Europe's Biggest Amusement Park

The Largest Amusement Park in Europe is located in Russia and is Called Kudikina Gora and it about 500 hectares.

 Alton Towers in Britain is second place but is crammed with rides and attractions. Disneyland is not even on the top ten list; that because a large part of the park is a resort the actual amusement park area is only 50 hectares. 

You could say Kudykina Gora has a lot of potential because it is so much bigger than the other amusement parks. 

LegoLand windsor

Before Legoland windsor opened in 1996, the site was a large safari park called 'Windsor Safari Park'

 The site was filled with many wild animals and visitors could drive amongst the animals in their cars. The brow of the hill would have given visitors a panoramic view of all the different animals. 

There was even a dolphin show held at the park. Amazing to think. 

There are many theories to why the original Safi park closed down. Some people think the whole park was on the side of a hill and it irritated the visitors. Other people think the cost of keeping wild animals increased. 

The bottom line is the visitor numbers dropped and at some point at the beginning  of the '90s, the park stopped making a profit. 

City Via Assassination

Southend on sea, a seaside town in Essex England was promoted to a city because of an assassination; let me explain. 

The local politician for the area, David Amess campaigned for many years to change the status of Southend on sea from a town to a city. On 15 of October 2021 he was assassinated by a Islamist terrorist because he voted for air strikes against Isis. 

Out of pity for his death, the Leadership cabinet, MP Boris Johnson and the Queen of England agreed to change the status of Southend on Sea to a city even though the population was less than half a million. 

A year later the Queen's Son, prince Charles (now King Charles the 3rd) went to Southend to declare Southend on sea a city. The status of the city changing hinged on his death. If he didn't die, they wouldn't carry out his wishes, there were places with a bigger population like Reading that still remained with a town to this day. 

Early 3D Game

You won't think there was a 3d game available on the Atari 2600, but there was. In 1983 CBS electronics released a first person dungeon crawler game called Tunnel runner. 

The game pushed the 1970's hardware of the Atari to its limits. It featured a maze inhabited with monsters. The goal of the game is to get out of the maze and avoid  the monsters. 

In my opinion it is the most graphically advanced 3D game on the console. Very few people were aware the game existed because it didn't have an established marketing network like other games providers. They even tried to add some shading to give some depth to the game. 

When you were confronted by a monster, it felt like it was a part of the game terrain and was animated. 

Tyson Fury

Tyson Fury was named after mike Tyson by his father because we was born premature and only weighed 450 grams so they thought the name would bring him good luck and help him survive because Mike Tyson was a good fighter. 

Run For it

Britain is such a small island that it is possible to run across it in one day. 

If you were able to run at a top human speed you can get anywhere in Britain in 10 hours. No one can though, most humans can only sprint for 2 minutes. 

If you jogged at half the sprinting speed 20km/h or 12 to 14 miles per hour, you could run to any part of Britain in a day. Animals that run fast like horses can't maintain a human jogging speed for long, they would just collapse after a few hours so humans are the fastest long distance runners on earth. 

Hot air and Helium

Hot air has a lower density than regular air and that is why hot air balloons float. Hot air would need a temperature of 1800°c to have the same density as Helium at room temperature.  It would likely melt the envelope containing it at that temperature. 

So hot air is lighter than the surrounding air but Helium at room temperature is much lighter than hot air so it can lift more weight. 

That is why a large hot air balloon lifts a tiny basket yet a Helium blimps have an enclosed cockpit and engine attached. 

Physical Pong

You can buy a real physical Atari pong table. It's sold as a coffee table but it has a real 8bit brick ball that goes back and fourth. 

At the time of writing this post the price was over £2,000 (£2,295.82 to be exact). That is quite expensive for a table. I guess it was built to last and it looks amazing. 

The table uses magnets to drag a cube shaped ball back a fourth across the table to be deflectd by the paddles are a also real objects. It creates quite a nice effect. 

If I was loaded, I would buy one myself. 😍

Games Watches

A family of retro gaming watches is currently being released by www.myplaywatch.com/. They're the same company that made the Atari watch with mini paddle controllers that I mentioned in the previous post. 

They lack connectivity; no WiFi or Bluetooth but they do have fitness tracking and they tell the time and have a selection of themed clock dials. At the time of this post there were three watches being released. I particularly like the space invaders one and Tetris. 

It is nice to have old computer games in a watch. 

Atari Watch

Atari is still around and now they're making smart  watches. You can buy an Atari watch with 4 popular Atari games on it. 

It also has a selection of retro gaming themed digital dials to chose from and all the other trimmings that come with a smart watch like fitness monitors and pulse metrics. 

I want one myself. I thought the four games on there like pong, super breakout, centipede and missile command are perfect for watches. I love super breakout. 

