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

Jackson Pollock's real first name was Paul.

The character played by Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies was first portrayed onscreen in 1968 by Frank Sinatra albeit with a different name.

Can you be a little more specific?

Nevermind.

Tony Rome or Joe Leland?

Joe Leland.

Polar bears' white fur doesn't only allow them to blend in against snowy backgrounds in visible light but also makes them nearly invisible in infrared as well. (source: http://coe.berkeley.edu/engnews/fall02/3S/polarbear.html )

How long did we work on building light conducting fibres - and they just grow them!

Polar bear hair is hollow, as are the outer guard hairs on a reindeer's hide. This is why early Arctic explorers had sleeping bags made out of reindeer hide. We took years to develop hollowfibre, animals have been growing it for millennia.

Re the link to the science article given above
>>Her paper also rated high in originality at the ME conference. “People at these conferences usually present on dry things. This research had a high coolness factor and coolness factor usually counts for a lot at ME conferences,” she adds. <<

This sounds like a line from "The Big Bang Theory" TV comedy show.

The article also stated the following:

" While interesting, her polar bear discovery has little practical application to spur further research. The military quickly lost interest in the subject when they discovered that the polar bears could easily be seen using ultraviolet detection technology."

I read that and interpreted it as "Useless Fact".

Also, I just love the the idea of polar bears performing the bugblatter beast maneuover of covering their faces with their paws. But in this case, if they can't see you, you really can't see them.

It would be interesting to find out if they do. There was the idea that they covered their faces to hide their black nose from prey (as the only bit that may be seen) but this was dispelled as a myth... Hmmmm, what if they were hiding from creatures with infra red vision goggles?!

As I'm sure we all know, the dot above an "i" is called a tittle; but does anyone know what the cross in a "t" is called?

The "Nail your prophet here" point?

Mr X, If I said I needed to know that wouldn't it render your entry as inadmissible in this thread?

The cross on a T can also be called a tittle. By the way, the phrase "to a tee" (or "to a T") is short for "to a tittle".

A quick Google also reports cross, cross bar or tisten.

... not one jot nor tittle ...
the jot is the crossbar on the t

funny that - wouldn't you thunk they'd be t'ither way round?

Not quite... Jot is the anglicized form of Iota, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. Iota was used as a small diacritical mark under other vowels in ancient Greek texts. Jot and tittle implies every small mark in a text so in general the phrase would include the T crosses.