Things you always wanted to know the answer to [Vol. 3]

[Ayahuasca]

PoleDriver said:

Cliftonite said:

Bobby_Mac said, "On road signs there is often a brown fox with places of interest . . . " but he edited it very soon after!

Although he must have edited it by 15:52 and you responded at 18:42?
Are you sure you didn't just misread it?

You saying it was a quick brown fox?

[PoleDriver]

Ayahuasca said:

PoleDriver said:

Cliftonite said:

Bobby_Mac said, "On road signs there is often a brown fox with places of interest . . . " but he edited it very soon after!

Although he must have edited it by 15:52 and you responded at 18:42?
Are you sure you didn't just misread it?

You saying it was a quick brown fox?

Boom! Boom! And it was gone!

[Tyre Smoke]

Is there a reason why truck wheels are half inch sizes, eg 22.5 and 18.5 in diameter and not 18 and 22 or 19 and 23?

[Shakermaker]

Tyre Smoke said:

Is there a reason why truck wheels are half inch sizes, eg 22.5 and 18.5 in diameter and not 18 and 22 or 19 and 23?

On the back of this - are wheels and tyres sold in Europe in purely metric sizes or do they still subscribe to our weird half metric/half imperial set up?

[Tyre Smoke]

Shakermaker said:

Tyre Smoke said:

Is there a reason why truck wheels are half inch sizes, eg 22.5 and 18.5 in diameter and not 18 and 22 or 19 and 23?

On the back of this - are wheels and tyres sold in Europe in purely metric sizes or do they still subscribe to our weird half metric/half imperial set up?

Same as us. I've seen tyres on sale in France 205/70 15 for example.

[Y8RSP]

Shakermaker said:

On the back of this - are wheels and tyres sold in Europe in purely metric sizes or do they still subscribe to our weird half metric/half imperial set up?

Happily you can still buy Imperial sized tyres in Euroland. Earlier this year I reshod the Landy on a set of 33x12.50R15's...

Common sense would dictate that you can still get hold of OE-sized tyres for vintage/veteran cars - there are plenty of them still on the road, after all...

[Shakermaker]

Y8RSP said:

Shakermaker said:

On the back of this - are wheels and tyres sold in Europe in purely metric sizes or do they still subscribe to our weird half metric/half imperial set up?

Happily you can still buy Imperial sized tyres in Euroland. Earlier this year I reshod the Landy on a set of 33x12.50R15's...

Common sense would dictate that you can still get hold of OE-sized tyres for vintage/veteran cars - there are plenty of them still on the road, after all...

Oh of course. But then I often wondered if the whole "inches" thing was purely for US/UK and the rest of the world was on full metric.

But then I remembered my old E24 had metric wheels which were 418mm or something like that.

[S11Steve]

PoleDriver said:

Cliftonite][url said:

|http://thumbsnap.com/NrONCXko[/url]

Nice picture of a beautiful creature, but why?

"Fox nose" what the answer is to that one...

[StevieBee]

Shakermaker said:

ambuletz said:

In the past few weeks I've woken up around 7:45, give or take 5minutes. +How is your body able to wake you up at almost the exact time each morning? (sometimes regardless of what time you went to bed). I haven't got an alarm set.

Cicadian rhythm.

IIRC Your body is attuned to the environment around you pretty much without the need for all the stimuli that you think you need, and works on a series of 8-12 hour cycles. that in turn, works out that you do 2 or 3 of these cycles per day.

On a similar vein, if, as I often do, have to set an alarm unusually early to catch an early flight or something, I always wake up before the alarm goes off regardless of the time it was set for. How does that work (or is it just me?).

[jontysafe]

You don't sleep so deeply or at least I don't if I have an early flight

[Voldemort]

One for Bi-Lingual Scholars…

Linguistic puns/jokes and plays on words:

Is English the only language (but if not, do we have a preponderance/surfeit?) of jokes/puns based on words that have more than one meaning or which are phonetically similar?

For example, you’re probably familiar with a joke that ends ‘…the other makes your whole (hole) week (weak).’ And who amongst us can talk about Uranus without sniggering inside?

I assume these and any other examples will not directly translate (and still be funny) into any other language, but do other languages/cultures derive humour in the same way?

