afactaday
A Fact A Day
a titbit of nerdiness coming to you daily! ⬇ AMA / FAQ ⬇ | @nerdymemes for more humorous nerdy stuff
1218 posts
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Last Seen Blogs
lesbianapplejack
Those ponies are gay
rosestains
rosestains
tubashoots
Tuba Shoots
gearfalcon
Psithurism
whmsykttn
whimsy yet to be determined
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1212: Crush, Texas was the temporary town set up for the publicity stunt of crashing two full trains head-on at high speed into each other. as a one-day event in 1896, it beckoned over 40k visitors who were offered reduced travel fares and free entry, making it the second-largest settlement in the state at the time. Crush wasn't actually named that because of the railroading shenanegans, though: it was named after William Crush (nominative determinism!!!), the passenger relations guy at the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad (MKT). the Katy, as they were known, had a bunch of recently obsolete locomotives to get rid of, so, um, boom!
Crush assured his employers that every safety measure had been taken and that the boilers would resist rupturing. of course, they exploded immediately upon impact, "as if controlled by a single impulse", killing two attendees and injuring many more. Crush was fired but got the job back within a couple of days because the whole thing turned out to be a roaring success regardless.
the photos are actually very cool. and Scott Joplin wrote a commemorative piece which is worth a listen too. oh and the score tells you how to make the sound of two trains crashing on a piano
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
happy international penguin day!!! truly the holiest of occasions.
#1211: the word penguin originally referred to the great auk, a white and black bird of Northern Atlantic coastlines (it went extinct in 1852 - always saddening when they give you that much precision). it's thought to come from Welsh "pen gwyn" (white head), either referring to the white patterning on the auk's head or the island in Newfoundland on which they were found. alternatively, it could come from Latin pinguis "fat" but that's a lot less cool. penguins were simply called penguins because they look like an auk (convergent evolution!), even though they're hardly related. penguins eat small rocks, partially to help them grind up harder food (they don't have teeth, but they do have spines on their beak and even tongue) and to let them dive deeper, reducing buoyancy. they don't have swim bladders, yet the emperor penguin can go as deep as 550m below the surface. the the fastest penguin is the gentoo penguin, reaching up to 36kph; the most populous species is the macaroni, at 11.7m pairs; the most-decorated penguin is Nils Olav, a king penguin, baron and colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King's Guard. the group noun of penguins is a waddle, but when they're swimming it's a raft. penguin facts are the best.... stay tuned until next year!
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1210: if you're reading this, chances are that the screw head you're most familiar with is the Phillips, with a cruciform hole and a 57-degree driver, (actually invented by Not Phillips (fotd#165)) - but in Canada, you're probably a Robertson head user, with a square taper (aka Scrulox, and also created by Not Robertson). both of these were intended (the latter before the former) as a replacement to the slotted screws. these days, the Robertson is in many ways simply better than the Phillips, to the point that it's slowly been escaping the Great White North and is appearing in shops elsewhere - but why do we use such an awful standard everywhere else? when the Robertson was dreamed up (by Not Robertson), it left the head of the screw much weaker because of the stamping process. by the time this had been ironed out (by Yes Robertson), the Great War had broken out and the industries, focused on the fighting, didn't want to shop from a Canadian.
but that wasn't the screw in the coffin, so to speak - when Ford realised that he could use the efficiency of the Robertson head to save money, he asked for control of the business. when Robertson said no, the auto manufacturer ousted him from the market and turned to the Phillips head instead, restricting the superior shape to the land of maple syrup. it was the same force that displaced Robertson that gave Phillips the edge: during WW2, car makers turned into plane builders and everything was filled to the brim with Phillips heads. when the allies returned, they demanded the same tools that they had used in action. Robertson drivers are great because they don't easily come out of the screw and they hold onto the screw on their own, making one-handed driving much more reliable.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1209: when the Australian quiz show Spicks and Specks played Men at Work's Down Under (you'll recognise it if you look it up), the band lost money. they got the royalties ofc, but they still became poorer as a result. the game was to identify nursery rhymes inside other tunes, and the panel spotted a flute solo that had been directly lifted from the popular children's number Kookaburra. turns out that the original composer of it died in 1988 and it was still under copyright. after a lawsuit, they settled for 5% of the total historical profits.
