Forum: Questions and Answers

I accept all responsibility for 'medical advice' given, yadda yadda. I'm on hydrocodone for post-surgical pain. It is, however, giving me violent nausea. If I eat anything, it comes back up. I have been on a babyfood diet since the surgery...

You know, those big ball shaped towers with your town's name painted on them. What do those things do?

In Sweden, many actors, TV personalities and such work hard to get rid of their own accents and actively learn to speak a dialect that is called "rikssvenska" ("National Swedish"). The funny thing is that this dialect doesn't exist; it's an...

Why did it take so long for sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo to come about? The Internet was well-established and many of the sites we're familiar with were present on the web in 1999 and before, but I hadn't heard of Facebook or Myspace until...

Is there one? I recall hearing several times that the QE2 was considered the last "official" ocean liner. Is it because the QE2 is/was the only one making tansatlantic voyages, while cruise ships just sort of island hop.

A common scene in movies : a bunch of mooks holding wads of bills, crouched down next to a wall, shooting dice. What exactly would they be playing? Not craps (as I know it) - they'd need all those different bets from a craps table. Anyone here...

How is it that professional football (soccer) players get injured so easily? There seemed to be a sudden surge in metatarsal breaks a few years back, for instance, and players seem to get injured by nothing challenges all the time (including...

Are combat troops in any Western army still issued with vials of morphine, like those seen in Saving Private Ryan? If not, when did this practice die out?

I guess the first question is should I capitalize the word "Royalty" in regards to the British Kingdom. Moving on, I was struck by an anecdote someone once told me. It had something to do with the Queen ruling as a monarch, but was unable to use...

Why does eating lots of oranges, or drinking lots of orange juice, give you the runs?

Suppose under some unlikely set of circumstances, the White House is taken over by terrorists, and the President is taken hostage. Which agency would perform the rescue, if there was one? Standard police SWAT teams? The Secret Service? Or would...

Was it started on 4chan, or somewhere else?

After reading the thread about Whim Marriages, I was looking through Wikipedia and found that New York is the only state which doesn't accept "irreconcilable differences" or something similar as sufficient grounds for divorce, instead requiring an...

BBC Link It says it was part of a "measuring device" How many rulers or scales do you own that are nuclear? And why would the material be wrapped in a lead ball? Wouldn't that make it about as useful as... a lead ball?

I mean, did your average American in the late 19th or early 20th century drink much genuine coffee? Over here coffee has been known for centuries and you will find many references to people from all parts of society drinking "coffee." However far...

Something I've been wondering for years. (Yes, really!) Very often, in american movies or novels, I'll see or read the characters getting up then brushing their teeth. Then, having their meal, and it's not shown or written if they again brush...

Will it be safe to jump in from, say, 10 feet high?

Supposedly about 20% of the population of the City of Detroit is white. Where do they live? Are there any neighborhoods inside the City of Detroit city limits -- not the suburbs or incorporated enclaves like Hamtramck -- that still have a...

Even before it became a big thing to drink water constantly, I remember that one of the pieces of advice mothers always gave when you were sick was to drink as much water as you could tolerate. Now if you're vomiting or have diarrhea, dehydration...

This watch is so cool. It was given to me as a very dear gift, something bought a couple decades ago. The watch keeps excellent time, unless it's left still for very long. But you begin to turn it gently back and forth and the "motor" seems to...

I've read these phrases in a variety of novels set around the world and I'm curious about their use in real life. Apologies for my ignorance. Have any of you good folk across the Atlantic or the Pacific ever used the term, "who will be mother",...

Why do some cave dwelling fish lose the use of their eyes, for instance? What is the advantage to the fish? How resource intensive is maintaining a functioning eye?

If movies and television are to be believed you can go to Las Vegas or Reno and get married almost immediately. Are there any such places in Europe?

Who pays for involuntary psychiatric hold (aka 5150, Baker Act, sectioning, etc)? Let's say Bob is placed on a 72 hour old; does the bill go to his health insurance? What if he has no insurance; does he need to pay out of his own pocket? Does the...

Hurh, I thought about it and I have a few questions about both the science behind the feasibility of such a project and the practical issues regarding it. The Glass Necklace First off: In theory, could it work?

This is my darling dog Jordie. My problem is I can't get him to want to go on walks with me. Whenever I try to take him out, I have to drag him, quite literally, down the street. The only place he will willingly walk is to the dog park about two...

