Book of General Ignorance

[Heathen]

http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/esheline/Book_of_General_Ignorance/Mitc_9780307405517_oeb_c01_r1.htm

Many things you THINK you know are wrong.
Things I can find in history books still in publication are wrong.
Who is America named after, what is the number of the beast, what does the moon smell, feel, or taste like?
Did you know that the speed of light can go as slow as 38 mph?

read up and post the ones you were most surprised about.

[mech]

What’s the largest living thing? It’s a mushroom.
And it’s not even a particularly rare one. You’ve probably got the honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in your garden, growing on a dead tree stump.
For your sake, let’s hope it doesn’t reach the size of the largest recorded specimen, in Malheur National Forest in Oregon. It covers 2,200 acres and is between two thousand and eight thousand years old. Most of it is underground in the form of a massive mat of tentacle-like white mycelia (the mushroom’s equivalent of roots). These spread along tree roots, killing the trees and peeping up through the soil occasionally as innocent-looking clumps of honey mushrooms.

I CONFESS THAT NOTHING FRIGHTENS ME MORE THAN THE APPEARANCE OF MUSHROOMS ON THE TABLE, ESPECIALLY IN A SMALL PROVINCIAL TOWN.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
I was under the impression that the largest living thing was

your mother :caruso:


There's spelling errors on this website, just saying.

[Ganon]

This is pretty neat

[cheezdue]

How do dogs mate?

Dogs mate back to back, not doggy style.

When you see a dog doing the mount-and-pump it’s actually performing a dominance gesture. Ejaculation is very rare.

That is why your next-door neighbor’s dog seems to choose children’s legs to hump. It isn’t primarily sexual: it’s establishing its position in the pack and chooses the smallest first.

Dogs actually mate by going in from behind but then getting a leg over so that they end up rear-to-rear. Once this happens the tip of the male dog’s penis (called the bulbus glandis) engorges with blood, making withdrawal impossible.

This is called “knotting” (as in the expression “get knotted!”). It is designed to minimize semen leakage: a classic example of sperm competition, or keeping other dogs’ genetic material out. There’s a period of jostling until ejaculation occurs and the penis eventually shrinks so the dogs can separate.



Thats quite interesting.

[blind]

When did the most recent Ice Age end? We’re still in it.
Geographers define an ice age as a period in the earth’s history when there are polar ice caps. Our current climate is an interglacial period. This doesn’t mean “between ice ages.” It is used to describe the period within an ice age when the ice retreats because of warmer temperatures.
Our interglacial started ten thousand years ago, in what we think is the Fourth Ice Age.
When it will end is anyone’s guess; ideas about the duration of the interglacial period range from twelve thousand to fifty thousand years (without allowing for man-made influences).
The causes of the fluctuations are not well understood. Possible factors include the position that the landmasses happen to be in, the composition of the atmosphere, changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun and possibly even the sun’s own orbit around the galaxy.
The Little Ice Age, which began in 1500 and lasted for three hundred years, saw the average temperature in northern Europe drop by 1°C. It also coincided with a period of extremely low sunspot activity, though whether the two were linked is still being argued over.
During this period, the Arctic ice sheet extended so far south that Eskimos are recorded as reaching Scotland in kayaks on six different occasions, and the inhabitants of Orkney had to fight off a disoriented polar bear.
Recent research at Utrecht University has linked the Little Ice Age with the Black Death.
The catastrophic decline in population across Europe meant that abandoned farmland was gradually covered by millions of trees. This would have led to a significant absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forcing the average temperature down in an anti-greenhouse effect

[Heathen]

I was under the impression that the largest living thing was

your mother :caruso:


There's spelling errors on this website, just saying.

yeah, quite a few.

I saw the mushroom one, pretty neat.

And the dogs one is pretty weird.

[LlamaMaster]

@ dog one: I've seen my Chihuahua mate a couple times, so I can validate this. It always looks very painful.

