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Post by Gamblin' Telly on Jul 6, 2020 8:06:58 GMT -5
We all learn things during our lifetime and a considerable part of it will not come to use in any of it but most of those still are in the category of "Good to know". Then there's things, at least in my head, that are so completely, utterly useless to know that you wouldn't even use them as a conversation starter at a party where you hate everybody. I wonder how my brain decided to keep those. So if you're still reading, get ready to know something completely useless: In the EU and especially Germany, everything is standardized. Even the tools and objects you use to test products. So as everything gets tested for functionality, reliability etc., toilets are no exception. A vital part of a working toilet is it's ability to flush human excrement. Surprisingly, even we Germans don't use that for the tests, as much fun as that may sound. Instead a tube-formed net is used, with three brown "filling objects" (I can't be bothered to find out of which material they're made, it's bad enough to know that exists). It has a weight of 1450 gram and is 2,54 cm in diameter at the thickest part. Here's a sketch, complete with the official DIN number:  In practice this is not referred to with it's DIN number but with it's innofficial yet common name: Deutscher Normschiss (German Standard Shit). Thanks for reading and feel free to post (no toilet relation needed) your useless knowledge. |
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Jul 6, 2020 9:20:15 GMT -5
I can say the (English) alphabet backwards faster than I can say it forwards thanks to a draconian nun who taught second-grade reading.
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Post by Prole Hole on Jul 6, 2020 10:53:44 GMT -5
I can recite pi to twelve decimal places.
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Trurl
Shoutbox Elitist 
Posts: 7,490
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Post by Trurl on Jul 6, 2020 11:28:15 GMT -5
I can recite pi to twelve decimal places. I can recite 100 digits of pi, I just don't know where that stretch of digits appears. |
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Post by Gamblin' Telly on Jul 7, 2020 16:19:18 GMT -5
Ok, I have a really fresh one for this:
One of the things we all do at some point is leaving all this earthly shenanigans behind. There's several opportunities what happens to those physical remains of you then. My MiL asked to be cremated and buried at sea. We opted for the version where you let a dissolvable urn ( has to be, yes we have a law for that) go down into the sea. (You can just do the classic version where you stray the ashes into the sea but let me tell you in the raging dutch sea with stormy wind that is not what you want).
This is not completely useless knowledge so far but here comes the party piece:
In case you die in hospice care which is pretty common, there's not a lot left of you because you lose a lot of weight in those last few months/weeks. Bonus if you're stats are -1 leg at the time.
In those cases the good people who do these sea burials will add some weights to your ashes, so the urn doesn't bop up and down in a non pious way.
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber 
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,513 
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 8, 2020 2:06:35 GMT -5
Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were born 4 days apart. A few decades later, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were born 2 days apart.
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Post by Ben Grimm on Jul 8, 2020 5:54:29 GMT -5
Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were born 4 days apart. A few decades later, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were born 2 days apart. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were also born four days apart. |
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Post by Prole Hole on Jul 8, 2020 7:24:18 GMT -5
Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were born 4 days apart. A few decades later, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were born 2 days apart. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were also born four days apart. But on different planets. |
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Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Jul 8, 2020 7:35:59 GMT -5
My favorite fact to throw out is that Dallas is the only major American city named after a Vice President.
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Post by Gamblin' Telly on Jul 11, 2020 13:47:05 GMT -5
Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were born 4 days apart. A few decades later, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were born 2 days apart. On the topic of silly mustaches, Groucho Marx died only three days after Elvis Presley. Guess whose grand artists' death went largely unnoticed. |
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Dellarigg
AV Clubber
This is a public service announcement - with guitars
Posts: 7,513
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Post by Dellarigg on Jul 11, 2020 13:51:33 GMT -5
Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were born 4 days apart. A few decades later, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were born 2 days apart. On the topic of silly mustaches, Groucho Marx died only three days after Elvis Presley. Guess whose grand artists' death went largely unnoticed. Spare a thought for Aldous Huxley, who died on the 22nd of November, 1963. |
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Post by Gamblin' Telly on Jul 11, 2020 14:26:28 GMT -5
On the topic of silly mustaches, Groucho Marx died only three days after Elvis Presley. Guess whose grand artists' death went largely unnoticed. Spare a thought for Aldous Huxley, who died on the 22nd of November, 1963. YMMV, but I'll take going out on an LSD trip over 'out of nowhere' any time. |
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Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Jul 11, 2020 14:27:49 GMT -5
On the topic of silly mustaches, Groucho Marx died only three days after Elvis Presley. Guess whose grand artists' death went largely unnoticed. Spare a thought for Aldous Huxley, who died on the 22nd of November, 1963. CS Lewis did too. |
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Post by Jimmy James on Jul 11, 2020 14:57:59 GMT -5
My favorite fact to throw out is that Dallas is the only major American city named after a Vice President. Whereas Washington, DC is one of two capitals named after an American president, the other being Monrovia, Liberia. |
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Post by Gamblin' Telly on Jul 11, 2020 16:15:51 GMT -5
My favorite fact to throw out is that Dallas is the only major American city named after a Vice President. As most of my friends suffer from even worse ESL than I do, I had to explain to several of them that snow in Texas is not the most egregious thing in Die Hard 2, because it does not occur in Dallas, Texas but Dulles Airport, somewhere where it snows in the US. |
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Jul 12, 2020 0:03:55 GMT -5
I was factory trained to repair the RCA SelectaVision CED Video Disc player, which used an actual needle to play video discs, as well as several other completely obsolete electronic devices. |
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Post by Prole Hole on Jul 13, 2020 10:10:53 GMT -5
I still have a rough working knowledge of CPM, an operating system that, briefly, competed with MS/DOS and has been of absolutely no use since around 1984.
