A "Well, bugger me!" thread

[Heresson]

Re: A "Well, bugger me!" thread

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
Stuff what I learned today-

The tadpoles of the South American Paradoxical Frog are three times larger than the adult frogs.

frogs
btw, we need a frog smiley.
and
- vomit
- better crying
- crab
ones.

In the "Little Ice Age" of the 16th century, polar ice spread so far south that Eskimos reached Scotland.

what did they do there? Do the Scotts have some minimal ammount of Inuit blood in them?

The Inuit launguage has only three vowels and no adjectives. If you want to count in Inuit, once you get past 12 you have to switch to Danish.

How do they say "big fish"? they have to use something to compare stuff.

The Welsh language has no word for "brown". Until fairly recently, it had no word for "blue" either.

hard to believe. why?

The Andaman Islanders still cannot make fire. They save it for centuries after lightning strikes.

I cannot make fire without the matches either. Though in kindergarden, we used many ways to strike fire.

The penis of the Nine-banded armadillo is two-thirds the length of its entire body.

I expect a lot of horny humans trying to mate with a nine-banded armadillo after the news spread.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by LordShiva
Andaman Islanders

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4144405.stm

They have luck. Austrians wanted to colonise these islands (Nicobares) in XVIII century, but resigned. How different would these islands look now!

Originally posted by LordShiva
You're only 3 inches tall?

[onodera]

Re: A "Well, bugger me!" thread

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp The Andaman Islanders still cannot make fire. They save it for centuries after lightning strikes.

They should be introduced to the wonders of modern civilization as soon as possible.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Heresson

what did they do there? Do the Scotts have some minimal ammount of Inuit blood in them?

Mostly they got shot and then put on public display before being tossed in a hole after they started to stink. Pretty standard European treatment of strange foreigners really.

Austrians wanted to colonise these islands (Nicobares) in XVIII century, but resigned. How different would these islands look now!

Probably not much. Like all tropical locations I suspect Europeans would have died in huge numbers of malaria and yellow fever before modern medicine found cures.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Re: Re: A "Well, bugger me!" thread

Originally posted by Heresson
what did they do there? Do the Scotts have some minimal ammount of Inuit blood in them?

Not a lot. Drifted around Orkney and Hebrides harbours in kayaks to mutual bafflement, as far as I can determine.

hard to believe. why?

Why was the sky bronze in the writings of Homer?

Several explanations have been made, but the most convincing to me is because defining things according to colour is a cultural attribute, and in Homeric times they were more interested in how shiny it was than what colour it was. Why bother defining things in terms of colour? Why not in terms of fluffiness or bendiness?

Another explanation was that in ancient times our retinas worked differently and we perceived colours in different ways. Welsh, like Homeric Greek, is an old, old language.

Then again, settling on a few dozen recognised names of "colours" on a vast spectrum of possibilities is a pretty weird thing to do anyway. Why is "brown" any more important to define and recognise than "taupe" or "puce" or "International Klein Blue"?

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Here's a little beauty for you. This was a state-of-the-art piece of supplementary medicine from 80 or so years ago.



Lovely isn't it?

It contained a nice big helping of radium. And was to be strapped against the scrotum to restore vigour and potency.

Yes, that's right. Radium. Snuggled up against the love spuds. It should surprise nobody that its inventor died of bladder cancer.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Radium suppositories.

[Heresson]

well, but they did have to call bronze colour something... did they consider it yellow, or what?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
Granted, this probably has more to do with the fact that the female probably has a lot of armor plating to get through.

The male must be thinking. Oo yah! Look at the armor plating on that one.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by Heresson
well, but they did have to call bronze colour something

Why? You've already said what it is, so why go on and tell us something we already know?

[Heresson]

huh? I'm asking what was brown or blue for them, if they weren't considered separate colours.

[Ecthy]

Originally posted by Heresson
did they consider it yellow, or what?

The stupider part of it. Hobsbawm was right in his asessment of the intelligence of most people of our trade.

[Theben]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp


Radium suppositories.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by Heresson
huh? I'm asking what was brown or blue for them, if they weren't considered separate colours.

You're struggling with this, aren't you? Why do you need a specific word for "blue" or brown"? What's no important about those particular points on the colour spectrum?

[Kuciwalker]

If you haven't noticed, we actually do have names for practically every point in color space. Not terribly formalized, of course, but we have a way to describe them. It's not too much of a stretch to think they had some way of describing color that consists of mostly 440-490nm light.