Fun Facts Open Thread [Y-notitlan]

Courtesy of Mr Y-not and via List25.com, here's a list of Twenty-five Things That Sound Too Crazy to Be True But They Are.

A small sampling below.

France was still executing people by guillotine when Star Wars: A New Hope hit theatres

It's true! France wacked off some scummer's head in 1977. Here's the story:

The famous and infamous blade dropped for the last time at Les Baumettes prison in Marseilles on Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of the torture-murder of the naive young girlfriend he had forced into prostitution. Oddly, he had already had another appendage - a leg - amputated as a result of a work accident; it was while recuperating that he caught the fascination of his hospital roommate's 19-year-old daughter, Elisabeth Bousquet.

Though the death penalty was grinding to a halt in 1970s France, Djandoubi was not the last person condemned (the link is French); the guillotine was only abolished with the election of the Francois Mitterand government in 1981.

On Jupiter and Saturn it rains diamonds

Here's the scoop from Gizmodo:

The chemistry is actually pretty simple. Saturn's atmosphere is mostly made up of hydrogen and methane, but when storms crop up, the lightning fries the methane, producing pure hydrogen and burnt carbon, a.k.a. soot. As the clouds of soot fall towards the planet, they clump together forming graphite, and as the pressure builds up closer to the planet's core, that graphite is compressed into pure diamond. So it's literally raining diamonds on Saturn. The scientists think the same thing might be happening on Jupiter.

Does this do us any good? Not right now. It's pretty hard to get to Saturn and Jupiter and to get down to where the diamonds are would be pretty tough since the pressure there is about 100,000 times what it is at sea level on Earth. And if we don't catch them fast enough, the diamonds eventually fall into the core and melt. Nobody wants a melted diamond necklace.

And my personal favorite...

Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire

Yup, Oxford University is pretty damned old. Here's what the Smithsonian Magazine has to say about that:

As early as 1096, teaching had already started in Oxford. By 1249, the University of Oxford had grown into a full-fledged university, replete with student housing at the school's three original "halls of residence" - University, Balliol and Merton Colleges.

Oxford isn't the oldest university, not by a long shot. India's Nalanda University had already operated for hundreds of years and been burnt down by invaders before Oxford got its act together.

What about the Aztecs? Well...

the origination of the Aztec civilization, marked by the founding of the city of Tenochtitlán by the Mexica at Lake Texcoco, didn't come until 1325. Tenochtitlán was captured by Spanish conquerors in 1521, just 196 years later.

Kinda wild.

Speaking of Aztecs, here's an episode of The Tick in which they are featured prominently.

Open thread to chit chat of this and that. It-lan.

posted by Open Blogger at 06:04 PM

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