Mindless Crap Earth & The Universe Trivia

Weekly Droppings

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Crap About The Earth & The Universe

The following are all of the Weekly Droppings that have appeared on Mindless Crap, dating back to the first one posted on October 1, 2000.

An airplane traveling 1,040 mph in a westerly direction would equal the speed of the earth's rotation, and would be flying at exactly the same local time around the world until it suddenly flew into tomorrow at the International Dateline.

A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year. Mercury rotates very slowly but revolves around the sun in just under 88 days.

There is believed to be more water underground than the total of all the lakes and rivers in the world. Raindrops, piled on one another, eventually seep down hundreds of feet into the earth's crust.

In 1976, 700,000 people around the world died as a result of earthquakes.

The Earth is not round. It's an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator.

The hottest recorded temperature occurred September 13, 1222, when it registered 136 Fahrenheit in Libya. The coldest was in Antarctica on August 24, 1960 when it was 127 below zero Fahrenheit.

Uranus actually lies on its side. The extreme axial tip of Uranus is 98 degrees as it revolves around the sun. By way of comparison, Earth is tipped at 23.5 degrees.

The moon weighs 81 billion tons.

For the first two billion years of its existence, the earth had no life on it whatsoever.

The first pulsar, discovered in 1967, never varies in its timing by even as much as a hundred-millionth of a second. Its pulse is registered every 1.33730109 seconds.

The discovery of Neptune was announced in 1846. But when astronomers checked, they found the record of an observation of the planet as far back as 1795 by astronomers who, believing it to be a star, recorded the position routinely.

According to scientists, gold is believed to also exist on Mercury, Venus and Mars.

Greenwich Observatory, founded in 1675, at zero longitude near London contained a brass line that divided the world into its eastern and western hemispheres. The Observatory itself was moved in the 1940s to Herstmonceux, Sussex.

The earth's rotation around the sun covers 585,000,000 miles.

The largest refracting telescope, the 40-inch Yerkes telescope, was built in 1897 and is still in use. All larger telescopes are of the reflecting variety.

Only about 3,000 stars are visible to the naked eye.

There have been no recorded instances of anybody being killed by a meteorite.

Astronauts become between two and three inches taller when in space.

Sea water weighs about a pound and a half more per cubic foot than fresh water at the same temperature.

Every 14 years, Saturn's rings become briefly invisible to astronomers on Earth. At that time, the plane of the rings is tipped to that of the Earth's orbit, and they are seen edge-on. Since the ring's are so thin, they can't be seen at that angle.

Fog and a cloud are the same thing, only at different altitudes. Fog is simply a cloud lying on the earth, while clouds are fog floating in the sky.

The closest star to the sun, Alpha Centauri, is never visible in the sky north of about 30 degrees Northern Lattitude.

If the earth were to become totally flat and the oceans distributed themselves evenly over the planet's surface, the water would be approximately two miles deep at every point.

The equatorial bulge of the earth does not rest along the equator. The highest point of the bulge is actually located 25 feet to the south.

Because of the speed at which the sun moves, it is impossible for a solar eclipse to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds.

Polaris is the closest visible star to true north and is thus referred to as the North Star. By sometime around the year 2100, the wobble of the Earth's axis will slowly begin pointing the North Pole away from Polaris. By the year 14,000 A.D., the new North Star will be Vega.

At its center, the sun has a density of over a hundred times that of water, and a temperature of 10-20 million degrees Celsius.

All of the stars comprising the Milky Way galaxy revolve around the center of the galaxy once every 200 million years or so.

To go one lunar day, adjust your watch to lose two minutes and five seconds every hour.

The brightest star in history was the supernova of 1054, which formed the Crab Nebula. It was brighter than Venus and bright enough to be seen in daylight and to cast a shadow at night. We know about it through the astronomic records of China and Japan.

The plant life of the oceans makes up about 85% of all the greenery on the planet.

Jupiter has the shortest day of all the planets. Although it has a circumference of 280,000 miles - compared with Earth's 25,000 - Jupiter manages to make one turn in 9 hours and 55 minutes.

The longest single-word name of a place on Earth is:
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipuakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu. This place is a Moari name for a hill in New Zealand and consists of 85 letters. By the way, the name means �The place where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed, and swallowed mountains, known as land-eater, played on the flute to his loved one."

Earth's magnetic field has been weakening. It seems to have lost 15% of its strength since 1670. At the present rate of decrease, it will reach zero in 2,000 years. Between the years 3500 and 4500, the magnetic field will not be sufficiently strong enough to ward off charged radiation from outer space.

The earth weighs 6 sextillion, 588 quintillion tons.

Our sun and the surrounding planets orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy once every 250 million years.

Every time the moon's gravity causes a ten-foot tide at sea, all the continents on earth rise at least six inches.

Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper was so relaxed on the morning of his launch into space in May 1963 that he fell asleep in his space capsule while waiting for blastoff.

The period between midnight and dawn is the best time to look for shooting stars. On a normal night you can see between five and ten an hour. In a desert, you can see one every eight minutes.

Syzygy is the term referring to when the moon is in a direct line with the earth and the sun. The average person knows this time to be a full or new moon.

On its trip around the sun, the earth travels over a million and a half miles per day.

The sun is about three million miles closer to the earth on January 1st than it is on June 1st.

