I bet you didnt know that

Paddy Cow · 24-12-2018 4:52pm

NewbridgeIR wrote: »

People with two first names become pop stars (Paul Simon, George Michael, Rod Stewart) while people with two surnames become actors (Harrison Ford).

People with three names become assassins - Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman.

Esel · 24-12-2018 5:59pm

Paddy Cow wrote: »

People with three names become assassins - Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman.

Sirhan B Sirhan - still incarcerated since killing RFK in 1968 afaik.

Buford T. Justice XIX · 24-12-2018 7:04pm

There were no magpies in Ireland until 1674. Gerald of Wales, while travelling across the island in the 1180s, made no mention of the presence of any during his stay in the country.

The first sighting of magpie is believed to be in County Wexford in 1674 when a small flock of about a dozen birds were blown across the Irish sea during a storm and began to breed in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy and eventually spread across the country.
http://www.michaelfortune.ie/Under_a_dozen_they_came.html

mzungu · 25-12-2018 1:31am

In the the Middle Ages, a type of clay – called ‘pygg’ – was used to make pots that could store money. This is where we get the name piggy bank from.

Franz Von Peppercorn · 25-12-2018 10:33am

Paddy Cow wrote: »

People with three names become assassins - Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman.

Some that because the media tend to use the triple barrelled name, as Mark chapman might be too common.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-gabrielle-giffords-suspected-shooter-has-three-names-so-do-lots-of-famous-assassins-what-gives.html

TomSweeney · 27-12-2018 12:20am

B.A._Baracus wrote: »

There is a $2 American bill. Most Americans don't know about it. As there's only so many in circulation.

I have one, must dig it up and post a pic ... cool picture of the singing of declaration of independence on the back of it ...

stimpson · 27-12-2018 12:49am

The papal density of Vatican City is 4.54 popes/km^2.

Esel · 27-12-2018 1:14pm

TomSweeney wrote: »

I have one, must dig it up and post a pic ... cool picture of the singing of declaration of independence on the back of it ...

Before a big mining strike in Arizona (1970s/80s) the company paid everyone in cash in $2 bills. The idea was that all local businesses would see where their money was coming from.

NewbridgeIR · 27-12-2018 11:11pm

Episodes of A Country Practice were 50 minutes long.

When broadcast by RTE (started September 1985) these episodes were cut in half and shown as 25 minute programmes. While it was shown five days a week, we were really only getting 2.5 episodes.

KevRossi · 27-12-2018 11:22pm

NewbridgeIR wrote: »

Episodes of A Country Practice were 50 minutes long.

When broadcast by RTE (started September 1985) these episodes were cut in half and shown as 25 minute programmes. While it was shown five days a week, we were really only getting 2.5 episodes.

I think this was planned in the scriptwriting and after about 25 mins there would be a slightly dramatic moment where stations with ads or like RTE who wanted to split the programme had a handy spot to stop the reel and dive to ads or credits.

Not the only programme to do this.

Water John · 27-12-2018 11:30pm

You'd have it American made for TV as they would have more frequent ad breaks TMK

NewbridgeIR · 27-12-2018 11:47pm

KevRossi wrote: »

I think this was planned in the scriptwriting and after about 25 mins there would be a slightly dramatic moment where stations with ads or like RTE who wanted to split the programme had a handy spot to stop the reel and dive to ads or credits.

Not the only programme to do this.

Yes, you can spot the cliffhanger / half-episode endings a mile off. I only found this out when I purchased the DVD sets from Australia a few years ago.

TomSweeney · 28-12-2018 3:23pm

MagicIRL wrote: »

The great football club FC Barcelona would not exist today if it wasn't for an Irishman, Paddy O'Connell.

During the Spanish Civil War, the football league was suspended and Barcelona were in huge debt. It was he who brought the club on a tour of North America (incl. Mexico) which generated enough revenue that it saved the club from bankruptcy.

He's affectionately known as Don Patricio O'Connell among Barcelona fans.

He also led Real Betis to their one and only La Liga win after saving Barcelona from the brink of extinction.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/european/paul-oconnell-bust-recognised-real-betis-la-liga-barcelona-legend-a7608691.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_O%27Connell_(Irish_footballer)#FC_Barcelona

Well F*CK PADDY O CONNELL anyway!

What a c*nt!

TomSweeney · 28-12-2018 3:29pm

Mountainsandh wrote: »

The man who claims to have first bottled Coca-Cola was Joe Biedenharn, in Vicksburg Mississippi. There's a little museum I visited there, where you can see the old style fountains sodas used to be dispensed from.
There were lots of different flavours, and they got to the dispenser in a syrup form.

