Questions you've always wanted the answers for

[Brendan]

So it?s not because space is in fact not a vacuum at all and you can quite safely travel into and around it but the secret world government has hidden this fact from us in order to keep us under submission and stop us interacting with the rest of the Free Galaxy?

Do you work for the government Huguenot?

[citizenED]

why do clothes go darker when they get wet?

ps is this theat new service form 118 118?

[Huguenot]

Citizen, that's a splendid follow-up question, because the two are linked!

Water has a higher 'refractive index' than the fabric, and one observed impact of this is that when light is reflected from the fabric/water boundary it reflects back at a less acute angle than from the fabric/air boundary.

As a consequence incoming light needs to reflect off more particles inside the wet fabric before it finally bounces back from the garment and into your eye.

Light is the visible component of electromagnetic radiation, and each time it reflects a little more of the light energy is transformed into heat energy in the particles it bounces off.

This means that more reflections in wet material means less light bouncing back at your eye, and hence a darker appearance.

The heat in turn increases the water energy and moves it from liquid to gas phase, which evaporates away from your fabric and dries it!

This means that there's always a limit to a wet t-shirt competition in the sunshine.

Brendan, governments are like, so yesterday.

[mockney piers]

Why do I get a warm feeling inside after Huguenot's quality posts?

[SeanMacGabhann]

because you miss him

I miss him

but he is still wrong about "eating is cheating" on the pub crawl thread

[mockney piers]

As it happens that IS the third rule of Drink Club, but in telling you this we have both of course broken the first rule of drink club ..... sshhhhhh

[Strawbs]

Who was it that decided the letter A would be A, how it would sound, how it would be written and that is was the first letter in the alphabet?

[mockney piers]

Blimey, language, now you're asking as it's a subject that almost noone agrees anything about.

But roughly our own Latin A came from the Ancient Greeks, who resurgent 300ish years after the collapse of the minoan civilisation, found themselves partial to travelling and foreign technical and cultural innovations.

It's thought they stumbled upon literacy from the phoenicians with whom they traded, and applied it to their own language, with the funky idea of actually using Vowels (ancient Hebrew, like phoenician (for the two tribes were probably both of Canaan origins in the deep mists of time) also forewent written* vowels.

We all know how good the Greeks got at this writing malarkey and the Romans nicked a variant of their alphabet (and their Gods and stuff) for their own purposes, an alphabet we use largely untouched to this day.

Why's it first someone else will have to hazard a guess to, but Alpha Beta has a nice ring to it doesn't it.

*edit: you'd struggle speaking without vowels.

[david_carnell]

If you mean why does A look like A does then it's a gradual evolution of a picture - much like nearly all forms of writing today. "A" was originally a ox's head in Egyptian hieroglyphics which through the Phoenicians, Greeks and Etruscan's became the Roman A that we know and love today.

I have no idea where its dipthong pronunciation comes from though. Wikipedia offers this which sounds quite romantic:

Plutarch in Moralia, presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet. Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, thinks of Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox -- which, unlike Hesiod[2], the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities. "Nothing at all" Plutarch replied. He then added that he would rather be assisted by Lamprias, his own grandfather, than by Dionysus' grandfather, i.e. Cadmus. For Lamprias had said that the first articulate sound made is "alpha", because it is very plain and simple ? the air coming off the mouth does not require any motion of the tongue ? and therefore this is the first sound that children make.

*Yawns* It just is, ok!

Edit - beaten to it. That darned Piers and his knowledge!

[Brendan]

I think the vowels we currently use in European alphabets developed the way they did when scripts initially used for Semitic languages were adapted to be used for Indo-European languages like Greek, which was adapted for latin and basically adopted by the rest of us.

[SeanMacGabhann]

Less high-brow maybe, but one question that always has and always will bug me

if a show is on Channel 4 or BBC2 it gets, say, 3 million viewers

if the exact same show is shown on ITV or BBC1 it gets 8-9 million viewers

That means, teh majority of TV watchers will not watch anything JUST because it's on BBC2 or CH4.

Why?

What does it say?

Why does it upset me SO SO much????

[Strawbs]

@ MP,DC & B - Thank you - those answers were brilliant.. I feel I have been educated this morning.. Oh and DC I did actually really like the romantic version that you posted.. :))

You have no idea how many times Ive asked that question and just received blank looks.. I am loving this thread..

x

[SteveT]

What would life be like if lawyers had not been invented?

[SteveT]

People would dance and sing in the streets, they would have flowers in their hair and hold hands as they skipped along the byways of life.........................

It would be bliss:))

[KalamityKel]

Lawyers? Invented? U mean like the lightbulb or dishwasher eh steve? ;-)

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

What is snot made of?

Carbohydrate, protein or fat?

I asked my Chemistry teacher at school but he thought I was trying to be funny.

I always wondered cos my dad used to eat his!

[KalamityKel]

::o Chav have u not googled "nasal mucus" ? :p

[clive3300]

Yeah what use is the internet if not for cool stuff like that :)-D

[KalamityKel]

Are Pigeons meant to eat chocolate?

witnessed one tucking into a flyte bar at lunch...

[Floating Onion]

Getting back to this a bit late I know. In the same way that the birds are safe, I quite like this

.

Jaws Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> My questions is: how come pigeons do not get

> frazzled, when they perch their tootsies on the

> electric cables??

[Ant]

I have two questions.

A) Where is Great Britain's border? Not necessarily as easy as it sounds: I mean, it's basically the coast, right? But is that measured at high tide? At low tide? Somewhere in between? National maritime boundaries... usually 200 nautical miles (I think) but measured from where?

B) How many individual words are in War and Peace? (As in, counting 'the' only once no matter how many times it may be repeated.)

[macker]

Ant Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I have two questions.

> B) How many individual words are in War and Peace?

> (As in, counting 'the' only once no matter how

> many times it may be repeated.)

In the 12th edition (English translation) available here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600 the answer is 17,468 unique "words", where a word is defined thus: a string of alphabetic characters separated by white space, numerals or punctuation, and case is not significant. The first words are:

a

aah

ab

aback

abacus

abandon

abandoned

abandoning

abandonment

and the last are:

zis

znaim

znamenka

zone

zoology

zu

zubov

zubova

zubovski

zum

zweck

Hope this helps :)

[Huguenot]

Macker, you're dreamy.

Floating Onion, I have never to this point seen anything on this fabulous forum that I felt made me a better person. That clip changed my life.

[Huguenot]

Just watched it again... "There's only three things in life I'm afraid of... electricity, heights and women. And I'm married too..."

What are we afraid of?