How about an Interesting as HECK thread???

[FlyingClayDisk]

OOOOO!!!  Me next!  Me next!!!

This has volcanos, boiling snow, and mystery!

https://www.lakescientist.com/mystery-of...ns-solved/

Your link reminded me of something else which is pretty interesting.  In the link there is a picture of a "cairn" overlooking the Crowley Lake area.  "Cairns" (a human made pile of rocks) have a pretty interesting history.  Cairns have been used for a variety of reasons by different cultures over the course of human history.  They are most often used to mark something or other, but some of them are used to tell a story.

I grew up in the great state of Wyoming, and in the very remote areas of the state it is not uncommon to find cairns.  I wondered for the longest time what they were, what they meant, and who put them there(?).  When I was in college I worked for an Engineering company who did registered land surveys.  One summer the survey crew I worked on was involved in a contract to run a survey across the entire state from north to south for a pipeline (Northern Natural Gas's "Trailblazer" pipeline).  Our Crew Chief was an Old West and Wyoming history nut.

During my time on this crew we surveyed across some of the remotest areas imaginable (less people meant less right of way problems, so it was the remotest of the remote).  I learned the cairns I saw served two main purposes in Wyoming.  One of these purposes was to mark geographical survey points (land divisions) from the original U.S. surveys which laid out the American "Frontier" (more on this in a moment).  The other purpose for cairns was they served as both a marker and a 'language' of sorts for the Basque sheepherders who still roamed the vast BLM lands of the West.  The cairns would mark things such as good grazing spots, or mark where fresh water was nearby and various other things.  But more than just marking a geographical feature, the cairns also served as a language.  The piles of rocks would be adjusted certain ways by different herders as they passed through the area over the years and decades.  They told a story about the conditions, and about the herders themselves.  They served as both a greeting and sometimes even a warning.  Each passing herder would change the cairn just slightly, and they would also add to it (to continue the story).  Many of them became taller than a man.

A cairn, once established, can remain intact for virtually centuries, and in some cases it would have been decades before another sheepherder came upon one of the cairns left by one of their brethren.  The life of a sheepherder is one of the loneliest occupations a person can ever do.  Their 'contracts' often lasted for 3 to 5 years, and in that time they may never see another person.  It is a life of solitude few can even imagine.  The wind and the elements in Wyoming can be harsh in the extremes, but these simple piles of rocks, or cairns, weathered all of these extremes.  They last forever.  

We surveyed hundreds of miles across vast expanses of the Wyoming lanscape, and I always looked forward to finding the cairns.  It was interesting to look around across the landscape and wonder what life was like when many of these were first established.

Regarding surveying, the cairns also served a purpose.  These were not erected by sheep herders, but rather by the original surveyors who first surveyed the western United States.  Because of the nature of how a survey is performed, a registered land survey has to "tie" the points it lays out to known territorial boundaries (often called Monuments), and then document the distances and angles to these known points.  Every so often we would need to find the next boundary marker along our route.  We could compute the expected location and angle based on our triangulated position.  Then, when we got close, we would start looking for the actual marker.  Now remember, this was in the middle of literally "nowhere" ("bum-fuck-Egypt", some might say).  These original surveys were performed using a wagon wheel for measurement (among other tools), thus to surveyors these surveys were called the "Wagon Wheel Survey's of the 1870's". In the high deserts of Wyoming cairns were used for these boundary markers.  They were the only things which would stand the tests of time.

I can't even begin to count how many of these boundary markers we computed the location of, only to find them down to the EXACT INCH of where we predicted them to be located!  Seriously, down...to...the...inch!  One hundred years before we were there, someone had come before us, probably the only other humans to have set foot in that exact spot, and they nailed the location down to the exact inch.  While we may have been 150 to 200 miles from the nearest town or road in the late 1970's, but back in 1873 the people who piled those rock cairns were probably 1,500 miles from the nearest civilization and even so they still maintained a degree of accuracy which is fantastical in the extreme of extremes.  Can you imagine such a thing today?  People would just say..."Awww fuck it, just pile the rocks here...no one will ever know (or care) if it's right or wrong!"

Honestly, I bet you never thought something as simple as a pile of rocks could be interesting!

Cairns...pretty interesting.

[Byrd]

Your link reminded me of something else which is pretty interesting.  In the link there is a picture of a "cairn" overlooking the Crowley Lake area.  "Cairns" (a human made pile of rocks) have a pretty interesting history.  Cairns have been used for a variety of reasons by different cultures over the course of human history.  They are most often used to mark something or other, but some of them are used to tell a story.

That's REALLY neat!

[FlyingClayDisk]

My ex-wife received a beautiful bouquet of some pretty expensive (like really expensive) flowers from some dick head.

She worked in a call center for one of the major airlines.  This dick head had experienced a death in his family, and the ex helped him out.  In return, dick head sent her some flowers.

So why was he a dick head?

