Your Wikipedia find of the week

[Mr Larrington]

How do you move a dragline excavator 13 miles to its new working location?

You walk it at 0.01mph.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundew_(dragline)

FTFY.  Forum linky SCIENCE strip off final “)” from bare Wikinaccurate url.  Bad SCIENCE…

[rogerzilla]

Bad SMurFs.

[rogerzilla]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat-roofed_pub

[andyoxon]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat-roofed_pub

The [MG] Midget pub in Abingdon springs to mind.

[FifeingEejit]

When I first started at the health board we occasionally went to the flat roof pub at the western gateway.
Although we usually managed to eat a burger and chips and shoot some pool without having to fight the locals there was one occasion before my time when the chips arrived only to be returned to the kitchen with the statement "I didn't ask that type of deep fried King Edwards".

Although it was probably actually regal kingsize.

Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk

[rogerzilla]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine

This sounds like one of those bonkers thought experiments, but they were actually used.  It's not recorded whether anything
 went wrong.  Decommissioning must have been interesting.

[Ian H]

To coin a phrase...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_postillion_has_been_struck_by_lightning

[Kim]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine

This sounds like one of those bonkers thought experiments, but they were actually used.  It's not recorded whether anything
 went wrong.  Decommissioning must have been interesting.

Sounds like the sort of thing Rickover's team would have come up with when asked to find a safer alternative to Sodium...

[T42]

"Three hundred thousand pounds of liquid mercury"

To coin a phrase...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_postillion_has_been_struck_by_lightning

In France, someone who splutters may be said to envoyer des postillons.

[Cudzoziemiec]

"My carburettor needs regulation" is one I remember seeing in a Polish phrasebook. Friends told me this was code for "I need another shot of vodka".

[The French Tandem]

Road signs in the UK can be traced back to the development of the bicycle. Really? Who would have believed that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_signs_in_the_United_Kingdom#History

A

[rogerzilla]

The new Russian attack submarine has a name to inspire confidence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada-class_submarine

[Legs]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century

[mllePB]

The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre

[Ian H]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stubblebine

"[He] initiated a project within the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), which he commanded from 1981 to 1984, to create "a breed of 'super soldier'" who would "have the ability to become invisible at will and to walk through walls". He attempted to walk through walls himself—but failed, as he himself described in a 2004 interview."

[Captain Nemo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stubblebine
 He attempted to walk through walls himself—but failed...

I picked up the book "The Men Who Stare at Goats", which relates Stubblebine's antics, at an airport many years ago - these guys were seriously crazy! Not only was walking through walls one of their aims but also the ability to kill (the eponymous goats) by intense staring. If I remember rightly, large amounts of LSD and other psychotropic chemicals were involved which is hardly suprising...

Even the name Stubblebine reminds me of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling and his attempt to teach ravens to fly underwater:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhS35f015SQ

[Mr Larrington]

He also gets a namecheck in Dawkins' “The God Delusion”.

[mrcharly-YHT]

During the cold war, the MoD seriously considered building nuclear land mines containing live chickens.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock

[Woofage]

There was a real Saul Goodman (a musician), not just the dodgy lawyer from Breaking Bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Goodman_(percussionist)

[Regulator]

There was a real Saul Goodman (a musician), not just the dodgy lawyer from Breaking Bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Goodman_(percussionist)

There is actually a US lawyer called Saul Goodman (he's a tax lawyer in Washington).

As you might expect, he is somewhat weary of the usual 'jokes'...

[grams]

Brampton is the last place in the UK with four-digit local numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom

[Cudzoziemiec]

It's so long since I used an immobile phone I'd forgotten it's possible to dial just the "number" without the "code"!

[Kim]

It's so long since I used an immobile phone I'd forgotten it's possible to dial just the "number" without the "code"!

When I first configured our Asterisk server, I was careful to arrange the internal numbers so that dialling local numbers would still work without a timeout^[1].

AFAIK we've never used it, and it seems to have gone out the window when I de-crufted the dialplan last year.


_{[1] An analogue phone sends dialled numbers one at a time at human-pressing-buttons speeds, so the only way the exchange knows when the user has finished dialling is when they reach the limit for the number of digits that are expected based on the digits that have already been sent.  Otherwise it needs to use a timeout, which leaves the user listening to a 'dead' line for a few seconds before attempting to place the call, which isn't how people expect phones to work.}

[Ian H]

Our five-figure (+code) landline number is rejected by some online forms.  Fortunately, adding a random final digit doesn't change the effective number.

[rogerzilla]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avril_Lavigne_replacement_conspiracy_theory

It's a "Paul Is Dead" for the 21st century.