the person who played the riff allegedly fell into alcohol abuse as a result of the proceedings and died of a heart attack, and the lead singer's father also passed during the case, possibly under the stress. so uhhh
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1208: patternmakers use rulers that are 1-3% longer. it's quite weird because you look at one of these and you wouldn't be able to tell until you put it next to a normal one that's a few millimetres shorter. patternmaking is when you make a positive model of what you want to cast in metal (often for structural/mechanical things) so they make everything slightly larger to account for shrinkage when it cools. they also have to work out how the end product gets removed and factor in distortion.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1207: only one American has been inducted into the Hall of Fame for speed skating, figure skating and hockey, and not someone with the bulk of a defender and the grace of a dancer: it's Frank Zamboni! in 1947 he built an ice resurfacer to reduce downtime on his California rink by mounting basically a huge razor on an army jeep chassis. now they're just referred to by the genericised trademark of Zamboni. it shaves, washes, wets, then squeegees the ice, which is apparently a proper word. in fact, "to squeege" has been around for over 200 years. i would like to know where window cleaners get their squeegees because apparently they're special.
oh and apparently you can get squeegee training? the technique the pros use is called the "swivel method" and you have to get all the angles just right to reduce "streaking". there are annual national window cleaning championships too, and the world record holder is Teddy Burrows of Essex, who cleaned three standard 45"x45" windows in 9.14s with 9L of water.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1206: Boktai: the Sun is in Your Hand is a Game Boy Advance game with a photometer on the cartridge. you can charge your in-game solar weaponry by standing outside in daylight. it was received well by parents, who liked that it encouraged their kids to touch grass while playing and made it less fun to play at night. there are lots of other sun-based mechanics for which you have to input the current time and zone, and then the 24-hourly cycle mirrors the real-life sky.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1205: any orchestral musician knows the pains of transposition, where instruments have a "written" and a "concert" pitch that sounds different (eg a D on the viola and a C on the clarinet sound the same), but, uh,,, why?? one of the reasons is for instrument families that have variants that vary by irregular intervals, but have common fingering. for example, a "written A" on a French double horn in F is played similarly to the same written note on a horn in Bb, allowed by transposition. also, there were many historical reasons for various instruments to transpose (like, before valves were invented you could only use a certain key without switching out parts; also there were a bunch of different standards for what A was back in the baroque days) and it was just easier to leave it like that than to rewrite every piece ever and retrain every artist ever.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1204: rudimentary can describe both the understanding you have of something ("my grasp is rudimentary"), or the basicness of that thing that you have the comprehension of ("i speak rudimentary english"). it comes from "rudiment", which means a fundamental principle (and is a word that i intend on using). this comes from Latin rudis which is also the root of rude, both meaning simple or untrained. an erudite is someone who is well-learned or accomplished and is an assimilated form of this plus ex "out". your education is your erudition and you could call scholarship or any body of book-origin knowledge this too.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1203: on the Moscow metro (of which most of the lines are radial), the PSA voices are male as you head towards the city centre, and female as you head towards the suburbs. it was initially introduced as a measure to help the blind (or even non-Russian speakers, i guess), according to one random unreliable news article. the same page said that the ring route has a female reader going clockwise and male when anti-. the mnemonic is "your boss calls you to work, and your wife calls you home". just try to look over that i guess. the network also apparently extremely well-signed with lots of information and maps everywhere. and of course the famous deco. but it's also unique for having large gaps between stations - an average of 1800m - which means it can run at around 40km/h.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1203: the reverse Tinkerbell effect (see fotd#1167) is when believing in something causes it to be less true. for example, if you believe driving is safe, you're likelier to get in a car, resulting in more people on the roads, making it more dangerous. another one is the belief that your vote matters: if you believe so, and you go and vote on this premise, then you've just made your ballot and everybody else's slightly less important.
of course it's a strange line to tread because in the case of automobiles, it's going to be hazardous to some degree regardless, while in our election scenario, the whole system only works if the majority of the populace believe in the power of their choice. so be wary of using this as a fallacy in argument i guess?