In the image above the wristband has a walnut finish just like the atari 2600. Very nice 👍 

New Hand Held Console

Evercade are releasing a new games console called the evercade nexus. What makes it special is it has eversync, a feature that lets you connect to another console and share the game on the cartridge through the air and play two players; only  one person needs to have the game cartridge, the console will send the game code to other console and let the other one play the same game as a second player. 

It also has lots of improved hardware features, wireless audio and improved sound output, better controls and a more crisp screen. It also has improved controller components. 

The evercade cartridges are the same ones that work on all the other Evercade consoles. 

WhatsApp Spontaneously Draws

Meta Ai can draw with commands prompts from inside from inside WhatsApp.

Everyone that has WhatsApp can now ask the meta Ai to draw an image and it will. In this example I asked it to draw a picture of cat playing scratch cards. 

I also like the default size of the image, 810 by 1140 pixels, it is a good size to share with other places and it's not too small in quality. 

Meta Ai was able to draw from the beginning of its creation but wouldn't take spontaneous drawing commands from inside WhatsApp until recently. 

Acid Injury

On December 2014 a man called David Phillips drove from Hastings to Truro in Cornwall (almost the width of England) to knock on the door of Adreas Christopheros and throw concentrated acid on his face because he thought he was the man that sexually assaulted someone close to him. It turns out he had got the wrong guy and his injuries were very serious. 

This is one reason why we shouldn't take the law into our own hands. 

The burning of the acid was so strong it instantly destroyed his shirt and left him with chronic pain for many years. He was also disfigured and blinded in one eye. 

The gasses from the acid even set off the fire alarms in the emergency room at the hospital. Plus there was a strong possibility he would pass away from infection. 

Sources 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-34478357

https://youtu.be/8RABNt4drq8?si=05_F4iaL7rEiA2fqh

Giant Bug

During the Devonian age there lived a giant arthropod called Jaekelopterus. They estimated it to be roughly the weight of two men, about 150 to 180 kg. It grew to be over 2 meters long. 

It lived in the water and belonged to the group euripterid, they were a group of arthropods that resembled scorpions but were more closely related to horse shoe crabs. 

It was a large creature that ate anything it could grab with it's claws but was the size of a panda, or a go cart. 

At the time more than 300 million years ago, there was a lot more oxygen in the air so creatures could grow a lot bigger and still move quite fast. 

Coal Makers

If you hold coal in your hands, you're looking at the remains of carboniferous period trees and plants. In the carboniferous period, the eco system didn't know how to break down tough plant fibers like wood. 

The trees that were around in the carboniferous period were nothing like the trees you see today, they were more like ferns. They wold look like ferns with tree sizes stumps. 

They were scaly prickly bizarre looking plants like Lepidodendron (scaly tree). They didn't embed their sperm in pollen like modern trees,  instead their sperm would swim along standing water on the ground just like animal sperm does today.  The trees were often male and female so one tree would make the seeds and the other would make the sperm. 

The trouble with these types of trees is they need damp environments to reproduce. 

After the carboniferous period in the Permian period, fungus and bacteria emerged that were able to break down tough plant fibers like wood so coal was no longer being created on a large scale. 

Taxi Vs Train Chilterns Railway

I gathered some prices for train tickets from high Wycombe to Marylebone (50km)  and compared it to Taxi tarrifs. 

Once again I found it was cheaper by train. It gets close when groups are considered. 

The results were a bit closer than the ones to Southend from Barking, the distance is the same (50 km). Barking to Southend report

In this model the ticket of the train drops dramatically when there are 3 or more adults. (This is without rail cards), just a group ticket. It drops down to £9.10. In this model only one way is considered. 

The cost per person also drops on Uber taxi as the passengers increase up to 6 passengers at  £15.33 per person. (You need UberX for more than 4 passengers) That is tarrif b on the chart. 

Six passenders by train pay £9.10 each. 

A group of 6 passengers  on a  Uber taxi pay roughly £6.10 more than if they went by train. If they had rail cards and a return tickets the gap would even get bigger. 

A group travelling 50 km on the Chiltern line pay roughly £3 more for the same distance on the c2c line. I'm not sure why; perhaps more of the C2c line is subsidised while it is in London. I also noticed lines that use diesel trains are slightly more expensive than electric ones. Perhaps the tracks needs to be replaced less often because the trains are lighter and the trains cost less to maintain because they use electric motors. 

It could also be that line itself has more passengers so it can charge less money and still break even with their costs. I can only speculate at this stage. 

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Half and Half

The worlds Tallest Mountain, mount Everest occupies two countries. The north side of mount Everest is in China in the region of Tibet. The South side of mount Everest is in Nepal in the Koshi Province. koshi means river in Nepal. 

The South side of Mount Everest in Nepal has the most frozen bodies: just in case you were wondering. 

