Asklemmy

Eric Blair was a Trotskyist who wrote
Animal Farm and 1984 to spite Stalin,
as Stalin turned on Trotsky,
as Trotsky was a one-world-government proponent,
(with Moscow as its capital),
with the argument that capitalist nations would do anything
to isolate and destroy socialist nations,
whereas Stalin thought that socialism would bring the
Soviet Union enough success to defend itself.
This had far-reaching consequences for
Eric Blair who was participating in the
Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939,
having joined the Trotskyist resistance group
and saw the Stalinists resistance group turn on them
and outright attacked them.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
"The truth is always stronger than the lie."

One is a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
the other is a paraphrase of a paraphrase
of a quote made by Joseph Goebbels,
with the "In British culture" part missing.

Guess which one is which.

(P.S. I disavow German fascism.
It's just the more I learn about the US or UK,
the more I'm surprised that fascism took hold in Germany... (first.))

When a drug company in the 80s scaled up production they accidentally created seed crystals that spread around the entire Earth's atmosphere that prevented other companies from manufacturing a generic drug without it attaching to the seeds and converting to the patented drug.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph#Paroxetine_hydrochloride

You can speeddrift on the top of the tube on Purple, a classic Trackmania fullspeed map, and continuing the SD from the top to the next section without cutting it but with a little overdrift alows you to set World Record if done correctly

If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called 'tonic immobility'.

Here is a photo from Wikipedia:

OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.

I found a paper from 1928 titled "On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates" written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).

In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:

OK, but, that's still not it.... The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:

Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them... Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.

Marx did actually consider human nature

Ancient Egypt was ancient before it ended. The time when Cleopatra ruled is about as close to today as it was to the first pyramids.

The word "America" does not come from Amerigo Vespucci, but is likely an amalgamation of
the Mayan word "Amerristiquiqque" for "land where the wind blows constantly", which is the name of a mountain range in Nicaragua, and the Spanish word "Rica" for rich, like in "Costa Rica" (Rich Coast) as Spanish sailors would ask Carib Amerindians where their gold came from.

The smallpox blankets event where a couple of blankets laced with smallpox were knowingly gifted to Native Americans happened before germ theory existed. The plan was based on miasma theory.

The first iteration of the baptist church was a militaristic commie org. That took over a small town.

I don't exist. I had a meeting and voted. It was unanimous.

Diamonds aren't stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon's more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.

Oh, here's another good gemstone related one!

Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.

Not obscure but apparently a lot of people aren't aware that sheep don't have top teeth in front.

You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.

There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.

The correct spelling of pneumono­ultra­micro­scopic­silico­volcano­coniosis

Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.

&

This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.

That's how it got its name. People would say "X,Y,Z, and, per se, And". (And "sort of" an and). Thus, "And per se And" became Ampersand.

The origin of the name 'Amerigo' Vespucci is 'Emmerich' in German. So the namesake of a contintent is a very demure provincial city close to the German/Dutch border.

Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, testified in defense of evolution at a trial in Arkansas then was on the same plane as Bill Clinton during Clinton's interregnum between governorships. Clinton said he "would have vetoed that bill", meaning the bill mandating equal time for creationism.

The dot above the letter i is called a tittle.

Not that obscure, but most orange cats are male since the orange gene is tied to the x-chromosom, so male cats only need one copy to appear orange. Female cats have to have the orange gene on both x-chromosom to be fully orange.

And usually only female cats can be calico/tortoise since the orange gene is co-dominant, so if they only have one copy of the orange gene both the orange and black will be visible.

A seemingly male calico/tortoise cat is usually intersex and sterile.

Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.

However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up "between" pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.

The Latin meaning of the color ultramarine is "over the sea" Also, they once made a pigment called mummy, which was literally made out of finely grinded mummy.

A large amount of visual inspections on the inside of nuclear reactors is done literally with a camera duct taped to either a really really long pole assembled in sections or a rope. Operators "swim" the cameras to various locations and camera handling is basically an occupation in that field. You also need camera shots for any work being done on the inside of the flooded reactor with, again, really really long poles that end up acting more like pool noodles at such a length. It is silly and difficult work. Also you basically are wearing a trash bag sitting above a hot tub while doing this work. So it is a wild experience.

Chinese scientists worked to create the "humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.

There is a dust layer in the ice at the South Pole about 2km under the surface that interferes with about 5000 photomultiplier tubes spread out over a cubic kilometer in the ice that are watching for light created from high energy muons moving faster than the speed of light in the ice that were in turn the result of the very rare chance of a high energy neutrino interacting with the nucleus of a single atom in the ice.

A lot of people know of the April Fools 418 I’m a Teapot error code, but did you know there’s a full Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol from the same RFC for running a coffee pot server? It even includes an HTCPCP method named “WHEN” to let the pot know it has poured enough cream.