A page for randomness

Things Not Generally Known
Hmmm. Reading this now I can see I must have been having a Bad Hair Day at the time Some of these points are, it has to be said, rather fatuous. You certainly should not attach equal importance to everything you read here. There were a couple of topics that I wanted to discuss seriously, 1 and 9, and I wondered if I could think up enough other topics to make a ‘list’. You’ll see I was scraping the barrel with some of them!

But it is interesting, is it not, that societies count things differently from time to time? Why should we have four tastes and then five; nine colours in the rainbow and then seven (or six)? And on body senses, are there five, or six, or more?. New Scientist magazine ran an article a couple of years ago, which detailed 21 distinct body senses. And several myths and counter-myths about lightning rods are commonly heard, although I still manage to forget the ‘real’ answer myself, despite having it pointed out to me several times over the years.

OK… I’ll shuffle these topics around into some sort of order, with the bar-room arguments and fatuous comments at the bottom.

* 1 Spacecraft heat up on re-entry because of the friction of the atmosphere
* 9 Foucault’s Pendulum appears to rotate because the earth rotates underneath it

* 4 There are five body senses
* 5 There are four tastes
* 8 There are seven colours in the rainbow

* 2 Everest is the highest mountain in the world
* 3 Pressure cookers force steam into the food, cooking it quicker
* 6 A lightning conductor works by safely conducting the lightning to ground
* 7 Things expand as they get hotter

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