The thread of useless knowledge!

[electrick_eye]

Post your useless knowledge here! It will be the fountain of anti-productivity!

[atrax]

Earsbuds are good ear-itch scratchers.

[Abhorsen3rd]

The giraffe is the tallest land mammal.

I found this out while playing a school jeopardy, but I have some doubts if this is entirely true.

[JDGAFFLIN]

Pete Rose had 4192 career hits in the major leagues.

[saminthehat]

Nintendo is over 110 years old.

[dfkt]

Ground control for the moon landing in 1969 had the processing power of two Commodore 64.

[WalkGood]

Originally Posted by dfkt

Ground control for the moon landing in 1969 had the processing power of two Commodore 64.

Just think what we can do today, by the way the Commodore was fun in its day.

[dfkt]

Still fun for me today. I have two C64's in perfect working condition... graphics and sound are a bit "updated" though, connected to a big widescreen TV and my HiFi set.

[e260]

Originally Posted by saminthehat

Nintendo is over 110 years old.

Ya they used to make playing cards are something!

[staxchipswell]

I loved my C64 it was the best. I had the disk drive and a 14.4 modem. I believe it was the #1 selling computer of all time. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,60349-0.html

[sumx4182]

Under the International System of Units, the duration of time known as one second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom

[jconsortium]

A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes.

[Abhorsen3rd]

Originally Posted by jconsortium

A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes.

oh...kay...I'm interested in how you found this out lol

[Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander]

As you stare at your computer screen right now, your number of blinks per second are about 7. Their resting rate is 22. Yay! Let's all get glasses.

[sumx4182]

The width of the fuel tanks on a NASA Space Shuttle directly corresponds to the width of a horse's ass

[WalkGood]

Originally Posted by jconsortium

A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes.

Originally Posted by Abhorsen3rd

oh...kay...I'm interested in how you found this out lol

She knows a pig like me








(Apologizes, I couldn’t resist)

[sumx4182]

In case you want the story behind the NASA Shuttle...

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did they use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay!

Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts?

The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by, or for, Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus we have the answer to the original questions.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right - because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.
When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass.

[Abhorsen3rd]

Originally Posted by Ray

She knows a pig like me

(Apologizes, I couldn’t resist)

In this case I'm guessing it would be a compliment to be called a pig. Another flattering instance might be when someone says "you think like a pig"...there's the unflattering side and then the fact that an average pig has a higher IQ rating than even dogs and cats. I can't think of anymore at the moment though.

[Postal]

when you have a ring in your ear, thats the sound of a ear cell dieing. You'll never hear that frequency again.
(guess where i got that from)

The hippo is the animal with the most human kills.... I thought they only ate little white marbles.

[sumx4182]

Originally Posted by Postal

when you have a ring in your ear, thats the sound of a ear cell dieing. You'll never hear that frequency again.
(guess where i got that from)

i dunno where it's from, but you know that's not right, right?