFTHAND

Mark Selby is the only man in history ever to win World titles in both Pool and Snooker.

2006 8Ball World Pool Champion.

He has won the World Snooker Championship on 3 occasions.

2014, 2016, 2017.

mzungu

The US state with the longest name is the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, known to most as simply Rhode Island!

Capt'n Midnight

You probably know that LA is short for El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula.

Portiuncula like the hospital in Ballinasloe. Named after a church within a church. As in they built a huge basilica around the original chapel.

New Home

Isn't the original Portiuncola (small door <-- Edit: No, that bit is wrong) in Assisi (as in St. Francis of Assisi), or am I remembering things wrong?

nim1bdeh38l2cw

368100 wrote: »

What about Elvis? Wasn't he abducted by rock and roll loving aliens?

Yes, but it hadn't happened at the time of this picture

nim1bdeh38l2cw

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

You probably know that LA is short for El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula.

Portiuncula like the hospital in Ballinasloe. Named after a church within a church. As in they built a huge basilica around the original chapel.

Portiuncula means small piece of land, nothing to do with a church

New Home

Melissa Uneven Archer wrote: »

Portiuncula means small piece of land, nothing to do with a church

Well, something to do with a church...

MikeyTaylor

Fleetwood Mac have two songs called "Without You" (one written by Danny Kirwan, one by Stevie Nicks) and so do the boy band Blue.

Capt'n Midnight

New Home wrote: »

Well, something to do with a church...

Church-ception

[Deleted User]

MikeyTaylor wrote: »

Fleetwood Mac have two songs called "Without You" (one written by Danny Kirwan, one by Stevie Nicks) and so do the boy band Blue.

Chris Rea has two songs called Texas.
One is on 1983's Water Sign album, the other was included on The Road To Hell (1989).

New Home

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Church-ception

Russian dolls?

mzungu

The asterisk comes from the two thousand year old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark duplicated lines. Likewise, Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning has remained more or less constant as a symbol used to correct defects.

KevRossi

Outside of the polar regions, the country with the most glaciers is...... Pakistan.

That's also the country that has the record for the hottest temperatures ever recorded in April or May on the planet, both times being over 50 C,

[Deleted User]

mzungu wrote: »

The asterisk comes from the two thousand year old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark duplicated lines. Likewise, Origen is known to have also used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning has remained more or less constant as a symbol used to correct defects.

I misread that as '...when proofreading homoerotic poetry...' and I thought "That's rather specific!"

[Deleted User]

KevRossi wrote: »

Outside of the polar regions, the country with the most glaciers is...... Pakistan.

That's also the country that has the record for the hottest temperatures ever recorded in April or May on the planet, both times being over 50 C,

Also the home of the worlds largest salt mines in Punjab, where Himalayan Pink Salt is mined, and not in the Himalayas. It's marketed as not only being Himalayan, but as having health benefits in the form of many trace minerals - most of which are present in the rock salt, but in quantities too small to be of particular benefit.

More importantly Pakistan has the worlds largest private ambulance service, established by the Edhi Welfare Foundation which in turn is one of the worlds biggest private social welfare organizations, encompassing education, shelter, childrens services, coast guard services and healthcare via a network of free-to-user privately funded hospitals and clinics as well as womens health services in some of the most remote areas of rural Pakistan that have been instrumental in substantially reducing the rates of death and injury in childbirth of both women and children.

Lady Haywire

A man known as simply 'Tarrare' was born in rural France, near Lyon, around 1772. His date of birth is unrecorded and it is not even known if Tarrare was his real name or a nickname.

As a child, Tarrare had a huge appetite and by his teens could eat a quarter of a bullock, weighing as much as Tarrare himself, in a single day. By this time, his parents could not provide for him and had forced him to leave home. For some years after this, he toured the country with a roaming band of thieves and prostitutes, begging and stealing for food, before gaining employment as a warm-up act to a travelling charlatan. Tarrare would draw a crowd by eating corks, stones and live animals, and by swallowing an entire basketful of apples one after the other. He would eat ravenously and was particularly fond of snake meat.

Despite his unusual diet, Tarrare was slim and of average height. At the age of 17, he weighed only 100 pounds(45 kg; 7 st 2 lb). He was described as having unusually soft fair hair and an abnormally wide mouth, in which his teeth were heavily stained and on which the lips were almost invisible. When he had not eaten, his skin would hang so loosely that he could wrap the fold of skin from his abdomen around his waist. When full, his abdomen would distend "like a huge balloon". The skin of his cheeks was wrinkled and hung loosely, and when stretched out, he could hold twelve eggs or apples in his mouth. His body was hot to the touch and he sweated heavily, constantly suffering from foul body odour; he was described as stinking "to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces". This smell would get noticeably worse after he had eaten; his eyes and cheeks would become bloodshot, a visible vapour would rise from his body, and he would become lethargic, during which time he would belch noisily and his jaws would make swallowing motions.
He suffered from chronic diarrhoea, which was said to be "fetid beyond all conception". Despite his large intake of food, he did not appear either to vomit excessively or to gain weight. Aside from his eating habits, his contemporaries saw no apparent signs of mental illness or unusual behaviour in him, other than an apparently apathetic temperament with "a complete lack of force and ideas".

