The more you know!

[Adorno]

#409 When the sails of a windmill are at a standstill, their position have different meanings.
At least in The Netherlands. I don't know about other places.

https://heavenly-holland.com/position-of-sails/

1. Short rest.
When the sails are in a plus + position it means the miller is taking a short break
2.Long rest.
When the sails are in an x position it means the miller is taking a long break.
3. Celebration.
When the miller stops the sail just before it reaches the highest vertical position,
it means there is something to celebrate like the birth of a child or a marriage.
4. Mourning.
When the upper sail has been fixed after having passed through the highest position,
it means that the culminating point has been passed and life is going downhill, meaning that there is a reason for mourning.

 

[Arvenski]

That's really neat; it's like signal flags. Thanks for sharing

 

[Adorno]

#410 For his 2013 single Breakfast Can Wait Prince used a picture of comedian Dave Chappelle dressed as Prince.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tonight-show-dave-chappelle-explains-711896

 

[TheFlyingFishy]

There's a longer version but it seems to have been purged from YouTube.

 

[Adorno]

#411 Draculin is a glycoprotein found in the saliva of vampire bats.
It's an anticoagulant, keeping the blood of the bitten victim from clotting while the bat is drinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draculin

 

[crodio]

#412: Water not only can be cooled down under 0°C, or heated beyond 100°C without freezing or boiling, but it also can have a negative absolute pressure, that is, it acts a bit like a solid, and pulls if you try to stretch it.
it's a meta-stable state tho, so if it isn't done carefully, the water will just "boil" or cavitate and generate vapor and return to  a normal state.
That water has a sort of cohesive force can be seen in the effects of surface tension, like when you drop a needle on water and it doesn't get wet, it just floats. These cohesive forced can apparently overpower the repulsive forces and give you a liquid that pulls

here's a paper for the doubtful

 

[Adorno]

#413 The first 3 albums by The Isley Brothers are named thusly:

 

[crodio]

-which records do you want?
- I want shout and twist and shout and twisting and shouting

 

[Dryvus]

Little Timmy and The Shebangs
The Shebangs
and The New Shebangs, Featuring Big Timmy

 

[Paronomasia12]

#414 The British K-class of submarines of the First World War were considered unlucky. Of the 18 vessels built, 6 sank in accidents and none through enemy action.
[list type=decimal]
[*]K1 collided with K4 during a patrol off the Danish coast and was subsequently scuttled on the 18th November '17 to prevent her capture.
[*]K2 suffered an explosion and fire during her first diving trials before even commissioned. Had her bow crumpled in a collision with K12 on the 11th January '24 as they left harbour and collided with H29, another submarine, on the 7th November '24 during an exercise.
[*]K3 suffered an uncontrollable dive in December '16 (she had the future King George VI on board, as well). On the 9th January '17, her boiler room flooded when patrolling in the North Sea. On the 2nd May '18, a second uncontrollable dive sent her to 266 feet, below crush depth, but she survived.
[*]K4 collided with K1 on the 17th November '17. She was lost with all hands when almost cut in half by K6 and, when sinking, hit by K7 during the disastrous night time fleet exercise Operation E.C.1 on the 31st January '18.
[*]K5 was lost with all hands on the 20th January '21 when en route to a mock battle in the Bay of Biscay.
[*]K6 damaged when she collided with K4 in Operation E.C.1.
[*]On the 16th June '17, K7 fired a salvo of torpedoes at German U-boat U-95 and hit. The torpedoes, the only ones fired by a K-class submarine in action, failed to detonate and she had to withdraw before retaliated against. Damaged in collision with K4 during Operation E.C.1.
[*]K8 actually survived the war relatively intact.
[*]K9 also survived unscathed.
[*]K10 survived and was sold for scrap on the 4th November '21, but still foundered in tow afterwards.
[*]K11 was damaged by a fire during a North Sea patrol in '17.
[*]K12 was holed in the collision with K2 on the 11th January '24.
[*]K13 sank on the 29th January '17 with the loss of 32 of her 80 crew. She was raised during the rescue efforts, but sank again. She was recommissioned as K22 on the 15th March when she was salvaged and repaired. Ended up getting rammed by K14 during Operation E.C.1.
[*]K14's steering jammed during the Operation E.C.1 incident and she collided with K22 (old K13) with the loss of 2 men.
[*]K15 sank in harbour on the 25th June '21 but was salvaged the next month.
[*]K16's hydroplanes failed resulting in a sudden dive. Resurfaced successfully, though.
[*]K17 was lost with all hands in a collision with HMS Fearless during Operation E.C.1
[*]K26 was launched after the war and, as the last built, was the best designed. The last of her class, she was scrapped in March '31 as she exceeded the limits set in the London Naval Treaty.
[/list]

