I bet you didnt know that

Trigger Happy · 09-01-2018 7:33pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

About 50 light years away there's a star called Lucy that's a little heavier than our sun. And depending on who you believe it's mostly diamond.

Is it not called Twinkle Twinkle?

New Home · 09-01-2018 7:37pm

No, it's Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

(Waits for "That's the joke" comments)

david75 · 09-01-2018 7:39pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Nope, no diamond rain. Diamonds need serious pressure.

If you heat a diamond up without pressure it will turn into a worthless chunk of carbon.

Diamonds are found at the heart of very large carbon rich planets and stuff.

About 50 light years away there's a star called Lucy that's a little heavier than our sun. And depending on who you believe it's mostly diamond.

Right! It’s raining acid on mercury or something right?

Where’d the diamond thing come from? Sure I heard it somewhere. No matter.

Evade · 09-01-2018 7:41pm

david75 wrote: »

Where’d the diamond thing come from? Sure I heard it somewhere. No matter.

Gas giants.

Duckworth_Luas · 09-01-2018 7:53pm

david75 wrote: »

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Nope, no diamond rain. Diamonds need serious pressure.

If you heat a diamond up without pressure it will turn into a worthless chunk of carbon.

Diamonds are found at the heart of very large carbon rich planets and stuff.

About 50 light years away there's a star called Lucy that's a little heavier than our sun. And depending on who you believe it's mostly diamond.

Right! It’s raining acid on mercury or something right?

Where’d the diamond thing come from? Sure I heard it somewhere. No matter.

Think it's on this very thread that it rains diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1 · 09-01-2018 7:57pm

david75 wrote: »

Right! It’s raining acid on mercury or something right?

Where’d the diamond thing come from? Sure I heard it somewhere. No matter.

Saturn and Jupiter, where carbon is abundant in the atmosphere coupled with sufficient heat and pressure - result; diamond hailstones.

david75 · 09-01-2018 8:07pm

Cool thanks. Knew I didn’t imagine that. Or hoped I didn’t.

Chancer3001 · 09-01-2018 11:39pm

david75 wrote: »

Right! It’s raining acid on mercury or something right?

Where’d the diamond thing come from? Sure I heard it somewhere. No matter.

It's raining acid right here on earth

Grayson · 09-01-2018 11:45pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Nope, no diamond rain. Diamonds need serious pressure.

If you heat a diamond up without pressure it will turn into a worthless chunk of carbon.

Diamonds are found at the heart of very large carbon rich planets and stuff.

About 50 light years away there's a star called Lucy that's a little heavier than our sun. And depending on who you believe it's mostly diamond.

I read a theory that black diamonds are formed in Neutron stars. They only occur in two places on earth so it's a common belief that they are from meteorites.

Doctor Jimbob · 10-01-2018 12:16am

Grayson wrote: »

I read a theory that black diamonds are formed in Neutron stars. They only occur in two places on earth so it's a common belief that they are from meteorites.

I read this as neutron stars occur in two places on Earth at first.

Dtp1979 · 10-01-2018 6:43am

sbsquarepants wrote: »

It's not so much that they are needed by the body, it's that if they weren't there in the first place, the pure water you ingested would absorb them from your body leaving you deficient. I'm talking about pure H20 - I'm not sure how pure the water from a reverse osmosis pump is, but I doubt it's anything approaching actually pure.

I thought that was a myth tbh. I’ll have to digging and find out more.

sbsquarepants · 10-01-2018 10:11am

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If you heat a diamond up without pressure it will turn into a worthless chunk of carbon.

.

What sort of temperature are we talking? Acetylene torch, blast furnace, nuclear fusion?

I know it's safe enough to leave an engagement ring on the mantle piece!:D

Riva10 · 10-01-2018 2:49pm

sbsquarepants wrote: »

I know it's safe enough to leave an engagement ring on the mantle piece!:D

Much safer and cheaper than putting it on someone's finger.

Nagikami · 10-01-2018 2:55pm

There's a clock at an abandoned petrol station in the evacuation zone area around the Fukushima Dai'ichi power plant that's still working, despite being hit by the earthquake and tsunami, and it being seven years since.

It was a Seiko clock.
Good clocks.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1 · 10-01-2018 3:12pm

sbsquarepants wrote: »

What sort of temperature are we talking? Acetylene torch, blast furnace, nuclear fusion?

