Useless facts. Share yours. No googling allowed.

I have quite good general knowledge, I think, but often find myself, especially when I'm within earshot of other adults "I hope I'm not talking a load of shit here" when I'm trying to explain something to one of my daughters.

Although, just to clarify, the "size" of the event horizon is directly proportional to the mass of the singularity. If you condensed the Earth into a singularity, it would create an event horizon about 3.5m in diameter.

They're classified according to their Mass. Not their size.

Of course, the "black hole" is just the area beyond the event horizon. By the "centre", I refer to the singularity. I know Googling is not allowed, but I think we can to settle this. See the below extract:

Singularity
Main article: Gravitational singularity
At the center of a black hole as described by general relativity lies a gravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite.[51] For a non-rotating black hole this region takes the shape of a single point and for a rotating black hole it is smeared out to form a ring singularity lying in the plane of rotation.[52] In both cases the singular region has zero volume. It can also be shown that the singular region contains all the mass of the black hole solution.[53] The singular region can thus be thought of as having infinite density.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_holes#Singularity

That old "We only use 10% of our brains" is rubbish, as anyone who has ever seen a brain scan knows.

Mass in a black hole is not "infinitely" condensed. It is just very condensed.

Google and you will see that black holes are actually classified according to their size.

I wonder what the moonwalking pig singing to woo a mate will do if she's on a balcony and he can't look up?

clenching your teeth to tense your pelvic floor... good reason to relax the face in childbirth- good snog works a treat.

You would never do anything under hypnosis that goes against your moral code.

Rubber bands last longer if you put them in the fridge.

Glow sticks carry on glowing if you put them in the freezer!

Salt does not actually make food taste better, it stimulates your taste buds to taste the food. The older you get the more your taste buds naturally deteriorate, so you need more salt to stimulate then, hence why older people usually use more salt!

Flour beetles would out-live cockroaches (and humans) in a nuclear disaster.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

I love this! I have many more....

Seismic waves from large earthquakes circle the Earth for months, acting like striking a bell. Just as a bell has a fundamental note, so does the Earth ? an E, 20 octaves below middle E on a piano.

Bees have no bumholes? How do they go?

The word "Peeping Tom" originates from the story of Lady Godiva. A wager was made that the taxes would be lowered if she rode through the streets naked on a hoarse. She asked that the entire town stayed in doors with their windows shut to save her dignity as she was doing this only to help them (she was a earless, I blieve, so money wasn't an issue to her). Everyone agreed, except for one man named "Tom" who snuck a peak through the window, but was apparently punished in some devine manor that I cannot recall. Hence the terms "Peeping Tom".

I love this thread :)

A guinea pig also cannot physically vomit.

I am usually the queen of useless facts, although cannot think of anymore.

Loved Pinot's 'gullible' one

"An erect penis is the same length as the very start of the hand to the tip of his middle finger."

Thanks for that loopylou6

So has anyone else on here measured their own hand to see how big their cock would be if they were a man?

Just me then . . .

I got SEVEN inches! < swaggers >

I'm aware that a black hole is a collapsed star. But theorically, I've read on the subject that it is infinitely condensed and therefore it's size is null, but it's mass is still whatever mass made it.

Of course, Cote. But I make it a principle not to argue with something I only half understand.

What do you think is outside it?

I suppose the simplest idea would be that space exists as pure space, and therefore it's only the matter in it that matters. But I'm sure that that's not possible, it's got something to do with hte universe callapsing in on itself.

Also, a black hole is a collapsed star, not an abstract concept. It has a mass and a size.

The blackness you would see in the sky is mostly just emptiness, of course, defined by the Event Horizon.

That is of course only a theory.

garlicbutter - Here's one way to understand what's outside the universe. Imagine that the entire universe is nothing more than a single bubble in someone's bathtub. Except within each of the uncountable number bubbles is a universe. The laws of physics only exist within each bubble, and those laws may be completely different in each of those bubble. Outside of the bubble, nothing phyically exists from the persective of the inhabitants of the bubble, because outside of it there is nothing more within that reality. Our reality only extends as far the edge of the universe - out little 90b light year bubble. Does that make any sense?

A Black Hole has no size. It is compressed to an infinite density, and therefore the loads of sun sized stars worth of matter it takes is compressed into nothing. The black hole in space is the event horizen, the distance from the singularity from which light cannot escape due to the high gravity.

Stars are big round balls, so yes, there is a centre. It's the hottest, densest part. It's this heat and desity that causes nuclear fusion to occur because it's just so hot and dense.

What's outside the universe? Well, as I understand it, nothing exists. The universe itself expands, not just the things in it. Get you head aruond that if you can. Or possibly there's a really, really big alien playing marbles.

Do stars all have centres, then? I'm now imagining some kind of scorching hot, pinprick-sized, heavy thing ... (Or dense, I suppose, since weight would be meaningless.)

If the universe has ends, what's outside them??

The circumference of a pint glass at the rim is just under twice its height.

jbcbj - Let's have them, then! I love obscure astronomical facts. Like, did you know that the centre of a netron star is so dense that the amount of matter it take fill would be the mass of the earth?

The maximum distance light can travel is 15 billion light years befoere the photon no longer sends the light. That is why the known uiniverse is up 15,000 light years away, but the entire universe is estimated to be around 90 billion from end to end. It would take you 1,841,860,465,116,279 years to cross in a modern space shuttle. Just think of the electric bill if you left the bathroom light on as you left.

'set' is the word in the English language which has the most meanings (strands of definition in the dictionary).

King Arthur's sword Excalibur was made from 'an iron not of this world'. It was forged from the iron extracted from a meteorite.

Not quite a 'fact' but an interesting piece of trivia for Arthurians.

oops, overuse of actually...