PS: Operation E.C.1 is sometimes called the Battle of May Island as there were two submarines sunk, and four submarines and a cruiser damaged. All in accidental collisions.

 

[DanAngleland]

What a farce! How terrible for the seamen who had to man those vessels.

 

[Roccoflipside]

Lol, while Brittania rules the waves, I guess she has no power under them 

 

[BenKenobi]

#415 Malta has the largest number of nuns, monks and priests per capita in Europe

 

[pentagathus]

How hot are the nuns?

 

[crodio]

300 K

 

[Adorno]

#416 The one-electron universe postulate was proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940.

It sounds like the ramblings of a really stoned guy:

"Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

 

[crodio]

Feynman proposed that positrons are electrons going back in time too

 

[Anarion]

Number 417. Cool story of Italian people fighting da powah.

In Northern Italy, not far from Venice, there's a small town called Montaner (pop. 1200 or so). Despite being deep in Catholic Country, though, Montaner is almost completely Eastern Orthodox in confession. How did this come to be, you ask?

In 1966, the (Catholic) town priest died. He had been in town for almost 40 years, and he was much beloved by the people (also a great guy who fought fascists during WW2). Trouble arose when it was time to choose who would succeed the priest: the town wanted the chaplain, Antonio Botteon, to become priest, but bishop Albino Luciani (who would later become Pope John Paul I) chose a different priest, Giovanni Gava.

The people of the town were unhappy, and petitioned Luciani to make Botteon the new town priest, but Luciani didn't budge an inch: first and most important, it's not up to the people to choose their own priest; and second, Botteon was too young and inexperienced.

The people were not deterred, however. When Giovanni Gava arrived into town on January 21st, 1967, he found out that the door to the church and to the priest's house had been walled up, and the townspeople forcibly prevented him from unloading his personal belongings from his truck. Defeated, Gava turned around and went back to Luciani.

Luciani then tried to compromise: in March he installed a friar as temporary town priest, and gave the people a list of names among which they would have to choose the new official priest within six months. Antonio Botteon's name wasn't on the list, though, so the townspeople steadfastly refused to choose a new priest that wasn't him.

Amid mounting tensions, things came to a head on September 12th, 1967. In the morning the new priest, Pietro Varnier (chosen by Luciani), arrived in town; the townspeople promptly seized him and locked him in the priest house's attic for a few hours, and only let him out in the early afternoon so he could phone the bishop and explain the situation.

That same afternoon bishop Luciani himself arrived into town, escorted by the police. He went into the church, removed the bread and wine intended for the Eucharist rite, excommunicated the whole town, and left, taking the bread and wine (and father Varnier) with him.

That was when the townspeople went "You know what? Screw this. We'll make our own church." They asked around and found out that the small Italian Eastern Orthodox Church would take them; on 26th December the first Orthodox Rite Mass was celebrated, and two years later they had built a new church, which was consecrated under the Eastern Orthodox rite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_of_Montaner

 

[Adorno]

#418 Nüshu is considered to be the world's only writing system that is created and used exclusively by women.
Nüshu - literally meaning "women's script" - is a syllabic script derived from Chinese characters that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China.

Its origin is unknown, and it was not known to people outside Jiangyong until the 1980's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nüshu
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nushu-chinese-script-women
https://en.unesco.org/courier/2018-1/nushu-tears-sunshine

 

[Age of Empires ¶ Densetsu]