HD-DVD and Blu-ray weren’t the only HD video disc formats competing for dominance in the '00s. HD VMD which was basically a DVD containing more layers unsuccessfully tried to compete with the two. The company who produced it dissolved in 2008 and only a few titles were ever released on the format.

There are more hydrogen atom in a single molecule of water than there are star in the entire solar system.

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This symbol, the ampersand, used to have equal status with letters of the alphabet and was stuck at the end after Z.

That’s how it got its name. People would say “X,Y,Z, and, per se, And”. (And “sort of” an and). Thus, “And per se And” became Ampersand.

Dogs can’t look up

Fish mate inside of a sea cucumber’s anus.

You know how geese fly in a “v” shaped pattern in the sky? One side of the “v” is usually longer than the other. The reason for that is that there’s more geese on that side.

The entomology book Life on a Little Known Planet taught me that bebugs mate via “traumatic insemination”. The female has no opening, so the male pierces the exoskeleton and the wound later heals over – all of which allows entomologoists to count the number of times a female has mated by the number of scars on their abdomen.

Bedsheet thread counts have been artificially inflated for years by the shifty linen companies counting individual fibers that the threads consist of as threads themselves. It’s become a meaningless number, since there is zero regulation. If you want a nice thick heavy cloth, GSM is the number you want, but most companies won’t share this (looking at you, The Company Store) because they obviously don’t want you to know how thin and flimsy their products really are before you buy them.

Darwin drank tortoise piss and, according to his documentation, didn’t hate it.

Diabetics piss has so much sugar in it that you can make high end whiskey with it.

Several popular graphing calculators from Texas Instruments, including the TI-83 and TI-84, have a display resolution of 96*64, but only 95*63 pixels are used for graphing.

However, the earlier TI-81 did use all 96*64 pixels. The rationale for this change was to establish a central row and column for the axes and a central pixel for the origin. The cursor could only move pixel-by-pixel, and since the axes and origin would end up “between” pixels on the TI-81, they were inaccessible by the cursor.

Diamonds aren’t stable and will eventually, over billions of years, decompose from their cubic molecular structure to carbon’s more stable form, graphite, which has a hexagonal molecular structure.

Oh, here’s another good gemstone related one!

Amethyst and citrine are both quartz varieties, and if the color source happens to be from traces of iron in the crystal lattice, one can be turned into the other. Heating amethyst can make citrine, and irradiating citrine can turn it into amethyst. This is because the only actual difference between the two is the valiance level of a specific election in the iron atom giving the stone its color.

The Leatherman Skeletool is currently available in several varieties, including the long-running standard model with an unfinished stainless steel body, a chunk of aluminum in the handle, and a 420HC semi-serrated blade, and the Skeletool CX variant with…whatever the black coating is made of, a carbon fiber chunk in the handle, and a 154CM plain blade.

When the model was first introduced, the base model had a plain blade, and the CX had a semi-serrated blade. This was swapped, as they realized first time knife buyers were more likely to see the semi-serration as a value-add, while more serious knife guys would prefer a plain blade. So you might find a very old Skeletool with a plain 420HC blade, or an old CX with a semi-serrated 154CM blade.

it’s so easy to break into an apartment in south korea, any basement dweller can do this.

Most male cats, when investigating something with a paw, will use the left paw.