Useless Trivia: Places to Drive on Left

[Danger]

I seem to remember from decades ago, when I was living in tomato and tobacco country, that someone was trying to introduce the nicotine gene into tomatoes so they'd be more bug-resistant. (Nicotine is the primary active ingredient in a lot of insecticides.) I don't know what became of the research.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

Tomatos do have nicotine in them. Maybe they were trying to increase the amount.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Tomatos do have nicotine in them.

That would explain the guy that I saw smoking a tomato.

 

[Huckleberry]

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/extract/329/6/437
That's the quickest thing I could find.

I didn't see anything about nicotine in seaweed in there. Oh well, just a book.

Are you sure he wasn't smoking a blowfish?

No, they save those for the people that ask for a cigareete as a last wish before they go in front of the firing squad. Saves bullets that way.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

There is considerable evidence that nicotine is present in certain human foods, especially plants from the family Solanaceae

I was thinking that the family name of vegitables that have nicotine in them might have helped. It doesn't seem that any of them grow underwater though.

 

[matthyaouw]

I heard eggplant had the most.

Yeah, but an eggplant is harder to smoke, unless you have a really large mouth.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

There are 10²⁴ sheds in a barn.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Beauty; milliHelen: 1mH = amount of beauty that will launch one ship

...FurlongsPerFortnight is the most standard of the nonstandard units of speed in physics and engineering.


...FurlongsPerFortnight: 1 furlong/fortnight = 10 Snail's Pace (note: 1 furlong = 10 chains) This is incredibly (literally, for once) close to a centimetre / minute -- 0.99785914 cm/minute
c (speed of light): 1.80 tera furlongs per fortnight
c (speed of light): 18 tera snail's paces [continued]

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhimsicalUnitsOfMeasurement

Here is a down-to-earth example of another unfamiliar set measurement parameters. Eggs are sold by the dozen, but they are actually priced by the pound. Farmers or egg sorting machines separate eggs into sizes we call small, medium, large, extra large and jumbo.

On the farm where I grew up we packed eggs into layers of 36, in an egg crate which held two stacks of 5 layers or 30 dozens. note A dozen large eggs weighs 24 oz or 1.5 lb. So the case weight is approximately 45 lbs. The vast majority of egg consumers wouldn't have a notion of what you were talking about if you were to say that eggs had just gone up by $1.50 per crate or $0.033 per pound, when the price per dozen had increased from $1.20 to $1.25. Of course they also would have no reason to care! For more on eggs check here, or try the British Egg Information Service. Note that the British have only recently adopted the same egg size standard as we use in the U.S.

[continued with other weird units of measure]

http://www.jardine-engineering.us.vu/written/furlong1.html

 

[zoobyshoe]

Bulgaria produces more computer viruses annually than any other country in the world.