The Quite Interesting Thread

We have a Factoid Man. Would seem a shame not to use him. So here's a thread for all those quite interesting but odd facts that you may come across and want to share with people. We may be seeing a lot of Colt here....

Anyway, I'll start the proceedings with a little factoid about spiders. As you may be aware, the female of the species is generally much larger than the male - and will quite often like to post-coitally munch on her mate once the job's over and done. So when it comes to the male getting in there, doing his bit for spiderdom, and extracting himself swiftly in once piece, a few species have learned some neat tricks.

Some have taken to catching a fly, wrapping it up in a ball of webbing, and presenting it to their would be conquest. She takes it, starts unwrapping it, they get in there, do the business while she's busy, and nip off while she's finishing her "box of chocolates". Very crafty.

But....it's not as crafty as some species which have learned that they don't even need the fly, but simply present their potential mate with a ball of nothing but web, before getting in there, doing the business and nipping off before she finds that she's been presented with a beautifully wrapped but empty box of chocolates.

Here endeth my factoid. Colt?

This is too much to get into for me, I'll just lose myself completely. So I'll let Richard Feynman do the talking.

Part 1

Part 2


Mind blown.

(As Alquiel will know, this was inevitably going to be my starting point. It is rather more of a rant than a factoid, but maybe you'll find it interesting, if rabidly biased.)


Once upon a time there was a bear. Like all bears it was an omnivore, eating a bit of whatever it could find. This bear would eat plants, fish, carrion and fruits. However the area that it lived in had one type of plant that grew far more abundantly than any other, a big tall sort of grass. Carrion was rare, fish difficult to catch, and fruit scarce, so it came to rely more and more on this one type of plant.

Over time its molars became bigger, and its jaw muscles became stronger, because it had to chew and chew to break down the plant. This gave it a big round face. In addition, because the plant had so little energy, the bear had to slow down, do less, move less, and developed a big tummy to keep all the chewed plant stuff in.

The outside of the thick stems was so low in nutrition, and so hard to eat, that the bear preferred it when he could strip the outer layers off. This could have been tricky to do - bear paws have no thumbs. Fortunately, though, he had been working on a thumb for some time, because it was useful for grasping branches and food and so on. He had allowed a sesamoid bone of his wrist to stick out a ways. It now proved exceptionally useful for holding and stripping the plant. This was clearly a step forward he thought.

But still he had no energy. He’d eat and eat all day, but was so tired he could do little more than mooch slowly to the next bit of big grass. In order to keep going at all he basically had to keep his tummy full, gurgling away. Indigestion was a daily problem.

He saw less of his friends and relatives, because socialising was too energetic, although he’d occasionally pee a hello on the borders of his land. Sex was way too much for him, and he dated less and less. The females seemed less interested too, though he thought this was partly because the young were born so small and seemed to take so long to grow up.

Eventually Man found the land of the bear. They called him a Giant Panda. He seemed to eat nothing but bamboo, which they found odd, because he was, after all, a bear, a carnivore. But they loved him for his round face, his strong black and white colouring, his big tummied cuddliness, and his slow, thoughtful, ambling gait.

But men needed land to work, and the bamboo was cut down, and the slow, stupid, clown-coloured, big-toothed, fat-bellied, frigid, dyspeptic, plant-eating, slow-procreating, over-specialised bear realised that sticking to a single type of food had been a really, really bad idea. It occurred to him that, although man was the cause of the environmental change that was resulting in the death of his species, it had been pretty inevitable, in an evolutionary sense, since he started to only eat bamboo. He had chosen to specialise, and like all specialists, was struggling to compete now that the environment had changed. And as an over specialised evolutionary dead-end, his species’ inability to adapt would inevitably result in their extinction.

Fortunately for the panda, he was so cute that man didn’t want him to die, didn’t want nature to take its course, and spent millions of dollars keeping him and his species alive. For some odd reason though, they never seemed to want to grow forests of bamboo, and give him his home back.

Great Feynman video ! I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by him during my Physics days at University.

Here are two geeky Physics factiods which still keep me awake at night:

1) The number of real numbers is the same as the number of integers
2) The charge on the electron is the same (but opposite in direction/ sign) to the charge on the proton

berylia wrote:Great Feynman video ! I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by him during my Physics days at University.

...I was born in the wrong decade.

A little known fact.

It is illegal to keep Ferret's as pets in:
Queensalnd or Northern Territories, Australia
Portugal
Iceland
California
Washington DC
and New York City.
...and all Brazilian Ferrets must be sterilised.


(I'm looking forward to getting home so I can listen to Mr Feynman!)

berylia wrote:1) The number of real numbers is the same as the number of integers

Actually .. it's not. Real numbers are uncountable.

Love how Feynman gets all excited about the exciting things he's explaining - that's true passion!

Also, love the History of the Panda, was quite amazed when you told me about it the first time.

Grrr. I now want a tee-shirt with that classic WWF style image of a panda and the words "slow, stupid, clown-coloured, big-toothed, fat-bellied, frigid, dyspeptic, plant-eating, slow-procreating, over-specialised bear" underneath it....

Erc wrote:

berylia wrote:Great Feynman video ! I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by him during my Physics days at University.

...I was born in the wrong decade.

Doh, that came out wrong ! I didn't have a lecture by the man in person (although that would have ruled for sure !): shortly before he died, he spoke at a conference that my particle physics lecturer attended; the whole thing was filmed, and we were give a series of particle physics lectures with Feynman speaking on video and my lecturer chipping in. Brilliant stuff, and Feynman was a genius but most of it was over my head, I could never get my head around it. Google "Feynman diagrams" if you want your head to be taken apart !

