Games "useless" knowledge

[I Me & Myself]

I've been researching fun facts to share with people nearly every day. Here is a small taste of what's to come:

- A Zebra's stripe pattern is completely unique, like a fingerprint

- Korean kings had historians follow them 24/7 and write down everything they do

- In Central Africa, there is a frog with claws dubbed the "wolverine frog"

- The Cox-Zucker mashine is from a paper published by Mr. Cox and Mr. Zucker, who only collaborated to make the name combination in a paper

- A physician once completed a paper alone, but didn't realise the publishing medium only allows papers with co authors. So he added his cat as a co author: F.D.C. Felis Domesticus Chester.

- Past German Chancellour once said in full seriousness "The internet is new territory for all of us". In 2013.

- German youth votes for a "youth word" of the year every year. Examples include : "das crazy" "aura" and "Ehrenmann / Ehrenfrau" (man of honor)

- There is an alternate alphabet for English called Sharian, developed specifically for the English language (unlike the latin alphabet)

- Some frogs turn blue during mating season

- On average across species, female frogs are bigger than male frogs

- Some frogs have been around longer than wooly mammoths

- The egyptian word for cat was "Mau" which is the sound a cat makes

- Things produced in occopied Japan used to be worth something as collectibles


I will add new facts when I find and share them (nearly every day, let's see how long I keep it up), feel free to add your own curious knowledge!

 

[stopMotionSickness]

About 2.5 to 3.4 billion years ago, the oceans might have looked purple because of bacteria using a simpler purple pigment instead of the more complicated green chlorophyll pigment.

 

[itsoverforme303]

Stripes thing is actually pretty interesting. It's not just limited to zebras. All animals with any kind of patterns (external stripes or internal ones like the pattern of blood vessels on our retina) are randomly generated. This doesn't "ensure" uniqueness but given the amount of randomness, it practically is impossible for two members of a species to be the same. That is why even twins have different finger prints.

External stripes arise usually from which gene got activated, which can depend either or chemical reactions or sometimes be determined by the which of the two chromosomes were activated.

For examples, in female mammals, in each cell, there are two X chromosomes but only one is activated, the other becoming a shrivelled "Barr body". This process is completely random and usually happens at the 8 cell stage of an embryo. Then, the cell will clone itself, leading to a formation of "stripes". This is the reason Calico cats are always female. Human females are "striped" this way too, but for us there is no external difference between the two types of cells.

 

[Frxtagooox]

The earth might be not flat.

 

[Forever Sleep]

If all the humans in the world were on one set of scales and all the insects on another- it's estimated all the insects combined would weigh double or more. The ant population alone is estimated to weigh one fifth of the all the humans. (According to Google.)

Animals experience time differently to humans. Cats experience time slightly faster- making their reflexes even more impressive. Dogs- slower. Supposedly- 60 minutes feels more like 75 minutes to them. Cold blooded animals experience time according to their temperature.

Some animals (including frogs) naturally produce a kind of anti- freeze to allow them to cope with freezing temperatures. Some animals can cope with 70% or more of their bodily fluids freezing. Wood frogs can freeze, stop breathing, have no detectable heartbeat for weeks before thawing out in the Spring. (Again- all quoted from Google- so hopefully it's accurate but, I don't know for sure.)

 

[Spite]

Lemmings do not commit mass suicide, it is a myth that was popularised by the 1958 documentary White Wilderness.

 

[princexhhn]

related to og post, the mandarin for cat is 猫, pronounced māo !! similar, lets all just meow if we want to say "cat" XP

 

[I Me & Myself]

Lemmings do not commit mass suicide, it is a myth that was popularised by the 1958 documentary White Wilderness.

Oooh I've also got lots of fake history ones

For example: The idea that Beethoven was black was popular due to people describing him as "fair skinned" but that just meant he was not pale white. We actually know Beethoven's ancestors pretty well because someone was able to sample his DNA! All of his family is from Europe.

 

[I Me & Myself]

Today's useless info:

The linear band ceramic age was in the neo Stoneage time, and towards the end of it many conflicts arose inbetween groups. Such as the "Massacre of Talheim". Which sounds ridiculous imo xD Massacre of valley home, small town in a valley.

(There were 36 skeletons found)

 

[stopMotionSickness]

Yeah heck it why not: another theory that might be true but at least I have a lot of fun thinking about:Giant and Colossal squid, despite living their entire lives at pitch-dark depths, have chromatophores; basically tiny skin muscles that let them change colors (like more photic-zone cephalopods like octopuses and squid do). Furthermore, there's a curious pattern with the apex predators that emerge after great extinctions: they're not really best shaped for smooth speeds as well as they could be. A pattern seems to be that they have longer bodies that let them "thrash" with a bit more vigor, at the cost of movement efficiency.


This leads to the plausible (though admittedly slightly crazy) theory that giant squid thrive specifically in dying worlds, after the apex predators of the shallows can't keep them in check anymore. That the moment the world ecosystems falter, squid emerge out of the depths and clean house, decimating most of everything else; and when the next apex predator emerges, it first has to deal with the squid. Insanely lovecraftian kinda creepy that might actually be true (though admittedly it's a bit far-fetched tbh). Largely constructed around the modern-day rivalry between sperm whales and said squid:
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[verdedefome]

Cool, just one correction, a physician is a doctor, like in the field of medicine, whereas the scholar who published the papers with his cat was a physicist and mathematician, so the fields were physics and mathematics.

 

[Redacted24]

papers with his cat was a physicist and mathematician, so the fields were physics and mathematics.

Was the cat the physicist or the mathematician? Do we know?

 

[verdedefome]

Was the cat the physicist or the mathematician? Do we know?

Since Schrödinger was the physicist I'm pretty sure the cat has to be mathematician.

 

[gunmetalblue]

The Hoatzin bird, is nicknamed the "stinkbird". Because it smells basically like death. Its digestive system ferments leaves like a cow's stomach producing a manure-like odor.

The Common Swift, is another species of bird that can never land for years. It can stay airborne for up to 10 months straight while eating and sleeping. It only lands to breed.

 

[U. A.]

The "country" with the most time zones is...France, due to its evil colonial legacy; this allows it to count several time zones in extremely far-off places.
Meanwhile, China has one time zone—the sun rose at 5:59am today in Beijing, while Kashgar (at similar latitude) won't see sun until 8:42am.

 

[Custos]

Looked up that alphabet, it's called Shavian not Sharian.

Here's a fact: Every London Underground station has different coloured/patterned tiles, this is because when it was originally built the illiteracy rate was quite high so many people couldn't read the station names. So, they would instead refer to each station by their colours and patterns. So one might have said "let's meet at that red and white cross station" or something.

 

[_Gollum_]

We are closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the pyramids

 

[I Me & Myself]

though admittedly it's a bit far-fetched tbh).

I don't care it sounds cool as fuck. I knew about squid's rivalry with a whale species but I had no idea! This is incredibly interesting to think about, especially given how many other deep sea a species are a sort of "living fossil"

Anyway my fun fact about giant squids:
Their eyes are nearly identical to those of humans except the layer with the nerves (Retina) is switched with the layer behind it, which actually is the part that "sees" (Choroid).

Due to the Retina being on top of the Choroid in humans, we get our blind Spot. This is where the nerves go through the seeing layer.

Giant squids, due to the layers being switched, do not have blind spots.

This suggests, that very very similar eyes developed in evolution parallely! With one detail swapped. Because there is no way in Evolution these layers just "swap" it has to be a whole different prototype of eye that evolved into this :]

 

[stopMotionSickness]

This suggests, that very very similar eyes developed in evolution parallely!

I didn't know cephalopods had their own unique origin of eyes, that's pretty cool! As far as I'm aware, I think that puts up 3 unique (multicellular) eyes, along with arthropods' compound eyes.

Anyway this is a lotta fun so here's another:

Axel Heilberg Island is an uninhabited tundra island in the far North of Canada. It used to be covered by forests 50-30 million years ago (in the Eocene), when the world was a lot warmed and there were no ice caps in the Arctic.


The insanely cool thing is that it cooled off and got buried so fast that modern expeditions there have found the wood still preserved from that time. And that's the wood straight-up, not even petrified or fossilized in any way. Lowkey would be a huge dream come true to see it in person:



It's just insanely cool to me to think that such a cold barren tundra still bears the signs of life that once thrived there, and what an arctic forest must have been like. Like how does a forest ecosystem even work when it's pitch dark for several months straight? How do the trees grow? How do the animals behave? Would there be more nocturnal species? What would it sound like to walk around at a dark arctic forest 40 million years ago, with a breezy spring-like warmth in the air? It's really cool to think about imo.

 

[I Me & Myself]

Like how does a forest ecosystem even work when it's pitch dark for several months straight?

You've just given me huge inspo for my worldbuilding! Oh my god. I've been pondering on a planet with an excentric orbit and planetary tilt for a while now. In my model, the most habitable spaces would be around one of the poles where there would be polar night and day... I had not even considered that! This is such an interesting addition to this already fascinating model I had :]

 

[stopMotionSickness]

Yess glad I could help!

I'd also highly recommend looking into the Carboniferous, if you haven't already. That was a period in Earth history (360 to 300 mya) when the first rainforests/swamps spread across the Earth, and it had all kinds of implications for the element cycling. On one hand, this made for a huge boost in photosynthesis, which super-oxygenated the atmosphere to levels never seen before or since. Because of that, insects, not yet facing serious competition from vertebrates on land, and which have fixed lung surface areas, were able to grow to the largest they've ever been.

At the same time, this was before fungi or microbes had developed an ability to decompose wood, which meant that when a "tree" (technically they were more related to mosses and ferns than classic seed-bearing trees we know today) died, it just fell over and buried all the carbon it was made of. This is exactly where most of the coal we mine today comes from. The problem was that this process slowly depleted the soil and the air of carbon dioxide over millions of years, which caused cooling and led to the "Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse", where the forests once connected in a single giant ecosystem receded into separate forests as the Earth cooled down and dried up.

A little bit down the line, this might have also contributed to the end-Permian extinction, which was the single greatest extinction in Earth history. It was caused by a supervolcano erupting and making basically an ocean of lava covering all of modern-day Siberia for a few hundred years. But what really messed up every ecosystem was how depleted of oxygen the air and water became.

But yeah idk how well known it is, so my bad if I overexplained it, paleontology (especially paleozoic) is a huge interest of mine. ALSO worth checking out BizleyArt for paleoart/inspiration, their work is genuinely fantastic for thinking on this kinda stuff!

 

[I Me & Myself]

But yeah idk how well known it is, so my bad if I overexplained it, paleontology (especially paleozoic) is a huge interest of mine

Don't worry I had a blast reading your explanation and appreciate it :]

I'm gonna use the coal thing as the next fun fact for my friends, I'd never really considered where all the coal came from and this makes so much sense!

It also came to me, that this is likely what inspired the night forest Perélin in the never ending Story!

(I love this book so so so much)

I did check out the artist and their work is incredibly sick, I love it. Literally textbook material for teaching.

You never gotta apologise for info dumps towards me - I love em!

I love that I finally have more context for the Cambrian explosion. Do you have any favorite (group of) creatures from that time?

 

[heywey]

Venus! My favorite planet, I think. It's so weird and interesting. Assorted fun facts:

• It's typically only visible at dawn and dusk -- this is because its orbit is closer to the sun than ours (and of the planets closer to the sun, it's also more or less the only one that's visible to the naked eye). To make sense of why this makes it only visible at dawn and dusk, think of it like, it's always going to be kind of in the direction of the sun -- so during the day it's drowned out by the sun's light, and during the night it's on the opposite side of the earth.
• Because of that, a lot of ancient cultures thought it was two separate planets, and it also helped to prove the heliocentric solar system model, which is really the only way its funky movements can make sense
• It rotates in the opposite direction of every other planet in the solar system
• It's a hellscape in practically every way you can imagine -- it has a super thick atmosphere which keeps the surface at around 850F / 450C, constant lightning storms, corrosive clouds of sulfuric acid, and pressure on the surface equivalent to around 3k feet below sea level. But since the atmosphere hid the surface, before we had more advanced radio telescopes n stuff, it was often speculated to be a lush jungle/swamp planet
• It's the first planet we explored - first flyby, first landing, first audio and first photos of another planet. It was more of a focus than Mars in the (very) early days of the space race, though once it became clear how much of a nightmare it was, the US pretty quickly pivoted to Mars (and the moon of course) -- the Soviet Union on the other hand...
• The USSR had a strange fixation on Venus, and god bless them for it, since it's thanks to them we got the only photos we might ever see of the planet's surface (below). They sent up dozens of probes, and the vast majority failed in one way or another. Going to Venus isn't like going to the moon, or even Mars, you can't just sort of point something in the direction and it'll be okay. With Venus, probes have to be built like tanks, layers on layers of armor, and parachutes work better at first because of the thicker atmosphere but burn up easily, so the probes have to pretty much be ready to crash land, and once they get there, it's a matter of hours at best before they melt or get crushed under the pressure. The current survival record is 110 minutes by Venera 12
• We have exactly six photos from its surface:

 

[Sphinxi]

You can convey any basic logical statement (or, and, if P then Q, X is true) using only two operators: Negation and any one of conjunction, disjunction, and conditional (and, or, and if/then)
I'll use or(v) to demonstrate:
P & Q is equivalent to ~(~P v ~Q) so "it is false that P is false or Q is false)
P -> Q is equivalent to ~P v Q so either P is false or Q is true, [or both, since we use the inclusive or in logic]

From here we can make any prop logical statement with just those two operators:)

If you want to add quantification (for all things, there exists a thing) or modality (it is possible that..., it is necessary that...) we would need one additional symbol respectively.

 

[I Me & Myself]

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That is so sick I didn't know we had images of Venus' surface!

 

[noname223]

- German youth votes for a "youth word" of the year every year. Examples include : "das crazy" "aura" and "Ehrenmann / Ehrenfrau" (man of honor)

As a German myself I can approve this message.

 

[stopMotionSickness]

Don't worry I had a blast reading your explanation and appreciate it :]

yeyy! yea i'm just a lil self conscious about nerdy subjects, but super relieving to hear!

I love that I finally have more context for the Cambrian explosion. Do you have any favorite (group of) creatures from that time?

mm! So correction: there's the Cambrian, and then there's the Carboniferous.
The Cambrian is the first period of the phanerozoic (which is the latest of 4 eons in history, basically capturing all of the time that multicellular life has been relevant on Earth). It was 539 to 487 million years ago, and officially is defined by when this particular burrow/track first appears in the geological record (called treptichnus pedum, and chosen because a huge thing about the cambrian was that it was the first time things start digging in the seafloor, which improves the nutrient cycling of ecosystems, letting them thrive more for longer)


The Carboniferous was about 200 million years later (359 to 300 mya), a good ways into the development of animals and plants and things.

The Cambrian explosion is something I'm actually reaalllly into, because it might be a bit of a misconception. We know a few of the things in the cambrian have modern relatives/descendants, whose DNA we can compare in labs these days. If you make the assumption that over millions of years, the rate at which DNA sequences change is steady, you can basically infer that if two DNA sequences have a certain amount of differences, then they must have diverged a specific amount of time ago (they call this the Molecular Clock). If you do this for the modern descendants of different species in the cambrian, you actually get that they diverged a few million years before the cambrian, in a period called the Ediacaran.

Now the Ediacaran is really cool because first, this is actually when the first large(r than microscopic) fossils show up; it's just that they're all soft-bodied (like slugs or jellyfish), really rare, and we have very little idea about what they even were. Some say they were a completely separate kingdom that then quickly went extinct, others say that they produced cholesterol, and therefore counted as the first animals. Second, this was right after the Cryogenian, where sediment and oxygen records suggest that the Earth was completely frozen over for millions of years, then thawed out (maybe because of volcanoes erupting out of the glaciers), and caused a chemistry shift in the oceans that allowed multicellular life to begin. We tentatively call them the Vendobionts:

^ Charnia, one of the first Ediacaran fossils found ^Dickinsonia (yes a very silly name), strongly thought to be among the first Animal species

But in terms of the Cambrian explosion, the theory goes that it was actually the chemistry of the Oceans that changed, and allowed living things to grow hard shells for the first time. And because shells preserve a lot better than soft tissue, we only see so many species "show up" in Cambrian-aged fossils because they only started fossilizing in the Cambrian, even though they had existed for a long time before then.


So to answer the question, I think the vendobionts are the coolest things conceptually, just because of how mysterious they are. It would be hard to properly choose, though, between them, trombone ammonoids (plus about a gorillion other ancient cephalopods), prototaxites, eurypterids, and the tully monster; each of which I could write entire posts about lol.

 

[I Me & Myself]

So correction: there's the Cambrian, and then there's the Carboniferous.

I'm absorbing this knowledge to second hand infodump it at the worst times possible to look intelligent /silly

about 200 million years later

Eh that's neglectable, 200 million years is only like... two times 100 million years. (I hadn't even heard of the carboniferus so that's cool!)

you actually get that they diverged a few million years before the cambrian, in a period called the Ediacaran.

Oh my god the thing I love about science is that often it is wrong and then gets corrected but that correction is also wrong so we try to learn more. /genuine
This is a peak example of this.

And because shells preserve a lot better than soft tissue, we only see so many species "show up" in Cambrian-aged fossils because they only started fossilizing in the Cambrian, even though they had existed for a long time before then

That's weirdly beautiful as in that there is likely so so much more that has been on this planet that left traces so small and vulnerable we may never find them.

I think the vendobionts are the coolest things conceptually, just because

After reading your post: Hard agree.

Also I opened this at 3am when I got up and looked at it, fell asleep again, and then I had a dream about being some kind of single cellular organism. I'm not even kidding. It was kinda chill.

 

[stopMotionSickness]

Oh my god the thing I love about science is that often it is wrong and then gets corrected but that correction is also wrong so we try to learn more. /genuine
This is a peak example of this.

The ediacaran has soo much scientific community lore it's actually really funny. For example, everyone just assumed that because a bunch of these things kind looked like jellyfish, they must be jellyfish. It wasn't until this guy called Dolf Seilacher, a paleontologist who had worked on trace fossils (basically tracks and burrows left behind by animals), walked into a world conference one day and said everyone was wrong, and dared anyone to point out a jellyfish that sits on the seafloor. The prime example still carries the name Cyclomedusa (pictured), but we understand these to have been completely separate from jellyfish now.


There's also the name itself; the group is called Vendobionta because throughout the 80s and 90s when these things were actually being discovered, all the best samples came from a few assemblages in Russia, which was the Soviet Union at the time, and the russian scientists had agreed on calling the time period the Vendian. Everyone else actually followed suit for a while. But when the global council voted on officially inducting this period into the geological timeline, the soviet union had just collapsed, so their scientists lost funding and couldn't show up. As such, the "west" collectively decided to name it after the Ediacara hills in Australia, a much less prominent assemblage of these things.

Plus there's things in paleontology in general that are so ruthlessly argued about it's kinda funny. The biggest example was everyone trying to decide on the cause of the dinosaur extinction; was it a more steady series of volanoes going off, or was it a sudden asteroid impact? It wasn't until much after the debate that they found this global layer of soot containing Iridium (an element that doesn't really exist on Earth's surface that much). But for years afterwards, scientists who had argued for volcanism kept insisting everyone else is wrong. They wrote public memos and papers straight up insulting each other, and refused to speak to each other at in-person conferences.
The funny thing is that at the end of the day, we understand that it was mostly the asteroid impact, but that there actually also was volcanism, and a combination of the two is probably what actually made it so devastating.

Also I opened this at 3am when I got up and looked at it, fell asleep again, and then I had a dream about being some kind of single cellular organism. I'm not even kidding. It was kinda chill.

Nice!! I always LOVE atmospheric dreams like that. I always got some trippy music to go with it, too

 

[TransilvanianHunger]

related to og post, the mandarin for cat is 猫, pronounced māo !! similar, lets all just meow if we want to say "cat" XP

On a similar note, the Middle Egyptian word for "cat" is 𓏇𓇋𓅱𓃠, pronounced /mỉw/, and later "mau".

• The USSR had a strange fixation on Venus, and god bless them for it, since it's thanks to them we got the only photos we might ever see of the planet's surface (below).

The Venera missions are probably my favourite ones. I do hope that some space agency will get us more photos from the surface—maybe even some video.