Progressive Boink

[webber]

-When Thomas Edison first made electricity available in the home, there was extensive debate as to whether alternating or direct current should be used. Edison supported DC chiefly because his major rival George Westinghouse had come forward in favor of AC; in order to prove his point, Edison toured the country electrocuting dogs and cats to death with AC electricity. For some reason he believed this would cause people to believe AC was more dangerous than DC (it's actually slightly less so). At what could appropriately be called the climax of this tour he executed an adult circus elephant named Topsy in front of an assembled crowd.

This is the best fact so far and the only one I have checked the veracity of

[emily]

Hey anyone who watched The Prestige knows that Edison was a shithead.

[TheEvilGingivitis]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never described Sherlock Holmes as wearing a deerstalker hat, nor had he ever included the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson," in his stories.

Similarly, nobody ever said "beam me up, Scottie" in an episode of Star Trek.

-Sir Isaac Newton did a bunch of crazy things besides discovering gravity, including sticking a needle as far back into his eyesocket as he could to see if anything happened, and, for the same reason, staring directly at the sun for a full day. He had to stay in a dark room for a week in order to recover his sight.
-Only four known individuals have ever been involved professionally in both anime and medicine. One is a voice actor, one created Sailor Moon, One created Neon Genesis Evangelion, and one more or less created anime in the first place.
-On a similar note, Osamu Tezuka stayed awake during long nights by listening to the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey on full-blast.
-The woman currently titled as "Brazil's Most Beautiful Woman" according to a nationwide poll is a transwoman.
-The most likely candidate for the world's largest organism is an enormous interconnected grove of Aspen. Each "tree" is actually part of one huge root system. It weighs six-thousand tonnes, covers fourty-three hectares of land, is eighty-thousand years old, and is named "Pando".
-"Charlie" is a blue-and-yellow macaw that hatched in 1899 and still lives to this day. She was once rumoured to have belonged to Winston Churchill.
-The tardigrade is an animal with a maximum length of 1.5 millimetres. It can survive for a decade without water, withstand any temperature between -200 degrees and 151 degrees Celsius for a variable amount of time (actually it can even withstand being one degree Celsius above absolute zero for a few minutes), can withstand one-thousand times more radiation than any other animal, and can live in a vacuum (including outer space).
-Steven Colbert learned how to talk without an accent and in a deadpan manner by watching television newscasters as a child.

[webber]

-The tardigrade is an animal with a maximum length of 1.5 millimetres. It can survive for a decade without water, withstand any temperature between -200 degrees and 151 degrees Celsius for a variable amount of time (actually it can even withstand being one degree Celsius above absolute zero for a few minutes), can withstand one-thousand times more radiation than any other animal, and can live in a vacuum (including outer space).

they are also adorable

[Mr.5dollarbill]

The College of New Jersey is a terrible, terrible place.

Seconded. I just helped my girlfriend's sister move into her dorm there yesterday. It's horrible. Her room used to be a lobby before they turned it into a four person room. Ugh it still has florescent lighting.



The first TV commercial: a Bulova watch ticking onscreen for exactly 60 seconds.
Apples are 25% air.
A microwaved baseball will fly farther than a frozen baseball.
On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity.
Iguanas have two penises.
Out of all the senses, smell is most closely linked to memory.
Europe is the only continent without a desert.

[Maynard!]

-When Thomas Edison first made electricity available in the home, there was extensive debate as to whether alternating or direct current should be used. Edison supported DC chiefly because his major rival George Westinghouse had come forward in favor of AC; in order to prove his point, Edison toured the country electrocuting dogs and cats to death with AC electricity. For some reason he believed this would cause people to believe AC was more dangerous than DC (it's actually slightly less so). At what could appropriately be called the climax of this tour he executed an adult circus elephant named Topsy in front of an assembled crowd.

This is the best fact so far and the only one I have checked the veracity of

Not only is this true, it was filmed. The footage was released under the appropriate title "Electrocuting An Elephant." I know it's available online somewhere because I've seen it.

[Wat]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkBU3aYsf0Q

[Kristen]