…that the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow depends on whether it is of the european or african variety.
…74.4% of men will admit to masturbating, 24.7% of men refuse to admit to masturbating, and .9% of all men have no arms.
…that my white and my blue coloured underpants are 100% cotton, and my black & my grey coloured underpants are 85% cotton / 15 % poly – despite all being the same cut, from the same manufacturer & coming from the same package.
There was a kid on Howard Stern awhile back that had no arms and freely admitted to masturbating. I never quite got how exactly he did it, but he did do it.
Don’t underestimate the resiliance of the disabled, especially when it comes to getting your rocks off.
There is an Congressional Space Medal of Honor. As of this date, it has been awarded to 27 people. (17 posthumously)
It’s now possible to run a GUI and a web browser on a Commodore 64.
In addition to the shake being a unit of time used when describing nuclear reactions. A shake is defined as being ten nanoseconds - 1 x 10[sup]-8[/sup]
According to Grace Hopper, to consider just how short a nanosecond is - get a packet of ground pepper. Each individual grain is approximately the distance that a light wave will cover in one picosecond, or one thousandth of a nanosecond. A length of wire 30 cm long is the distance light will travel in one nanosecond.
A barn is also a measure used in nuclear reactions. It is used to measure how close to a nucleus a neutron has to pass to be absorbed into the nucleus. It is a measure of area, specifically 1 x 10[sup]-24[/sup] m[sup]2[/sup]. It is so named, because on the scale of nuclear reactions, that’s as big as a barn for aiming purposes.
I suspect a lot of phycists are frustrated farmers. 
The first neutron star was originally referred to, when the radio signal the star emitted was first detected, as LGM-1. This stood for Little Green Man, since aliens had to be behind such a regular signal.
OtakuLoki
Are you sure about a barn being 1 x 10[sup]-24[/sup] square meters ?
My converter at http://www.1728.com/convert.htm
says that a barn is 1 x 10[sup]-28[/sup] square meters.
Also, here’s a site that says a barn is 1 x 10[sup]-28[/sup] square meters.
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictB.html
And of course let’s not forget the shed which is much smaller.
A shed is 1 x 10[sup]-24[/sup] barns or 1 x 10[sup]-52[/sup] square meters.
Cite for shed:
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictS.html
Sincerely,
Arthur “2 Sheds” Jackson
wolf_meister, you’re right. :smack:
I’d memorized the exponent and forgot that for some reason the people who taught me about barns measured them as 10[sup]-24[/sup] centimeters. Which has got to be the silliest way to look at things…
OtakuLoki
Thanks.
At least you learned about the “shed” (but I have a feeling you may already have known about it).
The name of the system that companies file with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission is called EDGAR.
It can be simple ASCII (EDGAR I) or HTML (EDGAR - II)
The first computer “bug” was an actual bug, a moth, caught in a relay in an early mainframe computer. It was found & fixed by one of the first women to work in the field.
A nibble is one half of a byte.
Grace Hopper is one of my heros!
Strange, I remember keeping a dragonfly alive for six days before letting it go.
Now I remember some mayflies only live until they mate which is immediately after obtaining their final adult form.
This site says that drangonflies can live 2 weeks - 2 months and don’t call me strange.
Not quite true, in both cases.
The term “bug” was in use before the moth incident (the fact that the log book comments on the irony of an actual bug being found confirms that), and although Grace Hopper was involved with that machine and helped popularize the story, she was not present when it actually happened.
Weekend-shifters, to arms!
The workweek has 5 days where it does. Lots of factories work on weekends, at least Production and Quality. Lots of stores work week-round.
Abbie Hoffman’s suicide note read; “It’s too late. We can’t win, they’ve gotten too powerful.”
The Soviet Union had actually launched armed (and manned) military spacecraft.
[url=http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/Crossword.htmIn a bizarre coincidence, a crossword puzzle in a May 1944 in an issue of the British Daily Telegraph used several codewords—Utah; Omaha; Mulberry; Neptune and Overlord—being used in the Normandy invasion plan.
Interesting.
Cite?
Link?
More tea?
Cite, link, and [url=http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htmP(olyus).
The latter wasn’t manned, but the former (Salyut 3 and 5) were.
[pedant mode ON]
Not at all. The traditonal naive way to count on fingers gives eleven distinct possibilities, from zero to ten. Yes, you can declare that each possibility is worth one million, but you’re still limited to the eleven distinct values.
Using finger and thumb positions as bits (either raised or clenched), you can count 1024 distinct values, zero through 1023. As **Bill H.**suggested, you can also reasonably consider each finger/thumb as a three-valued “trit” (raised, half-raised or clenched), giving rise to 3^10 =59049 distinct values.
My dexterity doesn’t reliably extend to a 4-valued “quit” per finger, but maybe someone better than I could do that, enabliing counting 4^10=1048576 distinct values using two hands.
What we’re talking about here is exactly the difference between a tally-based notation and a place-based notation. The naive finger-counting method is like writing numbers like this (pretend the slash is across the 4 pipes):
||||/ ||| for eight
whereas fingers-as-bits counting is writing them like 10011 01101 for six hundred twenty one.
[pedant mode OFF]