trick
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Maybe that's where it comes from. In any case, it's a common term used by anyone, here. It's short for "grønnskolling", which loosely translated means "greenskull" or "greenhead".

[Edited by trick on 09-03-2004 at 04:27 PM GMT]

YtterbiJum
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The odds of getting a "perfect deal" in Bridge, meaning each player has all of one suit, is 2,235,197,406,985,366,368,301,599,999 to 1.

Friday was named after Freya, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Venus. Therefore, we should thank a goddess it's Friday.

Yucatán, Mexico, got its name from Indians words meaning "What do you want?" When the Spanish explorers first landed there and asked the natives what the area was called, they said "Yucatán."

In the U.S., pennies aren't legal tender in amounts over 25, unless the receiver agrees to accept them. In other words, if someone owes you more than 25 cents and tries to pay you in pennies, you can legally refuse them, without affecting the debt.

The hydroid is an animal whose children aren't hydroids, but jellyfish. Jellyfishes' children are hydroids, and so on.

If you hold open a frog's mouth too long, it will suffocate.

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This molecule of Yb and J is the strangest thing you've ever seen. The individual atoms don't appear to be bonded. Which isn't so strange in and of itself, except that it's also blocking out the sun.

wackhead_uk
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What does 'kangaroo' mean in australian aborginal dialect?

Mattcrampy
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Which Aboriginal dialect? 'Kylie' is a word for boomerang, but there are plenty of others around.

And, more importantly, why would they have a word for horse? Horses aren't native animals.

Matt

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eytanz
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Australian aboriginies speak languages, not dialects. And Matt's right - saying that "Kangaroo" is Australian for "horse" makes about as much sense as a British person saying "Washington D.C." is American for London.

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DiMono
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You mean it isn't?

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Mattcrampy
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eytanz wrote:
Australian aboriginies speak languages, not dialects.

Eytan's right - everybody listen to Eytan. Austrralian Aboriginals were exceedingly tribal, so each one had their own language. Jury's out on whether they had different culture, but one assumes they must. But that makes asses out of you and me or something.

Matt

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b0rsuk
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Yes, 1 isn't considered a prime number. It is, technically, BUT considering it prime would cause much mess. You would have to include many exceptions and additional statements in mathematical definitions. It would be simply inconvenient.
And in coding, it could be nasty. Algorithm of Euclides would never stop, I guess.
--------------

Random useless fact: my birthday is the same as Albert Einstein's, and I have "314" in my ID card number. (well not id card, but you get the idea, I don't know how is it called in english)

Another one: if you take a map of Poland, take a flight above Poland and throw the map out of the plane, then....
exactly one point of map will touch the point it represents.
(works for every country, of course, but our polish mathematicians proved it)

I hope I don't repeat myself:
Black widow and some other spider whose english/latin name I don't know make the most durable spider webs. They can catch scorpions and small birds with it.
Spidersilk is one of the most durable materials in the world. This is not because it's hard - it's because it can endure 30% stretching without permanent damage.
A vest made of spidersilk would be about 10 times stronger than made of kevlar. Scientists are close to synthesize it. Silkworm approach won't work because spiders
a) are a hassle to feed
b) can't be kept together
A piece of spidersilk material as thick as a pencil would stop a flying Jumbo.

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DiMono
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27 only has four divisors

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eytanz
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As does 8, and 125, and all the other perfect cubes of prime numbers.

By the way, whether or not 1 "technically" is a prime depends on your definition of prime. If you define a prime as a number which is divisible only by 1 and itself, it is. If you define a prime as a number that has only two divisors, it isn't.

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DiMono
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I was always told "only two divisors, those divisors being 1 and itself"

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eytanz
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The second part of that definition is redundant.

In any case, 1 is divisible by 1, and it's divisible by itself, but that doesn't add up to two divisors

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KevG
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Technically 1 is a unit. As for prime numbers the real definition is that a number p is prime if it is not a unit and the fact that p divides the product ab implies that p divides either a or p divides b. While not exactly random the above is on-topic in regards to uselessness.

b0rsuk
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DON'T TRY THIS OR I'LL KILL YOU
A cat is more likely to get hurt when falling from 3rd floor than 10th floor. This is, as they say, because in "3rd floor case", the cat may not have the time to assume right positions (with paws and tail spread etc). It's not height that kills, it's the falling speed - and falling cat tries to slow the fall down much like a parachute.

From 20m distance, a cat can distinguish two sound sources which are 20cm from each other.

Cats can see colours, but usually don't bother. Their brains can distinguish them, that's certain. It takes some effort to teach a cat to see colours. This is because cats prefer work at night, and colours have little value to them.