I know it's safe enough to leave an engagement ring on the mantle piece!:D

Diamonds burn in pure oxygen at 690º C to 840º C. Carbon Dioxide is given off and carbon remains in a similar form to graphite.

Oldtree · 10-01-2018 3:46pm

Nagikami wrote: »

There's a clock at an abandoned petrol station in the evacuation zone area around the Fukushima Dai'ichi power plant that's still working, despite being hit by the earthquake and tsunami, and it being seven years since.

It was a Seiko clock.
Good clocks.

Is it battery operated?

New Home · 10-01-2018 6:02pm

Nagikami wrote: »

There's a clock at an abandoned petrol station in the evacuation zone area around the Fukushima Dai'ichi power plant that's still working, despite being hit by the earthquake and tsunami, and it being seven years since.

It was a Seiko clock.
Good clocks.

Oldtree wrote: »

Is it battery operated?

Is this a wind up? :pac:

Thargor · 11-01-2018 10:50am

7 years on a clock is hardly that impressive is it?

Quazzie · 11-01-2018 11:17am

Thargor wrote: »

7 years on a clock is hardly that impressive is it?

The batteries were taken out of it 5 years ago :eek:

may not be true

Nagikami · 11-01-2018 12:54pm

Thargor wrote: »

7 years on a clock is hardly that impressive is it?

I'd say so! Mine only goes up to 12 hours.

Oldtree wrote: »

Is it battery operated?

Solar powered

valoren · 11-01-2018 1:04pm

In the summer of 1943, American and Canadian forces launched an amphibious assault on the north Pacific island of Kiska.

Codenamed Cottage, the operation was intended to seize the last enemy stronghold on North American soil from Japanese occupiers. The assault began in the predawn hours of August 15 with a heavy coastal barrage by an armada of nearly 100 Allied warships. Intense fire support was followed by a chaotic but successful ship-to-shore movement of over 34,000 U.S. Army and Canadian combat infantrymen. For 2 long days, the invasion force slugged its way inland through thick fog and against the constant din of machine gun and artillery fire. By the time the island was declared secure, 92 troops had been killed and 221 had been wounded.

Japanese casualties?

There were none. The Japanese (all 5,000 of them) had abandoned the island almost 3 weeks prior under cover of dense fog.

http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/577595/jfq-76-operation-cottage-a-cautionary-tale-of-assumption-and-perceptual-bias/

Chrongen · 11-01-2018 3:03pm

Dolly Parton (the real Dolly Parton) entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest in Santa Monica California........and DIDN'T WIN.

She exaggerated her looks, hair and beauty spot and wasn't recognised as a result.

ohnonotgmail · 11-01-2018 3:19pm

Chrongen wrote: »

Dolly Parton (the real Dolly Parton) entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest in Santa Monica California........and DIDN'T WIN.

She exaggerated her looks, hair and beauty spot and wasn't recognised as a result.

is that not just a retelling of the same story about charlie chaplin?

scotchy · 11-01-2018 3:49pm

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

is that not just a retelling of the same story about charlie chaplin?

What??? Charlie Chaplin entered a Dolly Parton lookalike compitition ???

I definitely didn't know that.

.

Buford T. Justice XIX · 11-01-2018 4:02pm

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

is that not just a retelling of the same story about charlie chaplin?

Doubt it, Charlie Chaplin looked nothing like Dolly Parton...

Riva10 · 11-01-2018 4:51pm

Buford T. Justice V wrote: »

Doubt it, Charlie Chaplin looked nothing like Dolly Parton...

Not from the side anyway

BrokenArrows · 11-01-2018 5:00pm

Apparently the Berlin wall fell by mistake.

The soviets had decided to allow travel from east to west but it was still highly restricted travel which wouldn't change much for regular east Germans.

Guenter Schabowski was giving a press conference in east Berlin and was given this information at the last minute and was asked to announce it as part of his conference. He wasn't aware of the finer details of the decision and it wasn't meant to be a big deal.

When he did eventually announce it at the end of his conference he got confused and wasn't very clear about what was allowed. He also said it came into effect immediately.

Some reporters left the conference immediately and didn't wait for clarification.