If you ascend the western or eastern flank of the mountain, it is possible to climb a mountain in two countries at the same time. 

When you stand on the top of the mountain, you would be standing in china and Nepal if you feet were aligned with the border line. 

Build Virtual Circuits

Have you ever wondered if there is a website that lets you make your own circuits and virtually simulate a current flowing through them. There is one. 

https://www.withdiode.com/

On the site you get existing projects and you can modify them or you can make your own from scratch using a virtual breadboard and standard electronic parts. 

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Nyctinasty and Planter Fasciitis

Daisies and many other common flowers often close their petals at night. This is action is known as Nyctinasty; tissues at the base of the flower petal absorb water and swell up, the swelling puts pressure on the base of the petal and pushes it shut. 

It is thought they do this to keep condensation off the flower parts and prevent frost damage. It also helps keep nuisance insects off the flower at night. It must be amazing to be a small mite living on a daisy flower and see the flower close and open around you. 

Have you ever felt a feeling of pain in the heel of your foot as you take your first steps that fades away. Is the pain usually only in one foot? The chances are you have Planter Fasciitis. The Planter Fascia tissue that connects your heel to your toes can become swollen and push back into the nerve fibres inside your heel tendons. 

It's not a serious condition but it can cause a lot of pain and discomfort. The best way to treat the condition is to do foot stretches and to lose weight. Finding more comfortable shoes can also cause a rapid improvement. 

The cause of the condition usually  stems from the calf muscles in the leg pulling your Achilles tendon for prolonged periods of time causing tightness in the arch of the foot. 

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Taxi Vs Train

Through my own investigations I can confirm that is is now cheaper to take a train 50 km from Barking in London to Southend Central by the coast in Britain than by taxi. 

With an Uber Taxi, it gets cheaper per person as the passengers increase up to 4 passengers, then the price goes up because you need a more expensive 6 seater Uber. But the train is cheaper in every metric. 

With 3 or more Adults, each person is paying just £6.05 because of Group save supplied by the c2c train line. 

With 4 passengers, an Uber ride from barking station costs just £15 per person because the taxi costs £60 regardless of the number of passengers. However, one passenger is only paying £9.10 on C2C so it is cheaper by train in every way. If your just one passenger or 6, it is cheaper than the cheapest configuration on Uber taxi although is gets close with 4 passengers. 

The Uber is slightly more convenient because you can chose the pickup and dropoff point and with 4 passengers, you're only paying £8.95 more than the train. 

The train is cheaper still when you add return tickets and rail cards. 

Commander Keen game

When the Mario Brothers Game was released for the '80s Nintendo (NES),  it was thought the hardware on most PC home computers could never compete with the smooth side scrolling of the game system because the graphics processor was so advanced. 

However, The ID software team that later made Duke Nukem found a way around the hardware limitations. They used a technique called double buffering, they were aware that the VGA graphics controller keeps two copies of the screen so they programmed the game to draw the graphics changes of the hidden copy of the screen then switch the panes around when the rendering is complete at the end of each frame cycle. They also programmed the game to only render the parts of the screen that had changed, like a brick was that was half way off the screen. 

When commander keen was released, people were amazed that is was still smooth scrolling as well as the mario brothers despite running on much slower graphically challenged dos based PC computers. 

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Red Dead Redemption Game

Red dead Redemption is one of the most popular games of all time. Did you know it was nearly abandoned; When Rockstar games was developing red dead redemption, there was so many bugs in the code that the game seemed unfixable and the development team were considering whether they should abandon the project. In forums and press interviews, they claimed they had made the game too complicated and caused software bugs to emerge. 

The game is so advanced that the animals in the desert hunt other animals in real time without user input. Sometimes you can witness a deer being hunted by a bear or wolves hunting a rabbit. 

There is also many hidden things in the game and if you just want to play you can always go to a bar in the game and play blackjack or layers dice. 

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Biggest and Smallest Seeds

The largest seed in the world that we know about is Coco De Mer palm tree seed. They weigh 30 kg and are roughly 50cm across. They are native to The Seychelles islands on the African continent and are found no where else in the world except in human cultivation. 

The Smallest seed that we know of is from the Orchid flowers that are often sold in supermarkets and florists. Their seeds are so small that they resemble dust. They are so small that the need a fungus partner to get them growing because they won't germinate on their own. You need a microscope to see the individual seedlings. 

The Seychelles

The smallest country on the African continent is the saychelles islands. It  has a surface area of about 459 km². The population is 100,000; less than many cities and towns in Britain. 

There are many plants and Animals that are unique to the Seychelles atol, they're found nowhere else on earth. 

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Tree Net

Trees have been known to communicate with other trees through their roots. They relay information about the conditions in the soil like having too many pests or poor sunlight. 