No one so far proved with 100% sureness what cat whiskers are actually for.

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wackhead_uk
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Sheep can tell the difference between each other purely by looking at each other's faces. They can also remember these faces if they meet them in the future.

I wonder is sheep can tell the difference between all of us if we can't tell the difference between them?

Oneiromancer
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b0rsuk wrote:
A cat is more likely to get hurt when falling from 3rd floor than 10th floor. This is, as they say, because in "3rd floor case", the cat may not have the time to assume right positions (with paws and tail spread etc). It's not height that kills, it's the falling speed - and falling cat tries to slow the fall down much like a parachute.

The statistic I learned was that cats that fall from a short distance, say one story, are usually not injured at all, assumig they have time to twist their bodies around and land on their feet. Cats that fall from medium distances, say up to 10 stories, are usually injured greatly or even killed, while cats that fall from above 10 stories (or whatever the number actually is) have a pretty amazing rate of survival, often only having a few broken bones. The basic reason for this is whether or not the cat reaches terminal velocity.

Bascially, terminal velocity is the speed at which air resistance counteracts the force of gravity enough to make you fall at a constant speed, and not accelerate downward any more. When you reach terminal velocity, the forces on you are balanced, and you feel weightless...you're in "free-fall". It's apparently a pretty relaxing feeling, because it's what saves the cats...when they reach terminal velocity they instinctively relax their bodies, which spreads them out, increasing their surface area and actually decreasing their terminal velocity. Thus a cat that falls from a great enough height could hit at a slower speed than one that falls from a lesser height. Apparently, when they near the ground even the relaxed cats panic a bit and lose formation, which increases the injury/death rate to a higher, but still unusually low, amount.

(And of course there weren't ever any experiments of these kind of things, just observations over the years collected and explained by someone who one of my old Physics teachers read and then related to us.)

Game on,


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wackhead_uk
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Here are some really useless facts:

1. you share you birthday with 1 in 365 people (roughly - dont quote me on this and say it is wrong)

2. if you choose a card and then pick it out of a deck, you have a 1 in 52 chance of picking it out (no jokers)

3. Henry VIII did NOT have six wives. He had six marriages, but not six wives.

DiMono
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If you put 20 people in a room, odds are two will share a birthday. More generally, given n items, once you pick more than root-n you've probably picked the same one twice.

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HSE
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If you put a non-waterproof electronic device underwater, it will keep working until you take it out.

wackhead_uk
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You did realise that the first two were jokes? there's only 365 days in a year so it must be true, and there are only 52 cards in a deck, so that must be true as well...

And yes, my friend submerged a hard drive connected to a computer in a bowl of water and it worked - somehow...

agaricus5
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If the voltages are small enough, pure (distilled) water shouldn't cause a problem in theory, since there should be (almost) no ions in solution to move and produce currents that can short-circuit the components inside a device, although I would guess that eventually some components may begin to disintegrate due to hydrolysis if you kept them in there for long enough.

It's salty water that causes the problem, I believe - if you repeated the "hard-drive in a bowl" experiment, except this time using some very salty water, I would imagine that it would fail, since there will be many ions in solution to create currents and thus potentially short-circuit components.

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wackhead_uk
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I think that in the end he melted it anyway...I have a hard rive in my hand right now and...wait a minute, that's my hard drive!

...
...

b0rsuk
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Cats and dogs don't realise that the reflection in mirror is actually theirs. Chimpansees, gorillas and other monkeys do.

Once upon a time there was a farmer, who was very angry about baboons eating his plants.
So he caught one, and, jokingly, painted its fur white.
Other baboons ran away as soon as they saw the white one. Next day the white baboon has been found dead, killed by his own "friends".
This is the case with many animals especially humans.

Pigeons (!) are capable of abstraction thinking. They call river, ocean, lake etc. water, recognize a tree even if it's shown upside down, without leaves, etc. They don't call vegetables (celery...) "a tree".
Obviously they can't speak, but the experiment was conducted with pictures on sheets of paper. Pigeons received tasty grain each time they classified a picture right.

Crows from New Caledonia are good at using and beakufacturing tools. They may be so sophisticated that the birds return to them when they realise they left it somewhere.
In an experiment, there was a food container inside of a glass jar. Two crows were given two metal wires - one straight, and one in a shape of a hook. After first crow has taken the curved wire, the second one immediately bend (sp?) straight wire into a hook.