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Jul 14, 2020 14:21:41 GMT -5
I can successfully fold a fitted sheet.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jul 14, 2020 14:22:50 GMT -5
I'm an American yet I can (and do) drive a stick shift.
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Post by haysoos on Jul 15, 2020 10:44:11 GMT -5
Virtually everything I know is useless. My brain seems to be a specialized device intended solely for the collection and retention of useless information, largely to the exclusion of anything useful.
But quite possibly the most useless thing in my head is a grocery list. Back about 40 years ago now, the Nature of Things, a long-running science show on CBC ran an episode on memory and at the beginning of the episode gave a list of grocery items to memorize, which would then be tested later in the show to see how many you could recall.
1. Potatoes
2. Cheese
3. Lightbulbs
4. Wine
5. Steel Wool
6. Toothpaste
Four decades later, and I can still pull this stupid grocery list up, in order. I can't remember the first girl I kissed, or what I did on my 18th birthday, but this grocery list will probably be with me until my deathbed.
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Post by Some Kind of Munster on Jul 15, 2020 11:05:54 GMT -5
I can successfully fold a fitted sheet. She's a witch! Burn her! |
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Post by Prole Hole on Jul 15, 2020 13:34:27 GMT -5
I can recite, word for word, the words to a 1986-vintage UK advert for a Toshiba FST television (Flatter! Squarer! Tube!) I even remember the terrible little tune which had proto-scratching in it. Useless doesn't even begin to describe it.
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Post by Gamblin' Telly on Jul 16, 2020 14:50:21 GMT -5
^^^ Useful if you want to drive abroad! You get a special (in both senses of the term) license if you can’t drive stick in the NL.
Oh wait no one’s ever going abroad again.
No worries there, myname would rather die than set foot in any socialist hellhole with proper healthcare and pension systems. This totally counts since why the fuck do I remember that discussion from years ago. |
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Post by liebkartoffel on Jul 19, 2020 10:23:34 GMT -5
I can identify, with a high degree of accuracy, whether that bald character actor on the screen is Stephen Tobolowsky, Fred Melamed, Robert Picardo, John Caroll Lynch, David Koechner, Richard Jenkins, Kurt Fuller, or Larry Miller. I've also been working on a "guy who always plays some asshole corporate/military/politician-type" mental database, consisting of William Sadler, James Rebhorn, John Heard, Jeffrey DeMunn, Anthony Heald, and John Glover, and so far the results have been promising.
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Post by Ben Grimm on Jul 19, 2020 10:55:16 GMT -5
I can identify, with a high degree of accuracy, whether that bald character actor on the screen is Stephen Tobolowsky, Fred Melamed, Robert Picardo, John Caroll Lynch, David Koechner, Richard Jenkins, Kurt Fuller, or Larry Miller. Melamed is the one I'm always confusing for someone else, though it's inconsistent who I'm confusing him with. The rest I can usually identify. |
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Trurl
Shoutbox Elitist
Posts: 7,490
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Post by Trurl on Jul 19, 2020 11:28:54 GMT -5
All knowledge is useless folly in a universe that's heading towards an entropic heat death.
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Post by Prole Hole on Jul 12, 2022 3:14:00 GMT -5
The only number one song in UK chart history to feature my home city of Glasgow is Abba's Super Trouper.
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Jul 13, 2022 15:11:09 GMT -5
The only number one song in UK chart history to feature my home city of Glasgow is Abba's Super Trouper. I am not familiar with this song, but I sincerely hope it has a section that goes "Speeding and......speeding and.... speeding and....smoking the reefer", or at least contains a "Meow" or two. |
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Rainbow Rosa
TI Forumite
not gay, just colorful
Posts: 3,604 
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Post by Rainbow Rosa on Jul 14, 2022 1:49:29 GMT -5
My favorite fact to throw out is that Dallas is the only major American city named after a Vice President. Whereas Washington, DC is one of two capitals named after an American president, the other being Monrovia, Liberia. Interestingly, the only other country with a capital named after a president is Kazakhstan (sorry, Qazaqstan), which changed its capital's name from Astana to Nur-Sultan about a week after Nur-Sultan Nazarbayev "retired" in 2019.
And the most populous city named after a president, somewhat surprisingly, is Quezon City in the Philippines. (Unless I'm missing something obvious.)
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Post by liebkartoffel on Jul 14, 2022 11:03:39 GMT -5
My favorite fact to throw out is that Dallas is the only major American city named after a Vice President. King County (Seattle) in Washington State was originally named for perhaps the most obscure Vice President in U.S. history--William Rufus King, who died 45 days into his tenure and never actually stepped foot in DC as Vice President (he took the oath of office in Cuba, where he was attempting to recover from tuberculosis, and died two days after returning to his estate in Alabama). In 1986 King County subsequently retroactively renamed itself after Martin Luther King, who had just as little to do with Washington State (which is to say nothing), but at least is a far more noteworthy historical figure. |
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