Testing of his extraordinary stomach began after he suffered extreme exhaustion serving in the French Revolutionary Army. Despite being granted quadruple rations, he stole and ate anything he could. Doctors learned of his eating habits and detained him at the military hospital. While there, Tarrare ate:
-a meal meant for 15 laborers
-a live cat (except its bones, and he vomited up its fur)
-a live eel (he swallowed it whole)
-30 pounds of raw bull's lungs and liver

The army believed he could be put to use for France, and made him swallow a wooden box with secrets inside. Tarrare went to Germany in disguise, but couldn't speak German, so was immediately suspected. Sources differ on what happened to him after being caught, but after he returned to France Tarrare told surgeons he was desperate for any cure.
Efforts to keep him on any kind of controlled diet failed; he would sneak out of the hospital to scavenge for offal outside butchers' shops and to fight stray dogs for carrion in gutters, alleys and rubbish heaps. He was also caught several times within the hospital drinking from patients undergoing bloodletting, and attempting to eat the bodies in the hospital mortuary.
He was eventually chased from the hospital after a baby disappeared and he was suspected of eating it.

At the end of his life, Tarrare contacted the old surgeon (who tried to cure him) and said that he was dying from a gold fork stuck in his intestines. On the contrary, the surgeon recognized that he was dying of tuberculosis. When Tarrare died (from continuous exudative diarrhoea:pac:) the surgeon was the only one who would agree to autopsy him.

At the autopsy, Tarrare's gullet was found to be abnormally wide and when his jaws were opened, surgeons could see down a broad canal into the stomach. His body was found to be filled with pus, his liver and gallbladder were abnormally large, and his stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers and filling most of his abdominal cavity.

Tell me how

^^^^^

I'd prefer if I didn't know that to be honest.

Also, I'd suggest there is a link between his 'expulsive' bowel problems and him not gaining weight.

KevRossi

Back to the subject of Pakistani weather, they haave one of the widest recorded ranges of weather diversity on the planet.

Parts of Balouchistan in the north of the country have experienced temperatures as low as -19C and as high as +53C

Islamabad recorded a rainfall of 620mm (over 2 feet) in 12 hours.

106cm of snow fell in less than 24 hours in the Khyber

Winds hitting 200 km/h in a dust storm.

20% of the country flooded in 2010 - (Pakistan is slightly smaller than France and Germany combined).

To combat some of the extreme weather, they are planting 10 Billion trees over the next 5 years.

It's a country that's on my bucket list, especially the Hunza Valley, it's just a pity that it's so politically unstable at the moment.

mzungu

The oldest rollercoasters date back to the 1600s and are believed to have originated from the so-called "Russian Mountains", specially constructed hills of ice located in the area that is now St. Petersburg. The slides were built to a height of between 21 and 24 m (70 and 80 feet), had a 50-degree drop, and were reinforced by wooden supports.

However, rollercoasters as we might recognise them were popularised in America by businessman LaMarcus Thompson.

Thompson was inspired by a trip to the hills in eastern Pennsylvania, where a railroad line running through Carbon County had been converted from a coal transport into a tourist attraction. The Mauch Chunk Switch Back Railway was an 18 mile, mostly downhill course that featured a 2300 ft long, 665 ft high drop at the end. The railway was a rousing success with tourists, who came by the thousands to ride every year. Thompson's idea was to capture the essence of Mauch Chunk in a smaller package.

Thompson's rollercoaster opened at Coney Island in 1884 and was a resounding success. He charged 5 cents a ride and was easily clearing $600 a day in profits from the get-go. Almost immediately there were rival rollercoasters being built by other entrepreneurs trying to get in on the lucrative action.

A sound business venture, but profit was not his only motivation. In fact his main motivation was something else altogether. He didn’t like that Americans were going to places like saloons and brothels and wanted people to go to amusement parks to get their kicks instead.

So next time you're at Disneyland or Alton Towers looking at all those massive rollercoasters, you will know that the only reason they are there at all is because 1880s American fellas were nothing but a bunch of drunken brothel visiting scoundrels.

humberklog

Rosa Parks was aged 42 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
How the system of segregated seating worked was that there was an allotted amount of seats at the beginning of the journey. Whites in the front and "Coloureds" at the back. There was a moveable sign displaying the designations.
However if the whites seats filled up the sign would be moved back a row. All the black people in that row would have to move even if it was to accommodate just 1 white person- this is what happened to Parks. 3 other black passengers moved and she just scooched up to the window seat leaving 3 empty seats for that 1 white passenger. Not good enough.

Parks wasn't the first person to do this and even earlier that year a 16 year old girl refused to move. It wasn't uncommon and in court Parks was received the typical fine of $10+$4 court expenses. She appealed.

Parks was well connected in civil rights circles and was the secretary of the local NAACP chapter. Her appeal and backing by civil rights activists led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasted 381 days.

The original demands of the organisers of the boycott didn't look for desegregation instead it looked for a compromise that black people fill the back seats and fill forward and white people fill the front seats a fill to the rear and no one should be asked to vacate to accommodate.

BaZmO*

Tarrare

Wtf?! did I just read!!? It just read like a crazy stream of consciousness.

Lady Haywire

BaZmO* wrote: »

Wtf?! did I just read!!? It just read like a crazy stream of consciousness.

:D
Sorry, it's from a couple of different sources so it might go a little hazy in places. It's long too but there's bits I found really interesting and couldn't leave out. Bet you'd never guess I was a fan of horrible histories!!

CinemaGuy45

Priests socks are not really black they are a very very very very very very dark navy.

New Home

We can safely say we all knew that. However, some people may need to be reminded why it's vital not to be plagiarising Norwegian b-sides.

gormdubhgorm

The only country the world whose flag does not have at least one of red/white/blue is Jamaica.

Chancer3001

Up until 15 August 2017 Mauritania would have been included on that list too.

But they added red stripes then to symbolise the blood they are willing to shed to defend their country!

Chancer3001

Double post

CinemaGuy45

New Home wrote: »

We can safely say we all knew that. However, some people may need to be reminded why it's vital not to be plagiarising Norwegian b-sides.