What is one very interesting fact you know?

I posted this one before but I'll post it again because, wow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War, was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978.

Trees gain most of their mass from the air. It seems logical to think they pull up nutrients and stuff from their roots, but really most of the actual tree part is made of carbon, which the tree has pulled out of the air via CO2.

Likewise if you're working out and trying to lose weight, the weight you're losing isn't actually expelled as sweat, but it's mostly breathed out. If you lose twenty pounds of fat, that fat was lost as 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, which you exhaled.

Interesting to me, but I don't know about others, is the etymology of the word laconic.

Expressing much in few words, after the manner of the Laconians or Spartans; brief and pithy; concise; brusque; epigrammatic

• Websters (1928) on-line dictionary
• Wordnik

I might have mentioned this before but here goes.

Sparta, whose fearsome warriors are now legendary due to the film 300 and its creation all those memes, is the administrative region or capital of Laconia, Greece.
In ancient times the people of Laconia were known for expressing themselves using very few words often being blunt or pithy with their remarks.
The word laconic shifted in meaning from person of Laconia to person using few words or frugal with speech.

This trait was exemplified before Phillip II of Macedon devastating attack on Laconia.
During his campaign, when camping outside he sent the message.

"You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land,
I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city."

Their laconic reply:

"If"

Strawberries and raspberries aren't berries, but bananas and watermelon are.

Most metals appear silver/white. However gold appears yellow because of relativistic effects on it's electrons, which move at 58% of the speed of light, changing it's absorption spectra

I was once fascinated by the fact that Andromeda Galaxy looks much larger than the moon from Earth - or would, except that most of it is too faint to see without a telescope. I guess most people know that these days? Anyway, here’s a picture with the moon for scale.

This is stretching the boundaries of your poll, but here's something that came to mind.

Most of us know of that old game or strategy of how two people can divide something fairly (such as a cookie): One person does the division or cut, and the other person gets to decide which half they will take. The one who divides is incentivized to make as even a division as possible, so as not to receive a smaller portion. I find this pretty clever.

Well, there was, apparently, a similar game or process that allowed and incentivized three people to fairly participate in a transaction. I find it pretty clever, too. Here's a description (which is a bit long winded, for which I apologize).

New Fair / Hand in the Cap

New Fair could be used as a way to settle a dispute if two people were negotiating for the purchase or sale of an item. The rules varied, but, in a common version, you and I might have a couple of items that we might want to exchange. Let’s say we each have a cloak that we want to trade. But I think my cloak is worth a lot more than yours. We can’t agree on the difference in value, or even if there is a difference in value, so we agree to play this game called New Fair.

We bring in a friend who acts as an umpire. We all three put some money in a hat or cap held by the umpire. So the umpire is playing, too. The money in the cap is a random amount of money. It’s basically the prize. Now, you and I both place our hands in the cap, and the umpire estimates the value of each cloak. He’s basically the appraiser, and he determines that my cloak is worth 3 shillings, and yours is worth 2. So, if we’re going to make a deal, you have to give me a shilling to make up for the difference in value. Each of us then pull our hands out of the cap.

If we agree with the umpire’s valuation, we pull our hands out opened. If we disagree, we pull our hands out closed.

If both of our hands are open, it means that we both agree with the umpire’s appraisal, and we complete the trade. You add in the extra shilling, and the umpire keeps the money in the hat. He’s basically done a good job: he’s made a good appraisal that allowed us to complete the trade, so he keeps the prize money.

Now, if both of our hands are closed when we remove them from the cap, it means that we both disagree with the umpire’s appraisal. So we don’t trade our cloaks, and you don’t owe me the shilling. But, again, the umpire keeps the money in the cap. The reason why he keeps the money is because he, again, has done his job: he came up with a number that was too low for me, and too high for you, but it was somewhere in the middle. So, even though we don’t accept the number, he keeps the prize money in the hat.

But, if you and I remove our hands from the cap, and one hand is open, and the other is closed, it means that one of us liked the umpire’s valuation, and the other didn’t. In that case, again, there’s no deal, so there’s no trade. But the person whose hand was open and agreed to the valuation gets to keep the prize money in the cap.

That money in the cap was the incentive for each of us to agree with the valuation. If I agreed with the umpire, it meant that I either made the deal with you, or I got to keep the money in the cap. And if you kept your hand closed because you disagreed with the umpire’s valuation, you kept your cloak, but you lost the money you put in the cap. So, there was an incentive to agree with the valuation if the number was close to what you wanted.

Of course, the umpire was also risking his money in the cap, as well. So, there was an incentive for the umpire to be fair and reasonable in his valuation. Otherwise, he would lose the money he placed in the cap. To put it another way: The only way the umpire would lose his money in the cap is if his valuation was either too high, or too low, so that only one of us agreed to it. As long as the value was somewhere in the middle, we would both either accept or reject the number, and he would keep the prize money.

Transcribed from an episode of http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ , my favourite podcast.

I am going to rebel against your rules and offer TWO facts that get me.

1. In the United States, a Tomato is legally a vegetable, even though its biologically a fruit; this was important enough for the Supreme Court to rule on it.
2. The "Patootie" in the term "Cutie Patootie" is most likely a bastardization of "Potato". So calling someone a cutie patootie is calling them a cute potato, which feels rather insulting in a weird way.

Anytime you're in a party of 23+ people, you can try this out! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

A human-chimpanzee hybrid is theoretically possible and experiments have been made.

In 2001, some dude on ICC convinced GM Nigel Short^[1] that he was playing Bobby Fischer. The ruse went on for at least 24 games.

The first film projectors^[2] were manually operated and incredibly flammable, resulting in numerous fires that, for a brief period, created a negative association with the rising art. I don't have a source for that, that is something I studied long ago in books that are not even in English. That didn't really make a mark in world history, and it is almost forgotten even in the places where the fires happened. But here's one example. Film stock in storage caused many fires over the years and requires extra care to this day.

^[1] English grandmaster and 1993 World Chess Championship challenger against Garry Kasparov.
^[2] Yes I'm pretty much ignoring Edison, because the kinetoscope was meant for private viewership, and that is not the collective experience we came to identify as the birth of cinema as an art form.

Galaxies are dim to human eyes, and so would be intergalactic space. There are only 3 that are easily visible to the naked eye absent light pollution, being the large and small Magellanic clouds and Andromeda Galaxy, at 2.5 million light years away. More difficultly, there is the Triangulum Galaxy at 6 million light years and a few others at 10 million light years. Since the apparent brightness of objects decays to the square of their distance, a Galaxy that's 5 million light years away and 1.000.000 times more distant than nearby stars would have to be a trillion times brighter than them to appear similarly bright to us. The Andromeda Galaxy is estimated to be "only" 26 billion times brighter, albeit it's twice as close so it's light counts 4 times more. This means that no galaxy outside of ones with Quasars in them can be seen from over 10 million light years away, and most spaces in the universe will have no more than half a dozen galaxies visible in them, and even the most crowded ones will only have a few dozen, much unlike the comsic web that actually surrounds anyone in an intergalactic space.