Tell me something useless but interesting I don't know. No googling allowed. Corrections welcomed.

[YourMaNoBraBackOfMyCar]

I love these threads so please tell me all manner of useless info. [Thanks]

Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a Friday the 13th.

It's impossible to fold a sheet of paper in half more than 8 times.

It's a shame, because if you folded a sheet of paper 0.12mm thick in half 50 times, it would stretch out into space, beyond the Sun!

The dot on top of the letter 'I' is a tittle.

Baby puffins are called pufflings.

Further to that:

'Tittle' (means the same as 'title') is the word not just for the dot on the i, but also for non-vebal abbreviations used in medieval England (like the one we get & from), and for the letters INRI (= Jesus Christ, King of the Jews) written above Christ's head in paintings of the crucifixion.

For this reason, medieval people learning to read thought that there was a fundamental similarity between little details in written script, and the image of Christ crucified - and they thought that proved the whole world was effectively 'written' by God.

In 2019 there will be more Lego people on earth than living human beings.

Bonus: world's biggest tyre manufacturer?

You guessed it, lego again.

:)

I also thought carrots were originally purple!

And I still think that the flamingos and colour thing has been shown to be wrong, despite the fact that everyone believed it to be true, including scientists, and it is quite a recent revelation.

But I haven't googled it to find out if it is true!

David Duchovny is a proper academic...... BA from Princeton, MA from Yale and an incomplete PhD (English Lit).

I knew you'd have some brilliant obscure facts LRD

I have actual interesting ones too, somewhere. Honest.

I'm just too busy awwing over baby puffins being called pufflings.

arfishy yes that it.

DeckTheHalls, that's so cool! I was tempted to measure before I posted but I'm here on my own so wouldn't have managed.

Pineapples eat you. There's an enzyme in them that starts breaking down the protein in the lining of your mouth.

So THAT's the reason it hurts like hell if I've tried to eat raw pineapple. The reason I can eat the tinned stuff is that it's been cooked and this destroys the enzyme.

My own useless fact.

The collective noun for crows is a 'Murder'.

Peoples feet are the same size as your forearm.
(Place toes at your wrist and your heel will be at your inside elbow)

Ok, I have one:

People think the King James Bible was the first Bible widely produced in English. There are perhaps 200 surviving copies of the first edition of the King James Bible (last count I saw had 174 but acknowledged more doubtless exist).

There are 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the first printed Bible made in the fifteenth century (written in Latin).

But there are over 250 manuscripts - hand-written copies of the Bible John Wycliffe and his friends translated from about 1370 onwards.

There are even translations of parts of the Bible surviving in English from more than 1000 years ago.

I suspect this is only 'interesting' to me but I find it absolutely amazing that we all think the KJB was such an important Bible, but actually for hundreds of years people had already been reading that book in English and far more early copies survived than later.

The collective noun for zebras is a dazzle

Father Christmas probably originated from stories of the Norse God Odin, the 'All Father' who led the ghostly hunt through the skies to celebrate Yule.

So Here it is Merry Christmas??

It was on radio 4 last week that they earned half a million (or one million??) every year from it. I didn't notice the wrong song had been quoted!

was too busy being amazed at the amount.

this has to be my favourite fact of the moment:

''Cleopatra lived closer to the date of the moon landing than the date of construction of the pyramids.''

thank you to who ever posted it

YY, my mind was blown by that steppe.

Fozzie bear is called that because he was played by Frank Oz.

Swedish Chef's hands belong to two different people: Jim Henson was the left and Frank Oz the right.