[English Mobster]

What is the most likely survivor of a nuclear war? Cockroaches is the wrong answer.
Quite why so many of us persist in the belief that cockroaches are indestructible is an interesting subject in its own right.
They have been around a lot longer than we have (about 280 million years) and are almost universally hated as hard-to-control carriers of disease. Plus, they can live for a week without their heads. But they aren’t invincible and, since the groundbreaking research of Drs. Wharton and Wharton in 1959, we have known they would be one of the first insects to die in a nuclear war.
The two scientists exposed a range of insects to varying degrees of radiation (measured in rads). Whereas a human will die at exposure to 1,000 rads, the Whartons concluded that the cockroach dies at a dose of 20,000 rads, a fruit fly dies at a dose of 64,000 rads, while a parasitic wasp dies at a dose of 180,000 rads.
The king of radiation resistance is the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, which can tolerate a whopping 1.5 million rads, except when frozen, when its tolerance doubles.
The bacterium—fondly known by its students as “Conan the Bacterium”—is pink and smells of rotten cabbage. It was discovered happily growing in a can of irradiated meat.
Since then it’s been found to occur naturally in elephant and llama dung, irradiated fish and duck meat, and even in granite from Antarctica.
Conan the Bacterium’s resistance to radiation and cold, and its ability to preserve its DNA intact under these extreme conditions, have led NASA scientists to believe it might hold the clue to finding life on Mars.

[Bodzilla]

How do polar bears disguise themselves?

They cover their black nose with their white paw, don’t they?

image

Adorable but unfounded, unfortunately. And they’re not left-handed, either. Naturalists have observed polar bears for many hundreds of hours and have never seen any evidence of discreet nose covering or of left-handedness.

They like toothpaste, though. There are regular reports of polar bears wreaking havoc in Arctic tourist camps, knocking over tents and trampling equipment, all in order to suck on a tube of Pepsodent.

This may be one of the reasons the town of Churchill in Manitoba has a large concrete polar bear jail. Any bear moseying into town is apprehended and incarcerated there. Some serve sentences of several months before being released back into the community, embittered, institutionalized, and jobless. Formerly the morgue for a military base, it is officially designated Building D-20. It can hold up to twenty-three bears. Polar bears don’t eat during the summer, so some of the inmates aren’t fed for months at a time. They’re held until spring or the autumn—their hunting seasons—so that when they’re released they go off fishing and don’t just wander back to Churchill.
lol'd

[Heathen]

lol'd

that'd be cute :3

[Jelly]

Oh man, I remember getting this book for christmas a few years ago and spending ages reading and re-reading it.

It also has a foreword by Stephen Fry

Also fuck you scotland!

Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from? Not from Scotland.
In fact, not even Scotland is Scottish. Scotland is named after the Scoti, a Celtic tribe from Ireland, who arrived in what the Romans called Caledonia in the fifth or sixth century A.D. By the eleventh century they dominated the whole of mainland Scotland. Scots Gaelic is actually a dialect of Irish.
Kilts were invented by the Irish, but the word kilt is Danish (kilte op, “tuck up”).
The bagpipes are ancient and were probably invented in Central Asia. They are mentioned in the Old Testament (Daniel 3:5–15) and in Greek poetry of the fourth century B.C. The Romans probably brought them to Britain but the earliest Pictish carvings date from the eighth century A.D.
Haggis was an ancient Greek sausage (Aristophanes mentions one exploding in The Clouds in 423 B.C.).
Oat porridge has been found in the stomachs of five-thousand-year-old Neolithic bog bodies in central Europe and Scandinavia.
Whisky was invented in ancient China. It arrived in Ireland before Scotland, first distilled by monks. The word derives from the Irish uisge beatha, from the Latin aqua vitae (water of life).
The elaborate system of clan tartans is a complete myth stemming from the early nineteenth century. All Highland dress, including what tartan or plaid there was, was banned after the 1745 rebellion. The English garrison regiments started designing their own tartans as an affectation, and to mark the state visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Queen Victoria encouraged the trend, and it soon became a Victorian craze.
Hae’ing said a’ that, they’ve nae been idle, ye ken. Scots inventions and discoveries include adhesive stamps, the Bank of England, bicycle pedals, Bovril, the breech-loading rifle, the cell nucleus, chloroform, the cloud chamber, color photography, corn flour, the cure for malaria, the decimal point, electromagnetism, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fingerprinting, the fountain pen, hypnosis, hypodermic syringes, insulin, the kaleidoscope, the Kelvin scale, the lawn mower, lime cordial, logarithms, marmalade, motor insurance, the MRI scanner, the paddle steamer, paraffin, piano pedals, pneumatic tires, the postmark, radar, the raincoat, the reflecting telescope, savings banks, the screw propeller, the speedometer, the steam hammer, tarmac, the teleprinter, trucks, tubular steel, the typhoid vaccine, the ultrasound scanner, the U.S. Navy, Universal Standard Time, vacuum flasks, wave-powered electricity generators, and wire rope.