I've never had it before, as I've always gotten the shot, but I'm told there are strains that don't care about the shot. According to Wikipedia, the symptoms are: * Chills * Fever * Pharyngitis * Muscle pains * Severe headache * Coughing

I am a longtime WinAMP user that's slowly converting over to iTunes. I don't actually like iTunes, but since it's the easiest way to copy music to my 2G Shuffle (yes, I know about the WinAMP plug-in and third-party software like Anapod Explorer), I...

I had a quick Google search and didn't find anything. What does bumble mean? Somehow, the word seems to match the creatures perfectly.

Let's say the bad guys pitched me into a large pool of molten lava. Any guesses as to how long I'll survive, what will be the cause of death, and how painful it will be? Please tell me it's painless and instant; this will let me cross one small...

What was the first non-constructive proof in mathematics that was widely believed? I did a course as an undergraduate where the course notes stated that Hilbert's original proof of the Nullstellensatz was the first, and at the time caused a...

This has plagued me for years, and i don't understand why. If I eat a hearty, chewy piece of bread, say a whole grain, dense bread that is fairly dry without butter, I get the hiccups almost IMMEDIATELY after the first few bites. What does that...

So by what criteria were the G20 countries selected, and who determined the criteria? I mean, some of the countries, such as the USA and China, are pretty much no-brainers (insert punch line here), but when you get down into the 12-20 range they've...

My brother has an IBM Thinkpad T22 which has a rather odd problem, I think. It didn't come with an installed burner and he wanted me to make a disc image of the harddrive. I have an external drive enclosure, so I slapped one of my CD burners in it...

I'm pretty good at identifying accents, but this one has me stumped. This was someone I just met through work, which means I can't give you any links to sound bites, nor can I tell you her name. However, the accent sounded much like a cross...

Whiling away a boring shift at work, I counted up the variety of different little energy shot drinks that we sell - things like 5-Hour Energy. We sell : 5-Hour Energy - Three different flavors 5-Hour Energy Extra Strength 6-Hour Power - three...

Currently, male heirs trump female heirs to the British throne under the current British constitutional arrangement. Suppose Prince Charles was born a woman and the Queen dies. Charlie is overlooked, in favour of her son, William. Could Charlie...

How do they do it? Do they actually have ways of analyzing the pattern and determining which numbers are being displayed, or do they just have cracks for what the numbers are?

I've posted "satisfactorialy' a couple of times on here now, each time thinking "er, I hope that's actually a word". I Googled it and got some results, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a real word. Is "satisfactorialy' a real word, an...

I finally found somewhere today that a)had some swimming goggles in stock adequate to my approximate eyeglass needs and b)was willing to sell them to me. Part of the problem with my search was that approximately half of all manufacturers of...

After a 4-mile run yesterday, I felt fine all evening... then I woke up this morning barely able to walk on my right ankle. It feels stiff, a little locked up, painful when I put weight on it, but not swollen or visibly inflamed. I add distance...

How does a person typically become a Director General of, say, MI5? Do they work their way up through the ranks? Do they apply for the post, when it becomes available, or are they appointed, somehow? How stringent are the security checks?

When I make a best fit line in Excel, is there any way to use the formula it gives me dynamically? In other words, as I get and enter new data, I'd like to use that data to make a new best fit line. In the help section under the TREND command, it...

Yesterday I had an idea for a baby's car seat. Just a little innovation to help prevent all those deaths every year from parents leaving their babies in their cars. It would be a little device that you keep on your keychain. When your keys are more...

There's a thread going on in Jibba Jabba about dreams, and it got me thinking. It's natural to think that our dreams are trying to tell us something, but are they? What's the latest research? I gather Freud's been pretty much abandoned. Is there...

Simple question: how do you pronounce the British word "chav" for a lower-class white person of trashy, rapper-style dress and violent sensibilities? Is it "tch?v", "tch?v", "sh?v", "sh?v", or something else?

Yeah. So. Anyone know? I know it'll be an approximate answer, but I'd like to have at least a decent idea of the number.

Back in 2001, I went on the "BridgeClimb" tourist attraction in Sydney, Australia (where you get to hike up to the top of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, which, incidentally, really is a nifty thing to be able to do, but not in any way "extreme", despite...