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1202: at the end of Queen Elizabeth I's reign, there was a grand total of zero dukes. there weren't any royal dukes (because she never married or had kids) and she managed to get most of the other dukes killed. there were also very few other peers: 1 marquis, 18 earls and 37 something or others. then when James VI ascended and the crowns were (kinda) united, all the dukes of Scotland became dukes of England. there was one.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1201: although it may seem like one of historical preservation things (like London's famous views), the reason that all the buildings in Washington DC are shorter than the monument has nothing to do with that: in 1894, the Cairo Hotel was constructed at 164ft and people hated it so much that in 1899 (amended 1910), all buildings' heights were restricted to the width of the road they stood on (plus 20ft), and there was a hard cap on 130ft. buildings already above this limit were grandfathered in and many exceptions were made throughout the past century, but it still makes the city stand out among the other American metropoleis. Mayor Bowser (yeah, really) is trying to change it, but it'll need congressional approval which seems unlikely rn.
the list of the tallest structures in DC is quite funny - it's just a bunch of TV and radio towers with the occasional monument or basilica or smth
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1200: frogs' voices don't change in helium. their ribbits sound identical. frequency distribution analysis on five species showed no difference under different gases. this is actually quite cool because it means the vocal sacs (those big ballooning throats) don't have "cavity resonance", ie they don't make noise with the air inside them (like our larynx does). they're simply just wobbly bits of skin that vibrate. humans and dinosaurs, however, would of course be affected (see fotd#641) by heliox.
i feel a little bit sorry for the scientists, who wanted to make the froggies go ribbit all squeakily, and ended up with nothing. at least it was the biggest anuran discovery of 1993. then again, froggies are cute no matter their pitch.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1199: the first computer ever to discover a shape starred in the 1980 sitcom Laverne & Shirley. it was trying to look for the biggest shape (don't worry, it's not as stupid as it sounds) and i guess to fund itself, it had a side-hustle as an actor. it also featured in the Land of the Giants multiple times. it was a 1957 Burroughs 220, and ran on vacuum tubes; even though transistors had already been invented, it had quite a good stage career because it looked properly sci-fi. the B205, of the same series, trumps it by far, appearing in dozens and dozens of shows and films, from Batman to Transformers to Austin Powers. there's a website that's basically the IMDB of computers, and people scour the screen to figure out what model of computer everything is.
oh and about the shape: they added a few constraints so the answer wasn't just "the universe", for example saying to find the biggest shape where all the vertices are inside a sphere, and then there'd be a different solution for each number of corners. the one that this computer found was with 8 points, and there was no way to do it mathematically, but they figured it out with this computer back in 1962, running night shifts on it.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1198: an inherently funny word is one which is humorous without context. for example, Vaudeville theatre made comedy from the sound /k/, like in "car keys", "cucumber" and "Alka Seltzer". according to "the world's funniest joke" (not to be confused with fotd#91), an experiment by Richard Wiseman, quips rated most comical were ones with "k" sounds, like "two ducks were sitting in a pond. one of them said 'quack'. the other said 'i was going to say that!'" or "what's brown and sticky? a stick". other words that tend to be inherently funny are those that sound similar to rudeness because they invert your expectations, leaving you with "a sense of relief - of getting away with it". for example, "focky" or "whong". other theories involve Shannon entropy, positing that these words are funny because of their unlikeliness - "skritz", for example, is a very improbable string of letters.
0 notes
Text
#aFactADay2024
#1197: King John of Bohemia went blind, but still insisted on fighting in battle. he absolutely loved war, so he got together with France and tried to take a stab at England. this was during the 100 Years' War, so the French were absolutely up to the job. it led to the battle of Crécy, with 15-30 thousand deaths on the Romanic side and around 200 on our side. a complete whitewash. John rode into battle with his horse strapped between two of his attendants'. he wafted his sword around vaguely and i don't think anybody will be surprised to hear that he didn't last long. alongside him, nine princes, ten counts, a duke, a bishop, an arch one of those, and roughly 1500 noblemen were slain.
0 notes