Tell Me Something I Don't Know

In Japanese fiction you'll sometimes see references to Teito university; perhaps a character has graduated from there, or are working at the place. They may alos read things in the Maicho Shinbun countrywide newspaper; if it's a crime novel a reporter from that paper may come around asking nosy questions.

As it turns out, both the university and the newspaper are nonexistent, and made up by some author or another. Other authors and script writers have picked up on these and use the same names, perpetuating their fictional existence. So if you ever need to reference an imaginary Japanese newspaper you know what to use.

http://janneinosaka.blogspot.com/2009/03/teito-university-and-maicho-sh…

The correct plural form of octopus is octopodes, although it is also the least used. The plural octopi is hypercorrect (meaning it is incorrect based on a mistaken application of linguistic rules), and comes from the misapprehension that the "us" in octopus is a Latin second declension ending. The word is actually treated as a third declension noun in Latin. The word octopuses is also considered a correct usage.

The red triangle on Bass Ale labels is the oldest continuously used registered trademark in the world.

Blimps, like the Goodyear blimp, have a zipper that allows them to open up and deflate if they are torn from their mooring.

The longest escalator in the Western hemisphere is in the Wheaton station of the Washington Metro; the Rosslyn station holds the world's third-longest escalator.

There is a town in Washington state, Point Roberts, which is on the North American mainland but is not connected to any other place in the United States. To drive there, or even walk there, you have to go through Canada.

Maybe everyone knows this one:

http://abstrusegoose.com/63

The Soudan iron mine in Soudan, MN is no longer mined for its rich iron ore, but is instead used to house several physics experiments. It is used for these because of the dense overburden of 1/2 mi. of ore. In one of the caverns, a physicist, unaffiliated with any of the other experiments, is electro-forming ultra-pure copper. A box made of this copper in the cavern is possibly the lowest-radiation place in the universe.

Speaking of copper, Germany was prevented from winning WWII by a piece of copper.

Very early in WWII, Germany was winning the most critical battle of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic. Between the U-boats and Hitler's secret weapon, the magnetic influence mine, shipping to Britain was being sunk faster than it could be replaced. The British had no clue about the magnetic mine; their only countermeasure was to have ships follow the exact course of a previous ship that had been sunk by one, reasoning that there was one less mine along that course.

One day staff arriving at the Royal Navy's research establishment noticed a dark object stuck in a mud bank in the waters just offshore. They managed to get it unstuck and manhandled it back to a laboratory. They noticed an incongruous piece of shiny copper sticking out of the side.

The object turned out to be a magnetic influence mine. Studying it allowed development of an almost completely effective countermeasure (degaussing coils). The rate of loss became less than the rate of construction, and the Battle of the Atlantic shifted to the British.

The piece of copper was the safety plug on the anti-handling fuze. Some German armorer forgot to remove it, otherwise the mine would have exploded when they tried to unstick it from the mud. Either that or James Bond's father stole it from the Germans and planted it on the grounds of the RN research establishment, which is almost as likely.

There are five (convex) regular solids in three dimensions, six in four dimensions, but only four in all higher dimensions.

Oops! Only THREE I meant. (realized it just when I hit POST)

Oops! Only THREE I meant. (realized it just when I hit POST)

Oops! Only THREE I meant. (realized it just when I hit POST)

Speaking of higher dimensions, in five dimensions gravitational orbits are unstable.

In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic pools.

http://www.lordkilgore.com/only-161000-tons-of-gold

The death penalty is still mentioned in the constitution of the German State Hesse. It is de facto inactive though because the federal constitution provides for the abolition of the death penalty since 1949.

Due to a misplaced comma, slavery was legal under the Michigan state Constitution until 1963. The original phrase was:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crime shall ever be tolerated in this state.

Which could be construed to allow slavery as punishment for a crime. In 1963, the new constitution read:

Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude unless for the punishment of crime, shall ever be tolerated in this state.

Grammar matters!

There is a patent for a vacuum cleaner in the shape of a dog, in which the suction nozzle is cleverly disguised as a retractable tail:

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=qCI1AAAAEBAJ

Exposure to gold cyanide complexes makes your fingers tingle.
Eating a whole bag of liquorice and a half a loaf of soy and linseed bread has drastic repercussions.

There you go. There's two. Bargain.

Speaking of footraces, if the coldest is in Antarctica, the hottest must be in Death Valley - a 135 mile uphill footrace in 120 degree heat, from the lowest to the highest part of the contiguous United States. http://www.badwater.com/

We all know about space-filling polyhedra. Crystallography, tesselation, polytopes and pure geometry... Everybody skilled in the art was surprised when an amateur - Russell Towle - discovered spirallohedra and a new way to fill space without gaps,

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/613/

There ya go! Not only new, but new in a new way. Who imagined concave shapes could gaplessly fill space? Nice YouTube animations, too.

It takes seven years for a tulip seed to bloom, and it will look nothing like the parent.

Each seed in an apple will produce a different type of apple tree.

(Both bits of knowledge from Micheal Pollan's Botany of Desire.)

The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department (VA) rounds ups wild horses every summer from Assateague Island, swims them to Chincoteague and then auctions the foals (only a certain number) to fund their department.

OK, here is a 1953 book by a Cambridge University student which is a guide to climbing the buildings of that institution.

The Night Climbers of Cambridge
http://www.insectnation.org/projects/nightclimbers/html/index.html

There's also a Tour de France for prison inmates. I heard about it on NPR just this morning....

Bob Hawkins @ # 9: ... or James Bond's father stole it from the Germans ...

If you read the original novels by Ian Fleming, Bond was active as an international assassin for the British government during WWII: his first hit was taking out a German spy in NYC in collaboration with an American sniper.

Less fictionally, the man who owned the largest number of slaves in Georgia before the US Civil War was named Bond - James Bond. (The runner-up was named Pierce Butler.)

Picked up from an off-hand comment in an article about charter schools in Los Angeles in a recent copy of The New Yorker giving the number of students there, and a wild guess later verified from current census numbers and enrollment reports on the web:

There are more students enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District than there are people living in Alaska.

688,000 students -vs- 686,000 people

(The number of students in LA public schools has been steadily declining, partly because of the thousands who are now in "Green Dot" charter schools.)

James Watson co-authored an ornithology book (title: Spring Migrataion Notes of the Chicago Area) with Nathan Leopold, of Leopold and Loeb infamy.