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Interesting facts/stories/events/news etc. that MOST people may be unaware of

Tangerine Dream

Tangerine Dream

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I've been reading random stuff; I thought I'd relay some here... Feel free to do the same! Interesting facts about anything, or articles or anything really. There are a couple of things here to start off...

So I was reading about platypuses, as you do...

Monotremes are an order of mammals (along with the marsupials & placental mammals) who's defining characteristic is giving birth to eggs, rather than live young. The platypus & 4 species of Echidna, make up the only members of the monotreme order, living today.

Monotremes are the only mammals (apart from at least one species of dolphin) known to have a sense of electroreception: they locate their prey in part by detecting electric fields generated by muscular contractions. The platypus' electroreception is the most sensitive of any monotreme.

Although powerful enough to kill smaller animals such as dogs, male platypus venom is not lethal to humans, but the pain is so excruciating that the victim may be incapacitated. Oedema rapidly develops around the wound and gradually spreads throughout the affected limb. Information obtained from case histories and anecdotal evidence indicates the pain develops into a long-lasting hyperalgesia (a heightened sensitivity to pain) that persists for days or even months.
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Echidna Penis:

NSFW:
2pp0bcy.png


Now I can't look at knuckles the same way!

Knuckles_the_echinda.png

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This sounds like a big load of balls... Anyone aware of this situation? Regardless:

WikiLeaks releases today the "Investment Chapter" from the secret negotiations of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The document adds to the previous WikiLeaks publications of the chapters for Intellectual Property Rights (November 2013) and the Environment (January 2014).

The TPP Investment Chapter, published today, is dated 20 January 2015. The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations.

Wiki_Leaks_TPP_Investment_Cartoon.jpg


Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor said: "The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies."

Current TPP negotiation member states are the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei. The TPP is the largest economic treaty in history, including countries that represent more than 40 per cent of the world´s GDP.
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Full press release here: https://wikileaks.org/tpp-investment/press.html

Sounds like some 'continuum' sic-fi future plot stuff: "The Global Corporate Congress (GCC) is the corporate controlled government of the North American Union and consists of the many CEOs of the largest corporations in the future."

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Long reads these next two, but interesting if sad/scary...

Moscow theater hostage crisis

The Moscow theater hostage crisis, also known as the 2002 Nord-Ost siege, was the seizure of the crowded Dubrovka Theater on 23 October 2002 by 40 to 50 armed Chechens who claimed allegiance to the Islamist militant separatist movement in Chechnya.[1] They took 850 hostages and demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya and an end to the Second Chechen War. The siege was officially led by Movsar Barayev.

Due to the disposition of the theater, special forces would have had to fight through 100 feet of corridor and attack up a well defended staircase, before they could reach the hall in which the hostages were held. The terrorist also had numerous explosives, with the most powerful in the center of the auditorium, that, if detonated, could have brought down the ceiling and caused in excess of 80 percent casualties.[2] After a two-and-a-half day siege and the execution of two female hostages, Spetsnaz operators from Federal Security Service (FSB) Alpha and Vega Groups, supported by Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) SOBR unit, pumped an undisclosed chemical agent into the building's ventilation system and raided it.[1]

All 40 of the attackers were killed, with no casualties among Spetsnaz but about 130 hostages died, including nine foreigners, due to adverse reactions to the gas.[3] All but two of the hostages who died during the siege were killed by the toxic substance pumped into the theater to subdue the militants.[4][5] The use of the gas was widely condemned as heavy-handed, but the American and British governments deemed Russia's actions justifiable.[6] Physicians in Moscow condemned the refusal to disclose the identity of the gas that prevented them from saving more lives. Some reports said the drug naloxone was successfully used to save some hostages

It is thought that the security services pumped an aerosol anaesthetic, later conjectured to be weaponized fentanyl, into the theater through the air conditioning system.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

At the time, the gas was surmised to be some sort of surgical anesthetic or chemical weapon. Immediately after the siege, Western media speculated widely as to the identity of the substance that was used to end the siege, and chemicals such as the tranquilizer diazepam (Valium), the anticholinergic BZ, the highly potent oripavine-derived Bentley-series opioid etorphine, another highly potent opioid, such as a fentanyl or an analogue thereof, such as 3-methylfentanil, and the anaesthetic halothane were proposed. Foreign embassies in Moscow issued official requests for more information on the gas to aid in treatment, but were publicly ignored. While still refusing to identify the gas, on October 28, 2002 the Russian government informed the U.S. Embassy of some of the gas's effects. Based on this information and examinations of victims, doctors concluded the gas was a morphine derivative. The Russian media reported the drug was Kolokol-1, either mefentanyl or α-methylfentanil dissolved in a halothane base.

