Trivia Thread!

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

 

[Deimos]

I don't know if this qualifies as Trivia or not... I kind of think it does....
Anyway...
Met a friend for a leisurely breakfast this morning (about 9AM).
I prefer IHOP, but it was more convenient for him to meet at a more ...ummm. ...prestigious place** (and since he was "buying" I gracefully acquiesced... yes, twist my arm, please do 😄).
So two hours later we leave; he walks one direction to his car, and I walk the opposite direction to my car.

** How prestigious? ...
This is what was parked next to my car ....

2024 Lamborghini (this is a stock pic... I had to search to find a pic that matched what I saw....but I DID clearly see "Lamborghini" on the back.)
This one shows the name in white... the one I saw , everything was solid black.
I had never seen one in real life, never mind that close.
(No doubt the owner was aghast at having to park next to a 2006 beater Corolla with faded paint 😄)

 

[Deimos]

Isn't that like when a black cat crosses your path. Maybe something good is coming your way.

Which reminds me of my (third, I think) Apollo mountain bike. Having parked it in the bike shed at work, at the end of the day I was getting ready to leave when I noticed the tyres were flat and the chain was rusted. I was puzzled by this and thought someone had been messing with me. It turned out my bike was sitting right next to this identical though much older Apollo.
That weekend I had my bike stolen. So that on the Monday evening I dragged the old bike back home, bought a new chain and puncture repair kit, and was soon cycling an Apollo to work again.
Trivial I know, but it's a funny old world sometimes.

The SOB that stole your bike...never brought to justice I guess?...

 

[Backyard Professor]

The “Q” in Q-tips doesn’t stand for “quick” instead it stands for “quality.”

The dot over a lowercase “i” or “j” is called a tittle.

Another one is bananas are technically berries, but strawberries aren’t.
And, I learned this one a while ago, but just wow... the word for the smell of rain after a dry spell: petrichor

 

[Deimos]

The dot over a lowercase “i” or “j” is called a tittle.

There's a little more to it... The word "tittle" is used in the expression "every jot and tittle" which has been around a very long time.
How long?
The "backstory" is biblical (as so many backstories are..."Nihil sub sole novum" 😉)
What follows is [partly] from a website on the written Hebrew language...

In Matthew 5:18, Jesus emphasizes the eternal nature of God’s Word: “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (KJV).

His statement naturally prompts the question of what’s a jot? And what’s a tittle?
Jots and tittles have to do with letters and pen strokes in Hebrew writing.
A jot is the tenth letter in the Hebrew alphabet and the smallest. It was written above the line and looks to us rather like an apostrophe:

Jot is related to our modern English word iota, meaning “a very small amount.” The Hebrew spelling is yod or yodh.
A tittle is even smaller than a jot. A tittle is a letter extension, a pen stroke that can differentiate one Hebrew letter from another. An example can be seen in the comparison between the Hebrew letters resh and daleth (or dalet):

The resh (on the left) is made with one smooth stroke. The daleth (on the right) is made with two strokes of the pen. The letters are very similar to each other, but the distinguishing mark of the daleth is the small extension of the roof of the letter:

That extension is a tittle.

It's used idiomatically to mean "every single detail," every bit of minutiae.
We might say: "I want these instructions followed to the last jot and tittle."

Another one is bananas are technically berries, but strawberries aren’t.
And, I learned this one a while ago, but just wow... the word for the smell of rain after a dry spell: petrichor

Boy do I know petrichor... in the desert that smell is magnified.
Had to look it up... I asked AI if the post-rain smell in the desert was only petrichor, petrichor and something else, or just something else.
Here's the AI answer (but I have read it elsewhere on non AI sites):

Yes, it's petrichor but it's a very specific, potent version made famous by the creosote bush, mixed with the earthy scent of geosmin from soil bacteria, creating that distinct fragrance. So, it's both—petrichor is the general term, but the desert's unique mix of plant oils and soil microbes makes it special.

 

[Backyard Professor]

There's a little more to it... The word "tittle" is used in the expression "every jot and tittle" which has been around a very long time.
How long?
The "backstory" is biblical (as so many backstories are..."Nihil sub sole novum" 😉)
What follows is [partly] from a website on the written Hebrew language...

