Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Today I Found Out" channel.

  1. People in Western China are on a de-facto later time zone. They start business hours at something like 10am. Take that, Beijing bureaucrats!
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  2. You know those “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoons? Every conversation Calvin had with his father was like that ...
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  3. 8:56 I thought the archery-related gesture involved two fingers, not one. Because it took both those fingers to pull the bowstring. If you want to know the gesture I mean, try watching old episodes of Last of the Summer Wine . As I recall, Compo used it frequently.
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  4. 6:39: So what about noon and midight--are they “AM” or “PM”? The answer is “neither”. Noon is “12 M”, the M standing for “meridiem”, of course. Midnight, I’m not so sure... This is why I prefer 24-hour numbering: then you know “12:00” means noon, and nothing else. Midnight can be either “00:00” or “24:00”, depending on whether you are referencing it to the start of the day, or the end of it. Either way, there is no ambiguity about what you mean.
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  5.  @TheHorseshoePartyUK  Yeah, some plants discovered how to make lignin, which is the basis of wood, allowing them to grow tall into the first trees. But when those trees died, they just lay on the ground until they were buried. It was only later that bacteria evolved that figured out how to eat that lignin and decompose it into something else before it was buried. So all the coal deposits were formed between those two points in time.
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  6. 5:24 Must have been a Democrat-dominated Congress. Republicans would never have agreed on a Federal standard--gotta respect “States’ Rights”, you know!
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  7. 3:19 No it is not the rotation of the Earth that is irregular (not to the extent of 16 minutes, anyway): that discrepancy arises from two facts: 1) that the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, and 2) the Earth’s rotation axis is inclined to the plane of its orbit. Put these two together, and you get the periodic variation in the apparent motion of the Sun across the sky, which is called the “Equation of Time” (sounds like something out of “Doctor Who”, doesn’t it?). Averaging this out over the year gives you ”Mean Solar Time” at any particular point.
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  8. PENCILS WORK IN SPACE?!? WOAAHHH ... BRAIN OVERLOAD!!!
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  9. Notice he changed the spelling. Maybe people were mispronouncing “Bich” ...
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  10. 10:20 I understand that verdict has now been reversed, and Brontosaurus is considered a real creature once again.
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  11. 6:17 He was named for a ball-point pen?!? And they hadn’t even been invented yet?!?!?!?!? WOAHHH ... MORE BRAIN OVERLOAD!!!
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  12. 10:07 They don’t even allow reclining bicycles to be considered “bicycles”. So recliners hold the world land-speed record for “human-powered vehicles”, not for “bicycles”.
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