h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wait a second- isn't glass made out of sand? If so, why doesn't sand flow, since they are the same thing?

One particle of sand won't flow, but a cupful will. There is lots of sand in glass - so it will flow.

Other interesting quotes:
"There is a widespread opinion that glasses are supercooled liquids and therefore have a finite viscosity at ordinary ambient temperatures. Stories are told of glasses flowing under their own weight: of ancient windowpanes that are thicker at the bottom; of glass that has sagged in storage. These observations must find other explanations, because glasses of commercially useful compositions are in fact rigid solids at ordinary temperatures." --Ernsberger, F. M. In Glass: Science and Technology; Uhlmann, D. R.; Kreidle, N. J., Eds.; Acad.: New York, 1980; Vol. V, Chapter 1.

"Glass is an amorphous solid. A material is amorphous when it has no long-range order, that is, when there is no regularity in the arrangement of its molecular constituents on a scale larger than a few times the size of these groups. ... A solid is a rigid material; it does not flow when it it subjected to moderate forces. More quantitatively, a solid can be defined as a material with a viscosity of more than about 10^15 P (poises)." --Doremus, Glass Science, 1973

So, it's not a supercool liquid, but an amorphous solid. Or something like that.

This all sounds rather useful for comfort. So, in the spirit of uselessness:


Please bear in mind that Dorothy Parker (The American Writer) had a dog named Cliche and a parrot called Onan.
Apparently the parrot would spill its seed on the ground.

Or you may prefer to hear that until 1819 you could be hanged for impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner, or for damaging Westminster Bridge.

Now that's justice...

If you turn an alligator - or crocodile - upside down it's brain drops a few inches and it cannot move until you right it again. Not that you'd want to of course.

When Tommy Cooper was in the Army during the war he was in the Horse Guards. He was officially known as 'Trooper Cooper'

And ten percent of the weight of an adult crocodile is accounted for by pebbles which it has swallowed in the course of its life.

This makes a mature crocodile a better swimmer than a young one - the ballast helps it lie lower in the water.

cat urine glows under a black light

Kentucky has a state tug-of-war championship

there are 6,500 languages spoken around the world.

6,500 languages? But there's only one allowed on H2g2...how can this be?

Maltese is the only Arabic language written in Roman letters

Kamikaze means "divine wind" and was first used to name a hurricane that wrecked the fleet of Kublai Khan in 1281 that was invading Japan. The term was adopted later by pilots on short term contracts.

The 'Foo Fighters' got their name from a UFO sighted in America. It was, fairly obviously, known as a Foo fighter.

I don't think anything I've ever asked has generated so much debate... except, maybe, 'where do babies come from'.
I'm watching a spider crawl across the ceiling in an amusing fashion. I know this because countless people have told me and it's an obvious answer, but- why doesn't he fall off?
Spiders have very bad eyesight. Female tarantulas live for approx. 25 years. They also float.

Is it just me or is anyone else also curious as to what exactly a black light is?

Insects and spiders primarily use tiny hooked hairs - basically miniature Velcro - to grip to all but perfectly smooth surfaces. Some insects also secrete adhesive oils, but I don't know if spiders do that too.

THAT'S the one! Thankyou. The spider's gone away now. I wonder what it would be like to be one.
There are only two types of venomous lizard- Gilah monster and... something closely related to the Gilah monster. The former is so persistent that, when it bites (it has to chomp its victims because it can't inject venom) they often have to be cut away. My mental image of this is of it being boring rather than painful, with the victim batting at the lizard and say "Look, will you just bugger off?"

Yup, it's the Gila monster and the Mexican beaded lizard. Their respective proper names are Heloderma suspectum and Heloderma horridum (no kidding ). Your mental image is sadly mistaken: the venom is very painful, and watching yourself change colour as your blood vessels leak all over the place is far from boring. If you're really lucky, you'll have a heart attack too

Damn. One by one my carefully-hoarded illusions are shattered... still, that makes for an interesting image.
(You're obviously knowledgeable on the subject, whereas I'm merely absorbed in an enthralling book of poisons and antidotes.)
St. George was probably Lebanese.

I'm only knowledgeable on the subject because I wasn't: my interest is primarily in not standing anywhere near potentially lethal reptiles and stems from an incident involving me, a diamondback rattlesnake and a complete absence of phones for 100 miles around. Unfortunately the snake in question exhibited exceptionally poor fang-eye co-ordination, callously failing to provide me with a top notch near-death anecdote or first hand experience of necrosis.

St. George never came to England or any of the other countries and cities of which he's the patron saint either.

A black light is a light bulb that gives off a very dark, almost invisible, kind of purplish light that makes some objects glow, kind of like glow-in-the-dark things.

at any given time, there are around 24 volcanoes erupting on earth.

A black light is, in other words, an ultra-violet light. It's outside the spectrum the human eye can perceive, but some materials can absorb the energy from it and re-emit it as light we can see, so they appear to glow because they're being, in effect, illuminated by light we can't see.