the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 3⁄32 in railway in the world.
…honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as “obscure”.
so, bonus:
the siljan area of sweden has a history of building observation towers:
the tower in the black-and-white photo, which started this trend, was financed by a man who made a fortune making and selling multiplication books. basically like books of logarithm tables but only for multiplication. 1×1 to 9999×9999.
also that entire area is europe’s largest meteorite crater:
For a minute I thought that meant the railway was ~3ft long
&
This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.
That’s how it got its name. People would say “X,Y,Z, and, per se, And”. (And “sort of” an and). Thus, “And per se And” became Ampersand.
I love the corruption of the saying to give us the name. Reminds me of “Goodbye” being a corruption of “God be with ye”.
per se means on its own
And in Finnish ”perse” means ass
nice
Nice perse
When a drug company in the 80s scaled up production they accidentally created seed crystals that spread around the entire Earth’s atmosphere that prevented other companies from manufacturing a generic drug without it attaching to the seeds and converting to the patented drug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph#Paroxetine_hydrochloride
Of course it was GSK with paroxetine
Ok, that’s absolutely bonkers
And it’s merely a hypothesis, there is no proof. Also we can assume that chemical plants are aware and have taken precautions, but it still happens. Back in the day it was speculated that chemists caried microcrystals around in their beards. This problem has been around for a while. One of the coolest hypothesis has been put forward by Rupert Sheldrake. He thinks that there is something in nature akin to memory. A force of nature as you will.
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The correct spelling of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Barnacles, relative to body size, have the longest penises in the world
The tsetse fly has the longest sperm, regardless of body size.
The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.
The things at the end of shoelaces are called aglets
The thing at the back of your throat is called the. “Hangy downy thingy”
Most military simulation databases have a classified and unclassified version. In the unclassified database a spefic russian apc is usually set to be indestructable.
It’s used for a quick test when setting up a federated sim. Drop one in the sim and trigger a detonation at the location. It should either be destroyed or not in all the instances.
Could do with a bit more explanation on this one.
It sounds like inception. Is this a way that generals being tested can tell if it’s a real test or not?
So military simulation for actual militaries is used for training. There are programs like OneSAF a training and stimulation RTS or VBS2 a first person shooter.
They can all be networked together using a federated system. Similar to Lemmy there is no master instance. Each program is trusted and manages it’s entities like tanks and soldiers.
They each have their own database that can be classified or not. The classified database has very accurate stats and the nonclassified has general simple stats. Think people leaking classified documents on War Thunder to get their tank better stats in the game.
Because each system is using it’s own database you don’t want some system using classified data and some not. So in the unclassified databases a spefic unit type is set to invulnerable.
So if it’s supposed to be an unclassified stimulation you fire up the sims and create one of the special units. You then trigger a detonation like an airstrike at the location of the unit.
The unit should be fine as it’s invulnerable. You then go and check each stimulation and if it’s been destroyed that one is using a classified database and you need to change it out before letting people use the system.
There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.
…. There’s only 1 star in our solar system, the Sun.
I assume you meant the Milky Way galaxy, or perhaps the Universe?
EDIT: ah ok it’s a play on words a bit. Yes 2 > 1
H2O
lol ok I get it now. It is indeed a bit of a play on words.
😇
A large amount of visual inspections on the inside of nuclear reactors is done literally with a camera duct taped to either a really really long pole assembled in sections or a rope. Operators “swim” the cameras to various locations and camera handling is basically an occupation in that field. You also need camera shots for any work being done on the inside of the flooded reactor with, again, really really long poles that end up acting more like pool noodles at such a length. It is silly and difficult work. Also you basically are wearing a trash bag sitting above a hot tub while doing this work. So it is a wild experience.
The smallest extant flightless bird in the world is the Inaccessible Rail.
There are no extant recordings of George Orwell’s voice
Also, the word doublespeak isn’t from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.
Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.
Newspeak was inspired by Esperanto, because George Orwell had an annoying Esperantist roommate. “bad” in Esperanto is “malbone,” literally “un-good.” “terrible” in Esperanto is “malbonege,” literally “very ungood.”
Also Esperanto at the time was hoped to be the universal second language of the working class. That did not mean esperantists were any less annoying then though
they meant well! honestly Esperanto has a really positive community, even still. but I can see how it’d get on someone’s nerves.
The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via “traumatic insemination”. The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over – all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.
Imagine if that were us, eh. #MeToo would be a different movement I bet.
Not obscure but apparently a lot of people aren’t aware that sheep don’t have top teeth in front.
TIL. I’ve looked gift horses in the mouth but never gift sheep /s
What follows is a guide on how to hurt your hand. No not do it. Do not “do it just a little bit”. I actually strained my hand when I first discoverd this and honestly dont want anyone hurt because of my comment:
dont do this
If you wrap your fingers around your thumb (like a closed fist with your thumb on the inside and pull the thumb down you can hurt your hand.