The other bit of physics that destroyed me was Einstein's General Relativity - that is fantastic stuff on a thought-experiment level, but when you write it down mathematically, it's horrendous !

Awesome stuff though ;o)

Rem wrote:

berylia wrote:1) The number of real numbers is the same as the number of integers

Actually .. it's not. Real numbers are uncountable.

True. But given a real number, you can add the relevant amount to it and raise it to the next integer. So that means integers are uncountable also.

Ahh, what a coincidence for this thread to appear.

My copy of 'The QI Book of General Ignorance' just arrived. I shall dazzle you all with amazing facts once I've fully digested its awesomeness.

berylia wrote:

Rem wrote:

berylia wrote:1) The number of real numbers is the same as the number of integers

Actually .. it's not. Real numbers are uncountable.

True. But given a real number, you can add the relevant amount to it and raise it to the next integer. So that means integers are uncountable also.

You can also subtract the relevant amount from it and lower it to the previous integer, i.e. just concatenate everything after the decimal point. All this proves though is that integers are a subset of real numbers, not that they have the same cardinality. Having a function assign an integer to every real is not sufficient, it would need to be a unique integer - adding up or concatenating however assigns every integer an infinite number of real numbers, which really bears no meaning for cardinality.

Integers being uncountable would also kind of get us in trouble, since it would mean naturals are uncountable and that .. would make no sense! Not to say we're not in trouble, mind you

I really feel like I have a serious lack of education after reading this post, it has made my little brain cells throb almost as much as my final year at university... *sobs*

I must agree with Sharr, I r stoopid.

Rem wrote:

berylia wrote:

Rem wrote:

berylia wrote:1) The number of real numbers is the same as the number of integers

Actually .. it's not. Real numbers are uncountable.

True. But given a real number, you can add the relevant amount to it and raise it to the next integer. So that means integers are uncountable also.

You can also subtract the relevant amount from it and lower it to the previous integer, i.e. just concatenate everything after the decimal point. All this proves though is that integers are a subset of real numbers, not that they have the same cardinality. Having a function assign an integer to every real is not sufficient, it would need to be a unique integer - adding up or concatenating however assigns every integer an infinite number of real numbers, which really bears no meaning for cardinality.

Integers being uncountable would also kind of get us in trouble, since it would mean naturals are uncountable and that .. would make no sense! Not to say we're not in trouble, mind you

Hehe. I think the argument really comes down to what your definition of infinity is. Think of the real number line extending from +N to -N, with the reals and integers running along it. If N is finite (e.g. in a computer), then the number of reals will be greater than the number of integers. However, as you let N approach infinity, the number of integers increases and tends towards the number of reals.

I suppose there is also the worry about the precision of the real numbers as well, although thinking about that starts to make my head spin !!!

Erm...my interesting fact? Your foot is the same length as your forearm

berylia wrote:Hehe. I think the argument really comes down to what your definition of infinity is. Think of the real number line extending from +N to -N, with the reals and integers running along it. If N is finite (e.g. in a computer), then the number of reals will be greater than the number of integers. However, as you let N approach infinity, the number of integers increases and tends towards the number of reals.

I honestly think you're confusing infinity with uncountability. Infinite sets can be countable or uncountable (there's also some reasoning on whether there is something in-between, but neither hypothesis is inconsistent with the rest). According to conventional mathematics (i.e. not taking into account exotic axiom sets) natural, integer and rational numbers are infinite and countable, while real numbers are infinite and uncountable. That despite both sets being infinite there is not the same number of integers as there is real numbers is actually quite an important point in mathematics - not all infinities are the same.

Now i r confusssssed, isn't inifinite errr infinite, like perfection is perfect, it can't be categorised or graded because it is in fact, perfect!? Man why does maths always make your head hurt, it's like showing an Irish man a row of spades and telling him to 'take his pick' haha.

Oh don't. When I was a kid my mother told me that infinity couldn't be imagined. Crafty woman. I spent a lonnnnng time trying it.

Here's a reasonably relevant and amusing picture that has done the rounds in my company's email today - made me chuckle ;o)



I had a Maths lecturer at University who was obsessed with the theory/ myth that Pi may be a rational number - he was a nutcase but very amusing in the pub ;o)

Oh, that's fantastic, love it

Wow monsters revealed.
Episode 1 – The Naga.

Naga is word with a number of meanings
Firstly it is an Hindi word for the hooded cobra, but often used for any snake. Naja is in fact the latin name for the genus of cobra’s who can flatten their necks to produce the hood and comes from the same root
Secondly it also refers to a group of deities in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, all being part serpent, or being able to shape change into snakes or part snakes.
Clearly it is from these ideas that WoW produced our serpent like semi-aquatic friends.

However the name Naga also refers to 2 million people living in the far North East of India. Originally of a more northerly origin (their language(s) are Tibeto-Bumese), they live in a state called Nagaland. There are about 60 tribes, all with their own dialect. Historically they used a trading language called Nagamese to converse together, although the missionaries did their work efficiently and English has wriggled in there and became the official language in 1967. Bizarrely the missionaries did so well, that 75% of the population are active Baptists making Nagaland the only predominantly Baptist ethnic state in the world.

Wow wiki defines the Naga as “Highborne night elves who mutated into vengeful humanoid sea serpents”. It doesn’t mention their religion though.....