In Matthew 5:18, Jesus emphasizes the eternal nature of God’s Word: “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (KJV).

His statement naturally prompts the question of what’s a jot? And what’s a tittle?
Jots and tittles have to do with letters and pen strokes in Hebrew writing.
A jot is the tenth letter in the Hebrew alphabet and the smallest. It was written above the line and looks to us rather like an apostrophe:

Jot is related to our modern English word iota, meaning “a very small amount.” The Hebrew spelling is yod or yodh.
A tittle is even smaller than a jot. A tittle is a letter extension, a pen stroke that can differentiate one Hebrew letter from another. An example can be seen in the comparison between the Hebrew letters resh and daleth (or dalet):

The resh (on the left) is made with one smooth stroke. The daleth (on the right) is made with two strokes of the pen. The letters are very similar to each other, but the distinguishing mark of the daleth is the small extension of the roof of the letter:

That extension is a tittle.

It's used idiomatically to mean "every single detail," every bit of minutiae.
We might say: "I want these instructions followed to the last jot and tittle."




Boy do I know petrichor... in the desert that smell is magnified.
Had to look it up... I asked AI if the post-rain smell in the desert was only petrichor, petrichor and something else, or just something else.
Here's the AI answer (but I have read it elsewhere on non AI sites):

Yes, it's petrichor but it's a very specific, potent version made famous by the creosote bush, mixed with the earthy scent of geosmin from soil bacteria, creating that distinct fragrance. So, it's both—petrichor is the general term, but the desert's unique mix of plant oils and soil microbes makes it special.

Do you study Hebrew? It's a heckuva language to learn. I did so years ago, but never got fluent, but I did gather a boatload of dictionaries and Hebrew lexicons and biblical studies. It's fascinating to look deeply into.....

 

[Deimos]

Do you study Hebrew? It's a heckuva language to learn. I did so years ago, but never got fluent, but I did gather a boatload of dictionaries and Hebrew lexicons and biblical studies. It's fascinating to look deeply into.....

HAHA....no...you give me too much credit.
But I did know that "jot and tittle" appeared in the Bible in one of the gospels (and in the context of the quotation I cited) so I thought I would elaborate on your post, specifically about the origins of "tittle".

You're new here.
I've only been here a llttle more than three years, but the members who interact on this [trivia] forum know that [metaphorically speaking,] "if you ask me what time it is, I will build you a clock."

 

[Backyard Professor]

HAHA....no...you give me too much credit.
But I did know that "jot and tittle" appeared in the Bible in one of the gospels (and in the context of the quotation I cited) so I thought I would elaborate on your post, specifically about the origins of "tittle".

You're new here.
I've only been here a llttle more than three years, but the members who interact on this [trivia] forum know that [metaphorically speaking,] "if you ask me what time it is, I will build you a clock."

And when you build a clock, I shall tell time by it mellon nin.....

 

[Deimos]

Coming up 3 March 2026 TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE (for some folks... moi is one, living in Arizona)

Visibility Chart courtesy of AI

Summary of Visibility

View Type	Regions
Entire Eclipse	Western North America, Eastern Australia, New Zealand, Northern Japan.
Full Totality Only	Central/Eastern U.S. (some phases missed), most of East Asia.
Partial Only	Central Asia, India, most of South America.
Not Visible	Europe, Africa, Middle East (it will be daytime).

Some people (such as moi) will see it pre-dawn on 3 March, some will see it late evening (but prior to Midnight) on 3 March.

Global Timing Differences
The "early morning vs. late evening" answer changes depending on where you are in the world because the eclipse happens at the same Universal Time (UTC) everywhere:

• Early Morning (March 3): All of North America, Central America, and Western South America.
• Late Evening (March 3): Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Eastern Asia.
• Middle of the Night: The Pacific Islands (e.g., Hawaii).

