Fun Facts

Entropy

No, hippos can suffer from sunburn and many other blad animals

Chimps can also stand on their heads.

I think you're just making yours up.

BoulderHead

Perhaps even more if you're around me.

Ivan Seeking

So Boulderbomb was close to the mark after all?

Oh yes. Thanks to you my 7 year old nephew is calling me eyebeen stinking!

Ivan Seeking

A key source of smell in Parmesan cheese is the same as that for vomit.

Also, I just heard that smelly feet and Limburger cheese have the same source of odor; a certain bacteria.

Sorry, not sure of the proper names. Also, maybe not exactly fun facts…

BoulderHead

I'm a regular bunker buster thanks to this new brand of dietary fiber.
Hahaha, I still get a chuckle over that.

BoulderHead

Tying a length of thread onto the leg of a June Bug or large cockroach makes an inexpensive powered airplane.

Birthday candles, straws, and thin plastic bags can be fashioned into working hot air balloons.

The Bob

Well maybe the sunburn one is inaccurate.

But chimps are close enough to humans anyway. I thought you would have thought of that.

The Bob (2004 ©)

The Bob

Oh Moonbear. You do crack me up everytime.

The one, though, that will stick in my mind is the sticky chess pieces. It will have to because the others were passing comments. This is just funny.

The Bob (2004 ©)

The Bob

Not making them up. Some are most likely out of date to the book.

The Bob (2004 ©)

Monique

There goes the secret of how Limburger cheese is made ..

Monique

The total length of the human genome is 3 meters, which is stuffed into a nucleus 6 micrometers in diameter. A single chromosome is on average 5 cm long. You carry 2*10¹³ meters of DNA with you, which is equivalent to going to the sun and back.

Ivan Seeking

Monique, perhaps you can confirm or deny the following claim. I have heard this several times: The number of beats of the heart over an average lifespan is approximately constant for many species. That is to say that we all get the same number of beats in total. Is there any truth in this?

plover

A few comments:

The Bob sez: "Starfish have no brains."
I'm pretty sure starfish and sea cucumbers are also the invertebrates most closely related to humans. (Counting tunicates as vertebrates.)

The Bob sez: "Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure."
Also bonobos.

The Bob sez: "The average bed is home to over 6 billion dust mites."
There are also several species of mite whose only habitat is the human forehead.

The Bob sez: "On average, a 4-year-old child asks 437 questions a day."
For very small values of "day".

The Bob sez: "There is no Albanian word for headache."
I'm not sure what this would mean. They must describe the phenomenon somehow. In English we invented a compound word, so there's no word for headache that's a root part of the English language. In Russian, the word for "hedgehog" is a two-letter root word: ёж. So could Russians say that English doesn't have a "real" word for "hedgehog". The French could also say that English has no word for eborgner ("to put [someone's] eye out")

The Bob sez: "The heads of a freak two-headed snake will fight over food - despite sharing the same stomach."
Snake head on left: "But these frogs are so tasty! Why should this jerk get all the fun?"
Snake head on right: [sticks out tongue]

The Bob sez: "In Tallin, Estonia, couples are not allowed to play chess in bed while making love."
But mah-jongg is ok...

A few more bits of essential knowledge:

The group of mammals most closely related to primates is tree shrews (followed by bats). (Also: 1/4 of all species of mammals are bats.)

More people are killed each year by hippos than by any other African mammal (including lions).

A (male) blue-ringed octopus apparently can't tell the gender of other blue-ringed octopuses without trying to mate with them.

Moonbear

LOL! This should be used as an example of time dilation...at least the day sure feels longer.

Actually, there is an English word for this: enucleation (technically, it's the surgical removal of the eye).

Yes, I actually have a lot of useless information crammed inside my head...I'm so glad this site gives me the opportunity to finally make some of it useful! How often does the shape of a pig's penis come up in normal conversation? I'd share more, but you have to ask the right questions for me to find the good stuff in the archives...too much information, need better search terms

Monique

Apparently there is a formula for mammals: lifespan = 1902.6/ heartbeat speed

The shrew is the smallest mammal, whose heart beats 800x a min = 2.38 years. The elephant is the largest mammal, whose heart beats 25x a min = 76.1 years. Both numbers are close to the actual age.

A human heart beats 60x a min = 31.7 years.. maybe if we lived without modern technology?

Maybe we should collect a larger sample of cats, skunks, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, chinchilla and whatever other mammals people have got sitting around their house

Ivan Seeking

Interesting. IIRC, in 1850 [Western Civilization I assume] the average lifespan for humans was about 40 years. This hinged greatly on infant mortality though.

Ivan Seeking

One reference I have seen to this ratio is in the movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley. Allegely Bill Gates once argued this as proof that exercise is bad since it increases your heartrate; thus shortening your lifespan.