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Ivory

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are you lot tryign to kill me off!? cos there are nicer ways to do it! lol :)

 

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people. Apparently! yay for right handed people! :D

 

...tho most of my firneds are lefties...im gonna live the last nine years of my life alone! :phew:

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That's the reason why spiral staircases in castles alway go up clockwise... to give the defender (or the person higher up the stairs) the advantage.

The defender could easily swing their sword at the enemy lower down because of the shape of the stairs, but the attacker couldn't easly attack because the center colunm of the stairs got in the way of their attack swing.

 

A lefthanded attacker didn't have that problem however, as they held the sword in thier left hand.

 

So remeber, when doing an assault on a castle always send your left handed soldiers in first. :phew:

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Wait till the defenders decide to simply push a big stone down the staircase :phew:

 

A few facts:

 

Most stone castles in the British Isles had a layer of lime plaster on the outside walls to make the castle conspicuous. Even today, you can often see traces of this plaster.

 

Despite what film directors seem to think, castle defenders rarely poured caldrons of boiling oil over attackers. Boiling water was much cheaper and less dangerous for the defenders.

 

Many castle seiges ended peacefully. There was a custom by which the defenders and attackers could agree that if the castle was not relieved within 40 days, the defenders would peacefully hand the castle over and leave with their honour intact.

 

An important goal in medieval warfare was to capture a rich enemy so that he would pay you to regain his freedom. Some knights tended to wear very expensive and ornate armour to ensure that the enemy would want to take them alive and not kill them in battle.

 

Under medieval Welsh law, a woman was entitled to divorce her husband if he had bad breath.

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It's illegal to jaywalk, until you get hit by a car... At which point charges are dropped, and raised against the driver of the car in question.

 

Kansas, a completely inland state in the United States, has a law against hunting it's whales.

 

I had a third one, but it's 3:30 AM and my sleepiness has caused me to forget...

 

Oh, that reminds me of something else though. Despite how, in your fatigue, your mind seems to be less active; the very bordering second between consciousness and sleep, your mind is working the fastest it possibly can. Leonardo Davinci (And several others I do not recall) used to perform a ritual where they'd lay down and hold a stone up with their hand, when they'd feel sleep coming onto them. They'd think and concentrate on a problem, and as they fell asleep, they'd drop the stone to the ground to wake themselves up. At that point, they would have the solution to their problem.

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If you place your hand down on a table and spread out your fingers as far as you can you will find that:

The angle between your thumb and little finger is always roughly 90degrees and the angle between your middle finger and thumb is always roughly 45degrees.

 

Assuming you have all 5 of your fingers of course, and assuming that you have no disability that stops you from spreading your fingers out complely.. :phew:

 

Handy (pun intended) if you need to quickly guestimate the angle between two objects.

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The Toyota MR2 was renamed the MR-S for the European Market, as MR2 in French is very similar to "merde" the french word for crap.

 

Apparently left-handedness is a throw back to the period in history where Cro-magnon (early human) and Neanderthals inter-bred. The Neanderthals were all left handed.

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Scientists don't even know what happened to the Neanderthals. The traditional view that they died out because they couldn't adapt to the warmer weather at the end of the ice age is unlikely as they managed to adapt to the cold in the first place.

 

Their brains were larger than those of the competing cro-magnon humans, and they had more advanced tools as well. They are also known to have practiced ceremonial burial with their dead.

 

Another fact that is well known, but still mkaes me laugh. The latin name for our species is homo sapiens, which means 'wise man' :phew::D:)

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It is beleved that the average human intelegence level hasn't changed much over the past few million years.

 

If you were bring a stone-age baby from the past, place it into a normal modern-day family, and treat the same as any other baby, you would be unable to tell the difference between it and any other human once it had grown up.

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The Creationist belief is that humanity actually started out as gigantic intelligent creatures, living hundreds of years on average.

 

The Evolutionist belief is that humanity is constantly growing and changing. Becoming better, smarter, and stronger towards the environment we grow within.

 

Each side has yet to be fully proven right. (Thus, probably both wrong)

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It is beleved that natural evolution has pretty much come to a halt in the human species as natural selection has pretty much disapeared with the development of technology.

 

In nature the weaker animals, animals with genetic illnesses, diseses etc. often don't live long enough to procreate. Thus the genetic alterations that lead to these problems in the animal don't get passed onto future generations and eventualy they are "evolved out" of the entire species.

 

In humans however, not only do people with genetic illneses, diseases, etc. continue to live through the use of technology/medicine, but they often live to have children themselves. This means the genetic alterations that cause these diseases/illnesses can be passed onto future generations and so the "problems" never get evolved out of the human species.

 

Some people use this as an argument for genetic engineering because, in effect, we are ALREADY geneticaly engineering the human species through the use of medicine and technology.

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On the seventh day God created Songs Of Praise, it is still shown on the BBC.

 

The Sound Of Music celebrates it's Fortieth birthday this year. It has been shown on the BBC every Christmas since 1937.

 

During World War II the RAF hid the secret of onboard radar in so called 'nightfighters' by issuing an advertising campaign informing kids that carrots helped you see in the dark. The Luftwaffe actually believed this and always fed their bomber crews extra carrots before night missions.

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Yes carrots do contain Vitamin A which is usefull for the eyes. However most people already have as much Vitamin A as they need in their bodys, thus eating lots of carrots won't make your eyesite better than it already is.

 

It may improve the eyesite of people who have a deficency of Vitamin A but it still won't make them see any better than than anyone else.

 

In fact continualy eating a large amount of carrots is more likely to turn your skin yellow due to the Vitamin A.

 

This was all covered on Radio 2 when they had a doctor in on a Q&a session about health eating.

I also found this webpage https://www.healthyeatingclub.org/info/book...ok/ch2/2-23.htm

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