The faintest sound a human can hear is around 8 decibels, which is the equivalent of a mouse fart at 10 feet.
The faintest sound a human can hear is around 8 decibels, which is the equivalent of a mouse fart at 10 feet.
Last edited by walt; 06-12-2004 at 03:51 PM.
The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.
Before or after the moyl?Originally Posted by Sean
Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.
The only bone in the human body not connected to another is the hyoid, a V-shaped bone located at the base of the tongue between the mandible and the voice box. Its function is to support the tongue and its muscles.
A notch in a tree will remain the same distance from the ground as the tree grows.
X-ray technology has shown there are 3 different versions of the Mona Lisa under the visible one.
Cape Cod was named in 1602 by the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who noted the high numbers of codfish in the coastal waters. ;)
The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
"The Four Feathers," finished in 1929, was the last silent movie ever made.
No species of wild plant produces a flower or blossom that is absolutely black, and so far, none has been developed artificially.
All the moons of the Solar System are named after Greek and Roman mythology, except the moons of Uranus, which are named after Shakespearean characters.
Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
Baseball's home plate is 17 inches wide.
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
Bartholomew Gosnold, during the 1602 trip in which he named Cape Cod, landed on an offshore island and found wild grapes growing. He named the place after his wife. Martha's Vineyard.
He didn't know any limericks so he neglected to name the island of Nantucket! :)
"Always laugh when you can. It is a cheap medicine"
Lord Byron
Take a photo tour of Cape Cod and the Islands!
www.capecodphotoalbum.com
I don't usually go in for these "regular feature" threads, but (as my recent posting history confirms) I'll post just about ANYTHING to create another excuse to promote my OptiBoard "website". I enjoy the advertising! These bons mots are not backed up by my customary standard of posting research. It's mostly what I remember reading somewhere or seeing sometime on TV.
Contrary to what must be the general impression, the plutonium bomb that the U.S. Army Air Force dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 was not the end of U.S. combat operations in World War Two. That was followed in a few hours by another raid using B-29 Superfortress bombers to drop conventional explosives on Tokyo. Called "the last mission of World War Two", this attack had an unintended but remarkably fortunate outcome: It ended a plot by Japanese military officers to overthrow the Emperor and continue the war against the United States.
The Thirty-Fifth President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, graduated from Harvard in 1940 and entered the U.S. Navy. His heroic efforts to save himself and his crew after the sinking of PT-109 are enshrined in American history. Some scholars of the war, however, find it curious, at the very least, that PT-109 was the ONLY American high-speed torpedo boat sunk by the Japanese. Some have even suggested that JFK and the boys just might have been partying a little, in the hours before the episode. Was it Profiles in Courage -- or McHale's Navy?
Early on in the Battle of Britain, the German Air Force unleashed a devastating air raid that partially destroyed the dockyards of London. Winston Churchill later said that the Germans could have ended the war on their own terms then and there, if they had just returned to finish destroying the same target. There were not many facilities in England for receiving cargo by sea.
Returning to those remarkable Harvard alumni, Isoroku Yamamoto studied at Harvard from 1919 to 1921. In 1941, Admiral Yamamoto plotted the attack on Pearl Harbor.
You can find the phrase "Chocolate Nazi" all over the Internet in different contexts. But the original Chocolate Nazi was Ernst "Putzi" Haenfstagel, so-called for his frequent appearances in a glitzy brown Nazi uniform as Hitler's foreign press secretary. An accomplished pianist and confidant of Adolf Hitler, he was known as "Hitler's piano player". And -- you guessed it: Another Harvard alumnus! (Haenfstagel; not Hitler.)
Before World War Two, two Jewish scholars (or maybe it was just one with a coauthor -- kind of sketchy about this one) working in Germany published a technically superb biography of Frederick The Great. Printed with a swastika on the cover, the book was a national bestseller in Germany. Some scholars consider it the single book that contributed the most to the rise of the Nazi party. The Jewish authors (or was it a single coauthor?) were confident that the Nazi anti-Semitism was only a passing episode, and that their friendly relationship with Hermann Goering (yep: THAT Herr Goering) would protect them. The scholars (or at least the one) finally fled Germany shortly before the war started.
The Road to Kandahar sounds like another of those old Bob Hope movies (The Road to Morocco; The Road to Singapore ...). In reality, it's the first chapter of Jeffrey Kramses's The Rumsfeld Way: A National Bestseller when it hit the bookstores in 2002 ... If you are online from an optical dispensary, you may have Certified NASA Space Technology as close as one of your frame boards. See what the critics are calling Your passport to OptiBoard Country. Just point and click in the Signature field (below the horizontal line) on the Web link that gives what is promised: And more!
Last edited by rinselberg; 09-21-2004 at 06:59 AM.
