The Random Facts Thread

[Earthshine]

Pfft. People eats bugs everywhere as part of their normal cuisine, they are nutritious, healthy and packed with protein that otherwise might be absent in their diet.

I really hope that we have grasshoppers farms on a large scale in the future.

[Angel of the Stars]

Oooh, yummy, I mean yuck.

[Angel of the Stars]

Pfft. People eats bugs everywhere as part of their normal cuisine, they are nutritious, healthy and packed with protein that otherwise might be absent in their diet.

I really hope that we have grasshoppers farms on a large scale in the future.

Well, wouldn't that be interesting? XD

My brother and I, two years ago, went to a place called Frankenmuth (I think that's how it's spelled), and in one of shops he bought THREE small boxes of cheddar-covered crickets! XP And he got a sucker/lollipop with a tiny scorpion in the middle!

[Earthshine]

Sounds good to me!

Farming crickets IS actually being seriously discussed in some scientific circles as a productive way to sustain the human population. Everyone is in agreement that we can't keep up our habits and we must find alternative means of sustaining ourselves. Switching to crickets as a protein source instead of the herds of cattle is just one of many ways we can keep ourselves healthy and our planet. Cricket farms take up so LITTLE space and don't produce nearly as much waste as processing cattle, it's a very efficient and clean way to get protein and food. And they taste good too (I've tried them!)

The hard part is convincing the general public that it's good to eat, but they should come around. I mean for the longest time people wouldn't eat tomatoes because they thought they were poisonous.

[Shiyonasan]

A group of cats is called a "clowder" (pronounced cloud-er).

It's fascinating how there's unique names for a group of each respective species of animal in English.

[fafner]

*checks dictionary*

And it's true There doesn't seem to have any special meaning though, unless cats have something to do with coagulation

[Earthshine]

American Sign Language is derived from Spanish Sign Language which is derived from French Sign Language which is derived from Native Americans who used sign language to communicate between many tribes as a 'universal' language. Some tribes used sign language even within their own tribes so often that some tribe members born deaf were not noticed to be so until they were well into adulthood.

[Shiyonasan]

The sentence "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog" uses every letter of the English alphabet. The technical term for that kind of sentence is "pangram".

[Astro Forever]

Interesting! The last time I must have paid attention to this was back when I was reading my Guinness Book of Records, a very long time ago!

I've just looked up the Wikipedia article in French, and some of these were used to test computer fonts or pre-computer keyboards.

Speaking of keyboards, I was in a museum one day and in the exhibition, there were several old typewriters from different years. I was surprised to see that some of them had two sets of letters. Two A's, two B's, two C's, etc. Then I realized that there was actually one 'A', one 'a', one 'B', one 'b', etc. That was before the "caps" key was invented!

There is an example of such a typewriter on this page (scroll down to the one subtitled "Bar – Lock 4 – 1892").

[Earthshine]

That's pretty neat! I would have loved to use them.

I am probably one of the last generation of students that learned how to type initially on a typewriter. I remember learning keyboarding in 3rd grade on a typewriter and then the very next year we had computers with the program Mario Teaches Typing