Orlando, FL is named after a man who may have died by stampede
December 11, 2018 10:39 AM   Subscribe

 
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth, the grain of sand closest to us is 40,000 years away at the fastest speed we've ever currently managed to travel.
posted by Cosine at 10:44 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


Ask Metafilter, not that long ago

Fun fact - I'll sometimes mine that thread for good things to say when clinic escorting, since it helps to make small talk to distract patients from protesters, but most of the usual small talk openers deal with little bits of personal information and can freak patients out more. The trivia is impersonal enough to not cause distress but interesting enough to work.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:52 AM on December 11, 2018 [38 favorites]


This one kind of amazes me:
From the time it was discovered until now, Pluto hasn’t completed a single orbit. And it won’t for another 160 years
Pluto was discovered in 1930. It has an orbital period of 248 years.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:57 AM on December 11, 2018 [17 favorites]


The fact about the Outerbridge Crossing made my heart skip a beat. How is such a thing possible?
posted by uncleozzy at 11:03 AM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837. The last person who had lived in her empire died last year.
posted by Etrigan at 11:07 AM on December 11, 2018 [5 favorites]


How is such a thing possible?

Nominative determinism
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:11 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have one about my city, Niagara Falls.

In 1827, as a tourism promotion, a group of hotel owners loaded up a barge with animals and sent them over Niagara Falls to their death.
The actual animals documented were a buffalo, two small bears, two raccoons, a dog, and a goose. A few reports from the day also noted two fox, 15 geese, and one eagle. On the appointed day, the animals were assembled and visitors were allowed to board the boat and view them. The total crowd was estimated at around 10,000 people. Then the vessel was towed from Black Rock to Navy Island, pointed to the falls and released, rocking in the boiling and perilous waters. At the rapids, the hull was torn open and the two bears escaped, swimming to Goat Island. But the others were tied or caged. [via: Vintage News]
posted by Fizz at 11:19 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


The previous thread listed my favorite: President John Tyler was born in the 18th century and served in the war of 1812. Two of his grandchildren are still alive in the 21st century.
posted by tavella at 11:19 AM on December 11, 2018 [6 favorites]


The Pallas's cat, unlike its brethren in the cat family, has round pupils.

That's why its face is so extra.
posted by Vesihiisi at 11:21 AM on December 11, 2018 [10 favorites]


This has come up in conversation a few times with different people in the past week, and blew my mind because it sounded completely fake:

Nachos and cheese were just a Mexican restaurant's leftovers prepared for some US Army wives by a guy named Ignacio in the 40s.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 11:30 AM on December 11, 2018 [19 favorites]


San Francisco's Octavia Street is named after the sister of a milkman who was appointed to the commission to name streets.
posted by alexei at 11:35 AM on December 11, 2018 [3 favorites]


Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr were born the same year. Yet we view them in completely different time periods.

I know a lot of these ("Daniel" is older today than "Mr. Miyagi" was at the time, and so on) but this one really freaks me out.
posted by The Bellman at 11:39 AM on December 11, 2018 [9 favorites]


Nachos and cheese were just a Mexican restaurant's leftovers prepared for some US Army wives by a guy named Ignacio in the 40s.

Leading to my favorite MetaFilter comment ever.
posted by sjswitzer at 11:40 AM on December 11, 2018 [17 favorites]


Nachos and cheese were just a Mexican restaurant's leftovers prepared for some US Army wives by a guy named Ignacio in the 40s.

And the nickname for Ignacio is Nacho, which the Army wives mistook for the name of the dish.

There are two places named Clovis, both in the United States, per Wikipedia. Clovis, California was named after a person's first name, one Clovis Cole, while Clovis, New Mexico (FKA "Riley's Switch") was reportedly renamed by the station master's daughter, who was studying about Clovis, the first Catholic king of the Franks, at the time.

It's the second Clovis, in New Mexico, is the source of the name of Clovis culture, "America’s First Culture". It is also home to (the "archived") Norman Petty Studios and Petty's Nor-Va-Jak Music label, where Buddy Holly and others recorded some rock'n'roll hits in the 1950s and '60s ... and also some early LeAnn Rimes?
posted by filthy light thief at 11:43 AM on December 11, 2018 [3 favorites]


Nicole is probably the only reason I'm still on twitter. That, and yelling at the orange crime family when I can no longer restrain myself.
posted by Space Kitty at 11:53 AM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


Wait, that Orlando fact was recently on the Shutdown Fullcast... is their an Orlando Beider-Meinhoff going on right now? Or do other people listen to that garbage?
posted by midmarch snowman at 12:14 PM on December 11, 2018


I get most of my fun facts from the Omnibus podcast, which taught me that the boysenberry invented Disneyland. You know, more-or-less.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:21 PM on December 11, 2018


aah, someone beat me to the John Tyler thing. I'll go with "woolly mammoths still existed when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built." Also, when you receive a kidney transplant, they leave the non-functioning kidneys in.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:27 PM on December 11, 2018 [13 favorites]


The fact about the Outerbridge Crossing made my heart skip a beat. How is such a thing possible?

