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Stupid & Funny from Around the World :Continued

2005-05-21-aerogel.jpg


Yup, that’s a brick.
It’s sitting on Aerogel, “frozen smoke,” the world’s lowest-density solid. The stuff is 99.8% air but can support 2,000 times its own weight, and it holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records.
Most amazingly, it was first created in 1931.

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Controversial remarks attributed to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh:
  • “If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”
  • When visiting China in 1986, he told a group of British students, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
  • To a British student in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
  • To a Scottish driving instructor: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough for them to pass the driving test?”
  • On a visit to the new Welsh Assembly in Cardiff, he told a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, “Deaf? No wonder you are deaf, standing so close to that racket.”
  • To an Australian aborigine: “Still throwing spears?”
  • To the president of Nigeria, who was dressed in traditional Muslim robes: “You look like you’re ready for bed.”
  • Seeing a poorly installed fusebox in an Edinburgh factory, Philip said it looked “like it was put in by an Indian.”
  • When a 12-year-old boy told the prince that he aspired to be an astronaut, he replied, “You’re too fat.”
Overheard during an extended tour of HMS Boxer: “Not another fucking chamber.”
 
After he’d been stung by almost everything, entomologist Justin O. Schmidt created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a four-point scale comparing the overall pain of insect stings:
  • 1.0 – Sweat bee: “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”
  • 1.2 – Fire ant: “Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.”
  • 1.8 – Bullhorn acacia ant: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”
  • 2.0 – Bald-faced hornet: “Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.”
  • 2.0 – Yellowjacket: “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”
  • 3.0 – Red harvester ant: “Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.”
  • 3.0 – Paper wasp: “Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.”
  • 4.0 – Pepsis wasp: “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).”
  • 4.0+ – Bullet ant: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”
 

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