Hanns Friedrichs a big news reporter announced that "This ninth of November is a historic day. East Germany has announced that, starting immediately, its borders are open to everyone."

Thousands started to gather at the wall. Initially the guards refused people to cross but the crowd became so big there was nothing they could do and didn't want to just start shooting people on mass so they started slowly allowing people through and eventually just opened the gates.

Anyone who was actually in significant power who would have ordered use of force to control and reject the crowd had no idea that this was happening because they were either in closed meetings or asleep in different time zones and by the time they did it know about it it was too late.

That night there was a huge party as everyone partied in the streets and freely flowed from east to west and visited family.
It would have been too difficult to restore order so the border remained open.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/30/AR2009103001846.html

ohnonotgmail · 11-01-2018 5:26pm

Due to the events of the War of 1812 the US started In 1816 to build a fort at Lake Champlain to protect againt invasion from British Canada. After 2 years of construction and considerable expense it was discovered that they were actually building on the Canadian side of the border. They had to abandon what they had built and start work again half a mile further south.

11-01-2018 5:55pm

BrokenArrows wrote: »

Apparently the Berlin wall fell by mistake.

The soviets had decided to allow travel from east to west but it was still highly restricted travel which wouldn't change much for regular east Germans.

Guenter Schabowski was giving a press conference in east Berlin and was given this information at the last minute and was asked to announce it as part of his conference. He wasn't aware of the finer details of the decision and it wasn't meant to be a big deal.

When he did eventually announce it at the end of his conference he got confused and wasn't very clear about what was allowed. He also said it came into effect immediately.

Some reporters left the conference immediately and didn't wait for clarification.

Hanns Friedrichs a big news reporter announced that "This ninth of November is a historic day. East Germany has announced that, starting immediately, its borders are open to everyone."

Thousands started to gather at the wall. Initially the guards refused people to cross but the crowd became so big there was nothing they could do and didn't want to just start shooting people on mass so they started slowly allowing people through and eventually just opened the gates.

Anyone who was actually in significant power who would have ordered use of force to control and reject the crowd had no idea that this was happening because they were either in closed meetings or asleep in different time zones and by the time they did it know about it it was too late.

That night there was a huge party as everyone partied in the streets and freely flowed from east to west and visited family.
It would have been too difficult to restore order so the border remained open.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/30/AR2009103001846.html

Wow. A great moment in modern history - accidentally so.

Thanks for posting that BA.

Kat1170 · 11-01-2018 6:12pm

Buford T. Justice V wrote: »

Doubt it, Charlie Chaplin looked nothing like Dolly Parton...

Turns out neither does Dolly Parton :eek::eek:

New Home · 11-01-2018 8:07pm

Still in the subject of the Berlin Wall, when it was built a "shortcut" was taken to save money, and a triangular patch of land (approx. 350 sq. m.) that technically belonged to East Berlin was left on the West side of the Wall. This land couldn't be used by either side because of its location, and was abandoned. In 1983 an Anatolian immigrant father of six, Osman Kalin, began clearing out the fallow land and built a single-storey hut and a vegetable garden there, and neither side could "legally" stop him, they only managed to limit the height of the building for fear that it might be used as an entry point. Kalin lived there for years (even after the fall of the Wall) and made his living in part by selling/smuggling goods to the East Berlin soldiers. The hut is known as "Baumhaus an der Mauer", or "Treehouse at the Wall", even though it's not built on a tree but between trees.

More here.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fde.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBaumhaus_an_der_Mauer&edit-text=&act=url

sbsquarepants · 12-01-2018 9:09am

These are 2 brilliant Berlin Wall stories - fascinating both of them.

I have a chunk of it at home somewhere. A cousin of mine just happened to be in berlin on a school tour when it fell. He picked up a few chunks off the ground that people had smashed off with sledge hammers and pick axes as they vented their anger at the damn thing.

30 years or so it stood as the physical embodiment of the cold war and division in general, and it topples in hours because of a botched press conference. Absolutely amazing!

AndyBoBandy · 12-01-2018 9:53am

BrokenArrows wrote: »

Apparently the Berlin wall fell by mistake.

This story is covered in an excellent episode of BBC's Days that Shook the World

redfacedbear · 12-01-2018 6:23pm

The Berlin Wall has now been down longer than it was up (1961 to 1989).