Fuck you france!


Who invented champagne?
Not the French.
It may come as surprise—even an outrage—to them, but champagne is an English invention.
As anyone who has made their own ginger beer knows, fermentation naturally produces bubbles. The problem has always been controlling it.
The English developed a taste for fizzy wine in the sixteenth century, importing barrels of green, flat wine from Champagne and adding sugar and molasses to start it fermenting. They also developed the strong coal-fired glass bottles and corks to contain it.
As the records of the Royal Society show, what is now called méthode champenoise was first written down in England in 1662. The French added finesse and marketing flair but it wasn’t until 1876 that they perfected the modern dry or brut style (and even then it was for export to England).
The United Kingdom is France’s largest customer for champagne. In 2004 34 million bottles were consumed in Britain. This is almost a third of the entire export market—twice as much as the United States, three times as much as the Germans, and twenty times as much as the Spanish.
The Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon (1638–1715) did not invent champagne: in fact he spent most of his time trying to remove the bubbles.
His famous exclamation, “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars,” was devised for an advertisement in the late nineteenth century. Pérignon’s real legacy to champagne was in the skillful blending of grape varieties from different vineyards and the use of a wire or hempen cage for the cork.
A legal loophole uniquely allows Americans to call their sparkling wines champagne. The Treaty of Madrid (1891) decreed that only the Champagne region may use that name. This was reaffirmed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) but the United States signed a separate peace agreement with Germany.
When prohibition was lifted, American wine merchants took advantage of this loophole, freely selling their own champagne, much to the annoyance of the French.
The saucerlike coupe from which champagne is sometimes drunk is not based on a mold of Marie Antoinette’s breast. It was first manufactured in 1663 (in England), well before her reign. No alternative English topless model has yet been suggested.

[Heathen]

countries of origin my ass

[Maniac]

The Scotland thing is mostly wrong. Alba is its name.

Also fuck you Jelly.

[Needles]

Which animals are the best-endowed of all?




Barnacles. These unassumingly modest beasts have the longest penis relative to their size of any creature. It can be seven times longer than their body.

Most of the 1,220 species of barnacles are hermaphrodites. When one barnacle decides to be “mother” it lays eggs inside its own shell and at the same time releases some alluring pheromones. A nearby barnacle will respond by playing “male” and fertilize the eggs by extending its massive penis, releasing sperm into the cavity of the “female.”

Barnacles stand on their heads and eat with their feet. Using a very strong glue, they attach themselves headfirst to a rock or the hull of a ship. The opening we see as the top of the barnacle is actually the bottom; through it their long, feathery legs catch small plants and animals that float past.

Other well-endowed species are the nine-banded armadillo (its penis extends to two-thirds of its body length) and the blue whale, whose penis, despite a relatively modest proportion in comparison to size, is still the biggest physical organ of all, averaging 6 to 10 feet in length and around 18 inches in girth.

A blue whale’s ejaculate is estimated to contain about 35 pints based on its testes, which weigh more than 150 pounds each.