Well, you see, his actual name was Richard Head ("but you can call me Dick" he told her).  She thought he was joking, right up until he gave her is American Express card info.  Sure enough, 'Richard Head'.

LOL!!

Poor guy!  Thanks, Mom & Dad! 

[ArMaP]

People should think twice before naming their kids.

Although not as bad as that case, my elder sister know a woman whose last name is Peixe (fish) that married a man with the last name Espada (sword). So their kids' last names are Peixe Espada (Sword Fish).

In Portugal we have many cases like this, not only because of the people that got their names from the place where they came from, for example, but also because of the New Christians, Jews that were more or less forced to change to Christianity and chose plant names for their last names. Besides that, in some regions is normal for someone to use as their real name the nick name of an ancestor. That's why a man I knew was Gato (Cat), as an ancestor of him climbed a pole like he was a cat to flee from a bull, so everybody started calling him "Cat".

[Karl12]

Apparently this one is true lol

[FlyingClayDisk]

Here's something pretty crazy...

What do the following (9) words have in common?

Month
Silver
Bulb
Wolf
Walrus
Rhythm
Husband
Woman (and)
Purple

Oh, and here's an 10th word..."Orange"

So, what do all these words have in common?

Here's a hint...what is unique about all these words?

The answer is, well, pretty interesting!  (I wish there was a way to do spoiler text so I could obfuscate the answer until someone was ready to peek (like how Reddit does it)).

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Here's another, seeing as how we're on the subject of "orange".  Blueberries were named "blueberry" because they were blue, and they were a berry.  So, what about oranges?  Were oranges named an "orange" because they were orange, OR was it oranges which created the name for the color "orange"?


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One of our moderator's "favorite" subjects is to post questions about the sport of Soccer and who is best.  I say this in complete jest (....ArMaP)!!! 

But do you know where the iconic black and white patterned color on a soccer ball originated?  I didn't know this.

The ball was created by the Adidas shoe company (this much I kind of knew), and the colored pentagrams are the same colors of Adidas original products (no real surprise there), but that wasn't the reason why.  The first major televised event of soccer was the World Cup held in Mexico in 1970.  Back then color televisions hadn't become mainstream.  Adidas reasoned the ball would be easier to see on a black & white television set, and they were right.  But even more surprising was what was quickly discovered after this creation.  Turns out, the curvature of the ball's path is much easier to spot with a ball colored like this.  In the game of Pool and Billiards we call this "English", or spin on the ball, which causes it to not move in a straight line.  This spin is much easier to detect by players and officials with a black and white patterned ball. 

Soccer balls would never be the same after this.

I did NOT know this!

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This one is kind of bizarre.

The tomato was first grown domestically in the early 1500's.  In 1519 the famous or infamous (depending on your perspective) explorer and conquistador, Cortes brought tomato seeds back to Europe to be grown as ornamental plants in his gardens.  In the 1700's some of the wealthy and the royals began to eat the fruit but quickly ceased  because they believed tomatoes to be poisonous.  The reason they thought this is because people would mysteriously die after eating tomatoes.  It took decades for people to realize the people weren't dying from eating the tomatoes themselves (well, they were and they weren't), what they were dying from was lead poisoning.  At the time, much of the elite's flatware as well as the dishes were made from pewter which, at the time, was an alloy of tin and lead.  The acid in the tomatoes leached the lead out of the dishes and flatware and resulted in lethal does of lead. 

Silly humans, tomatoes aren't poisonous!

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Edit - and the answers to the 1st and 2nd questions are.....

1. What is "unique" and common between the (10) words is...none of them have another known word in the English language which rhymes with any of these words.  Therefore, they are "unique" in the respect that they don't have a counterpart word which rhymes with them, thus the hint in the question.

2. Which came first, the color "orange", or the fruit orange?  Neither really, but if anything, the fruit.  Turns out the name describes the tree that the orange grows on, and the fruit was named after the tree.  The color was then derived as a result of the fruit's color.  Perhaps even more interesting is "orange" oranges are actually a genetic hybrid.  The very original "oranges" were actually...green!

Who knew?

[727Sky]

There are more trees on the planet than stars in the Galaxy! ( estimated 400 billion stars in the milky way galaxy ) – but over 3 trillion trees on Earth.

(Humm I guess they are counting bushes as trees as I find the 3 trillion number hard to believe ?) Also I remember when the galaxy was guesstimated to have only one billion stars.. I do think the 4 billion is closer to the truth though so at least there is that...

[727Sky]

When the Christmas Candy Cane was invented in Germany, it was made into a "J" for Jesus! The RED stripes symbolize his blood!

[FlyingClayDisk]

When the Christmas Candy Cane was invented in Germany, it was made into a "J" for Jesus! The RED stripes symbolize his blood!

Man, that blue text is really hard to read in dark mode!  (Sorry)

I did not know this about the candy cane!

[727Sky]

The X in Xmas is NOT an abbreviation. It comes from the Greek letter Chi (X) and actually stands for Christ!