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Trivia Thread!
O, Christmas tree. O, Christmas tree. How lovely are your…spiderwebs? Here in America, we decorate our trees with shiny baubles, snowflakes, angels, and family keepsakes. However, Ukrainians prefer a much different type of decoration—cobwebs. The popular Eastern European tradition began in the late 19th or early 20th century with a folktale called The Legend of the Christmas Spider. The story spawned an opera and a beloved Christmas tradition still popular to this day.
 
Here in Australia, the trees decorate themselves with spiderwebs... somehow.... 🤔

I've seen bushes pretty much entirely coated with the webs of these little guys:

Austracantha - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org
They're known as Christmas spiders. It might be because they look like little colourful ornaments, but they also like making their webs in summer, around Christmas. They like living together in vast colonies, with all their webs overlapping and joining together.
 
The Times Square New Year's Eve Ball Drop event (Info courtesy of Wikipedia and various other sources on the web)

The Times Square New Year's Eve ball is a 12 ft (3.66m) diameter geodesic sphere, weighing 11,875 pounds (~5385 kg,) and is primarily made up of 2688 Waterford Crystal triangles that vary in size, ranging from 4 3/4 inches to 5 3/4 inches per side (12-14 cm), all illuminated by over 32,000 LED lights.
The ball is a prominent part of a New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square commonly referred to as the ball drop, where the ball descends down a specially designed flagpole, beginning at 11:59:00 p.m. ET, and resting at midnight to signal the start of the new year. In recent years, the ball drop has been preceded by live entertainment, including performances by musicians. Over 1,000,000 people from around the world attend.

The ball's design has been updated four times to reflect improvements in lighting technology.
The first ball drop was 31 Dec 1907 to usher in the New Year 1908.

The original ball was 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter, constructed from wood and iron, weighed 700 lbs and illuminated with a hundred 25W incandescent light bulbs. The sphere was hoisted by 6 men onto a 70 ft flagpole atop the the Times Tower building. The men then lowered the sphere at 10 seconds to midnight but only to the roof (base of the flagpole). ...Once it hit the roof, the ball completed a circuit that lit 5-foot-tall signs on the sides of the building to signal the new year, and triggered a fireworks show.
 
If you don't count Pippin (who was underage by hobbit standards), Bergil son of Beregond is the only individual child who has any lines in LOTR. Other children are mentioned, but they never actually say anything. A group of children do cheer at Biblo's party, but they don't say anything as individuals.
 
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Happy 2025 = 45², the first “square” year since 1936, the next being 2116.
Notably, its digit sum is also a square: 2+0+2+5 = 9 = 3². This last happened in 1681 and next occurs in 2304. And, to top that, it’s the first year since 900 whose digit sum (9) and product (100) are both squares.
 
That's cool. I'm trying to figure out the math. How do you get a product of 100 for 2025?
 
Starbrow said:
That's cool. I'm trying to figure out the math. How do you get a product of 100 for 2025?
Click to expand...
Apparently the original quote whoever (no idea who came up with it) was wrong and it should be:

2+0+2+5 = 25 = 5^2
2025/25= 81 = 9^2

Digit sum and its product from original number are both squares. First time since 900
Click to expand...
 
The song thrush has the habit of using a favourite stone as an "anvil" on which to break open the shells of snails.


Hmmm…now that sounds familiar.

A Short Rest: “Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks,” read Elrond, “and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key-hole.”

On The Doorstep: A large grey stone lay in the centre of the grass and he stared moodily at it or watched the great snails. They seemed to love the little shut-in bay with its walls of cool rock, and there were many of them of huge size crawling slowly and stickily along its sides...he heard a sharp crack behind him. There on the grey stone in the grass was an enormous thrush, nearly coal black, its pale yellow breast freckled with dark spots. Crack! It had caught a snail and was knocking it on the stone. Crack! Crack!

The old thrush, who had been watching from a high perch with beady eyes and head cocked on one side, gave a sudden trill. There was a loud crack. A flake of rock split from the wall and fell. A hole appeared suddenly about three feet from the ground…”The key! The key!” cried Bilbo.
 
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When it comes to winning a mate, just being colourful often doesn’t cut the mustard. Many male birds of paradise must perform elaborate courtship rituals to gain the approval of a female- these often involve complex dances and wacky sounds, all of which must be performed to perfection.
 
[Online news quote]
According to recent reports, the first time the sound of a meteorite hitting Earth was recorded was captured by a home security camera in Canada, on Prince Edward Island, on July 2024, where a meteorite struck a homeowner's patio, with the impact clearly audible on the video footage; scientists believe this is the first instance of both video and audio of a meteorite strike being captured together.

The really scary part (according to the homeowners) is that he was standing in that spot just a few minutes prior to the impact, before walking away.
Anotehr article I read said that the meteor was traveling at 124mph (200km/hr) when it hit.
Had the owner been hit, well. it would not have been good (or pretty) 😬

In July, Joe Velaidum, who lives on Prince Edward Island, a Canadian province in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, noticed a small fragment of space rock on his property after walking his dogs. This week, he shared footage of the rock's impact with media outlets.
Velaidum returned from walking his dogs to find mysterious dust particles in his driveway. After reviewing his security footage and seeing a rock come flying out of nowhere, he suspected it was a meteorite.
The homeowner sent about 7 grams of the rock to Chris Herd, a curator of the University of Alberta's meteorite collection and professor in its science faculty, via the university's Meteorite Reporting System.
Herd confirmed that the rock was a meteorite after visiting the site and collecting more samples. He later concluded that Velaidum's clip was the first of its kind.




 
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Pretty cool!

If you play the clip in slow motion you can see it coming into view in the upper right against the blue sky.

Do we have to wait for the instant it hits the ground to call it a "meteorite"?
 
Eljorahir said:
Pretty cool!

If you play the clip in slow motion you can see it coming into view in the upper right against the blue sky.

Do we have to wait for the instant it hits the ground to call it a "meteorite"?
Click to expand...
Sharp eye (and good idea) on going "slo-mo". Very cool... very, very cool.
Yes, a meteor is the object traveling through space, including the atmosphere (any atmosphere).
If it burns up in the atmosphere (which is what most do and become "shooting stars") it is still called a meteor.
Once it hits the ground or any solid object , like a satellite or the space station, it is called a meteorite
When the brain boys would examine the returning spacecraft (e.g. Apollo) they would comment on the meteorites making microscopic impact craters in the outer skin of the spacecraft.
Another way to think of it (or remember it) is a meteor strike becomes a meteorite.
 
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