Monkeys are about as smart as 3y old children. Althrough they can't speak because of their throat construction, they do well with gestures (the ones used by deaf people), and pictures. They even make their own names for items they never seen before. For example one chimpanse called a duck "water bird", and a nut "stone plum" - hehe. Monkeys use gestures to communicate with each other, and try to talk with cats and dogs (!).

It's not entirely true that dogs don't understand anything, just tone of voice etc. They are quite good at recognizing words. Border colie named Rico reacts to a name of new toy after hearing the name only once, and remembers names of about 200 items.
Cocker-spaniel Denver from England has been trained to help crippled people can do shopping, exchange lavatory paper, bed sheets, hand over the earphone... and sort the mail. No one taught him to sort the mail, but he does it by name lenght.

Bottlenose (direct translation) Dolphins apparently use names. Each dolphin has assigned one specific, unique sound.

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wackhead_uk
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I am named 'eeeh-ah-ah' by my dolphin friends....did I say too much? Oh great, now they're going to break my fins...

How pure is nordic gold?

eytanz
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b0rsuk wrote:
Once upon a time there was a farmer, who was very angry about baboons eating his plants.
So he caught one, and, jokingly, painted its fur white.
Other baboons ran away as soon as they saw the white one. Next day the white baboon has been found dead, killed by his own "friends".
This is the case with many animals especially humans.

It probably has more to do with the smell of the paint than its color, though.

Pigeons (!) are capable of abstraction thinking. They call river, ocean, lake etc. water, recognize a tree even if it's shown upside down, without leaves, etc. They don't call vegetables (celery...) "a tree".
Obviously they can't speak, but the experiment was conducted with pictures on sheets of paper. Pigeons received tasty grain each time they classified a picture right.

Pigeons, and many other animals, are capable of learning symbolic thought. It really shouldn't be confused with abstract thought, it's a totally different thing - though a lot of newspaper and pop-science summaries of these experiments don't make the distinction.

Monkeys are about as smart as 3y old children. Althrough they can't speak because of their throat construction, they do well with gestures (the ones used by deaf people), and pictures. They even make their own names for items they never seen before. For example one chimpanse called a duck "water bird", and a nut "stone plum" - hehe. Monkeys use gestures to communicate with each other, and try to talk with cats and dogs (!).

Everything in this paragraph is very very controversial. Almost all these claims were made by people who stuided chimps raised by humans, not ones in the wild. Also, many results were reported by people and then no other chimp researchers could replicate them. Finally, even in the case where the chimps were shown to clearly act in certain ways, it's really not clear how to interpret it (what does it mean that a chimp tries to "talk" with dogs or cats? Is it really using anything resembling words? Or just trying to make sounds to elicit a response? No one really knows)

It's not entirely true that dogs don't understand anything, just tone of voice etc. They are quite good at recognizing words. Border colie named Rico reacts to a name of new toy after hearing the name only once, and remembers names of about 200 items.

This is the same as the pigeons - animals can be trained to recognize thing's names. That's undenyable. But that doesn't mean that they can do much with this information unless explicitly directed by a human.

Cocker-spaniel Denver from England has been trained to help crippled people can do shopping, exchange lavatory paper, bed sheets, hand over the earphone... and sort the mail. No one taught him to sort the mail, but he does it by name lenght.

I never heard about this, but I'd like to see a precise description of what the dog could do before interpreting this. My dog, when she was young, knew how to change tv channels. That doesn't mean she knew what tv channels were, only that she could make the room quieter by stepping on the remote control.

In general, if you are interested in good sources about the ways animals communication, I can give you some referrences (for instance, Marc D. Hauser "The Evolution of Communication" and Derek Bickerton "Language and Human Behavior", which despite its title, has a lot about animals too). There's a lot of stuff in this field reported in the press and popular science literature that focuses on some very specific results and ignores a whole lot more stuff that puts it in perspective. It's very tempting to look at an animal behaving in a way that resembles human behavior, and think that what's going on is the same thing, forgetting that there are a lot of other explanations too.

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Zmann
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Well I do know one thing. There was a Ripley's Believe It or Not thing going on where I live and I went to see it a while ago.

They had a man up on stage and a dog. The man would ask the audience to give the dog an addition, subtraction, or mulitplication problem with an answer no greater than 20 (to save the dog's voice, you'll see in a minute. I think that the numbers used in the problem couldn't be greater than 100 either.)

The crowd was small, so everyone was close to the stage. The dog would hear the person say the problem, then he would bark a number of times. The number of times the dog barked was equal to the answer of the math problem.

He even asked me to do one, and I said "3*3", and the dog promptly barked 9 times.

Now this could have easily been staged, with the person telling the dog how many times to bark somehow, but I bet Ripley's would test this before actually putting it on the show.

