Useless Facts

[Kraj]

So if it taint a fact, then one has as much chance as the other.

Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhh....that makes sense.

 

[emcf]

If you have never heard Robin Williams on golf, you should HERE

thatspuredeadf###ingbrilliantsoitispal! (said in a robin williams' scottish accent!)

 

[drobinson]

And u can even ask for a receit (if that's the way to spell it )

Hmmm..does that mean there's a refund policy? Punch cards for 11th free?

 

[drobinson]

There are precisely 613 seeds in a pomegranite. Exactly the number of mitzvah (commandments) that are performed by the Jewish society in Israel per year...that's a lot!

 

[Andromeda]

Huh? is that for real?

 

[Groundrush]

The song "Happy Birthday" brings in about $2 million in licensing revenue to Warner Communications who hold the copyright to the song.
Happy Royalties To You
The best known and perhaps most loved song in the English language, has to be that six note, six word ditty, “Happy Birthday to You”.

It’s been sung everywhere from schoolrooms to palaces. It was Western Union’s first singing telegram in 1933, appeared on Broadway in The Band Wagon in 1931, and the silver screen in As Thousands Cheer. All for “gratis”. But not for long.

The original song was written by Patty Hill, a kindergarten teacher/educator in 1893, as “Good Morning to All”, a greeting for the children in her class. Her sister Mildred Hill, who had started out as a teacher and turned to performing and composing, wrote the music. It then appeared in a songbook for children, and after that, we lose the trail…

Nobody knows at what point, or by who, the lyrics were changed to a birthday greeting. But it appeared as a second stanza to “Good Morning to All” in a 1924 songbook. When it began appearing in commercial ventures such as radio and movies, a third sister, Jessica Hill, went to court to secure the copyright on her sisters’ behalf. (Although Mildred had died in 1916.) By demonstrating the obvious similarities between “Good Morning To All” (for which the Hills owned the copyright), Jessica then obtained the rights to “Happy Birthday”.

Today, it’s estimated that Warner Bros. Communications, which now owns the copyright, earns $2 million dollars annually for broadcast and print rights to the song.

The Hill sisters both died unmarried and childless, and it’s believed the profits are split between the Hill Foundation, and a nephew.

 

[msp]

The Hippopotamus cannot swim it walks along the bottom of the lake river. A totally useless fact unless you are a hippo.

 

[KenHigg]

Ha.... I thought you were going to say Rich can't make non-hypocritical conversation so he has to stay at the bottom of forum. (And I was prepared to come to his defense... )

 

[FoFa]

British Rail was having trouble keeping its InterCity express trains running on time in 1998, but executives solved the problem without a major overhaul of equipment or systems enhancement. They simply redefined "on time". Now trains run on time if they arrive within an hour od schedule.

 

[KenHigg]

They should have phased it in over several years, giving an extra 10 minutes here and there, that way they could show improvements over several years while they sat on their duffs, like the major airlines did....

 

[drobinson]

Huh? is that for real?

Yep, it's for real. Why the correspondance, I'm not sure..pomegranates are holy I suppose. I'll have to ask a rabbi why that is.

See the "Pomegranates and symbolism" section on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate

 

[Mile-O]

Yep, it's for real. Why the correspondance, I'm not sure..pomegranates are holy I suppose. I'll have to ask a rabbi why that is.

See the "Pomegranates and symbolism" section on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate

Er, you are talking about one reputed pomegranate.

 

[indesisiv]

guillotine

The last use of the guillotine in France, at Baumetes Prison, in
Marsailles, was the execution of convicted murderer Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977.

The last public execution by guillotine was on June 17, 1939. Eugen Weidman was executed before a large crowd in Versailles, France.

 

[Mile-O]

Yeah, the French only ditched the death penalty, if I remember correctly, in the mid-nineties.

 

[indesisiv]

Capital punishment in France was abolished in 1981.

 

[msp]

The last use of the guillotine in France, at Baumetes Prison, in
Marsailles, was the execution of convicted murderer Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977.

The last public execution by guillotine was on June 17, 1939. Eugen Weidman was executed before a large crowd in Versailles, France.

The main reason the public execution were stopped was that someone managed to film the exacution of Eugen Weidman. The resulting uproar stopped all future executions... (The 2nd war breaking out also had a small effect)

 

[msp]

Yeah, the French only ditched the death penalty, if I remember correctly, in the mid-nineties.

But was in the same as in the UK where the Death Penalty was only removed from the books (for treason) in the late nineties (as part of the European Human Rights treaty)....

 

[Kraj]

More useless facts

The number of atoms that make up the average human body is 100,000 times the number of stars in the known universe.

 

[Rich]

How do they count either?

 

[Kraj]

How do they count either?

If you really want to know....

They can analyze the light from a star as well as the matter speweing out of it to determine its composition. Then they can estimate its mass based on how its gravity affects other bodies near it in space. Then they divide the mass by the known mass of different atoms in the proportions determined

The body is the same way. They take the average mass of a human body and the average compostion of all the molecules in the body to determine the number of atoms.

The numbers are just estimates, of course, since the composition of both stars and bodies changes from moment to moment, but even if the calculations for a star is off by a trillion atoms, that's still only an error of .0000000000000001%.