!!!! I spent the first 6 years of my life in Staten Island and I have NEVER known this. wow!!!!!
posted by supermedusa at 12:35 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


The QI Twitter feed is also great for fun trivia.
posted by backseatpilot at 12:37 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


Former Beatles drummer Pete Best once released an album called "Best of the Beatles". He was investigated for fraud but it was dropped because the title was technically accurate.
posted by ckape at 12:40 PM on December 11, 2018 [20 favorites]


Ferrets in the wild have poisonous fangs, but the fangs and venom sacs are removed when the ferrets are domesticated as pets. This is where we get the word "feral" from.

This is totally wrong and untrue! However, I once told it to a coworkers years ago as a true fact and he believed me, and then he told friends who also believed him. I'm waiting for this "fact" to make it back to me someday as "Did you know...?".
posted by Servo5678 at 12:41 PM on December 11, 2018 [8 favorites]




James Bond is half-Swiss. We find out in “You Only Live Twice” (the book) that his mother was Monique Delacroix from Vaud.

Winston Churchill was half-American. His mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was born Jennie Jerome in Brooklyn. She had a snake tattoo on her wrist. It’s claimed that she invented the Manhattan cocktail.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 12:58 PM on December 11, 2018 [3 favorites]


Winston Churchill was half-American. His mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was born Jennie Jerome in Brooklyn. She had a snake tattoo on her wrist. It’s claimed that she invented the Manhattan cocktail.

Bellman's Takeaway: The Manhattan was invented by someone from Brooklyn!
posted by The Bellman at 1:01 PM on December 11, 2018 [11 favorites]


The usual pattern of naming the Beatles - John, Paul, George and Ringo - also indicates the order in which they joined the band (Quarrymen/Silver Beetles/Beatles). Also each was recruited by the one before.
posted by YoungStencil at 1:02 PM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


Just found out about this yesterday: Hanny's Voorwerp is (probably) a giant cloud of glowing oxygen plasma in space powered by a dead quasar, the neighboring galaxy's neon sign.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:39 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


AND THEN HERMAN MELVILLE CAME BY TO HELP HAWTHORNE BABYSIT

I hate Twitter, but I approve of this.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:54 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


Someone in the archived ask thread said that sharks are older than trees and I think my brain is broken now.
posted by Faintdreams at 3:03 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


The U.S. state with the highest boat ownership per capita? Arizona.

Scratch that, it was a pre-Internet myth... from Encyclopedia Brittanica of all places.
posted by lubujackson at 3:08 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


The first honorary Harlem Globetrotter was Henry Kissinger (war criminal), who, unlike Bender, apparently was funky enough.
posted by palindromic at 3:17 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


OMG, this is not the rabbit hole I need to go down right now but here I go....
posted by photoslob at 3:27 PM on December 11, 2018


Animals that are hunted, over time, get smaller. Animals that are farmed get larger over time.
posted by sexyrobot at 3:37 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


Fusion in the Sun

From the "Starts with a Bang" blog.

A human being metabolizing their food over the course of a day is more energetic than a human-sized volume of the Sun’s core undergoing fusion .

All told, by looking at the power output of the Sun, we measure that it emits a continuous 4 × 10²⁶ Watts. Inside the Sun’s core, on average, a whopping 4 × 10³⁸ protons fuse into helium-4 every second. (losing 5 million tons of mass per second.)

However,
The electric repulsion between the two positively charged particles is too great for even a single pair of protons to overcome it and fuse together with the energies in the Sun’s core.

Even though the probability of quantum tunneling is very small for any particular proton-proton interaction, somewhere on the order of 1-in-10²⁸, or the same as your odds of winning the Powerball lottery three times in a row, that ultra-rare interaction is enough to explain the entirety of where the Sun’s energy (and almost every star’s energy) comes from.
posted by jjj606 at 4:42 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


This fact gives me little faith in fusion energy. OK, so fusion energy is unleashing the energy of the sun. But that energy? Barely more than a compost heap. So... yeah, the sun works out OK since it's HUGE, but how much energy can fusion really create in a confined apparatus? Maybe never really enough?
posted by sjswitzer at 4:52 PM on December 11, 2018


Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. studied under John Quincy Adams, famously yelled at Lincoln while a soldier in the Civil War, and in his old age met a young John F. Kennedy.
posted by saladin at 5:30 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]


One of my favorites, which stumps even Catholics more often than it should, is that the Immaculate Conception produced Mary, not Jesus. I learned this from a Jewish orthopedic surgeon.
posted by TedW at 5:57 PM on December 11, 2018 [6 favorites]


DJ Khaled's real name is Khaled Khaled.

