Fun Friday Fact - hope you respond weekly to give us all a smile

[Davie]

40 minutes ago, Jandi said:

Purple carrots sound cool.   Trans Carrots.

 

[stveee]

FACT: If Kurt sobered up and got clean, he would have eventually came out as trans, changed her name to Caroline, and would have went on to a solo career selling three platinum albums, producing and directing movies, and starting a halfway house for homeless trans youth.

[Heather Shay]

Some cats are allergic to people.

[miz miranda]

Some weather tidbits

 

In 1684, it was so cold that the River Thames froze solid for two months.

 

The coldest temperature ever officially recorded was -89.2°C -128.6 F). Brrrr!  Might feel good about now

 

Mild autumn weather often means bigger spiders in our homes.

 

About 2,000 thunderstorms rain down on Earth every minute.

 

A 2003 heatwave turned grapes to raisins before they were picked from the vine!

 

A whiteout or heavy snowfall that makes it difficult to see, can make you feel sick.

[Colleen Henderson]

I found myself thinking that whammies only come in multiples - doubles and sometimes triples. You never hear about a single whammy.

 

Note to self:  "Get a life."

[Heather Shay]

1. Flamingos can only eat with their heads upside down.

2. There are 32 muscles in a cat’s ear.

3. The chicken and the ostrich are the closest living relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

[Colleen Henderson]

31 minutes ago, Heather Shay said:

The chicken and the ostrich are the closest living relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

You could have fooled me.  I thought it was my ex-wife.

[Marcie Jensen]

27 minutes ago, Colleen Henderson said:

You could have fooled me.  I thought it was my ex-wife.

Me, too. Although, I admit that gives the T-Rex a bad reputation...

[Heather Shay]

Ouch ladies.....

[Heather Shay]

1. Light is made up of energy.
2. 02Light travels in a straight line. Objects in its path cause light to bend or refract.
3. 03The speed of light is exactly 299 792 km per second.
4. 04This is the speed when light is travelling in a vacuum and not obstructed by the atmosphere.
5. 05Travelling at the speed of light, you could go around Earth 7.5 times in a second.

[Heather Shay]

You are the tallest first thing in the morning.

[Colleen Henderson]

1 hour ago, Heather Shay said:

You are the tallest first thing in the morning.

Yet that's when you weigh the least.

 

Discuss.

[Ivy]

6 minutes ago, Colleen Henderson said:

Yet that's when you weigh the least.

Usually loose a bit of weight shortly after I get up.

[miz miranda]

Some stuff about sleep

 

On the first night of sleeping in a new place, one hemisphere of our brain remains more active than the other during sleep. Scientists believe this "vigilant mode" allows us to respond more quickly to unfamiliar, potentially danger-signaling sounds

 

A malingerer is someone who pretends to have a sleep disorder in order to get medication or other attention

 

REM atonia, or sleep paralysis, occurs in the typical sleeper every night to prevent people from acting out their dreams. Only a few muscles have the ability to move during REM sleep, such as the eye muscles, the auditory muscles, and the diaphragm for respiration.

 

The average amount of time people sleep has dropped from nine hours in the pre-lightbulb era to seven-and-a-half hours today

[Heather Nicole]

2 hours ago, Jandi said:

Usually loose a bit of weight shortly after I get up.

 

lol, I was thinking the same thing, but I couldn't come up with a polite way to word it.

 

18 minutes ago, miz miranda said:

On the first night of sleeping in a new place, one hemisphere of our brain remains more active than the other during sleep. Scientists believe this "vigilant mode" allows us to respond more quickly to unfamiliar, potentially danger-signaling sounds

 

So that's why, for the life of me, I absolutely cannot manage to get a halfway decent night's sleep when I travel (and even that's after hours of trying to doze off in the first place). It's a really annoying, anxiety-fueled deterrent to traveling for me.

[Hannah Renee]

7 hours ago, Jandi said:

Usually loose a bit of weight shortly after I get up.

I was going to say that I wish I could, but thought that might be TMI, so I won't.

[Heather Shay]

There is a technical name for the "fear of long words." It's called "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."

[Ivy]

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia causes hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

[JJ Orange]

Supposedly, the term "Bucket list" was created around 1999 to 2007 for the movie with the same name. Which is weird because I always assumed it was a much older term and that that it had nothing to do with the movie as far as its origin. 

[Mmindy]

[miz miranda]

words:

 

Startling is the only 9-letter word where you can remove one letter at a time and still create a word: Startling -> Starting -> Staring -> String -> Sting -> Sing -> Sin -> In -> I.

Deeded is the only word that is made using only two different letters, each used three times.

 

Stressed is desserts spelled backwards.

 

Feedback is the shortest word that contains the letters ABCDEF.

 

Listen contains the same letters as silent.

 

Misspelled/misspelt is – ironically – one of the most commonly misspelled words.

 

Pronunciation is one of the most often mispronounced words.

 

lastly in homage to hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Poecilonym is a synonym for the word synonym.

 

 

[Heather Shay]

[Ivy]

This is not a very fun fact…

[Heather Shay]

"Cats headbutt you as a way of telling you that they trust you."

[miz miranda]

Trying to answer the burning question did Dinosaurs head butt

 

"Finding out brings us closer to their social lives: were pachycephalosaurs more likely just showing off their domes like peacocks with their tails, or were they also cracking their heads together like musk oxen?"

Using CT scanning and a new statistical method for diagnosing behavior in fossil animals, the researchers compared the bony-headed dinosaur with modern ungulates (hoofed animals) that engage in different kinds of combat.

"Our analyses are the closest we can get to observing their behavior. In a way, we can get "inside their heads" by colliding them together virtually. We combined anatomical and engineering analyses of all these animals for a pretty thorough approach," says Snively. "We looked at the actual tissue types in the skulls and heads of the animals."

Head butting is a form of male-to-male competition for access to females, says Dr. Jessica Theodor, co-author and associate professor in the biological sciences department at the University of Calgary. "It's pretty clear that although the bones are arranged differently in the Stegoceras, it could easily withstand the kinds of forces that have been measured for the living animals that engage in head butting."

Most head-butting animals have domes like a good motorcycle helmet. "They have a stiff rind on the outside with a sort of a spongy energy absorbing material just beneath it and then a stiff, really dense coat over the brain," says Snively. The Stegoceras had an extra layer of dense bone in the middle. Stegoceras was a small pachycephalosaur about the size of a German shepherd, and lived about 72 million years ago.

Llamas would crack their skulls head butting and giraffes aren't very good at it. "They swing their necks at each other and try to hit each other in the neck or the side," says Snively. If giraffes do manage to butt heads, they can knock each other out because "Their anatomy isn't built to absorb the collision as well as something like muskox or big horn sheep."