the roslagsbanan commuter rail is the only actively used 2 ft 11 3⁄32 in railway in the world.
…honestly, with a wikipedia article that extensive it hardly qualifies as “obscure”.
so, bonus:
the siljan area of sweden has a history of building observation towers:
the tower in the black-and-white photo, which started this trend, was financed by a man who made a fortune making and selling multiplication books. basically like books of logarithm tables but only for multiplication. 1×1 to 9999×9999.
also that entire area is europe’s largest meteorite crater:
For a minute I thought that meant the railway was ~3ft long
The tiniest park in the USA is located on a city street corner in Portland, Oregon. Mill Ends Park
Edit: I fell down a rabbit hole. Corrected myself having posted it originally as “world’s smallest park” which is how I knew it - apparently it carried that distinction until Feb this year when a tiny space on a Japanese street (which was created in 1988) formally applied for, and was awarded the Guinness book of records title of World’s Smallest Park.
Also this one just popped into my head - the Guinness Book of Records was originally conceived as a means of settling arguments by compiling factual “records”. The original argument related to a shooting trip in England in which the Managing Director of Guinness Breweries partook, where a missed shot led to a disagreement about the fastest game bird. The realisation that arguments such as this would be commonplace, and that no resource existed to settle such matters - the niche for capturing these types of facts was identified and the book was born.
The older editions are lot more encyclopaedia like too, some super detailed descriptions of things like cars - right down to the gear ratios.
I just touched my nose. Until I posted this, I was the only person who knew this fact.
That is the most obscure fact in this thread so far.
But I’ll give you one of my favourite obscure-ish fact instead: baby sloths are so inept, they sometimes mistake their own limbs for tree branches, grab hold of them with one limb, let go of the actual branch, and fall out of the tree
Naw. Steve, the FBI agent assigned to you, and Dave, my roomie, were just discussing it.
I think Steve kinda likes you…
The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.
The things at the end of shoelaces are called aglets
The thing at the back of your throat is called the. “Hangy downy thingy”
Most military simulation databases have a classified and unclassified version. In the unclassified database a spefic russian apc is usually set to be indestructable.
It’s used for a quick test when setting up a federated sim. Drop one in the sim and trigger a detonation at the location. It should either be destroyed or not in all the instances.
Could do with a bit more explanation on this one.
It sounds like inception. Is this a way that generals being tested can tell if it’s a real test or not?
So military simulation for actual militaries is used for training. There are programs like OneSAF a training and stimulation RTS or VBS2 a first person shooter.
They can all be networked together using a federated system. Similar to Lemmy there is no master instance. Each program is trusted and manages it’s entities like tanks and soldiers.
They each have their own database that can be classified or not. The classified database has very accurate stats and the nonclassified has general simple stats. Think people leaking classified documents on War Thunder to get their tank better stats in the game.
Because each system is using it’s own database you don’t want some system using classified data and some not. So in the unclassified databases a spefic unit type is set to invulnerable.
So if it’s supposed to be an unclassified stimulation you fire up the sims and create one of the special units. You then trigger a detonation like an airstrike at the location of the unit.
The unit should be fine as it’s invulnerable. You then go and check each stimulation and if it’s been destroyed that one is using a classified database and you need to change it out before letting people use the system.
What follows is a guide on how to hurt your hand. No not do it. Do not “do it just a little bit”. I actually strained my hand when I first discoverd this and honestly dont want anyone hurt because of my comment:
dont do this
If you wrap your fingers around your thumb (like a closed fist with your thumb on the inside and pull the thumb down you can hurt your hand.
There are no extant recordings of George Orwell’s voice
Also, the word doublespeak isn’t from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.
Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.
Newspeak was inspired by Esperanto, because George Orwell had an annoying Esperantist roommate. “bad” in Esperanto is “malbone,” literally “un-good.” “terrible” in Esperanto is “malbonege,” literally “very ungood.”
Also Esperanto at the time was hoped to be the universal second language of the working class. That did not mean esperantists were any less annoying then though
they meant well! honestly Esperanto has a really positive community, even still. but I can see how it’d get on someone’s nerves.
Ancient Egypt was ancient before it ended. The time when Cleopatra ruled is about as close to today as it was to the first pyramids.
It’s actually even wilder than that.
The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it’s name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that’s pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.
Cleopatra had a kid with Julius Caesar lmao. When you think of it like that it makes more sense.
One of my favorite facts is that while the first pyramids were being built, there were still Mammoth roaming some northern European regions (never checked whether this is true or not but I’ve heard it so many times that I want to believe it is true)
When a drug company in the 80s scaled up production they accidentally created seed crystals that spread around the entire Earth’s atmosphere that prevented other companies from manufacturing a generic drug without it attaching to the seeds and converting to the patented drug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph#Paroxetine_hydrochloride
Of course it was GSK with paroxetine
Ok, that’s absolutely bonkers
And it’s merely a hypothesis, there is no proof. Also we can assume that chemical plants are aware and have taken precautions, but it still happens. Back in the day it was speculated that chemists caried microcrystals around in their beards. This problem has been around for a while. One of the coolest hypothesis has been put forward by Rupert Sheldrake. He thinks that there is something in nature akin to memory. A force of nature as you will.
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Diamonds aren’t stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon’s more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.
Oh, here’s another good gemstone related one!
Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.
hexagonal molecular structure
You know, I think I’ve heard something about hexagons on the internet before …
So if i bake a piece of amethyst in my oven i get cutrin, or we are talking about much greater temperatures?
NGL I’m not very familiar with the technical details, but I know quartz is pretty temperature sensitive and starts to get damaged about 400F iirc
It’s possible special conditions are needed to really succeed, like low/no oxygen or a long duration at a lower temperature.
But theoretically, the answer to your question is “yes”
That’s cool AF :3
Barnacles, relative to body size, have the longest penises in the world
The tsetse fly has the longest sperm, regardless of body size.
Fish mate inside of a sea cucumber’s anus.
The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via “traumatic insemination”. The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over – all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.
Imagine if that were us, eh. #MeToo would be a different movement I bet.
You can speeddrift on the top of the tube on Purple, a classic Trackmania fullspeed map, and continuing the SD from the top to the next section without cutting it but with a little overdrift alows you to set World Record if done correctly