[Hugo a Gogo]

they do have a little bit of that kind of Wortspiele in German, but more often than not, in print, they'd be explained like that with words or letters in brackets

some kind of 'four candles' stuff too with regional accents

[anonymous-user]

jontysafe said:

You don't sleep so deeply or at least I don't if I have an early flight

Or if on emergency response 4x4 duty. One eye on the phone, chaps.

[SilverSixer]

Voldemort said:

One for Bi-Lingual Scholars…

Linguistic puns/jokes and plays on words:

Is English the only language (but if not, do we have a preponderance/surfeit?) of jokes/puns based on words that have more than one meaning or which are phonetically similar?

For example, you’re probably familiar with a joke that ends ‘…the other makes your whole (hole) week (weak).’ And who amongst us can talk about Uranus without sniggering inside?

I assume these and any other examples will not directly translate (and still be funny) into any other language, but do other languages/cultures derive humour in the same way?

Yes, to an extent. A good example from Russian are their words for 'mother' and 'curse' being almost identical (to the foreign ear they are identical to start with).

I think it's more widespread in English as the language is far more of a hybrid than most, being based on several different sources rather than deriving purely from one root language. This gives more synomyms for example, which are rarer in other languages, giving more possibilities for misunderstanding and humour I would speculate.

[Shakermaker]

StevieBee said:

On a similar vein, if, as I often do, have to set an alarm unusually early to catch an early flight or something, I always wake up before the alarm goes off regardless of the time it was set for. How does that work (or is it just me?).

No, I'm just the same. I find that when I have to do the same, I wake up several times in the night, probably because my mind has fully shut down and I'm just dozing, and your brain will wake you up as a natural reaction to "OMG I HAVE SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT TO DO!"

[Jonboy_t]

Was reading about the 14 year olds who've just been convicted of murder and there's a big hoo-ha about then not being named due to their age.

What's to stop someone who knows then just going on Facebook and saying who they are? Shirley word of mouth would get around soon enough?

[TwigtheWonderkid]

I had a dream recently, where someone in the dream gave me some surprising news, and in the dream I was genuinely shocked. How does that work? Obviously I am everyone in the dream, they say what my brain wants them to say. So I must have known what the person was going to tell me before they told me, yet when they told me I didn't know??

Does any of this make sense. I know what I'm getting at, not sure if I've explained it properly.

I've also had dreams where people have made a funny comment that I've laughed at because it was funny and I never saw it coming? WTAF????

So a bit like laughing at my own joke because I hadn't heard it before.

[Voldemort]

If all the coinage in circulation was piled neatly in a cube, how big would it be and how much would it weigh?

[SpeckledJim]

Jonboy_t said:

Was reading about the 14 year olds who've just been convicted of murder and there's a big hoo-ha about then not being named due to their age.

What's to stop someone who knows then just going on Facebook and saying who they are? Shirley word of mouth would get around soon enough?

I'm sure in the area, everyone will know who did it. There's simply no way to keep that sort of thing a secret.

The ban is on the media naming them. Probably for good reasons, though I'm not sure, now they are convicted, what those are.

[glazbagun]

TwigtheWonderkid said:

I had a dream recently, where someone in the dream gave me some surprising news, and in the dream I was genuinely shocked. How does that work? Obviously I am everyone in the dream, they say what my brain wants them to say. So I must have known what the person was going to tell me before they told me, yet when they told me I didn't know??

Does any of this make sense. I know what I'm getting at, not sure if I've explained it properly.

I've also had dreams where people have made a funny comment that I've laughed at because it was funny and I never saw it coming? WTAF????

So a bit like laughing at my own joke because I hadn't heard it before.

At a guess, because there is no one "You". Your brain is a bunch of different parts which communicate with each other in god knows what way. So the "I" part of your brain that experiences and visualises is visualising something from your subconscious unlike when you try to visualise what's going on when you can't see a plug socket behind a chest of drawers.

If you want to freak yourself out, check out this famous experiment on a guy who had his Corpus Callosum cut so that the two halves of his brain can't communicate. One side controls half of his body, another the other half completely independently:

https://youtu.be/zx53Zj7EKQE?t=101

Edited by glazbagun on Thursday 20th October 23:05