The earth is not perfectly round. Technically, it's a triaxial ellipsoid, which is to say that it's nearly spherical, but flattened at the top and bottom.

The single highest temperature ever recorded in U.S. history was 134 degrees Fahrenheit. It was recorded in Greenland Ranch, CA on July 10, 1913. The lowest recorded temperature was minus 80 degrees on January 23, 1971 in Prospect Creek, AK.

The Sahara Desert is over twice as big as the second largest desert in the world, The Australian Desert. The Sahara is 3.5 million square miles compared to the 1.47 million square miles of the Australian.

This is "true" in the generic sense of the Autralian Desert. There is no Australian Desert. It is divided into many different deserts. What would be true would be to say the Sahara is bigger than the desert space in Australia (which is A LOT - not sure how much as a percentage - of the total land mass of australia).
- Lee H.

Venus rotates so slowly that in a typical day lasts approximately 244 Earth days (5,856 hours).

La Paz, Bolivia is the highest capital city in the world.

Pluto has the longest year, lasting 247 years and 256 days in Earth time (90,472 days including 61 leap years).

You would need to travel at 6.95 miles per second to escape the Earth�s gravitational pull. This is equivalent to traveling from New York to Philadelphia in about twenty seconds.

The first asteroid to ever be discovered is Ceres. It was discovered 1801 and is 582 miles in diameter.

The first building with an elevator was the six-story 130-foot Equitable Life Building in New York. It was built in 1870.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world (behind Russia, Canada, China and the United States). It�s only 300,000 square miles smaller than the United States. Australia, India, Argentina, Kazakhstan and the Sudan round out the Top 10.

The full Spanish name of the city of Los Angeles is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Se�ora la Reina de los Angeles de la Porciuncula." Translated, it means �The town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Little Portion.�

On average, about 500 meteorites strike the surface of the Earth each year. The calculated risk of being struck by a meteorite in the United States is once every 9,300 years.

The official definition of a desert is any land that where more water evaporates than is acquired through precipitation.

Despite the break up of the USSR, Russia is still the largest country in the world. It�s almost twice the size of Canada, which ranks second.

The first animal sent to space was a female Samoyed named Laika. Laika was sent into space on November 3, 1957 aboard the Russian spacecraft Sputnik II.

A manned rocket can reach the moon in less time than it used to take to travel the length of England by stagecoach.

The deepest land point on Earth is the area around the Dead Sea in Israel. The Dead Sea is located 1,312 below sea level.

As late as 1820, the universe was thought to be 6,000 years old. It is now thought to be between 15 and 20 billion years old.

One light year the distance light travels in a year at the speed of 186,000 miles per second is just under six thousand billion miles. Earth's nearest neighbor in space, outside our own solar system is four light years away (about 24 trillion miles).

The earth's rotation is slowing down at a rate of one second per century. The gravity from the sun and moon are creating tidal friction on the earth that are acting as brakes on planet's spin.

The telescope at the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, in California, also serves as a tomb. The 36-inch refracting telescope is mounted on a pillar that contains the remains of Jack Lick, who died in 1876. Lick was a wealthy financier and philanthropist who financed the construction of the observatory that bears his name.

Our sun has an expected lifetime of about 11 billion years.

The temperature of the earth's interior increases by one degree every 60 feet down.

To an observer standing on Pluto, the sun would appear no brighter than Venus appears in our evening sky.

The earth is 24,901 miles around at the equator.

The earth rotates on its axis more slowly in March than in September.

If someone were to capture and bottle a comet's 10,000-mile vapor trail, the amount of vapor actually present in the bottle would take up less than one cubic inch of space.

There are more than 50,000 earthquakes throughout the world every year.

At one time the earth consisted of one land mass and a huge body of water. Geologists today call the land Pangaea (from the Greek words "all land"), while the water was called Panthalassa (from the Greek words "all sea"). Between 180 and 200 million years ago, Pangaea split into two parts: Laurasia, which consisted of North America, Europe and Asia; and Gondwanaland, which consisted of Africa, South America, India, Antarctica and Australia.

More water flows over Niagara Falls every year than any other falls on earth.

The sun's total lifetime as a star capable of maintaining a life-bearing Earth is about 11 billion years. Nearly half that time has passed.

The curvature of the earth is pretty close to eight inches every mile, or 66 feet every hundred miles.

The setting sun is redder than the rising sun because the air at the end of the day is generally dustier than it is at the beginning of the day.

At the distance at which our sun is located from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, Earth and the rest of our solar system are moving at a speed of about 170 miles per second around the center.

In astrology, synastry is the comparison of natal charts to forecast how people will interact.

It takes about 1.25 seconds for moonlight to reach the Earth.

The first chimpanzee to travel into space was named Ham. He got the name from the lab he was raised in, the Holloman AeroMedical laboratory in Alamogordo, NM. Ham flew in a Mercury space capsule in 1961. His trip also proved that space travel was safe for humans.

David Wolf was the first person to cast an absentee ballot from space. In November 1997, he cast a vote via e-mail for the mayor of Houston while onboard the space station Mir.

In earlier times, virginity on one's wedding night was of the greatest importance. To prove that the bride was a virgin, it was customary that the couple would display the bloodstained bedsheet for all to see once the wedding was consummated.

Approximately 40,000 tons of meteoric dust hits the Earth each year.

The most common street name in the United States is Second Street. First Street isn�t first because many times the designation is replaced with the name Main Street.