TIL: Today I Learned - A Collection of Random Facts

GregRedd

GregRedd

New member
Thought it would be interesting to start a collection of random facts, factoids, nuggets of knowledge, that MyGamers' can contribute to whenever they pick up something interesting worth sharing.

The idea is not to just post up the fact, but also to add in some information about it too. Share the stuff you hear or read about that spark your interest enough to get you to go online and find out more. Not the stuff you know already, but the odd fact that you genuinely learned about today (or fairly recently at least :) ).

For example:

TIL just how powerful the Tzar Bomba bomb actually was.

I've always know that Tzar Bomba was the most powerful man-made device ever detonated, but never really considered just how powerful. Sort of worked from the perspective of "more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" and left it at that. The reality is that's like saying a hurricane is more powerful than a fart.

So just how powerful was Tzar Bomba? We've probably all seen images of the devastation caused by the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs the US dropped over Japan. Huge destruction, many lives lost. Little Boy (dropped on Hiroshima) was a 15 kiloton bomb, Fat Man (dropped on Nagasaki) was a 21 kiloton device. By comparison, Tzar Bomba was a 50,000 kiloton device!

The differences in impact, blast radius, casualties, and subsequent fallout and radiation spread, are huge.

Here's what Little Boy (15kt) would do if we dropped it on the Johannesburg CBD:
Capture31.JPG

Same drop point, but now using Tzar Bomba (50,000kt):
Capture3.JPG

For another visual comparison, check out the infographic here.
 
My friend sent me this from urban dictionary:

tottie
good looking teenage girl
esp. one that is a tease or dressed to look older
look at that tottie, I bet she's lookin' for some action!
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As an Afrikaans person I find this extremely funny.
 
I learned how to create optimal clustered (compound) indexes based on frequently queried pairs of keys in MongoDB, seeing as the project I'm working on will be storing approximately 33GB new data each month (receiving around 100 calls per second) and I need to draw statistics on the data.

EDIT: Oh, we're supposed to actually SHARE it, well, here goes:

It's not necessary to ever create an index for the "_id" key which is generated by default when a document is stored in a collection, as Mongo automatically indexes those keys. Since I'm storing very little nested array data in a document (none of which will be queried, anyway), I have no use for multikey indexes. I do, however, have use for compound indexes as the collections will often be queried by a group of keys. Now the important thing to remember is that you need to specify the sort order of the keys based on the queries that will be performed most often. A good example is retrieving transactions per user, with the latest transactions on top (in other words, descending order). So the sort order of the user field won't matter too much, as you will be filtering a unique user on each query, but the sort order of the transaction date will be extremely important. Single field indexes can be sorted either in ascending or descending order without performance impacts, so specifying a sort order for them doesn't matter.
 
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TIL (well, over the weekend I learned) of the Magnificent 7:

The Magnificent 7 are a group of enormous elephants that was found in the Kruger National Park. These 7 elephants had tusks over 50kg in size, some of them so big that their tusks would drag on the ground as they walked. These 7 elephants were named Dzombo, Jaoa, Kambaku, Mafunyane, Ndlulamithi, Shawu and Shingwedzi

These seven behemoths was named and heavily marketed throughout South Africa, in a bid to raise awareness for elephants and conservation within the country, as well as draw more visitors to the park.

Today, six of the seven elephants tusks can be seen in the Lethaba rest camp in the Kruger National Park. Now, I am no small man, standing at a height of 1.96m, and still some of those tusks make me look small in comparison.
 
TIL that necropants are a thing, and that wearing a pair of pants made from the skin of dead man's legs will give the wearer endless wealth! :eek:

IMG_3262.jpg​

From Wikipedia: In Icelandic witchcraft, nábrók (literally "death underpants") are a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead man, which are capable of producing an endless supply of money.

The ritual for making necropants is described as follows:

If you want to make your own necropants you have to get permission from a living man to use his skin after his death.

After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin. A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed. To ensure salvation the owner has to convince someone else to overtake the pants and step into each leg as soon as he gets out of it. The necropants will thus keep the money-gathering nature for generations.
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