 

[Erestor Arcamen]

The light hitting your eyes is a mix of the brand new and the ancient. While your lightbulbs create "new" photons instantly, the sunlight coming through your window was actually born in the Sun’s core over 100,000 years ago, slowly bouncing its way out before the 8-minute sprint to Earth. Mixed in is starlight from across the galaxy that has been traveling for millions of years. When you step outside, you’re literally being showered by prehistoric energy!

 

[Deimos]

I saw this on another forum, and thought it was funny and was going to post it in "The Other Joke and Meme Thread."
And then I thought, "I wonder if this is true about Paleontologists actually adopting the name. "
So I looked it up and, sure enough, it's really true.

From Wikipedia (excerpted):
A thagomizer (/ˈθæɡəmaɪzər/) is the distinctive arrangement of spike-shaped osteoderms on the tails of some stegosaurian dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.

The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name. Cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name "thagomizer" in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term sometimes used within scientific circles, research, and education....

The term was picked up initially by Kenneth Carpenter, then a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993.[2] Thagomizer has since been adopted as an informal anatomical term[3] and is used by the Smithsonian Institution,[2][4] the Dinosaur National Monument,[2] the book The Complete Dinosaur[5] and the BBC documentary series Planet Dinosaur.[6] The term has also appeared in some scientific papers describing stegosaurs and related dinosaurs.

Go HERE to read the complete entry.

 

[Idril Celebrindal]

Desert sand is colder than an ice in the morning.

How do I know this? Well, a while ago, my friend dared me to stand barefoot on an ice ring, and I stood there for 10 mins without my feet getting cold. A week ago, my family went camping, and I left my tent barefoot at 6 AM, and my feet were FREEZING. I had to go on my knees and get my feet of the ground every 30 seconds because they were burning so bad. I ended up giving up after a few minutes, and went back to my tent to get shoes (I didn't wear them at first because they get full of sand whenever you go up a dune.)

The moral of the story is that if you ditch shoes you can learn a lot of useless things.

 

[Server Room Gremlin]

The Earth seen at night.

Something peculiar which you may see here:

The bright lights in the middle of Australia here are not city lights at all. Very few people live in that area, and most of the population lives on the coasts. They are in fact bushfires, shining brighter than the lights of the cities.

 

[Deimos]

 

[Idril Celebrindal]

If you put (no subject) as the subject of an email, when sent the email will look exactly the same as it would if you hadn't entered a subject.

I'm not sure if this is some ground-breaking discovery I've made, or if everybody but me already knew this.

 

[Deimos]

If you put (no subject) as the subject of an email, when sent the email will look exactly the same as it would if you hadn't entered a subject.

I'm not sure if this is some ground-breaking discovery I've made, or if everybody but me already knew this.

I didn't know that.
Does no subject have to be in parentheses?
Not being funny or snarky in asking this.
Everyone knows when entering "data" formatting is paramount .

 

[Idril Celebrindal]

I didn't know that.
Does no subject have to be in parentheses?

Yes, it does have to be in parentheses. It doesn't need to be bold, though.

 

[Deimos]

Yes, it does have to be in parentheses. It doesn't need to be bold, though.

Good to know this, all of it. Thank you 🙂

 

[Vorondil]

Facts about Oranges:

• In their naturally occurring climate, oranges aren't orange, they're green. It's only cooler climates that cause the chlorophyll in the skin to break down and reveal the orange colour.
• Oranges are a cross between a mandarin and a pomelo.
• The word orange is derived from the Sanskrit word naranga which means ''orange tree'' and is believed to have roots in a Dravidian language (likely Tamil or Malayalam) meaning "fragrant" or "fragrant fruit".
• So oranges aren't orange, and orange isn't orange.

 

[Deimos]

Facts about Oranges:

• In their naturally occurring climate, oranges aren't orange, they're green. It's only cooler climates that cause the chlorophyll in the skin to break down and reveal the orange colour.
• Oranges are a cross between a mandarin and a pomelo.
• The word orange is derived from the Sanskrit word naranga which means ''orange tree'' and is believed to have roots in a Dravidian language (likely Tamil or Malayalam) meaning "fragrant" or "fragrant fruit" (naru).
• So the oranges aren't orange, and orange isn't orange.

"Orange" you glad you learned all that? 😁