# Tell us an interesting random fact you stumbled across (Part 2) **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [July 25, 2024, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785 "2024-07-25T15:06:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 108
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2025, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2141 "2025-04-14T22:11:31Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I remain impressed. Farouk Bulsara wrote a song when he was a teenager which later became Queen’s signature piece. Granted, he probably refined and enhanced it for recording, but he originally wrote _Bohemian Rhapsody_ as a young’un. My point is that, yes, we should be impressed with Mike Altman’s work, but not particularly on the basis that he was 14. He had talent. ---
**Author:** ![Dahu](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dahu/32/3416_2.png) [@Dahu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dahu)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2025, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2142 "2025-04-14T22:45:53Z")
TIL that Cyprus is in Asia. It’s obvious really looking at a map, but as it’s been treated as part of Europe for most things politically I’d always thought of it as being in Europe. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2143 "2025-04-15T00:23:41Z")
I think it’d be more accurate to say that it’s in the Mediterranean. And of course, the boundary between Europe and Asia is vague and arbitrary to begin with. Apparently some Europeans count there as being six continents, not seven, because although they consider Europe and Asia distinct, the Americas are all one continent. Nobody ever claimed that humans are consistent. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2144 "2025-04-15T02:06:33Z")
The ancient Greeks labeled everything on the east side of the Aegean Sea Asia, and everything on the west side Europa. Things get iffy once you get north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea of course. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2145 "2025-04-15T02:51:37Z")
But did they have the sense of a continent as such, or was it just a large region to them? There’s not really any good justification for making Europe a continent, anyway, other than the fact that it’s Europeans creating the system. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2146 "2025-04-15T02:56:58Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > But did they have the sense of a continent as such, or was it just a large region to them? The legend of Jason and the Argonauts recalls a time when rowing and sailing from Thessaly to the southern coast of the Black Sea was such an arduous voyage that it took a band of heroes to get there and back. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2147 "2025-04-15T03:44:37Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The ancient Greeks labeled everything on the east side of the Aegean Sea Asia, and everything on the west side Europa. I heard a recent definition that placed the boundary along the Dardanelles/Marmara/Bosporus, but that is still a little iffy. The motivation for that was to be able to claim that Istanbul is the only city that straddles two continents. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 5:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2148 "2025-04-15T05:50:58Z")
> [@Saint\_Cad](#): > > Similarly, Ylvis was doing a bit about a music group that wrote a song that they thought would be a huge hit and change their lives forever, but the song was so stupid that no one listened to it. > **[A Song for Europe (Father Ted)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_Europe_(Father_Ted))** > > "A Song for Europe" was the fifth episode of the second series of the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted and the 11th episode overall. It originally aired on 5 April 1996 and has since been recognised as one of the most popular episodes of the show. > The episode was based on Ireland's winning streak in the Eurovision Song Contest during the 1990s. The plot featured Ted and Dougal trying to write a song for the contest (its name was not mentioned) to settle a rivalry with Father Dick Byrne. The pair trie... ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2149 "2025-04-15T08:01:44Z")
The division of the world into continents comes from the attempts to draw the known world in the Middle Ages using a Mappa Mundi. This is a map of what was known about the world at that point. In such a map, east is at the top of the world. Jerusalem was in the center of the world. The world was a circle with the Asia being the top half of the world. Europe was on the bottom left of the world. Africa was at the bottom right of the world. They knew that the world was round, of course. They just didn’t know how much of the world was taken up by what we now call the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. They knew that they were just drawing a rough picture of the world, not drawing an exact map. They knew that they were splitting the world into round racial groups: > **[T and O map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map)** > > A T and O map or O–T or T–O map (orbis terrarum, orb or circle of the lands; with the letter T inside an O), also known as an Isidoran map, is a type of early world map that represents world geography as first described by the 7th-century scholar Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) in his De Natura Rerum and later his Etymologiae (c. 625) > A later manuscript added the names of Noah's sons (Sem, Iafeth and Cham) for each of the three continents (see Biblical terminology for race). A later variation w... ---
