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

Borrowed from the weatherchannelwebsite:

"France's Eiffel Tower can grow by more than 6 inches
in summer due to the expansion of the iron on hot days."


~jwf~

Here's one that Baron Grimm can officially confirm or deny:

"Astronaut helmets have a patch of Velcro inside of them
so astronauts have a way to scratch their noses."

Yes? No? Maybe?

~jwf~

Works for me


well, it would if...

>>"Astronaut helmets have a patch of Velcro inside of them
so astronauts have a way to scratch their noses." <<

I don't have an awful lot of knowledge about how those things are constructed, or how much room for movement there is inside, but surely such a scratching pad would have to be sort of in the middle of the visor? Maybe a little further down... And what if their ears itch?

I have no special knowledge about the helmets, but I agree with TC. I do know that it's a common misconception that Velcro was a NASA invention. It was invented in 1948 by a Swiss engineer. George de Mistral, after he he studied the burrs he picked up on a hunting trip.

~jwf~

Sometimes the most useless fact is a lie.
But it makes a good story:

Here's a little known fact for automotive buffs.

The Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram, and Max, invented and developed the first automobile air-conditioner. On July 17, 1946 , the temperature in Detroit was 97 degrees.

The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.

Henry was curious and invited them into his office.

They refused and instead asked that he come out to the parking lot to their car.

They persuaded him to get into the car, which was about 130 degrees, turned on the air conditioner, and cooled the car off immediately.

The old man got very excited and invited them back to the office, where he offered them $3 million for the patent.

The brothers refused, saying they would settle for $2 million, but they wanted the recognition by having a label, 'The Goldberg Air-Conditioner,' on the dashboard of each car in which it was installed.

Now old man Ford was more than just a little anti-Jewish, and there was no way he was going to put the Goldberg's name on two million Fords.

They haggled back and forth for about two hours and finally agreed on $4 million and that just their first names would be shown.

And so to this day, all Ford air conditioners show --

Lo, Norm, Hi, and Max -- on the controls.


~jwf~

Speaking of Henry Ford (the anti-Semitic ), He developed charcoal. He noticed the inordinate amount of wood scraps that was being wasted in production of his early vehicles like the Model T at one of his large assembly plants in the upper Michigan peninsula, (in Kingsford, MI named after one of Ford's cousins). He ordered them to be turned into charcoal in his chemical building. The Kingsford Charcoal company is by far the largest charcoal manufacturer in the US to this day.

Here's a list of words for things you probably didn't know there are words for as aggregated by one of the many websites out there that make lists of things just to get you to click through and get more ad revenue. Since these are facts, and facts can't be trademarked or copyrighted, I'll just post them here in no particular order.


Tines
the prongs of a fork

Fourchette
a strip or shaped piece used for the sides of the fingers of a glove

Armscye
the shape or outline of the armhole in clothing

Lunule
a crescent-shaped body part or marking (such as the whitish mark at the base of a fingernail)

Tittle
the dot over i or j

Steatopygic
having a large butt

Gambrinous
being full of beer

Tatterdemalion
a person dressed in ragged clothing

Accubation
eating or drinking while lying down

Defenestrate
throwing of a person or thing out of a window

Cachinnate
laughing very loudly

Preantepenultimate
fourth from last

Algedonic
something that is both painful and pleasurable

Brannock device
that metal thing used to measure your feet at a shoe store

Agelast
a person who never laughs

Kyphorrhinos
a nose with a bump in it

Duffifie
laying a bottle on its side for some time so that it may be completely drained of the few drops remaining

Scintillate
emiting sparks

Snellen chart
the standard eye exam chart

Krukolibidinous
looking at someone’s crotch

Griffonage
careless or illegible handwriting

Interfenestration
the space between two windows

Caruncle
the triangular, pink areas at the corner of your eyes

Pandiculation
stretching when tired or when waking up

Runcation
removing weeds

Sciapodous
having large feet

Crapulence
sickness from eating or drinking too much

Muntin
a strip separating panes of glass in a window

Bruxism
involuntary habitual teeth grinding; usually during sleep

Rasceta
the lines on the inside of your wrist

Rasher
a thin slice of bacon

Cancatervate
heaping things into a pile

Lemniscate
the infinity symbol

Dactylion
the tip of the middle finger

Poobah
a powerful person

Interrobang
a punctuation mark designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question; usually written as ?!

Natiform
something resembling a butt

Darkle
becoming cloudy or dark

Pogonotrophy
growing and grooming a beard or other facial hair

Phosphene
a luminous impression due to excitation of the retina (stars you see when you rub your eyes)

Aglet
the tag covering the ends of a shoelace

Pilgarlic
a bald head

Philtrum
the vertical groove on the median line of the upper lip

Callipygian
having a shapely butt

Nibling
the gender-neutral term for nieces or nephews

Ailurophile
a cat lover

Paresthesia
the prickly feeling when your limb “falls asleep”

Balter
dancing clumsily

Petrichor
the way it smells after it rains

Grawlix
a series of symbols commonly used in comics or cartoons to represent curse words





Obviously, this includes some words that are commonly known, at least to British speaking persons, like "rasher" and "tines". I knew of about 20% of these words. I knew nibling, philtrum, aglet, phosphene, interrobang, poobah, defenestrate and tittle. I'm going to have to commit a few more of these to memory.

I do mean to show several people my dactylion today.

"France's Eiffel Tower"

As opposed to, say, Germany's or Australia's Eiffel Tower?

Well, Las Vegas has one.

Tatterdemalion is a good word for me to have learned here - it's in Queen's song Fairy-Feller's Masterstroke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcM-GfmX4O4

All of the other planets in our solar system could fit between the Earth and the Moon (with room to spare for Pluto).

http://i.imgur.com/hexayzz.jpg

That is one amazing fact. Wonder what it would do to the tides?

I'd be more worried about the various moons of Jupiter and Saturn deciding to smash into us.

Or the giant planets could block out the sun and destroy our ecosystem.

OR, the chaotic gravitational effects of so many planetary bodies in such close proximity could severely destabilize the Earth's mantle and cause a ridiculous amount of volcanic activity.

I mean, yeah, sure, the tides would be affected too, but I think we'd have bigger problems than massive tsunamis flooding highly populated areas.


...


And that would be terrible.

So we're better off sticking to how many telephone books you would have to stack to reach the moon and such abstract ideas, then.

...as a matter of fact, an arrangement like that pictured, inside Roche's limit, would result in effective tidal destruction of all the planets, recoalescing into a brown dwarf (very small one, as brown dwarfs go), with an utterly fantastic system of rings and possible reaccretion of a few (new) moons...

I don't think we should do it then.