The summers were hot, and it occurred to Joe that only his urban clients could avail of the soda fountain. He thought there was a market there to distribute fresh sodas to the country folks on his delivery rounds, and he was already bottling soda water, so he wrote to Coca-Cola and with their agreement, went ahead and bottled it.

Biedenharn used standard soda bottles at first, but then he had to rethink the design as there was a rubber seal that changed the taste of Coke after some time. So he went for a straight edge bottle, and some of these had the Coca-Cola logo (not on a label, on the glass).
Shortly after that Coca-Cola decided to have their own distinct bottles as your post explains. According to the Vicksburg museum site the Coca Cola guy said : "we need a bottle which a person can recognize as a Coca-Cola bottle when he feels it in the dark.”

http://biedenharncoca-colamuseum.com/bottle.htm

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.3517774,-90.8818411,3a,90y,100.52h,99.07t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sURgqCZPqBrX6gEqV11rvjg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DURgqCZPqBrX6gEqV11rvjg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D97.43701%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656

Nice building too !

its_steve116 · 28-12-2018 3:38pm

Rhys Ifans was the Super Furry Animals' original lead singer.

TomSweeney · 28-12-2018 3:38pm

Tangatagamadda Chaddabinga Bonga Bungo wrote: »

America's number-one Irish place is the Boston suburb of Milton, where 38 percent of residents are Irish (decent).
Link to the census data which shows the top Irish places by state.

Six of the 10 cities in our list of most Irish areas are in Massachusetts, and all of them are in the Northeast.

The top 10 list.

Milton, MA 38%
Pearl River, NY 38%
Braintree, MA 36%
Collingdale, PA 35%
Marshfield, MA 35%
Scituate, MA 35%
Gloucester City, NJ 34%
Drexel Hill, PA 34%
Pembroke, MA 34%
Weymouth, MA 33%

Large cities with the highest percentage of Irish ancestry:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 16.74%
Boston, Massachusetts 15.80%
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 14.2%
Louisville, Kentucky 13.2%
Buffalo, New York 11.23%
Nashville, Tennessee 9.8%
Kansas City, Missouri 9.66%
Raleigh, North Carolina 9.5%
Cleveland, Ohio 9.43%
Baltimore, Maryland 9.14%

But according to Wikipedia - Holly Bluff, Mississippi (with a population of 189 individuals) is the only area in the US where the majority of the people living there are of Irish decent at 58.33%. Wikipedia Link.

(The first link seems reliable, the second one maybe a little less so)

Braintree MA !

I remember flying to Boston on a J1 in 1999, these two sweet old dears sitting next to me with Galway accents, on their way to Braintree - they told me they lived there.
I asked did they move there recently, nope had lived there for 40 years and no change of an accent ..

BaZmO* · 28-12-2018 5:02pm

Obviously there are exceptions but at the 12 year mark is when an accent pretty much gets locked down.

Ipso · 28-12-2018 5:07pm

BaZmO* wrote: »

Obviously there are exceptions but at the 12 year mark is when an accent pretty much gets locked down.

Or two weeks in Trinity.

TomSweeney · 28-12-2018 5:30pm

RiderOnTheStorm wrote: »

Nope. The immediate reply posters got it right. The 2nd point (location really, as its not a point) is anywhere on the latitude about a mile and a half from the South Pole.

I love Universe scale / ratio facts...
If the Earth was shrunk to the size of a snooker ball, the Earth would be smoother than the snooker ball.
If the Earth wad shrunk to the size of an apple, the Earths atmosphere would be as thick ad the apple skin.
If you shrink the Universe so the sun is the size of an orange and the earth id a grape, and place them at opposite sides of standard living room, the nearest star (at this scale), is the n South Africa....Thx to Porridge for this one!

hmmm not quite , still impressive distance tho.

More like north of Spain.

take a standard living room as 5m.

5meters = 8 light min.
1 lm = 62.5cm
1 light hr. = 37.5m
1 light day = 900m
1 light year = 328.5KM
4.5 light year (dist. to nearest star) = 1,478KM

Fourier · 28-12-2018 7:57pm

What I'm getting is if the Sun were an orange on Grafton Street, then Proxima Centauri would be a few meters north of the church in El Cuervo de Sevilla, Spain (a small town south of Seville).

EDIT: TomSweeney is accurate in terms of if you take the distance between the Earth and the Sun to be 5m, it's Northern Spain to get to Alpha Centauri. So the difference is I'm going by the Sun being an orange and going to Proxima, he's going by the Earth-Sun axis being 5m and going to Alpha

Ipso · 28-12-2018 8:03pm

There's a joke about Seville oranges in there somewhere!

Raheem Euro · 28-12-2018 8:53pm

If you were to shrink the Earth down to the size of a snooker ball it would be smoother than any snooker ball ever machined.

GrumpyMe · 28-12-2018 8:58pm

Raheem Euro wrote: »

If you were to shrink the Earth down to the size of a snooker ball it would be smoother than any snooker ball ever machined.

But it would still be a "oblate spheroid" and absolutely useless for playing snooker, surely?

Raheem Euro · 28-12-2018 9:05pm

GrumpyMe wrote: »

But it would still be a "oblate spheroid" and absolutely useless for playing snooker, surely?

A good player will factor this in and adjust shot accordingly.

*Whilst technically oblate and also slightly wider below the equater yada yada, at a macro level the earth is very round. In other words it's closer to a perfect sphere than a snooker ball. And would feel thus if shrunk to that size and you held it.

TomSweeney · 28-12-2018 10:12pm

Fourier wrote: »

What I'm getting is if the Sun were an orange on Grafton Street, then Proxima Centauri would be a few meters north of the church in El Cuervo de Sevilla, Spain (a small town south of Seville).

EDIT: TomSweeney is accurate in terms of if you take the distance between the Earth and the Sun to be 5m, it's Northern Spain to get to Alpha Centauri. So the difference is I'm going by the Sun being an orange and going to Proxima, he's going by the Earth-Sun axis being 5m and going to Alpha

Exactly, the size the sun being an orange is another calc., I was referring to distance purely ...I did think the distance was off as I remember reading somewhere that if the diameter of the solar system was on a €2 coin:

Alpha centauri - 110 meters away.
Orion Nebula - 35 KM
.
.
.
.
.
Andromeda Galaxy (and I had to double check this) : 65,700 KM away (about 1/5th distance to the moon)

:eek: and that's our "closest" galaxy, considered a mere neighbour in galactic terms !! - still think God loves you and has a plan for YOU and has a special relationship with YOU!!!!

TomSweeney · 28-12-2018 10:45pm

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

I only discovered this when I moved to America. I was giving out to the students about some hames they made of some assignment and said "I'm not giving out to you" (I was, I just wanted to make them feel OK about it) and they looked at me in a state of total confusion. I realised I had been using the phrase regularly for ages (it was a writing course focused on argument so I was differentiating between a constructive argument and just giving out to people...I didn't even realise they didn't understand at the time).

It's amazing the things we take for granted in how we speak.

Same with "I'm after..." as in, "I'm after making the dinner". Americans find me saying that hysterical. I actually did know that was an Irishism, but I don't notice myself doing it until I'm after doing it.

Its like a whole tense that only Irish people know.

Try saying "your man" to an American .....
stand back, especially if it's a homophobic bloke ..

Realt Dearg Sec · 29-12-2018 12:36am

TomSweeney wrote: »

Try saying "your man" to an American .....
stand back, especially if it's a homophobic bloke ..

Funnily enough my wife is American but we lived in Ireland for ten years. She didn't realise "your one" only referred to a woman for the first three of those years until I noticed she was referring to a man in conversation as your one.

gozunda · 30-12-2018 12:54am

For New Home

Chickens were the first birds to have their genome sequenced, in 2004

Other recent reseach has shown that birds are distant relatives of dinosaurs - however chickens are believed to be 'closer to dinosaurs' than other birds

In 2015 a number of scientist announced they found that birds have a unique cluster of genes related to facial development, which non-beaked creatures lacked.

When these these genes were silenced in chicken dna the beak structure reverted back to an ancestral state. By doing so, the scientists managed to create a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout and palate, similar to that of small feathered dinosaurs like Velociraptor.

None of these snouted chickens were ever hatched.

New Home · 30-12-2018 1:40am

Thanks for that.

Having said that, I do think it's unethical to experiment on animals, especially if it's "just to see what would happen if".

gozunda · 30-12-2018 2:01am

New Home wrote: »

Thanks for that.

Having said that, I do think it's unethical to experiment on animals, especially if it's "just to see what would happen if".

Even unhatched eggs? Is an unhatched egg an 'animal'? And where the reseach has a purpose - then?

I bet you didnt know that

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