Obscure facts ya know!

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"sephardi" (as in Sephardic Jew) may mean 'spanish' or hispanic'. it comes from the biblical location סְפָרַד, or Sfarád. which later jews point to to as being the iberian peninsula, or hispania. (though the biblical exact location is disputed)

in modern versions of hebrew, ספרד still translates to spain.

i found this out few days ago toying with hebrew-english translations of country names, many i tried were transliterations of the english, when i got to spain i was stumped!

Interesting!

Some say human intelligence has been steadily but surely declining ever since we ventured from the nomadic to steady, agricultural life....apparently boredom and security makes us dull.

Clearly, it lets many of us live who wouldn’t stand a chance as tribal hunter-gatherers. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if smart individuals still outbred dull ones, but perhaps the reverse is happening.

http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2003- ... sty020.mpg

There is technically no member of the band that is "Pink" from Pink Floyd. The name is actually a combination of the names of two jazz players, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Although one could argue that Roger Waters is indeed Pink, as their 1979 double concept album The Wall is partially based on his life and the protagonist of the album is named Pink. The idea of "which one's Pink" actually originated from their 1975 album Wish You Were Here in, which it's used by an apathetic member of the music industry that's more interested in sales than about the actual band during the song Have a Cigar. So the further naming is kind of a play on that concept since Pink is a depressed rock star that enters into a state of extreme paranoia and isolation. I really like The Wall. I'm a Floyd buff

Yeah, despite the so called Flynn effect.....we might be getting better at solving types of the tests that purpotedly measure so called "IQ", but if we would take an average person 2000 years ago, I bet it would outsmart us in every way.

Some studies indicate even Victorians were smarter than us...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9613000470

I'm going to have to think about that one for a while.

The late movie star of the 30's and forties, William Powell gave his fiancé Jean Harlow, Hollywood's biggest star of the time and the original ''Blonde Bombshell' a one hundred fifty-two carat blue star sapphire ring as an engagement ring.

She was never seen without it, even wore it during the filming of her last two films.

She died in his arms six months after he gave the ring to her.

There is no mention of it among her estate, though there was a rumor that she was buried wearing it.

When most modern ranchers want to collect bull semen to either sell or to impregnate their own heifers and cows, they lead the bull up and have it mount a steer instead of a heifer or cow. An employee uses a device that often looks like a funnel on the end of a pole to collect the semen. The semen is then placed in straws and frozen until it can be used.

Most people usually seem surprised to find out that the bull mounts a steer.

The Scottish mountain range near my home is older than both the Alps and the Himalayas.

The original name of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk was Yuzivka, named after the Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes, who built a steelworks there in 1869, thus attracting a workforce and a population to a previously almost uninhabited area.

Yuzivka as approximation of Hughesivka.

There is a mountain range in the Texas Panhandle called the Amarillo Mountains. The highest peak is about 1/2 mile underground.

Warren Buffett has only sent one e-mail in his entire life.

Gutzon Borglum, the unpleasant, temperamental sculptor of Mount Rushmore Memorial, was a proud member of the KKK, though his family tried for years to deny it.

The earths continents are built off of cratons, the original landmasses of the earth.

the first audio microphones were attached to amplifying horns. before then, people recorded audio by [basically] shouting and yelling into large recording horns attached to a primitive audio registration apparatus. the very first audio recording was made in france, on April 9, 1860, by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville who invented the phonoautograph which made the following recording of a woman singing a verse of "Au Clair de la Lune." -

it was not able to be played back until digital signal processing was applied to the problem of converting waveforms [etched in lampblack on a paper cone] to a digital signal, then back to analog.

What's a craton?