Amazing facts you're pretty sure are true

[Mr. Bean]

On January 9, 1793, Jean-Pierre Blanchard carried a personal letter, by balloon, from George Washington to be delivered to the owner of whatever property Blanchard happened to land on, making the flight the first delivery of air mail in the United States.

[marina]

Heroine is called heroine because it cured tuberculosis, making it the 'heroine' of a world in a TB epidemic. Unfortunately it's also horribly addictive.

[flerchin]

Originally Posted by DWarrior

One coordinate is sufficient to precisely define your position anywhere on earth (using 2 just makes it easier)

Is this one of the 9000 made up facts? I don't see how it is mathematically possible to derive your location on a sphere without 2 angles.

[The Quintessential Loser]

18% of Americans still believe the Sun revolves around the Earth.

[DWarrior]

Originally Posted by flerchin

Is this one of the 9000 made up facts? I don't see how it is mathematically possible to derive your location on a sphere without 2 angles.

Nope, not made up, it's a result of R and R^n having the same cardinalities.

For one example of a method that produces a unique single-coordinate identifier given two coordinates is this: imagine your X coordinate is .abcde... and your Y coordinate is .ABCDE... You can form a single real number that'll be unique to these coordinates: .aAbBcCdDeE... you thus have one coordinate that completely defines your position.

The pre-requisite for the above method is that each coordinate is some real number x so that 1>x>=0, but you can see that any real number can be uniquely identified by such coordinate using the same trick. For example, say X is a number ...EDCBA.abcde... and that it's either positive or negative, then your unique coordinate may be defined as .1aAbBcCdD... if X is positive, or .0aAbBcCdD... if X is negative or zero.

You can even extend it to all of space: X given by .abcde..., Y given by .ABCDE..., Z given by .klmno... your single coordinate is .aAkbBlcCm...

and so on. You can find other ways to uniquely represent stuff by one coordinate, and they'll all be fine as long as you use one method. As I said, it's not necessarily any more useful, but it's possible. It demonstrates that no dimension is "bigger" than another, they're all the same (as far as the number of points is concerned).

[Space Indaver]

Originally Posted by The Quintessential Loser

18% of Americans still believe the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Dude, look at the sky. It goes from one side to the other, of course it's moving. Jeez.

[DWarrior]

Augusta Ada King (Dec 10, 1815 - Nov 27, 1852) was the world's first computer programmer.

Your eye has a blind spot that the brain fills in with surrounding background. Cover your right eye, move close to the screen, and look at the circle in the image below with your left eye. Slowly move back while focusing on the circle and eventually you'll see the red star disappear, move back a bit more and the A will disappear.

[Sparrow]

Your blind spot is the hole where your optic nerve exists the eyeball. There aren't any light sensitive bits there...cause it's a hole.

[John Galt]

[-John-]

I call Bullshot on this entire thread