Are you reading more posts and enjoying it less? Make RadioFreeRinsel your next Internet port of call ...
The number 4 is the only number in the English language that has the same number of letters in its name as its meaning.
In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.
November 12, 1997: Antimatter is one of the most recognized and attractive words in science fiction. It's the stuff that drives fictional starships from one side of the universe to the other. Now NASA is giving it serious consideration as a rocket propellant to get around the solar system. A gram of antimatter would carry the same potential energy as 1,000 Space Shuttle external tanks filled with chemical rocket engine fuel. (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Website.)
The Great Karnac explores a scientific paradox involving the Washington Redskins. Rinselberg considers John Kerry's FUTURE military service. Follow the PURPLE web links to The Great Karnac and "Back to the Future!"
Last edited by rinselberg; 10-25-2004 at 10:30 PM.
Those "celebratory shots" -- bullets fired into the air -- that we are seeing at Arafat's funeral in Ramallah. Can be DEADLY. Bullet can return to earth at as much as 120 mph and strike a person. Bullet will be tumbling wildly instead of its normal stable mode, and so may tear open a large wound like the action of a dum-dum (soft lead core) type bullet. Credit Brian Williams of MSNBC
Are you reading more posts and enjoying it less? Make RadioFreeRinsel your next Internet port of call ...
A Dum-Dum is a solid lead bullett that has been cut in at 90 & 180 then Dug out so that it looks a little like the open mouth of one of those creatures on tremors. They open a lot wider and fragment than a soft core bullet.
Very popular with 1920's & 1930's gangster types who for the most part had low powered weapons and wanted to make sure great damage was done.
Chip
This has been a problem in New Orleans and Miami (and possibly other American cities that haven't made it into the news) for years, particularly on New Year's Eve. Two or three years ago three people died in New Orleans as a result of the return of 'celebratory shots'.
On at least one occasion in the long history of our odd little planet there was a functioning 'natural nuclear reactor'.
A Natural Nuclear Reactor In Gabon
Since uranium-235 undergoes self-sustaining fission in commercial reactors and since uranium lies in the Earth in great quantities, Paul Kuroda predicted that naturally operating reactors are possible under special conditions. Not nowadays, when the ratio of uranium-235 to uranium-238 is only about 0.7%, but in the past, when the ratio was much higher owing to the fact that U-235 has a shorter half life than U-238.
The conditions necessary for self-sustained fission would be as follows: a uranium deposit where U-235 was present at the 3% level (the level at which modern reactors operate); the presence of material (such as water, carbon, and most organic compounds) that could moderate, or slow down, the neutrons issuing from fission reactions; and the absence of material (such as Fe, K, Be, Gd) that would absorb the neutrons outright.
In 1972, such a natural reactor was found at the Oklo mine in Gabon, in West Africa. There a 2-billion-year-old uranium deposit some 5-10 meters thick and 600-900 meters wide was bathed by an ancient river. This “reactor” is reckoned to have released 15 gigawatt-years of energy and operated at an average power of 100 kilowatts.
Now physicists at Washington University in St. Louis have defined a likely mode of operation for this ancient reactor and confirmed one of the proposed mechanisms of its self regulation. According to Alex Meshik (am@wustl.edu), the reactor cycled on (producing heat that boiled the nearby water) typically for 30 minutes and then off (when the now-scarce water failed to moderate the nuclear fission process) typically for 2.5 hours.
This cycling saga is deduced from microscopic mass-spectrometric examination of the rock samples from the area. Meshik says that tiny alumophosphate grains found in the material of ancient reactor preserve a signature of the reactor's operational mode. "It is fascinating that xenon isotopic composition measured today provides us with such pristine timing records for a natural reactor operated 2 billion years ago." (Meshik et al., Physical Review Letters, 29 October 2004.)
The epic 1957 movie Bridge On The River Kwai, directed by David Lean, will forever be associated with the famous Colonel Bogey March that figured so prominently in the film's soundtrack. During World War Two, the old marching tune acquired some very strange lyrics! CLICK HERE TO SEE ...
For more about the fictional movie Bridge On The River Kwai:
http://www.optiboard.com/forums/show...8&postcount=76
For the REAL story of the bridge that still spans the River Kwai:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bri...the_River_Kwai
... and http://www.biography.ms/The_Bridge_o...iver_Kwai.html
The real bridge that spans the River Kwai (2004).
Turn up the SOUND on your PC and CLICK on the record icon below:
"March Of The River Kwai" featuring Mitch Miller and the Gang
Track length 02:29courtesy of Boy Scout Troop 1853
Springfield, VA (USA)
Inspired by the famous 1957 movie "Bridge On The River Kwai", Mitch Miller's cover of the movie soundtrack was a big commercial success: For more, see What was the name of that bridge again?
Last edited by rinselberg; 12-01-2006 at 12:46 PM.
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