"if a practitioner [of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu] receives his or her black belt at 19 years old, the earliest they could expect to receive a ninth degree red belt would be at the age of 67."
The Celsius temperate scale was originally reversed, with 0º at the boiling point of water and 100º at the freezing point.
It was flipped to the direction we know now after a couple of years, after Celsius had died (although numerous people seem to have independently developed it).
You can do a discrete Fourier transform in just one short line of J:
dft=: +/ .* ^@o.@(0j2&% * (*/ -)@i.)@#
Courtesy of this post by Andrey Paramonov which I indirectly found via a link from Dave's recently TIL post on the jlang hashtag.
And I just learned that the Arctic and Antarctic Circles are similarly astronomical and vary over time.
Growing up, I assumed the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn were defined at a set latitude, but I recently discovered they are, in fact, astronomical and vary over time.
Elvis was a huge Monty Python fan.
Tom Anderson (of MySpace fame) was a fellow hacker and friend of Bill Landreth.
The point on the Earth's surface furthest from the center of the Earth is NOT Mount Everest.
Due to the equatorial bulge of the Earth, caused by its rotation, Chimborazo in Ecuador is the furthest.
In the original Civilization, there was a signed integer bug that made Gandhi overly aggressive. Normally Gandhi's aggression level is a very low 1. If you are playing a democracy, your opponents' aggressions are reduced by 2.
But what should have been Gandhi's aggression level of -1 in that case was treated as 255, making him the most aggressive possible.
/via http://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-such-an-asshole-in-civilization-1653818245
IP addresses can be sorted with sort -V. (It's the option for version numbers.)