Really TRUE odd factoids

[Beebo]

On the LD50 toxicity scale, which measures how much of a substance you would need to kill half the people it is given to, Botox measures just 0.000001 mg/kg. In other words, a lethal dose for a 70kg man would weigh less than one cubic millimetre of air.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine...20I6QpUopoIJ-TBwI2porUFm6fK-57fFXvLhXed5h7_IE

Some good facts.
“A couple of kilos would kill every human on earth. It is so dangerous that it is manufactured in military installations and at around £100 trillion per kilo it is also the most expensive substance ever made.”

 

[Joey Shabadoo]

Feaguing was the medieval practice of putting a live eel in a horse's rectum to make it seem livelier when being sold.

 

[rikki]

Feaguing was the medieval practice of putting a live eel in a horse's rectum to make it seem livelier when being sold.

That is a really true and really odd factoid

 

[Chris S]

42 out of the first 43 American presidents were directly descended from King John (1167-1216). 26 of those were also 7th cousins or closer.

 

[Dave7]

A bit grim but approximately 50 people each year die in the river Thames.....most of them being suicides .

 

[yello]

42 out of the first 43 American presidents were directly descended from King John (1167-1216). 26 of those were also 7th cousins or closer.

There's some counterintuitive stat type thing that suggests (and I'm making this up but something like it is true) that 97% of Brits can trace their lineage to King Canute, or somesuch. One of those genealogy programmes remarked upon it.

 

[Tenkaykev]

There's some counterintuitive stat type thing that suggests (and I'm making this up but something like it is true) that 97% of Brits can trace their lineage to King Canute, or somesuch. One of those genealogy programmes remarked upon it.

The further back we go up the ancestry tree the closer we get to each other.

 

[Chris S]

There's some counterintuitive stat type thing that suggests (and I'm making this up but something like it is true) that 97% of Brits can trace their lineage to King Canute, or somesuch. One of those genealogy programmes remarked upon it.

According to the geneticist Adam Rutherford, "Everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, Drogo, Pippin and Hugh."
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford

 

[CharlesF]

@Chris S Very revealing and interesting!

 

[classic33]

Want to know the temperature but don't have a thermometer? Use a cricket’s chirps instead.
To get a rough estimate of the temperature in degrees fahrenheit, count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and then add 37. The number you get will be an approximation of the outside temperature.

 

[classic33]

A second isn't what you think it is. Scientifically, it's not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom".

 

[Tribansman]

A second isn't what you think it is. Scientifically, it's not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom".

Jesus, I bet you're fun at parties!

 

[Beebo]

A second isn't what you think it is. Scientifically, it's not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom".

I get the feeling they have reverse engineered that data to fit an existing measurement of time.

 

[Blue Hills]

Until 1907 you couldn't marry the sister of your dead wife.

(lucky for the dad of a schoolfriend of mine - he did just that - somewhat later)

 

[classic33]

Contrary to what you may think, humans don’t smell with their noses. It’s actually the brain that does the job. The more than 10 million olfactory nerves in your nose are only responsible for capturing smells and sending them to the brain, where the smells are then identified.