LOL The random fact of the day thread

The term ‘computer bug’ was coined after a moth flew into into a computer’s circuitry.

The moth was discovered on the circuit board of the U.S. Navy’s Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University in September 1947. After removing the pesky insect, the machine’s operators put out the word that they had “debugged” the computer, which grew into the technical term for identifying and removing errors in computer hardware and software!

 

Moved the trampoline

 

You CAN polish a turd!

 

The packing efficiency of M&Ms is around 74% (from the top of my head).

 

You can drink a gallon of beer or water in less than an hour, you cannot drink a gallon of milk in the same timeframe

(this has something to do with the fat in milk not being readily absorbed into the body, it might be possible with skim milk)

 

So what's the packing efficiency of putting them in a bag?

 

While the story is true, the use of the word bug for unexpected issue in a mechanical system predates this.

 

Packing efficiency is a constant. Provided you're not limited by the number of M&Ms in a given volume, you'll always get 74% packing efficiency.

Ever see those "Guess how many sweets in this jar?" puzzles? A similar method can be used to calculate the number of sweets in said jar with pretty good precision given that (a) the sweet is of a fairly regular shape and (b) the volume of the jar can be estimated.

 

The military hardware known as a 'tank' derives its name from the first tanks being transported to battle in high secrecy inside large shipping crates with 'Water Tank' painted on them.

Voyager 1 is still responding to commands from Earth despite being 187 AU away from earth. (1 AU being the same 92 million miles between the Earth and the Sun).

If light was instantaneous (i.e. didn't travel) the entire sky would be illuminated by stars.

Despite the famous phrase the Ford Model-T was never produced in black.

The Z-Cars were actually yellow since white didn't show correctly in black and white TV recordings.

 

Without wishing to patronise you, I think you missed the joke .

Also, I think the packing efficiency for M&Ms would be different from 74% as they are not spherical - I'd bet on higher.

 

1/3 of all Taiwanese funeral processions include a stripper.

The only food cockroaches won't eat are cucumbers.

The only nation whose name begins with an "A", but doesn't end in an "A" is Afghanistan.

 

Went totally over my head, haha.

I stand corrected, it's a packing fraction of (66.5±1)% in a disordered fashion. 74% is the highest packing fraction (gets closer to this as the structure tends to FCC I guess). Probs should have checked first but there ya go!

source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/...nel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

 

I have no idea what any of this means. I'm just going to laugh to fit in with the crowd....

ha ha HAAAAAA

 

Ah, so they do pack better than spherical particles. I wish I could reference M&Ms in a paper!

And next time, link a paper from Sciencedirect - I can read the whole thing then .

 

It ran out of lives?

Speaking of which, apparently the possibly-a-myth-after-all thing about cats having nine lives dates from ancient Eypt, where a sun God was credited with giving life to four major gods, and four elements. 1 + 4 + 4 = 9 - and this God apparently took the form of a cat for visits to the underworld.

 

Hmmm........

Its red you know, that the Ford Model-T never came in. Everyone knows that.

 

They're later models. After further investigation they were sold in black but not during the first years of production (1908-1914).

Meh, teach me to not check on stuff first lol

 

A magnitude 9 earthquake would be the equivalent of the entire UK's annual energy use in a single event. So that includes things like nuclear power stations and so on. The earthquake which hit in Japan recently was 8.9...

 

It's been upgraded to a full 9.0