**Author:** ![scudsucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scudsucker/32/14101_2.png) [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 10:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2150 "2025-04-15T10:02:36Z")
> [@Saint\_Cad](#): > > but the song became a big hit. I’m nerdy in several ways, but one of them is collecting cover songs. I have about 8 versions of “Suicide is Painless”. I think I have more of the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah” but “Suicide” is pretty popular. Ironically, I can only remember watching 2 episodes of _M_A_S_H\*, the series did not really appeal to me. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 10:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2151 "2025-04-15T10:58:00Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The legend of Jason and the Argonauts recalls a time when rowing and sailing from Thessaly to the southern coast of the Black Sea was such an arduous voyage that it took a band of heroes to get there and back. Have you seen maps of the proposed voyage? They differ from author to author and interpreter to interpreter, but, aside from Herodotus’ simple map, most of them involve voyages of truly heroic proportions: > **[Maps](http://www.argonauts-book.com/maps.html)** > > The Argonauts' route from Greece to Colchis is, with few exceptions, remarkably consistent across the Greek poets and historians. By contrast, the Argonauts' return route has been the subject of a... Myself, I doubt the more complicated ones – I suspect ignorance of the real state of things lead some writers to assume the voyage went way beyond reasonable bounds. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2152 "2025-04-15T12:37:12Z")
I’ve read that energy is conserved, and there are no exceptions to this “law.” But today I watch a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcjdwSY2AzM) that says this is not true: apparently energy is _not_ conserved over very long time frames, and when the expansion of the universe is taken into account. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2153 "2025-04-15T13:07:56Z")
Over very short time frames it isn’t conserved, either. It’s another manifestation of the Uncertainty Principle. I haven’t heard anything about lack of conservation over long time periods, though. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2154 "2025-04-15T14:40:02Z")
> [@scudsucker](#): > > the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah” A search says that there are 600 to 800 versions of this song. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2155 "2025-04-15T16:32:21Z")
And while some Europeans did speculate about the “antipodes” or the existence of what we’d call a “counter-weight continent” somewhere in the southern hemisphere, the discovery of the Americas was so astonishing to medieval conceptions that it was literally dubbed “The New World”. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2156 "2025-04-15T16:40:37Z")
I was just watching (ETA: that same) video about this yesterday explaining the contributions of little-recognized math/physics genius Emmy Noether. Noether revolutionized the understanding of physical conservation laws by showing that they were inevitable consequences of symmetry. In the case of conservation of energy it is due to symmetries in time and space: if the future will be the same as the past and moving to a different location in space doesn’t alter one’s global circumstances, then conservation of energy necessarily follows. Except that the expansion of space undercuts those symmetries, so then conservation of energy is no longer a given. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2157 "2025-04-15T16:54:36Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > And while some Europeans did speculate about the “antipodes” or the existence of what we’d call a “counter-weight continent” somewhere in the southern hemisphere, Which is why Australia was named before it was discovered. This hypothetical counterbalance continent was drawn on maps labeled Terra Incognita Australis (Unknown Southern Land). ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2158 "2025-04-15T18:21:16Z")
The _mappamundi_ gets a chapter in Jerry Brotten’s magnificent [A History of the World in 12 Maps](https://www.amazon.com/History-World-12-Maps/dp/0143126024?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.gcKAf4-Ufs41AsRD6K7R_vkA1c0BUDYdY5tQ6fVdDtZLyEsVT1YsozXX0nS9ufY3i47lGtKVPSEJzekrzGKzn3yESgYRxXM76UUk4KuDPEc9ZNS90mvsSudv4-X01XM9SfFV2mFLlk173UmirZb5zFPT6_AvCM0xzWnYYBijCDnLhZKIJgf-P9v7oXf1zYMcz6v0RP8z2e8R2EALubsMkrK-hwLpAxkA4F-aB5FjFfY.8f7b-D1Qn0EzYabjXy_0LAWBOjvCxp92SZ5p-LoJLUE&dib_tag=se&keywords=A+History+of+the+World+in+12+Maps&qid=1744740604&sr=8-1). (Lots more than 12 maps, obviously: publishers went obnoxiously crazy with rip-offs of Tom Standage’s _A History of the World in 6 Glasses_. A deserved bestseller, but c’mon.) It’s a fat, heavy-going book (for light reading about maps, seek out Mark Monmonier) but this is real history that opens up the world in several senses. ---
**Author:** ![Moriarty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moriarty/32/49_2.png) [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2025, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2159 "2025-04-15T18:32:10Z")
> [@scudsucker](#): > > the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah” I once did some work for Cohen’s estate. Before he died, Cohen’s email address began with “baldymonk”. And on some form (maybe his taxes?) he listed his occupation as _poet_. ---
**Author:** ![scudsucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scudsucker/32/14101_2.png) [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2025, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785/2160 "2025-04-16T00:59:22Z")
> [@Moriarty](#): > > …he listed his occupation as _poet_ He is (or… was). More so, in my opinion than Bob Dylan, who received the Nobel for literature I love Bob, but I think Leonard has superior lyrics. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785.md?page=107) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-us-an-interesting-random-fact-you-stumbled-across-part-2/1004785.md?page=109)