More recently (2012) Riches et. al. found evidence from liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry analysis of extracts of clothing from two British survivors, and urine from a third survivor, that the aerosol was a mixture carfentanil and remifentanil the exact proportions of which they could not determine. Assuming that these were the only active constituents (which has not been verified by the Russian military), the primary acute toxic effect to the theatre victims would have been opioid-induced apnea; in this case mechanical ventilation and/or treatment with opioid antagonists would have been life-saving for many or all victims.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_hostage_crisis_chemical_agent

Fucked up.

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Last thing I had in my head was this story, which could have been so easily avoided if education was sufficient? It shocks me how recent this happened, and how many times it was handed around before finally being identified as radioactive and bloody harmful.

The Goiânia accident was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, at Goiânia, in the Brazilian state of Goiás, after an old radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 were found to have significant levels of radioactive material in or on their bodies.
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Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident


So anyone got any fun or interesting facts that are obscure enough to perhaps be new information to most people? Maybe everything here you've already heard in which case I've failed!
 
If you have a living grandparent who still has a book of four-figure mathematical tables in amongst with all their old school stuff which they may have saved for whatever reason, try multiplying 2 by 2 using logs ..... Note this only works with 4 figure tables, not 3 or 5 figure tables.
 
Vitamin C is made internally by almost all organisms; the main exceptions are most bats, all guinea pigs, capybaras, and the Anthropoidea (i.e., Haplorrhini, one of the two major primate suborders, consisting of tarsiers, monkeys, and humans and other apes).
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Thought to be a mutation, not an advantageous one though. The animals that do produce it make many grams a day and if the animal is ill, it will produce much more, interestingly. We obviously would die of scurvy if we didn't consume it in our diet. As people have done in the past.

Vitamin C is found in high concentrations in immune cells, and is consumed quickly during infections. It is not certain how vitamin C interacts with the immune system; it has been hypothesized to modulate the activities of phagocytes, the production of cytokines and lymphocytes, and the number of cell adhesion molecules in monocytes.
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Amount of vitamin C naturally found in plants and fruit (mg / 100g)

Orange 53
Lemon 53

vs

Kakadu plum 1000–5300
Camu Camu 2800
Acerola 1677
Seabuckthorn 695

Rose hip 426 <- is a good, relatively easily sourced, source of vitamin C.

So while citrus fruits were one of the first sources of vitamin C available to ships' surgeons, they are way down on the list... whatever Kakadu plum is when it's out of bed!

In 1907 a laboratory animal model which would help to isolate and identify the antiscorbutic factor was discovered: Axel Holst and Theodor Frølich, two Norwegian physicians studying shipboard beriberi in the Norwegian fishing fleet, wanted a small test mammal to substitute for the pigeons then used in beriberi research. They fed guinea pigs their test diet of grains and flour, which had earlier produced beriberi in their pigeons, and were surprised when classic scurvy resulted instead. This was a serendipitous choice of animal. Until that time, scurvy had not been observed in any organism apart from humans, and had been considered an exclusively human disease. (Pigeons, as seed-eating birds, make their own vitamin C.) Holst and Frølich found they could cure the disease in guinea pigs with the addition of various fresh foods and extracts. This discovery of an animal experimental model for scurvy, made even before the essential idea of vitamins in foods had even been put forward, has been called the single most important piece of vitamin C research.
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Meh, I'm not sure how interesting this post is!
 
