Useless facts. Share yours. No googling allowed.

[SeasickSteveIsMyBoyfriend]

Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

Its illegal for a woman to eat chocolate on a bus.

111,111 x 111,111 = 12345654321

[EugenesAxe]

CBear6 - yours are cool. Mine are:

Water is most dense around 4 degrees. The bonded molecules in ice have started to break up but not fully; they interlock more closely.

I love weather trivia. A rainbow is effectively water refracting once through a water droplet; the area inside the rainbow is therefore quite light. Double rainbows are when some light particles get refracted twice before leaving the water droplet; the colour order is reversed and the light scatters into the expanse of sky beyond the second bow. The 'angle' between the first and second refractions contains no light (or much less?) and is the space between the two bows - it's called Alexander's Dark Band.

The great book 'The Cloud Collector's Handbook' taught me (don't know WHY it never occurred to me before) that sunsets are red/orange because the light is curving round the earth and travelling through more atmosphere before we see it; most of the light at the blue end of the visible spectrum is scattered. Raleigh scattering gives blue sky - when sun is overhead & travelling through a thin, clearer band of atmosphere, little is scattered and we see the blue end of the spectrum. Cloud makes all the light scatter so the sky appears white. Also water droplets in the upper atmosphere can be supercooled well below zero degs; they only freeze if there is something to cling onto, like dust or pollen.

Some Pink Floyd trivia: there is a hidden message at the start of the song 'Empty Spaces', recorded 'backwards'. It only says something like 'Well done you have found the hidden message.' Each of the beds on the beach on the Momentary Lapse of Reason album cover picture weighs a ton.

[Lizzabadger]

Schizophrenia and tickling:

thebrainbank.scienceblog.com/2012/12/24/why-cant-we-tickle-ourselves-but-schizophrenics-can/

[DaleyBump]

Slugs are hemaphrodites.

Worms don't have a heart.

There are 2 golf balls on the moon. (I might have made this up).

Every piece of gold in the entire world came from space - it came to earth on meteorites.

[GhostsInSnow]

Despite it being trotted out on every useless facts thread, it is perfectly possible to lick your own elbow, admittedly it's not something most people can do though.

[wiltingfast]

NOSE!

Pinch your NOSE shut sigh

[wiltingfast]

If you want to stop a sneeze, pinch your nosoe shut.

Works every time.

Not sure it's healthy tho...

[XanetiaOfTheDelphae]

Anatidaephobia is the fear of being watched by a duck.

[DisgraceToTheYChromosome]

St. John's Wood is the only tube station that contains no letter from the word "mackerel".

[lade]

Professor Yaffle in Bagpus was based on the philosopher Betrand Russell.

He children's tv show pug wash never had the characters seaman Staines, master bates etc. It was Tom the cabin boy, not roger etc.

Now, I wait to be corrected

[ShowOfHands]

alwayshasbeen, I think the schizophrenia thing is supposed to be a joke. Except based on the misconception that schizophrenics have a split personality, which they don't. Not sure where this misconception is from though. Possibly the split between the person's perception and reality and people have misunderstood what that means.

[ShowOfHands]

I've just read this thread marvelling at how many of these 'facts' are totally and utterly wrong. But I'm not allowed to google so can't prove it.

But lots of them are incorrect. Like genetic tongue rolling, parts of body parts equalling length of other body parts, not able to self-tickle, the duck quack thing, why we wear white as a bride, cars having arrows to point to the fuel pump, AIDs naming, teeth clenching and weeing. There are loads which are commonly held misconceptions. Not that it matters as most people who contributed have long since moved on with their lives.

I often wonder how many things I hold to be true and they aren't.

[Skoggy]

A few facts I know:

The pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, spin-off from The X Files, features a hi-jacked Boeing 727 being flown into the World Trade Centre. It was aired 6 months before 9/11.

IKEA stands for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. Ingvar Kamprad is the founder. He grew up on a farm called Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd is the village, in Småland, where he lived.

Sharks can smell one drop of blood in a million drops of water.

[alwayshasbeen]

blueemerald people who have schizophrenia cannot tickle themselves anymore than people without schizophrenia can yet another misconception of people with mental illnesses

[mrspremise]

Stephen Fry's prep school tailors was called Goringe...

[mrspremise]

The plural of mongoose is mongoose

[helentheginner]

Liechtenstein is the source of most of the world's false teeth

[Minion]

Stewardesses is the longest word you can type with your left hand using a standard qwerty keyboard.
(thats assuming you basically half the keyboard etc)

The ability to tongue roll is inherited. So if both of your parents can't do it, you won't be able to either... If they can't and you can, check the milkmans ability.

Your left boob will most likely be bigger than your right and probably more veiny as that's where the majority of the veins etc for your heart are. Your heart, however, is in the centre.

Da Vinci invented the helicopter. In fact, he invented a shed load of stuff we use nowadays, way way way before the stuff we need to power them was discovered.

[LividofLondon]

No idea if this has been mentioned already but when you hear "twit-twoo" it's not one owl but two. The female Tawny owl says "twit" and the male says "twoo".

[PinaColadas]

On most cars on the fuel gauge, the little picture of the petrol pump has an arrow pointing in the direction of the side where your petrol cap is.

[PlotTwist]

Since someone else reanimated this thread, and since I've read the entire thing and no-one's mentioned this fact...

nettles grow higher over a buried body.

[Stinkyminkymoo]

Olympic rower Peter Reed has a lung capacity of 11 litres.

[sashh]

Cows can walk up stairs but not down.

Your heart is the same size as your slightly unclenched fists.

Some people have the heart on the right, some people have all their organs as a mirror image of the norm.

In the TV series 'House', House uses his cane in the wrong hand and it is never lupus except in series 4 episode 8.

We are all born with a hole in the heart.

The largest area of permenant snow is in Australia.

You can kill yourself by drinking too much water.

[Gabeesh]

Charlie the Cat from the 'Charlie Says' PSA's was voiced by Kenny Everett! Absolutely true!

[StealthPolarBear]

How had this popped up?

[beginnersluck]

If you took everyone in the world and put them in Texas, it would be less crowded than New York City.