OT: Share useless Trivia!

[Barendd Nobeard]

Re: A couple more...

Again, you are free to correct me if I am wrong.

A woman was elected to Congress (1914, Jeanette Rankin of Montana) before women actually got the vote in the U.S.

She was elected to two terms, one in 1916 and the second in 1940. She is the only person to vote against US entry into both WWI and WWII. In the vote for US entry into WWII, she was the only dissenting vote.

 

[pogre]

A giraffe can survive longer without water than a camel.

You can't touch your nose to your own elbow. (Without removing your arm of course)

 

[NoOneofConsequence]

I'm in Oceania, but I was taught that New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893, and that Australia (which did not exist as a political entity until 1901) gave women the vote in 1902. And that's what is says in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, too.

But although it was the first country to give women the vote, New Zealand was not the first place to do so. That was South Australia, which gave women the vote in the 1870s. I think there was a state of the US that gave women the vote before 1893, also. But I might be misinformed on the last.

Regards,


Agback

Thanks for the correction on the date - I was out by a decade.

 

[Ravellion]

Not to burst your bubble or anything, but any scientist worth his salt knows this.

Of course. That's why I posted it - to show that the previous 'unknown fact' wasn't so special at all.

Rav

 

[Tanager]

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by apsuman


No.

W can be a vowel also.

so there.


g!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

originally quoted by Claude Raines

Really? Under what conditions? I can't think of a single word where W is a vowel. It would be cool to see some examples.

While I can't think of any contemporary examples in English or French using w as a vowel, in many classical Indo-European languages the discreet phonemes now rendered in English by "u" and "w" where allophones of the same phonetic entity.

On a similar note, some ancient indo-european languages like Vedic (and the hypothetical reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European) also allowed "r" and "l" as vowels.

Fun info :
many recorded instances of dragon slaying across indo european mythology describe the actual event using cognate thematics and sturcture. See Cal Watkin's "Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (or How to Kill a Dragon in Indo-European)".

this message brought to you by captain pedantic and the letters y,w,r and l

Tanager

 

[Felon]

The word "dingleberry" is actually in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. While I realize that there are a number of colloquialisms that have made the cut as "real words" (as my grade school English teachers used to say), finding this particular one provided me with both a little surprise and amusement.

 

[Agback]

I do believe that the dimensions are derived from atomic mass then used in formulation with moles (to make a useable weight ratio) and cubics (to change a single dimension into three) to make what we refer to as m (meters), and L (liters). Calories are also based on this, but we wont go into that.

You are in error. The metre is now defined in terms of the wavelength of a particular colour of light defined in terms of a certain atomic phenomenon. But that isn't how it started out, as you might have guessed from the fact that few of those things were understood in 1797.

The metre was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian of Paris. Since this was not a convenient standard, a standard metre was constructed out of metal. When more accurate surveys showed a slight discrepancy, it was (sensibly) decided to stick with the standard that had been actually used in measuring things. Later, this standard metre was measured with an interferometer to determine the wavelength standard that we use today (and which any experimentalist can construct in his or her lab with great accuracy).

The litre was defined as 1/1,000,000 of a cubic metre, and the gram as 1/1,000 of the mass of a litre of water. Imprecision arose because of the thermal expansivity of water. The kilogram was briefly redefined in terms of the density of water at its triple point, and then was replaced by an arbitrary standard.

The mole (that amount of a substance that has a mass in grams equal to the molecular weight of the substance) was not introduced until 1902.

So: the convenience of the metric system is a result of its consistent formal structure, not a result of its correspondence with physical fundamentals.

Regards,


Agback