Whale’s penises were useful. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), there is an account of how the outer skin can be transformed into a floor-length waterproof apron, ideal for protection when gutting the dead whale.

Like most other mammals, whales have a penis bone, the baculum or os penis. These, along with the baculi of walruses and polar bears, are used by Eskimo peoples as runners for their sleds or as clubs.

Other uses for mammalian baculi (“little rod” in Latin) are as tiepins, coffee stirrers, or love tokens. The bones are incredibly diverse in shape—they are probably the most varied of any bone—and are useful in working out the relationships between mammalian species. Humans and spider monkeys are the only primates without them.

Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for penis. This has led two scholars (Gilbert and Zevit in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in 2001) to suggest that Eve was made out of Adam’s penis bone rather than his rib (Genesis 2:21–23). This would explain why males and females have the same number of ribs but the man has no penis bone.

The biblical account also states that afterward “the Lord God closed up the flesh,” the suggestion being that this is the “scar” (known as the raphe) that runs down the underside of the penis and scrotum

Interesting fact....

What’s the word for Napoleon’s most humiliating defeat?

Rabbits.

While Waterloo was no doubt Napoleon’s most crushing defeat, it was not his most embarrassing.

In 1807 Napoleon was in high spirits, having signed the Peace of Tilsit, a landmark treaty between France, Russia, and Prussia. To celebrate, he suggested that the Imperial Court should enjoy an afternoon’s rabbit shooting.

It was organized by his trusted chief of staff, Alexandre Berthier, who was so keen to impress Napoleon that he bought thousands of rabbits to ensure that the Imperial Court had plenty of game to keep them occupied.

The party arrived, the shoot commenced, and the game-keepers released the quarry. But disaster struck. Berthier had bought tame, not wild, rabbits, who mistakenly thought they were about to be fed rather than killed.

Rather than fleeing for their life, they spotted a tiny little man in a big hat and mistook him for their keeper bringing them food. The hungry rabbits stormed toward Napoleon at their top speed of 35 mph.

The shooting party—now in shambolic disarray—could do nothing to stop them. Napoleon was left with no other option but to run, beating the starving animals off with his bare hands. But the rabbits did not relent and drove the emperor back to his carriage while his underlings thrashed vainly at them with horsewhips.
Or this one.

[English Mobster]

Everyone gets pwned by bunnies at some point.
EVERYONE.

[UnevenElefant5]

How many senses does a human being have?
At least nine.

The five senses we all know about—sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—were first listed by Aristotle, who, while brilliant, often got things wrong. (For example, he taught that we thought with our hearts, that bees were created by the rotting carcasses of bulls, and that flies had only four legs.)
There are four more commonly agreed senses:


1. Thermoception, the sense of heat (or its absence) on our skin.
2. Equilibrioception—our sense of balance—which is determined by the fluid-containing cavities in the inner ear.
3. Nociception, the perception of pain from the skin, joints, and body organs. Oddly, this does not include the brain, which has no pain receptors at all. Headaches, regardless of the way it seems, don’t come from inside the brain.
4. Proprioception, or “body awareness.” This is the unconscious knowledge of where our body parts are without being able to see or feel them. For example, close your eyes and waggle your foot in the air. You still know where it is in relation to the rest of you.

Wow. I never knew.

E: I lol'd at the Napoleon one.

[Cortexian]

Also fuck you scotland!
Oh by the way... :allears:

Bagpipes were originally invented in Egypt...

[Cojafoji]

Everyone gets pwned by bunnies at some point.
EVERYONE.
I have a pet rabbit. I can vouch for this statement.

[Bodzilla]

i didnt find this out from the book but from a TV show on cooking that i just watched.
old mate was doign a victorian style Feast and he needed something to wobble his jelly.

Vibrators where invented in Victorian times to cure the disease known as "women hysteria."
and they'd have regular check ups.

lmao.

[Con]

that's hilarious bod, same with the napolean thing. History is funny :)