Geddy Lee, Patti Scialfa, and Ken Burns were all born on this day, 67 years ago.
Today’s selection of music to mow the lawn by: Boston’s debut album. Forty plus years since its introduction, the music holds up beautifully.
Tom Scholz disagreed with the label (Epic) and did it his way…though they didn’t know it.
RIP Brad Delp—what a voice!
Another thread inspired me to look up RC Cola on Wikipedia. I learned that RC is part of the Dr. Pepper-Snapple Group, which in turn was bought by Keurig, and is now known as Keurig Dr. Pepper. But that’s not the interesting fact. Down at the bottom of the page is a list of all the soda brands that company owns. Among them are A&W, Hires Root Beer, Canada Dry, Schewppes, and Vernors. So in other words the same company owns two brands of root beer and three brands of ginger ale, two of which are also brands of tonic water.
John Ritter died in the same hospital he was born in.
In the Big Numbers category - It is estimated that the number of stars visible from earth through telescopes exceeds, by a factor of between five and ten, the number of grains of sand on all of the earths beaches and deserts.
Yet there are more trees on Earth than there are stars in our galaxy.
Huh? Do you have the numbers? As far as I know, our galaxy has about 100 billion stars, and I can’t imagine that there are as much trees on earth.
I did not see this coming…3 trillion plus trees.
Related:
Well, color me surprised! One more thing I learned at the Dope.
ETA: though you have to admit that there are a many very very tiny trees in that number.
This one always floors me. there are 1.67 sextillion water molecules in a water drop.
I know molecules are small, but I can’t wrap my head around how small.
Even though the conclusion is questionable I like this little explanation:
If you take a glass with a pint of water in it and go throw that water into the ocean, then wait 30 years until the water molecules from that glass are now distributed evenly among all the ocean waters (let’s just pretend that happens in 30 years), then go take a pint of water out of the ocean and there will be at least one molecule of water in it from the glassful you threw in 30 years earlier. That’s because there were more molecules of water in that pint of water than there are pints of water in all the oceans.
This has been questioned about accuracy though, I’m not sure how to do the calculations, but I don’t think it’s that far off.
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One of the events of the 1900 Olympics was shooting: live pigeon shooting. Yes, the pigeons were actually killed by the bullets.
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The National League of the US’s Major League Baseball was established 12 years before the English Football League.
Given a scale of “one atom” to “planet Earth”, a grain of sand is in the middle. (Someone will undoubtedly correct me on this- feel free, I can handle it.)
Nice one. Surprised that I hadn’t heard that before.
I heard same about air: every time you breathe, you are inhaling some nitrogen and oxygen molecules that were once breathed by George Washington.
If you read about the French Revolution, you came across the term “sans-culottes.” Nowadays, culottes are a woman’s clothing item, that looks like a skirt with separate legs. I wondered about the term.
Then I discovered “culottes” in French is the same as “breeches” in English – tight, knee-length pants that were standard style for the nobility at the time. The sans-culottes were French men who were too poor to wear stylish clothing. They became the vanguard of the revolution.
Interesting, as our 8th grade French class trip was to a restaurant in NY called Les Sans Culottes. I asked our French teacher what it meant and she just said it was something vulgar, so she couldn’t tell me. This was way pre-internet, so I never thought of it again until now.
st louis lost 1 baseball team (Browns), 1 basketball team (hawks), and 2 football teams 9Cards, Rams)
There are poisonous birds. They’re not venomous, they can’t inject you with poison, but eating or even touching their feathers and flesh can make you very ill. Some of them produce Batrachotoxin also found in frogs and used for poison darts, and a couple of others like the Common Quail can become poisonous based on their diet.
St Louis almost lost their hockey team in the 1980’s,