“#140 Holland is the only country with a national dog”
Upon googling the Finnish translation of “national dog”, “kansalliskoira” (because googling “national dog” got me all sorts of national dog shows, dog weeks etc. and I didn’t feel like going through 13 pages of info), I find, among others, that
*the national dog of Finland is the Finnish spitz
*the Mastin Español is the national dog of Spain
*Macedonia’s national dog is the Sarplaninac
*the St. Bernard is the national dog of Switzerland.
Also, I find that Holland is not the name of the country; rather, it is the Netherlands.
Some of the items just recycled nonsense (e.g., the infamous “duck’s quack” item). Others sound to me like they’re quoted from some “Book of Curious Facts” of perhaps 50 years ago. for instance:
That implies a world population of only 3 point something billion.
Or:
I imagine that would be true of any metropolitan city now; but a few decades ago it would be more remarkable.
Already addressed earlier but this is a sloppy one. Should be folded in half. Try to fold a piece of paper in half, then again with the new fold perpendicular to the previous, over and over again.
#28 Chewing gum while peeling onions will prevent you from crying
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Not true. You cry because the sulphur compounds in onions make sulphuric acid. It gets into your eyes two ways. One, it hits them directly in the air, and two, you breath it in. How does chewing gum stop either of these?
It just seems false to me, but I couldn’t find any info on it.
[quote] #173 Chinese is the most spoken language in the world [/quote
Misleading. There are many dialects of Chinese that are very different from one another. Someone who speaks Mandarin will have a hard time talking to someone who speaks Cantonese.
Yup, the first vacuum cleaners were indeed horse-drawn; they went from house to house and cleaned them out via long hoses fed through the windows. Here’s a picture of a very early one.
I really can’t bring myself to be pedantic enough to fault them for using “vacuum” to mean “vacuum cleaner”; certainly, that’s what the vast majority of Americans associate with the word.
Indeed. I just tried it with a sheet of ordinary office paper and was unable to get past fold #6. If the sheet were larger than 8.5 x 11 inches, you might, maybe, be able to reach 7.
You’d need special extra thin paper — like onion-skin or origami paper — to go any higher than 7 foldings. Even then, I doubt you could go higher than 10. (It seems to me I once tried this very thing years ago, folding origami paper in half over and over, and couldn’t go past 9 or 10.)
Has anyone verified that these are actually from Snapple bottle caps? Not that I’d be surprised if they were, but I’d at least expect them to have culled out duplicates (e.g. #50 and #129, as pointed out already).
In my glance at the list, I noticed #70, which was probably found floating around on the internet as computer lore: Linus Torvalds, when writing the linux kernel, created a unit of time called a “jiffy”, which was defined to be 1/100th of a second on the x86 architecture, but it can vary on other architectures. It’s not a standard unit of time.
#155 In 1926, the first outdoor mini-golf courses were built on rooftops in NYC
The first minature golf course was built in Tennesse in 1922 by Garnet Carter. The oldest course still in operation is in Rochester NY, and has been open since 1929.
I’ve never tried this personally, but there’splenty of anecdotalevidence out there for it. Certainly chewing gum affects your breathing patterns, and that would change the second factor.
Look, folks, I’m all for fighting ignorance, but let’s not fight fire with fire here, OK? Stick to stuff you know to be false and/or misleading.
:smack: Just call me mister reading comprehension.
This one is accurate. I actually did a ride with the guy who holds the record. He was drafting a very fast car, but he was turning the pedals himself. (It was at the Southern California Bike Expo fun ride a few years back. Every year they bring a “celebrity” from the bike world to be the guest leader. One year it was this guy. I asked him just how the hell he did it and he told me it was all drafting after about 50MPH. Oh and GREAT BIG GEARS)
Even calling them dialects is misleading; my understanding is that they are more properly a group of related languages that share a writing system. That said, Mandarin does have the most native speakers of any language in the world (cite; scroll down a bit). When you include non-native speakers, things get a bit trickier.
Noting the lack of “U.S.” before “state” in #139, I would just point out that New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia are each only one school district. (Even if the term “school district” is not used in Australia.)
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Depends what you mean by district, each county is considered its own district, but since we have a centralized school system…
