True, so you should never, ever set a crocodile’s tongue on fire.
psiders!?! What are those? Arachnids that can read your mind?!?
Well, I find that terrifying.
And they know you’re afraid…
Amonst mammals sloths, echidnas and golden moles have also never been observed to jump and there are physiological reasons to believe they can’t do so. Pretty much puts them in the same category as elephants.
Most of the sources I’ve found credit Harold Brown, an inventor who worked for Edison labs in Menlo Park, NJ (“Panati’s Extraordinary Endings Of Practically Everything And Everybody” p156, for example). In a nutshell, Edison wanted to show that Westinghouse’s AC system was far more dangerous than Edison DC and so he helped build the first electric chair (using AC) and gave many public demonstrations (on animals, not people) to show how deadly AC was.
However the Canadian Coaltion Against the Death Penalty has this timeline:
http://ccadp.org/electricchair.htm
(that page is mostly text however their site has some very upsetting photos, please be careful)
…and they note that a dentist named Dr. Albert Southwick had some experience with death by execution and it sounds like he may have pursued some ideas in that direction. They have an article with a headline calling Southwick the inventor of the electric chair but I didn’t see any details.
So, I’d say that this one has at least a grain of truth to it.
There have only been a handful of people who lived this long; the two oldest were Jeanne Calment of France (she died aged 122 years, 164 days, back in 1997) and Mr. Shigechiyo Izumi of Japan (previous record holder) who was 120 years, 237 days when he died in 1986. I don’t see any other cases of people living beyond 115 although several have made it past 110.
Guinness BOR notes that anything past 114 is incredibly rare and has this line:
"It is thought that only one 115-year life can be expected per 2.1 billion persons. " Dunno who the source of that thought is but I generally trust Guinness.
I think that given the tiny number of sample points in this data set (until recently it was pretty unlikely that there were even accurate birth records kept from well over 100 years ago) there’s some margin of error, but within an order of magnitude I’d say that 1 in 2 billion is fine.
At a recent emergency medicine conference, we learned more than 4000 North American children die annually from choking on small objects – usually coins, batteries or small toys. It’s pretty hard to swallow a pen. 100 people per annum is unlikely, even worldwide.
According to this site, “hurricanes release energy equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes”. That’d be 5 megaton in ten minutes, I expect, which is quite a lot less than all the nuclear weapons in the world.
According to this site, this is a common characteristic of all birds, not just ostriches.
There’s one obvious variable missing here: this imaginary real Barbie’s height.
In responce to the spider thing, being more afraid of something does not mean that you would rather have the other. lot of peopel accept death as the end of life. It’s there, it happens, no reason to fear it. Also, the fact that’s it’s intangible makes it hard to fear. Spiders are a real thing. They are there, we can easily be afraid of them and give a reason why (the reason being that they are the spawns of Satan and a part of his ever-growing evil army.) Just because I would rather eat a spider than die doesn’t mean I’m not terrified doing it.
Of course, if you ask someone on death row five minutes before his execution, he might say something different.
Maybe it is only with my accent - but does cunt not rhyme with month?
Not in Standard American English or Received Pronunciation (the “standard” British accent), but certainly in other dialects. Some New York and Irish accents will certainly replace the interdental “th” at the end of month with a simple “t”, allowing for a much wider range of rhymes.
Aren’t dolphins famous for jumping through hoops and stuff?
The wheel-lock mechanism of a cigarette lighter was invented by Leonardo Da Vinci in the 14th Century. However, since lighter fluid (butane) was first isolated in 1911 I cannot see how an actual cigarette lighter came into being before this. (Zippos were first invented in 1932).
Matches were far more recent than one might think - if memory serves, the first useables ones were very large smelly things to be rubbed on a specially coated paper in the 19th Century, but undoubtedly came before what any reasonable person would call a “cigarette lighter”.
(The least “fun” thing about Googling the veracity of these “fun” facts is that they are repeated on countless “fun pages”.)
Butane is a gas. It’s used in gas lighters, but it isn’t lighter fluid.
Lighter fluids are various chemicals, mostly petroleum spirits and naptha. These things would have technically been available anytime after the first distillation aparatus were made. By da Vinci’s time I’m sure something equivalent would have been freely available (if expensive). Failing that I suspect you could get a workable, if less than ideal, lighter fluid from plain old alcohol.
Not necessarily, unless one wants to define flintlocks as ‘cigarette lighters’, in which case the claim becomes completely uninteresting.
https://www.ronson.nl/pages_en/ronsonhistory_en/historytekst_engelstalig_lite.html
The eye one is true… if you measure a babies eyes (either from one side to the other, or just the radius from the center to any give edge), then continue to measure it throught the babies life, you will find no measurable change.
I know this to be a fact because they measure my daughter’s every year (she has some bone abnormalities in her head that cause her eyes to drfit apart, something known as Cranio Frontonasal Dysplasia) since birth and it has never changed.
It could of course be an idiosyncrasy of your daughter’s. I assume they’re measuring her eyes for a reason; does cranio-frontonasal dysplasia affect the size of the visible part of the eye?
I think Barbie is meant to be to scale. The sites I found on a quick Google list 1/6 as the exact scale. Therefore if she were enlarged to full scale she would have a defined height as well as the other measurements.
I’ve usually seen this one phrased as, “elephants have four knees, yet they cannot jump,” or, “elephants are the only animal with knees that cannot jump.”
If one reduces the set of “animals” to “animals with knees,” is the statement still true?
The “four knees” version would be quite false, since elephants, like all other tetrapods, only have two knees (and, for the record, birds’ knees do not bend backward, either). And, to my knowledge, elephants don’t jump regardless what category one puts them in. But then, I’ve never seen any evidence that a tree sloth can jump, either. And they’ve got knees.