Tell us an interesting random fact you stumbled across (Part 1)

You probably used the term dingbat before Archie Bunker, too!

In college, my fellow programmers referred to the exclamation point as “bang” as well. The command prompt on the computer we used was a “bang”
When I graduated, a friend and fellow programmer got me a desk sign that said “!Breezy” (my nickname)… :stuck_out_tongue:

In unix, **< **and > are sometimes referred to as “suck” and “blow” respectively, because of what they do on the command line.

How the fmeep do you make “Roy” and “Waugh” sound the same? Patrick Roy would have used the French pronunciation of “Roy”, [ʁwa], and while “Waugh” is one of those horrible ambiguous English spellings with a thousand pronunciations, none of them sound like [ʁwa]. Though YouTube seems to indicate that “Waugh” is pronounced like “wa”. So close-ish and kind of rhyming, but not the same.

Depending on who you ask, Ohio was not a state until 1953 instead of 1803. The idea is Congress screwed up admitting Ohio in 1803. When they “fixed” that in 1953 they made Ohio a state retroactive to 1803.

Australia and Antarctica each span 9 time zones.
Russia and the United States, with their various territories, each span 11 time zones.
But the country that spans the most time zones, with its territories, is France — 12 time zones.

If you like statistics, the Harper’s Magazine “Index” is often interesting. (If you click on the link, when you mouse over it will show you where it got the number. I copied a few to show a sample below and it included sources)

One of the arguments tax resisters employed was based on that. Ohio was one of the states ratifying the 16th amendment allowing Federal income tax and, since this was in 1911, it wasn’t a ‘real’ state yet.

Of course, six more states ratified the amendment after the requisite 36 states was reached, three of them within a day of Delaware’s ratification – the one that put it over the top – the last three within a month,* so it would have passed even without Ohio.

Only four states rejected ratification* and two reached no decision at all.

  • New Hampshire rejected ratification, then passed it five days later, both actions after Delaware so it was all moot anyway.

Oh yes. And one of our favorite in-jokes was “Pass me an umlaut.” Guess you had to be there…

In case you’re wondering, like I did, why Antarctica doesn’t span 24 time zones, it’s because there are no official time zones there, but there are nine major research stations which each use the local time most convenient for them.

nm

When pronounced farther back in the mouth as it is in French, “R” does sound quite a bit like “W”.

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Plymouth, Montserrat is a ghost town but still legally the capital of the country. It was abandoned because a volcano eruption destroyed most of it.

25% of the US trade with Canada goes over the privately owned(!) Ambassador Bridge.

On average, Mercury is the closest planet to Earth and is indeed the closest planet to any other planet in our solar system.

I assume this is because Mercury is always very close to the center of the solar system while the other planets are spread far apart in their orbits.

In Unix/Linux systems, a file that starts with the two characters #! is treated specially when it is executed. This sequence “hash exclamation-point” is often pronounced “shebang”, which I think is wonderful.

And Venus and Mars, with orbits closer to Earth, spend a lot of time on the ‘other’ side of the sun, while Mercury, on average, stays pretty close to it.

The most valuable banknote issued by any country? A $10,000 note issued by Singapore and Brunei, valued at about $7100 USD (as of today).

Apparently Brunei plans to continue printing it. 141 of those babies would be worth about $1M USD.

On the other end of the spectrum, while I don’t know if it’s the least valuable banknote ever issued, in the 1920s Canada issued 25¢ banknotes. Although it’s no longer in the current version of that page, when I first stumbled across that page* it stated they were issued “in an effort to combat an influx of lesser-valued American currency”.

*I have no idea what Wikipedia rabbit hole brought me to Withdrawn Canadian Banknotes.

OTOH, the coin with the highest nominal value of all time was a one billiard mark coin. Of course that was during the hyperinflation of 1923 in Germany.

From German wiki: