What are the facts you remember for no specific reason

NarendraCzar@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 86 points –

Does anyone else find themselves recalling random facts for no apparent reason? Like,

Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest and lost

95

Laser is an acronym and doesn’t have a god damned Z in it.

Laser is no longer an acronym. It's now an anacronym, which means it's its own word (despite originally being an acronym)

Source: Wikipedia

TIL - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

That reminds me, so is SCUBA, RADAR and MODEM...I miss the old History Channel shows, especially Modern Marvels

SCUBA: Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (Blew my mind for some reason when I learned that)
RADAR: Radio Detection and Ranging (I've watched alot of WWII documentaries)
MODEM: Modulation Demodulation (I've worked in tech)

Also, Lithuania is really good at making the fancy ones, like ones for research, variable frequency ones, femtosecond ones, etc.

I had to look it up, but we're #13 by global export value (not counting laser diodes)

White green, green, white blue, orange, white orange, blue, white brown, brown.

T568A White green, Green, White orange, Blue, White blue, Orange, White brown, Brown

T568B White orange, Orange, White green, Blue, White blue, Green, White brown, Brown

California Cows Don't Dance the Fandango

Steps for laser printing:

Cleaning, Charging, Drawing, Developing, Transferring, Fusing

I've known this for over 20 years and never used it. Thanks catchy mnemonics!

Are you making a crossover cable or installing it for the government? Those are the only places that I know of that A is used regularly. Nearly everywhere else uses B in my experience.

Are you making the assumption I am from North America?

Every place I have worked in Australia and Europe uses green first.

Really? I wasn't sure which one I "should" use so I looked at a cable that I had laying around (probably came with a cable modem or something?) and was able to see the wire colors through the connector and it was A. So that's what I've been using when making patch cables or wiring my house.

I guess my question is what's your experience with where B is used? Mostly I'm just curious, it probably doesn't really matter for me since I only do networking work in my house.

I guess it doesn't really matter as long as you stick to one for both ends of the cable

So I learned all this almost 2 decades ago so the details may be off...

There's crossover cables, which are a-b and used if you want to connect one computer to another-the tx and rx are flipped from one side to the other, so two "client" devices (like 2 computers) don't speak and listen on the same line

There's rollover cables, which are flipped on one side, that were used to connect to the console port of a router

Aside from that, nothing about the configuration really matters except being standard. The reason they're not just in stripe-color color order is to separate the tx and rx to minimize interference

I'm pretty sure all of this became moot after hundred gigabit Ethernet became a common thing anyways - they multiplex electrical signals across each of the wires, so they have to negotiate the method or fall back to a simpler protocol from the start. I'm not sure how robust it is to randomly shuffling the order on each side individually (I wouldn't try it on hardware I wasn't willing to risk)

So really, all that matters is that it matches. And since we've been doing it a certain way for so long, doing it differently is a bad idea. A vs b makes no difference, but you could make green the split pair and it'd be identical. You could use the same arbitrary order on each side and you'd probably not notice much difference, although you might get a lot more errors from minute interference

And FWIW, I think b is the more common standard across the world... But any advantage or disadvantage probably died back when we stopped using those trunk lines with dozens of pairs split out on a punch down block that goes to a bunch of different homes

It shouldn't actually matter. It's strictly by convention that the US (and probably North America; unclear about beyond) almost exclusively uses B. The big risk is that people will assume it's B, and the other end is B, which can cause issues when they e.g. replace a receptacle and make all of your connections crossover. But even that shouldn't matter much these days.

There's also some very limited issues switching from A to B on the same line (A in wall, B in patch cable), but this is very rare. If you saw A, it was probably either a crossover, or you live in a place that uses A.

I managed to memorize it for a test in networking class. The teacher was surprised someone actually managed to get it right.

The little piece of plastic at the end of a shoe lace is called an aglet.

I learned that from Phineas and Ferb.

IT DOESN'T MATTER!!

In what way?

That was just a quote from that episode. Candace repeatedly yells that at the boys as they celebrate aglets.

Sorry that it came off like I was screaming at you. I should have put it in quotes.

I haven't seen the episode in a decade, but reading it again in her voice made me laugh.

Thank you Terraria for this useless piece of info

Pretty sure it was the movie Repossessed with Leslie Nielsen that taught me this one.

I was gonna correct you and say aiglet, but turns out it's both correct

Orcas are a natural predator of the moose

Orcas are a natural predator of everything that his the ocean. Fun fact, orcas have been known to toy with seals by catapulting them with their tails. I believe I remember seeing at least one baby seal got seventy feet in the air before returning to the sea (and its inevitable death).

Karl Marx got drunk one night and, after being kicked out of a bar in London where he got drunk, went around London and almost got arrested sabotaging the lamp posts with rocks with his colleagues who were also drunk.

About 30-some years ago I borrowed a book of facts from the library, and the two I remember are:

  • There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.
  • Pound for pound, grasshoppers are 3x as nutritious as steak.

I have no idea if they're true, but they're burned into my brain.

How to get all kremkoins in Donkey Kong Country 2, through a cheat:

  • Enter the cabin with the map and the life balloon. Leave without touching anything.
  • Collect the banana bunch over the pirate crocodile. Go back to the cabin, now pick the life.
  • Repeat the above. You'll see a kremkoin over the map. Pick it and you got 75 kremkoins.

In no moment you can touch the two lone bananas close to the entrance of the cabin.

...it has been decades since I played this game, and I almost never used the cheat above (it's less fun than finding all bonus stages). Why do I still remember this?

I still remember the cheat for the first game. Down Y Down Down Y when cranky appears in the title to play bonus stages.

I remember this one too! There was also B A↓B↑↓↓Y (bad buddy) to switch when you wanted in 2P, instead of waiting until the arsehole playing with you to switch it.

Plus LRR LRR LR LR for DKC3. Then you'd insert a cheat and... I don't remember them. Damn.

The buttons on suit jackets are a holdover from a time that buttons were new, and therefore fashionable. Well to do sorts had buttons all over their suits, even in places that would be considered silly these days.

When buttons were new and therefore fashionable? I feel like buttons predate suits by a wide margin.

rats can't vomit

This is why rat poison works. There's no way to get it out quickly once it goes in.

2 facts about the CMOS battery on a motherboard: CMOS stands for "complimentary metal oxide semiconductor". Its a 2032 watch battery.

Also, the 2032 numbering indicates its physical size: it's 20mm x 3.2mm. There are for example 2025's (like in my car remote) that are 20mm x 2.5mm.

And CMOS refers to what the battery was powering on the motherboard (a small amount of CMOS static RAM) rather than anything about the battery itself. I don't know if motherboards still use any static RAM, the batteries might only be there to power the clock these days, making the name just a historical convention.

The solar system is 99.98% 99.86% (see thread) sun. The rest is comparable to a blood draw from a human.

The earth is a blood smear on a slide.

The sun is about 1000 times the mass of Jupiter. You're off a decimal place.

Edit: That in and of itself is a quotable fact. The real number rounds to 1053. So it's about 5% off. It's a meaningless coincidence.

Better ones include that our moon can produce both total and annular eclipses, and (geometrically) all the other planets fit between the earth and moon, but not by much.

Not a decimal place, a tenth of a percent. The sun is 99.86% of the solar system.

Wikipedia has a fine pie chart featuring Jupiter and Saturn (which is 90% of the Solar System mass not in the sun)

0.14% of a 90KG human is still only 126ml so still about a blood draw.

The proportion is about 0.998, and the parent post had it at 0.9998. You move the decimal point by adding 9s. There was one too many. It was off by a decimal place.

Whether you would call that "off by decimal place" or not, it is certainly larger than being off by "a tenth of a percent". That would mean the error bars of number 0.9998 ± 10% [edit: oops, did i miss a decimal place there. i'll leave it] would just close the gap.

I like the proportion of the smear, aka, the whole point of your post. I never heard it in those terms. It reminds me of the one where if the earth were a basketball, the moon would be a tennis ball about 9 feet away. I'll calc out the percent errors if anyone cares.

Eh. It's fixed now. I appreciate the data correction regardless.

Yeah, come to think of it, "moving the decimal" is wrong too. There must be a term for moving the decimal in the "one minus x" complement.

The USS Texas in WW2 partially sunk itself (flooded watertight compartments, if I remember correctly) to gain a higher elevation to shoot fortified bunkers farther inland than it could reach otherwise. I learned this on Reddit and never forgot it, oddly enough.

Tegucigalpa is the capital of Honduras. No idea where I learned that

Male bedbugs have a knife-like penis. To have sex, they stab the females in the thorax with it because the females don't have genitalia. The semen is then injected directly into the female's main body cavity for insemination

Platypuses hunt underwater using bioelectric sensors in their bills. Also, you cannot beat the final boss in X-Men for Sega Gamegear unless you are using Iceman.

Bicycle wheels with quick release axles have 9.525mm diameter, rounded up to 10mm. This is because the sizing is not actually metric, but 3/8 inch so imperial.

This is why it's most commonly called 9mm qr (quick release) /facepalm

If I was able to remember them on cue I would probably be a lot more interesting of a person.

The topic has to seed first and then all of the information I know about it rushes in.

2.2lbs to a KG

Should probably make an effort to know so many as a Canadian but only know the one conversion

5cm to 2 inches. It's slightly off but good to a 30cm = one foot.

Useful when converting penis measurements.

Scots have 421 words for "snow"

male otters have a pocket to store their favourite rock. They use this rock to bash females unconcious and rape them.

Stanislav Petrov's name, for some weird reason. Lots of people can tell the story but just call him 'a radar operator'.

The Roman names for the three fates are Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.

Actually, I suppose there is a reason I remember this, it's because of Golden Sun.

in Earthbound, there's an exploit where you can have technically infinite PP if you put a Magic Truffle to the last slot of your inventory and buy a good amount of Ketchup Packets.

When you use the Magic Truffle in a battle, only just a Ketchup Packet will be consumed but not the truffle - you still gain 90 PP.

I have a lot of specifications stuck in my head from previous jobs. A fun one is that precast concrete bridge beams aren't just concrete and rebar. They typically have a bunch (20-30 or more depending on size) of 13 mm steel cables that are each under about 13,000 kg of tension. The cables are pulled to a specific tension in the concrete form, the concrete is poured around them, then the cables are cut at each end.

Dolphines are whales. People keep doubting me, whenever I bring that up :D

Hyponatraemia occurs when sodium levels in the blood stream drop below 135 mmols/L.

I work in IT and this in no way applies to any aspect of my life (so far)

Carrots are good for your eyes. I learned it from the movie Shoot'em Up where Clive Owen plays an assassin and he eats carrots because it's good for his eyes.

I've heard this is not true, but it was a lie by the UK government to cover up the invention of radar and the cracking of the enigma code.

While the US uses the imperial system for most things the pharma/medical industries use the metric system

As does the auto industry, aerospace...

Outside of construction and plumbing plenty of stuff is metric here. Even our weird imperial units are based on metric units.