Really TRUE odd factoids

[Chris S]

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement is a Palestinian-led civil rights organisation.
It's initials, BDSM, are also used to refer to bondage, domination and sado-masochism as a sexual practice.

 

[Profpointy]

Liberace successfully sued the Daily Mirror for claiming that he was gay.

Good - serves them right for pruriently publishing something that they had no business sticking their filthy beaks into

 

[Profpointy]

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement is a Palestinian-led civil rights organisation.
It's initials, BDSM, are also used to refer to bondage, domination and sado-masochism as a sexual practice.

A pal of mine is a professional photographer whose initials were SM so naturally enough he set up a website called something like smphotos or whatever it was. He couldn't understand why he kept getting rather unsavoury enquiries until someone explained to him. His actual speciality was pictures of food and wine and such for trade magazines

 

[Profpointy]

Clearly not 15% by volume as evidenced by that fact that we can see through the air, even in a train station.

So what about by mass? Google tells me that the average breath is about 1g and the average rate is about 12 breaths a minute. This leads to 720g/hour. 15% of this is 108g/hour of skin. This may not seem a lot but if you stayed for a full day in a train station it would mean that you inhaled nearly 2.5 bags of sugar worth of skin.

Seems somewhat unlikely to me. I tried to find some source for this but all that I came up with was a load of sites of the "15 fun facts that you won't believe" variety.

My apologies for being picky but the whole point of this thread is that the factoids are true. I'll be happy to believe this but I will need to see some credible data.

A litre of air weighs about 1.3g, so a cubic
metre weighs 1.3kg (more that you might think but there it is). I somehow doubt there nearly 200g of skin per cubic meter; that's half a pound in old money

 

[Blue Hills]

Aulophobia is the fear of flutes

 

[Beebo]

Good - serves them right for pruriently publishing something that they had no business sticking their filthy beaks into

It was very brave because homosexuality was illegal at the time.
The sad thing is that he denied being gay for this entire life, even denouncing homosexuality.

 

[Profpointy]

It was very brave because homosexuality was illegal at the time.
The sad thing is that he denied being gay for this entire life, even denouncing homosexuality.

That too is sad of course

 

[Chris S]

Johnny Vegas trained to be a priest.

 

[Blue Hills]

Johnny Vegas trained to be a priest.

yep - covered in his book/early autobiog I think - well worth a read.

 

[ClichéGuevara]

The air you breathe in a train station is 15% human skin.

If you thought leaving the train station will save you from inhaling skin, just so you're aware about 80% of the floating specs you see in a sun beam are also skin.

Air is monitored at hundreds of sites around the world. It's usually presented as a mass to volume ratio, micro grammes per cubic metre, or by volume as parts per million. The main one for 'dust' would be particulate matter smaller than 10 microns, and a value of 100 ppm for particulate would be very high, even at a London roadside. The graph below shows the levels in Beijing that caused so much concern prior to the Olympics.

For the 15% figure to be accurate, that would equate to 150,000 parts per million, just for skin, so would be an even higher figure when the other emissions and size fractions were added.

Basically, it sounds like nonsense, or more clarification is needed on how they reached their conclusion.

 

[Chris S]

Sally Lindsay made her first TV appearance at the age of seven as a member of St Winifred's School choir.

 

[Chris S]

'Welsh' is an Old English word for slave.
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/wales/articles/find-out-how-wales-got-its-name/

Welsh Lives Matter!

 

[Joey Shabadoo]

Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, is now older than Patrick Stewart was when the show began.

 

[Blue Hills]

As late as 2013 all US chickens were fed arsenic in their diets.

(not necessarily as alarming as it might sound if you look into the history of arsenic though)

 

[Blue Hills]

Sobering melancholy one.

In the few days after sept 3 1939 about 400,000 animals were killed in London. Mostly household pets,cats, dogs, birds etc, but also London zoo's poisonous snakes and insects etc.