On a related note, the reason I went to see the show is because my friends grandpa was in it. He could lay on nails. With a board of nails on top of him. While people were sitting on the board. Ouch.

wackhead_uk
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I saw something like that in Ibiza - there was a man lying on a board of nails with 50 nails in it (or thereabouts - not much more at any stretch of the imagination) and he got two people to stand on his stomach along with two double decker buses...okay, two double decker bus toys,and that really did look painful I'll tell you now.

Here is another random useless fact (you have probably heard these):

An England football shirt costs £2 to make (they were sold at £40 apiece a few months back)

Ligth has been recorded travelling at 38mph. It was travelling through a 40 zone at the time and...actually, it was through sodium at -270 degrees. or 3 kelvin.

eytanz
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Zmann - Ripley's is an entertainment outfit, not a scientific establishment. Their criteria for accepting something is that it is real - i.e. it's not a man in a dog costume or something like that - but they don't actually check that the way things are done matches the (almost always exaggerated) interpretations given to the shows. I've seen shows like that -
heck, I've participated in one once - it's all a matter of training the dog.

Also, there's a lot of research that seems to indicate that animals can learn to behave in ways that are totally unnatural to them, the same way humans can learn to do things that are very unnatural - like astronauts floating in zero-g, or escape artists learning to dislocate their shoulders to escape straightjackets. Do you want to claim that humans don't need gravity or that we can dislocate our shoulders willingly just because it's possible, in certain conditions, to learn new things?

There's a big difference between saying "Dogs can understand numbers" and "dogs can, after a lot of training, be brought to a stage in which they can understand some things about numbers".


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Schik
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eytanz wrote:

There's a big difference between saying "Dogs can understand numbers" and "dogs can, after a lot of training, be brought to a stage in which they can understand some things about numbers".

Who said that "Dogs can understand numbers" ?

I think the mathematics trick in question was just that - a trick. I'm not sure how it was done, but since there are 20 possible answers, I wouldn't be surprised if there were 20 hand signals the dog had been taught to bark X number of times. Or one hand signal that was repeated X times. It could be a very subtle signal - a small twitch of a finger, for example, so audiences wouldn't see it.

As for the original post about dogs, b0rsuk's point was, and I quote "They are quite good at recognizing words." They're actually better at reading body language than they are at recognizing words, and they're great pattern learners.

what does it mean that a chimp tries to "talk" with dogs or cats? Is it really using anything resembling words? Or just trying to make sounds to elicit a response? No one really knows

I think the original poster was probably referring to primates who are taught sign language attempting to sign to other animals. There was a story I saw recently about Koko, an ape who has a vocabulary of over 1000 words in sign language. She began signing "pain" and then pointing to her mouth. They even constructed a pain chart with a scale from 1 to 10, and when she repeatedly pointed to 9 or 10, they gave her a dental exam and found a tooth that needed to be pulled.

Cocker-spaniel Denver from England has been trained to help crippled people can do shopping, exchange lavatory paper, bed sheets, hand over the earphone... and sort the mail. No one taught him to sort the mail, but he does it by name lenght.

I never heard about this, but I'd like to see a precise description of what the dog could do before interpreting this. My dog, when she was young, knew how to change tv channels. That doesn't mean she knew what tv channels were, only that she could make the room quieter by stepping on the remote control.

Dogs are certainly trained as service dogs to assist handicapped people. I don't see what the big deal is with any of these things - well, except maybe sorting mail by address length, that seems far-fetched (pardon the pun).

Training a dog to retrieve a phone when it rings would be relatively easy. A far cry from "Sit", but it would be very do-able. Changing the toilet paper on command? Assuming you have a special toilet paper holder, such that a dog could just grab the empty roll and drop a new one in it's place - again, complicated but very possible. The dog doesn't care why the person wants these things, his thought process would be more like "When that thing makes that funny noise, if I bring it to that person, I get a treat and petted." Behavior that is reinforced will be repeated. I've got a dog who will, on command, take a bunch of items out of a tiny shopping cart (he's a tiny dog, so the cart has to be tiny). He doesn't understand what shopping is, but if he were bigger and I needed assistance shopping, he could do it.

I've seen that dog Rico on shows before. It was pretty neat - someone scatters a bunch of items (which Rico previously knew) and from a seperate room, where the owner can't see the items or anything, the owner tells Rico to go get two randomly selected objects, and he does. Also, if there is one (and only one) unknown object and you asked him to get it, he would correctly get the unknown object, and even remember what it was called for future retrievals.


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RoboBob3000
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The story about the counting dog sounds a lot like the story of Clever Hans.

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