Mammals generally get 1.5 billion heart beats in their lifetime regardless of size.

From an old edition of the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge:

An airplane’s tire will hydroplane at a speed in knots equal to 9 times the square root of the tire pressure in PSI. So if your tires are inflated to 36 PSI, sq.rt 36 = 6 * 9 = 54 knots. If there is standing water on the runway, you will have no braking authority or steering control from the wheels, you will have to maintain control of the aircraft with the flight controls, and you cannot rely on short field stopping figures from the POH if it requires applying brakes above 54 knots.

I got that out of the 2003 edition; I don’t know if it’s in the current issue.

If you stare at the elbow of someone you are high-fiving, you’ll never miss the high five.

The Dreamcast SH4 processor has an instruction FTRV to accelerate FP32 4D Matrix*4-Vector multiplies. As far as I understand it, it was the first home console CPU that allowed you to perform effectively multiple MAD operations in one instruction. But it has a bit of a latency penalty.

I’m Western esotericism, names have power beyond simply being signifiers for the thing they represent- they embody some part of the thing they represent. The word “fire” contains some intrinsic “fire-ness” but not the whole picture. After all, everyone has different names for the same thing. It is thought that everything has a “true name” that perfectly encapsulates all things about it in their entirety, and this true name could be found by intense study, meditation, or etymology. The Bible pays a lot of attention to names in this way. Adam, the first man, names all the animals. Genesis pays a lot of attention to the names of places, and a lot of stories in Genesis are essentially folk etymologies of locations. God’s own name is of special importance, and its meaning was revealed to Moses by the Burning Bush. Even today Jews believe that even saying God’s name is powerful and dangerous and that only the High Priest would be allowed to say it once every year during Yom Kippur. Jewish folklore says that even this name is merely a part of God’s true name, and that Moses pronounced a longer more complete form of The Name to part the Red Sea, and some systems hold that there are even longer and even more complete forms that have been known to rabbis in the past.

There’s a trick with our loan servicing XML imports. If you pre-encode the property address into a [Comment] tag inside the [CIF] section, the system auto-fills it in three different screens, even though none of them actually pull from that tag offcially. I don’t know why it works, just that it does. Doesn’t really save me more than about thirty seconds but when you’re boarding dozens of loans per week, it can add up.

The great opera singer Enrico Caruso was the 18th of 21 children, only 3 of whom survived infancy.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote an opera about coffee addiction.

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky was afraid his head would come off while conducting, so he would hold his chin with one hand while doing so.

The girlfriend of composer Erik Satie wore a corsage made of carrots, and she was a painter and liked to feed the paintings she made. Satie once threw her out the window but she survived.

Wsl uses the 9p protocol from plan 9 to interact with windows and vice versa

There is only one model structure that can be put on the category of small categories for which the weak equivalences coincide with honest equivalences of categories. It’s called the Joyal-Tierney model structure. You can define the suspension of an object in any model category as the homotopy pushout to two terminals, then define an abstract notion of a sphere in any model category by setting the 0-sphere as the coproduct of two terminals and the (n+1)-sphere as the suspension of the n-sphere.

A small category is a CW-complex if and only if it is a groupoid.

It is possible to get access to nitrogen in antimatter chemistry before entering the nether.

There is (or at least used to be) a debug command to write-protect a hard drive. No idea what it’s for or why such a thing exists, but you flip a certain bit from 0 to 1 and drive no write. I won $100 once at work with this knowledge. We had a training course about how much better the new version of windows at the time was and how much harder it was to break - so hard they’d pay $100 (in early 2000s money) to anyone who could unrecoverably break their demo windows install during the 10 minute presentation. The instructor (who worked for Microsoft) said he’d been doing this for 6 months and they’d never had to pay out that prize before, much less 30 seconds in.

Reign of Kings, a medieval online PvE survival game had a bug where the 360 rotation camera could be used in 3rd person mode to look inside of walls of other players. You could even access their chests if they built them against the wall (which they all did).

This meant that you could loot everyone’s bases without even breaking in. The game went through several major updates with this bug still in place. My brother and I used it extensively.

One day there is a major update and the release notes mention about how they have now finally fixed the “glitch where players items disappear from chests when placed near walls”.

Real G’s move in silence like lasagna.

Hermeticism is the origin of most conspiracy theories if you dig deep enough. Truly the OG brainworm

“Bizarre” is the only word from the Basque language that is regularly used in the English language

(Can’t wait to be proven wrong in 5… 4… 3…)

Not sure if I can call this knowledge since I don’t know if it’s true, but I think I identified a couple of women from the 8th century CE who are mentioned in some Irish annals as actually being the same person. As far as I know there’s next to no discussion of these women on the internet and there are basically no historical records of them, at least. So I guess if I’m right it’s very obscure?

The women in question are Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh and Eithne ingen Cinadhon (and possibly also the legendary Eithne mother of Tuathal Techtmar)