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Posted by *Jojo*
'Stewardesses' is the longest word typed with only the left hand .

And 'lollipop' is the longest word typed with your right hand.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'.? (Are you doubting this?)

The sentence: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' uses every letter of the alphabet.

The words 'racecar, kayak, and 'level' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes). (Yep, I knew you were going to 'do' this one.)

There are only four words in the English language which end in 'dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous. (You're not doubting this, are you?)

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: 'abstemious' and 'facetious.' (Yes, admit it, you are going to say, a e i o u)

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. (All you typists are going to test this out)

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. (Some days that's about what my memory span is.)

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

A snail can sleep for three years. (I know some people that could do this too.!)

Almond is a member of the peach family.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. (I know some people like that also).

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.

The cruise liner, QE 2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns .

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. (Good thing he did that.)

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

There are more chickens than people in the world

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.





Posted by paul101

On 2007-12-14 01:25:24, *Jojo* wrote:

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!




does that mean my stomach will explode

Posted by methylated_spirit


A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. (Some days that's about what my memory span is.)




Not true, as proven in an episode of Mythbusters where they rained goldfish to do an underwater assault course.

Posted by whizkidd
Quote:

On 2007-12-14 01:25:24, *Jojo* wrote:
'Stewardesses' is the longest word typed with only the left hand .


I just typed it with my right hand..



Posted by Trev1982

On 2007-12-14 10:57:38, methylated_spirit wrote:


A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. (Some days that's about what my memory span is.)




Not true, as proven in an episode of Mythbusters where they rained goldfish to do an underwater assault course.



I have seen them train Golfish to play football aswell, they tought them how to put the ball in the other net, so not true,.

Posted by jcwhite_uk
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
Unsure - Technically, it's false - there aren't any muscles at all in the actual ear, but I imagine that it's referring to how many muscles control the ear. I haven't yet been able to find a good, reliable source for that, but it does appear to be a number on the order of 30.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
False- Their memory span is at least several months

A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
Partially True- That is one of the definitions, but there are actually many definitions of a jiffy, and there doesn't seem to be a standard consensus as to which one to use.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
False- Pufferfish can blink, and maybe a few others. Additionally, only some sharks can blink. They don't have eyelids, per se, but a structure called a nictitating membrane. Most sharks, however, protect their eyes by rolling them back in their heads.

A snail can sleep for three years.
Probably True- Actually, it's most likely being in a suspended state of animation for three years, which isn't the same thing as sleep in the sense that we're used to, but it's close enough. I haven't been able to find what I'd call a good, reliable scientific source that confirms the three year claim, but I've seen many references to snails hibernating or going into torpor. Plus, the site below does mention a study where snails did hibernate that long in laboratory conditions

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
False- They are made of cartilage when we're born, and don't become bony until 2 to 6 year of age.

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
Almost True- "Undreamt," "adreamt" and "daydreamt" also end in "mt."

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
False- February 1865 did in fact have a full moon, though there was no full moon in the Februaries of 1866, 1885, 1915, 1934, 1961, and 1999, and probably many others (whose recorded history, by the way).

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
False- To give just one example, foxes have been domesticated this past century. I guess it also depends on what you mean by domestication - actually selectively breeding an animal to change its behavior, like that fox experiment, breeding animals in captivity, like zoos, or simply "breaking" a wild animal to make it work for people, like is done with wild horses and elephants.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
False- At least, he wasn't the first. Shears were in use in Egypt by roughly 1500 B.C., and modern cross-bladed scissors were in use in Rome by roughly 100 A.D. I suppose it's possible that the technology was lost, and da Vinci re-invented scissors, but until I see some evidence, I'd doubt it.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
False- According to an e-mail sent into The Media Desk, "Orange rhymes with Sporange (a sac in which spores are produced). Silver rhymes with chilver (a ewe lamb). Purple with hirple (British--walk lamely or hobble)." A Merriam Webster online search found results for each of these, but told me I had to subscribe to their unabridged edition to get the definitions, so I'll take that e-mail writer's word for it. And let's not forget about a "purple nurple twister."

Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
True Enough- Peanut oil can be processed to produce glycerol, which can be used to make nitroglycerin, one of the constituents of dynamite. However, there are other processes that can be used to make dynamite without using peanuts at all.

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
Probably True- Cooling a rubber band will make it last longer by slowing down the chemical reactions that break down the rubber. However, I wonder what effect the dry humidity in the refrigerator would have if the rubber bands weren't in a sealed container.

"Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" with your right.
True Enough- Of course, the implicit assumptions are that this claim is for a touch typist, typing on a QWERTY keyboard in the standard way, typing only English words. The website below lists "aftercataracts," "tesseradecades," and "tetrastearates" for the left hand, and "johnny-jump-up" and "phyllophyllin" for the right, which are all longer than the words listed in this claim. However, johnny-jump-up is the only one that showed up on Meriam Webster, and it's hyphenated, so that's kind of cheating. Google searches for the other words just brought up websites saying that they were the longest words that could be typed with either the left or right hand, none of the sites were actually using the words in context, so I don't know if they're real words or not. Besides, they look like technical words, and if you are going to count those, I'm sure you could find some chemical compound that beats them all.

The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
False- The BBC has it listed at about 50' on one gallon of fuel. Going through a quick calculation using their fuel burn of 18 tons an hour, and assuming a 30 knot cruise speed, the ship would still get 31 feet per gallon.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
True- The researcher was Percy LeBaron Spencer of the Raytheon Company

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
False- The falls have never frozen solid in recorded history, though water has been blocked briefly upstream of the falls.

The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.
True, obviously- This sentence was once used to test typewriters.

The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
True, obviously- So are "sexes," my two favorites, "Madam, I'm Adam" & "A man, a plan, a canal - Panama," and plenty of others.

There are more chickens than people in the world.
True- It just makes sense - how many chickens do you eat per year? The UN estimates that there are some 15 billion chickens in the Asia-Pacific region alone.

There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous
True- There's also "annelidous," but if you're going to start using technical words,a lot of weird ones start showing up.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
True- There are others, but they're technical: "acheilous," "anemious," "caesious," "annelidous," and "arsenious." By the way, if you add "-ly" to the end of the words, you get all the vowels in order, including the sometimes vowel, "y."

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
False- He was born in Blenheim Palace, a private residence that doesn't have public bathrooms. According to at least one account, his mother did go into labor during a dance there, and then left the dance to go to a bedroom to give birth. She didn't give birth until the next day, with the local doctor present, long after all of the dance guests had left. The public statement was that Winston Churchill had been born a couple months prematurely, but many suspect that this was to hide the fact that he had been conceived two months before his parents were wed (they were still engaged at the time, however).




Posted by LesleyAnn
i love it when ppl take time to set the record straight!

Posted by jcwhite_uk
Didnt take much time. Just copy and pasted from a website.

Posted by methylated_spirit
Trivia:

The etymology of the word trivia seems to start with Latin tri- = "three", and via = "way", "road", thus trivium, which has been treated in two ways:

* "Where three roads meet", especially as a place of public resort. The Latin adjective triviālis, derived from trivium, thus meant "appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar." The first known usage of the word "trivial" in Modern English is from 1589; it was used with a sense identical to that of triviālis. Shortly after that trivial is recorded in the sense most familiar to us: "of little importance or significance." Gradually, the word trivia came to be used in English for what in Latin would have called "triviālia", for anything information or concern which is treated as everyday and unimportant.
* "The Three Ways" (first known used in English in a work from 1432-1450). This work mentions the "arte trivialle", referring to the trivium, which was the three Artes Liberales (Liberal Arts) that were taught first in medieval universities, namely grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (The other four Liberal Arts were the quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which were more challenging.) Hence, trivial in this sense would have meant "of interest only to an undergraduate".

The word "trivia" was popularized in its current meaning in the 1960s by Columbia University students Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, who created the earliest inter-collegiate quiz bowls that tested culturally significant yet ultimately unimportant facts, which they dubbed "trivia contests". The first book treating trivia of this universal sort was Trivia (Dell, 1966) by Goodgold and Carlinsky, which achieved a ranking on the New York Times best seller list; the book was an extension of the pair's Columbia contests and was followed by other Goodgold and Carlinsky trivia titles. In their second book, More Trivial Trivia, the authors criticized practitioners who were "indiscriminate enough to confuse the flower of Trivia with the weed of minutiae"; Trivia, they wrote, "is concerned with tugging at heartstrings," while minutiae deals with such unevocative questions as "Which state is the largest consumer of Jell-O?" But over the years the word has come to refer to obscure and arcane bits of dry knowlege as well as nostalgic remembrances of pop culture.

Posted by LesleyAnn
@ jcwhite_uk

and there was me thinking u were a fountain of trivia!

Posted by EastCoastStar
about the niagra falls thing... read the bottom half of this page

http://www.niagarafallslive.com/Facts_about_Niagara_Falls.htm




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