This is a fascinating and grisly story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party

The Donner Party (sometimes called the Donner-Reed Party) was a group of American pioneers who set out for California in a wagon train. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–47 snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas. Some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness.
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BecomingJulie said:
If you have a living grandparent who still has a book of four-figure mathematical tables in amongst with all their old school stuff which they may have saved for whatever reason, try multiplying 2 by 2 using logs ..... Note this only works with 4 figure tables, not 3 or 5 figure tables.
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That's not a fact that's a set of instructions.
 
felix said:
This is a fascinating and grisly story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party
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Just skimming for now but that sounds tragic. Hell on earth 8(

I would blatantly eat someone to stay alive though. I'm just putting that out there! I'd have to pause my vegan diet though is the only thing :\

It's weird to think how many people have died throughout time. I don't often consider/think about it, I mean.

https://youtu.be/o_WBo4sfmi4 This is an eye opener. Truth bombs from Ron Paul. Can see why 'they' didn't want his ideology in power.

And then the video goes on to show how he was cheated out of presidency. Media blackout mainly. It's rather compelling evidence.
 
If you look up the log of 2.000 in a book of 4-figure tables, you get 0.3010. If you double that, representing multiplying 2 by 2, you get 0.6020. And when you look up the anti-log of 0.6020, you get 3.999.

It's just an unfortunate rounding error; the actual figures are more like 0.30103 and 0.60206. 5-figure tables are too precise, and 3-figure tables are too imprecise for the error to show.
 
For my part I will do the proof of mine.

(1) x=4.9999999999........
(2) 10x=49.9999999999........

(2)-(1) is 9x=45 (as the 9s after the decimal place are both infinite they will cancel to zero)

Simplifying to x=5....therefore x= both 5 and 4.999999.....(recurring)

It's an anomoly in our mathematics system and I believe there is a way of discrediting that proof but I don't know it.
 
I just found out that in 1953 there were precisely 53kb of digital memory storage power available on all the Earth's digital technology combined.

George Dyson on the Origins of the Digital Universe

Tangerine Dream said:
Truth bombs from Ron Paul. Can see why 'they' didn't want his ideology in power.
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Indeed. Mostly cos he's so insanely far to the right even Americans are terrified of what would actually happen if he (or indeed his son) ever got significant power 8(

Whilst their "straight-talking" schtick is brilliant in some ways their actual politics are often utterly jaw-dropping in their insane brutality.
 
Shambles said:
I just found out that in 1953 there were precisely 53kb of digital memory storage power available on all the Earth's digital technology combined.

George Dyson on the Origins of the Digital Universe

Indeed. Mostly cos he's so insanely far to the right even Americans are terrified of what would actually happen if he (or indeed his son) ever got significant power 8(

Whilst their "straight-talking" schtick is brilliant in some ways their actual politics are often utterly jaw-dropping in their insane brutality.
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I was just shocked to see how blatant the tactics were to downplay ron paul. Shows just how 'in on it all' the various news channels are and the voting errors/corruption show nefarious actions from another group of people. It seems to me democracy is an illusion. If voting made any real difference they wouldn't let us do it. Sure small things change, but the big issues remain... war, deception, greed, inequality, wealth gap etc. I think every US president who has ever held office, had the biggest campaign funding. Either that or every one for a long time. Yeah I don't remember it well, but well enough to make the point it's all a charade.

53kb, lol. Got me thinking of alan turing, who was a great man who achieved so much in so many areas, and was so harshly punished :/

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/ tewr-ing; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British pioneering computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing's pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic; it has been estimated that the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.

After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he helped develop the Manchester computer and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when such behaviour was still criminalised in the UK. He accepted treatment with oestrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death a suicide, but it has since been noted that the known evidence is equally consistent with accidental poisoning. In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013
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THECATINTHEHAT said:
....therefore x= both 5 and 4.999999.....(recurring)

It's an anomoly in our mathematics system and I believe there is a way of discrediting that proof but I don't know it.
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It's not an anomaly at all; it's entirely correct.

If you have a truly infinite number of nines in the fraction, then if you tried to take the difference 5 - 4.9999999 ..... then you would have 0.000000 ..... 1. But there would be an infinite number of zeros in higher place value positions before that one; and any fraction that begins with an infinite number of zeros must itself evaluate to zero, since until you had finished writing down the entire infinite number of zeros (which will never happen anyway, by definition, since it is infinite) every digit you wrote would be a zero.
 
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