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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Second interesting fact about Lewes: it has two castles, essentially side by side; but it’s quite a job to see the earlier one (only the motte remains) - the houses are too closely built to allow it from most of the surrounding streets. You can see both from the hills around, but we only realized today that you can see the first castle from the town itself. Here’s a satellite view:

The later Castle is in the lower left quarter of the image and is labelled. If you track NE from there, the motte of the original castle is just north of the Maltings car park, on the east side of Castle Banks, with the text “The Lewes Arms” printed over it - door to door we’re talking about just over 100 meters between them.

And here’s the view we discovered today. Once the trees are in leaf, it would be really difficult to make this out - the view from Castle Banks:

j

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A fellow Columbia undergrad? (Plus there were waterbugs in the pool the size of Buicks.)

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Think further north.

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norvalnormal was trying to riff on a couple Woody Allen movies, I think

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A few days ago, Mr. brown and I were watching a silly Fleischer cartoon from the thirties. It depicted an anteater terrorizing an ant nest, and was laughably way off in animating the anatomy of the anteater. The cartoon anteater used its long proboscis like a flexible elephant’s trunk, sniffing things up or manipulating things like an arm, and its mouth was drawn as below the proboscis.

After I pointed this out, I realized I didn’t know if an anteater’s long proboscis was supported by cartilage or bone. So I looked it up, and it’s pretty amazing. That long “beak” has bone all the way down, with long, thin, mandibles, and furthermore, the anteater has no teeth. Here’s a picture of the skull of a giant anteater:

Talk about specialization! Stephen Maturin would have loved to dissect one.

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Something like this?

That’s not from the '30s, obviously.

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At least they put his mouth at the end of his snout.

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Something like that, but as Lumpy says, at least they put his mouth in the right place.

Here’s the cartoon; the anteater makes his appearance at about 3:18.

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Here’s a sentence to ponder on:

It is thought there are 40 breeding pairs [of peregrine falcons] in London, making it one of the densest populations in the world.

My bold. I wasn’t expecting that. Apparently they turned up in the 1990s, drawn in by London’s overabundance of pigeons.

This is from a story that’s been in the news here for a couple of days - here it is in New Scientist, which is where the quote comes from.

It’s a fairly misleading headline - parakeet consumption barely went up, from 15% to 18% of peregrines’ diet - not nearly enough in my opinion (they’re notorious pests). Starling went up from 29% to 36%; pigeon down from 49% to 35%. The reason?

Brandon Mak at King’s College London says the shift in diet was probably due to the effects of lockdown. Without tourists scattering sandwich crusts and crisp crumbs across London’s parks and squares, pigeons scattered to the suburbs during lockdown, leaving peregrines to rely on other prey.

If you’re visiting London and want to look for peregrines, it seems that Battersea Power Station is a good bet. (For those who don’t know, the iconic decommissioned power station is being converted to upmarket housing.)

j

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Oh, so instead of tossing bread crumbs to feed the birds, I can fling passerines?

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Hippo testes are internal, are not located in the same place from hippo to hippo, and they can move around inside the body during surgery.

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Not unlike the testes of other aquatic mammals. Which makes sense, since mammal testes are external for temperature regulation, and submersion has a large effect on that.

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TIL about “warm transfer”. This is when you’re talking to one customer service agent on the phone, but need to talk to a different one - and instead of just pushing a button, the first agent actually speaks to the second one and explains your situation and what’s been done so far.

A warm transfer is considered one of the best methods for providing a smoother and friendly caller experience. A warm transfer occurs when one employee answers a call and then transfers the call to a different employee but passes on any relevant information so that the caller doesn’t have to repeat themselves.

The original employee will then speak to the caller again to introduce the next person who will handle the call and assist the caller. This cuts out meaningless repetition and ensures that the caller will have their inquiry attended to immediately.

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I’ve run into that a few times, and it is awesome–it shows that the agents are engaged, and offers you an opportunity to correct any misapprehensions, plus you know you’re not going to expire on hold. Gold standard (although I actually prefer chat now).

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That makes sense. Them flying pigs is good eatin’.

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Today I learned country music is big in Germany. A couple bands of note include Truck Stop and Texas Lightning.

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And according to Norm MacDonald they love David Hasselhoff there too.

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I’ve done this many times as a CS rep. It really works well for both the customer and the person taking the transferred call.

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The Canadian national anthem is played before every Buffalo Sabres game, and not just the ones in which a Canadian team is visiting.

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We play it before the road racing starts at our local racetrack, too. Brainerd International Raceway had always made a big deal of the two countries because we pull racers from Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, not just MSP, Duluth, and Fargo. I’m not sure if this happens with the drag races.

We had a couple of years when we would have to hide the Canadian flag because stupid, rowdy spectators would remove it and the track would have to buy a new one only to have that one disappear too. So the track stepped up educating the spectators and it helped a lot.