Kat1170 · 12-01-2018 11:40pm

45% of the world's Tic-Tacs are produced in Cork

SimonTemplar · 13-01-2018 12:23am

85 year old movie composer John Williams (Jaws, Star Wars, ET, Indy, Schlinder's List, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Home Alone, etc) has never upskilled with modern technology and is in fact a complete novice when it comes to anything modern. Therefore, he is the only major Hollywood composer who still uses just a piano, pencil and paper when writing scores without any use of any synth or computer programs. Most movie composers use computer based orchestra mockup tools before passing it to a real orchestra, but Williams has been composing in the same way as he did in the 1950s.

mzungu · 13-01-2018 12:51am

If you drop a raisin into a glass of fresh champagne it will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.

evolving_doors · 13-01-2018 1:13am

For men it's Blond
For women it's Blonde

Duckworth_Luas · 13-01-2018 2:22am

Ireland is one of only 10 countries that doesn't have red or blue on their national flag.

The others are Bhutan, Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and the Vatican City.

Junkyard Tom · 13-01-2018 2:37am

Low fat milk contains slightly more calcium than full fat as the calcium is in the water not the fat.

Also, low fat milk is a scam.

LirW · 13-01-2018 10:40am

When Sylvester Stallone moved to Hollywood to make it big there, he really found himself struggling with money with his wife (just before Rocky). They had an old Pitbull dog and because they were struggling so much, they decided to sell the dog to a family in a very hot summer because they couldn't accommodate his elderly needs in the heat.
When around half a year later Sly was starting to shoot Rocky, he approached the family and asked if they'd be willing to let the dog star in the movie because he'd written parts for him in the script. After short hesitation the family said yes and the dog got to star in 2 Rocky movies.

Out of that story there developed the legend that Sly sold the dog to a stranger and once he made money from Rocky he bought the dog back for 15.000$. Which of course isn't true.

eisenberg1 · 13-01-2018 1:07pm

It's a myth that all oysters are aphrodisiacs.
I ate a dozen last nite and only nine worked.

HONKEY TONK · 13-01-2018 1:15pm

If you walked down Pytchley in London It may look like an ordinary street

But if you take a closer look at the railings you may notice they have a kink in them.

What most people don't realize is that these railings are actually the leftover stock from WW2 stretchers used to rescue Londonser trapped in the rubble

Also used for railings were the childrens stretchers along petrestrian areas of the estates

You can see the railings on Google Street view

Here

the purple tin · 13-01-2018 6:09pm

and during WW2 loads of british people donated their railings to be melted down and used for the war effort. The thing is the bulk of the metal was just scrapped and never used as it wasn't suitable. the government asked for the railings to make people think they were personally helping Britain win the war, like a morale booster.
Bees were originally wasps who decided to go vegetarian.

Buford T. Justice XIX · 13-01-2018 7:39pm

Yogurt was probably discovered at the same time in many places about 4000 years ago after milk carried in waterskins made of animal hide turned sour. The yogurt culture (boom boom) we enjoy in the west today traces its origins to Bulgarian yogurts from the 1920s and 1930s.

The link below goes into more detail about its development.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180110-the-country-that-brought-yoghurt-to-the-world

Capt'n Midnight · 13-01-2018 8:16pm

the purple tin wrote: »

Bees were originally wasps who decided to go vegetarian.

And ants are wasps that decided not to fly, well apart from the flying ants.

the purple tin · 13-01-2018 8:42pm

Grouch Marx's last words were 'this is no way to live'.

Riva10 · 13-01-2018 8:44pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

And ants are wasps that decided not to fly, well apart from the flying ants.

Ants are also known as Walks.

LarryGraham · 13-01-2018 9:03pm

Duckworth_Luas wrote: »

Ireland is one of only 10 countries that doesn't have red or blue on their national flag.

The others are Bhutan, Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and the Vatican City.

Since August 2017, when Mauritania added red to its flag, Jamaica is the only country without red, white or blue in their flag.

quickbeam · 13-01-2018 9:10pm

I didn't know Mauritania had amended its flag :eek:

I have fairly good country-flag recognition (thanks to having far too much time on my hands in the past). The extra stripes might have stumped me.

I bet you didnt know that

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