Theda Bara's real name was Theodosia Burr Goodman. Hamilton fans: she was, in fact, named after the subject of "Dear Theodosia".

And for a name trifecta, a lot of people think Oprah Winfrey was named after Harpo Marx, since Oprah is Harpo backwards. She was named Orpah, after the Biblical figure, but I guess no one could spell it.
posted by capricorn at 5:57 PM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


So... yeah, the sun works out OK since it's HUGE, but how much energy can fusion really create in a confined apparatus? Maybe never really enough?
You know about hydrogen bombs, right? It is possible to release quite a bit of energy in a comparatively small amount of space. Containing it and harnessing it productively is the harder part.
posted by Nerd of the North at 6:02 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


The dominant form of fusion in the Sun is proton-proton mostly because that's the isotopic composition the Sun was stuck with. For artificial fusion power we're mostly looking at other types of reactions (deuterium-tritium especially I think) which have more favorable properties.
posted by traveler_ at 6:33 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


A human being metabolizing their food over the course of a day is more energetic than a human-sized volume of the Sun’s core undergoing fusion .

I've always heard the "lower output than a human body" from the volume of the sun, not the sun's *core* where if we believe wikipedia the central 0.8% of the sun by volume does 99% of its fusing. My quarter-assed back of the envelope calculation with numbers scattered around put the output of a human body sized volume (about 66 liters) at about 500 watts. Also that volume would weight about 10 tons and be at 15 million K.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:42 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


For artificial fusion power we're mostly looking at other types of reactions (deuterium-tritium especially I think) which have more favorable properties.

Thanks! Sounds like an an answer.
posted by sjswitzer at 6:53 PM on December 11, 2018


Etrigan: "Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837. The last person who had lived in her empire died last year."

Well, it helps when you reign 63 and a half years.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:21 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


AND THEN HERMAN MELVILLE CAME BY TO HELP HAWTHORNE BABYSIT

This is detailed by Hawthorne in his diary (relevant excerpt published in '03 in Twenty Days With Julian & Little Bunny by Papa). Melville more came by to stay up late, smoke and talk metaphysics after Julian was in bed.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:20 PM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


Some enzymes are so efficient that they react with their substrate as fast as it can diffuse to the active site. They’re known as kinetically perfect enzymes because they run against the upper limit of what is physically possible. They’ve been optimized so exquisitely by evolution that they can no longer be improved upon. To give you an idea of how fast this is, carbonic anhydrase can perform up to 106 reactions per second.
posted by dephlogisticated at 5:21 AM on December 12, 2018 [5 favorites]


Melville more came by to stay up late, smoke and talk metaphysics after Julian was in bed.

I guess "talk metaphysics" was the "netflix and chill" of the mid-nineteenth century.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:38 AM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]


The geographical center of North America was calculated in 2016 and found to be at the spot of the town of Center, N.D., which was not named for that fact.

The German word for "team" is "Mannschaft," which is a feminine noun.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:16 AM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]


The Canadian Mounties don't use horses anymore, aside from for ceremonial purposes (and the Christmas Ride and such.)

The NYPD is more mounted than the RCMP.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2018


There is only one pair of North American cities who have had their teams face each other in the finals of all four major pro sports championships (Super Bowl / World Series / NBA Finals / Stanley Cup), Boston and St. Louis; Boston leads the series 7 to 3.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 10:51 AM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]


There is only one pair of North American cities who have had their teams face each other in the finals of all four major pro sports championships

Other city pairs that are close (3 of 4): LA - NY: Dodgers - Yankees, Lakers - Knicks, Kings - Rangers. Requires a Jets - Rams or Chargers - Giants meetup in the Super Bowl to complete the quad.

Boston - Chicago: Blackhawks - Bruins, Pats - Bears, Red Sox - Cubs, an NBA finals meetup to complete the four is not possible.

Boston - NY: Bruins - Rangers, Pats - Giants, Red Sox - Giants (also Red Sox - Mets), ditto as with Boston - Chicago.

Chicago - Philly: Stags - Warriors, Cubs - Athletics, Blackhawks - Flyers. Bears - Eagles meetup in the Super Bowl can't happen (same conference).
posted by e1c at 12:00 PM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]


The Canadian Mounties don't use horses anymore, aside from for ceremonial purposes

Also true for the U.S. Army Cavalry. Their "Spur Ride" does earn them a set of spurs, but no actual riding is involved.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:00 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]


Wendy wasn’t a name until Peter Pan.
Similarly, "Jessica" was invented by William Shakespeare for The Merchant of Venice.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:57 PM on December 13, 2018


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