I thought they just log on 😂. The floor of a forest or the woods is a communication network for trees and bushes. 

New Encyclopedia

There is a new encyclopedia created that was written by artificial intelligence. It is called Grokipedia. It was created by Elon Musk's ai company xAI. 

You can visit the Grok ai now at https://grokipedia.com/

Grok ai does it's own research and searches for the truth. It is a machine, it isn't biased, it doesn't have opinions about things or people so it only wants to display the truth. 

I have already created a shortcut to it on my Android desktop. 

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has had issues with biased authors recently, politicians and activists being labelled as far right and statements about companies that aren't true. Even historical events being changed to suit the opinion of the editors. 

When I tried Grokipedia, it was dark like a dos prompt screen so I changed it to light mode. 

Roman Urine

In the Roman Empire, Urine was very useful. It was used to prepare leather, clean clothes and Brush teeth. 

It was so useful that it was taxed when used for commercial purposes. 

That takes the piss. 

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Most Toilets

The sports venue or building with the most toilets is wembley stadium. It has 2618 Toilets, more than any other stadium in the world. 

It also has one of the largest cantilever roofs in the world. This allows the spectators to view the pitch without being obstructed by the pillars. 

Stegasaurus and Tyrannosaurs Rex

The stegasaurus and Tyrannosaurs Rex never met because the stegasaurus went extinct in the Jurassic period and the Tyrannosaurs  Rex was around in the Cretaceous period. When the Tyrannosaurs Rex was around, the Stegasaurus was extinct for 80 million years. 

We are closer in time to Tyrannosaurs Rex than the Tyrannosaurs Rex was to stegasaurus. The Gap between Us and Tyrannosaurs Rex was 66 million years. The Gap Between Tyrannosaurus rex and stegasaurus is 80 million years. 

In the movie Jurassic park, Tyrannosaurs Rex didn't belong there because it wasn't from that time period. 

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Before the Dinosaurs

Before the Dinosaurs were around on Earth, the dominant group of Animals that roamed the earth were the  Permian Synapsids. They were bizarre looking mamal like reptiles. Some of them had spines on their back. 

If you saw a Permian Synapsid, you would see a creature that looks both like reptile and a mamal at the same time. 

It is thought they went extinct because of frivalous volcanism, or several super volcanoes erupting in tandem. The food chain was wipe out by acid rain and cold weather because of dust from the volcanoes. 

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Giant Sloth

The closest being we have to king king Kong is the Megatherium, the giant sloth. It was a type of sloth that was able to grow 6 meters tall and weighed about 4 tones. It spent most of its life walking on all 4 limbs but was able to stand up on two legs to reach higher parts of the tree to eat, or to intimate predictors or other sloths. 

It was native to south America and went extinct about 10,000 years ago. 

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Largest Lizard

The largest species of lizard to ever exist as far as we know is the Magalania, it was native to Australia, and went extinct 40,000 years ago, about the same time humans settled there. 

It grew to about 7 meters long and weighed roughly 500 kg. There is no evidence that it ate people but many experts think it likely did eat people . There is also evidence that people are the reason it went extinct. 

It belonged to the same family as the Komodo Dragon and looked a lot like a monitor lizard only much bigger. 

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Largest Flying bird

The largest flying bird to ever exist as far as we know is the Argentavis magnificens, they were loosely related to Eagles but belonged to their own group. They were known to stand as tall as an adult human and have a wingspan of 8 meters. 

They were a predator and probably hunted other birds and mammals. If you saw one flying today, it would look like a paraglider or a small airplane. The family group they were a part of is Teratornithidae, they were a group of large eagle like birds that lived in south America. 

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The Sandy Drowning Theory

There is a well known fan theory associated with the musical movie titled 'Greace'. They think the whole movie is an hallucination of Sandies brain caused by her drowning. 

In the theory, Dan doesn't save her from drowning in the beginning of the movie, that was an hallucination along with all the other scenes in the movie up to the point when they're in a car and it starts to fly to heaven. 

The flying car scene in the theory would be when her oxygen starved brain finally shuts down. It is quite a grim concept and it makes the whole movie hard to view a second time. It adds a grim lens to an otherwise upbeat movie. 

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Largest Ever Flying Animal

The Largest flying animal to ever exist as far as we know is the Quetzalcoatlus northropi, it was a type of pterosaur. It went extinct at end of the late Cretaceous period, the end of the dinosaur era. It was huge, the creature is thought to weigh about 250 kg and stood about 5 or 6 meters tall when not flying; as tall as a giraffe. 

It not fully understood how they were able to fly but it is thought they would use a spring like muscle contraction to launch itself into the air. The 10 to 11 meter long wingspan would have helped it to stay airborne. 

If it existed today, it would likely be mistaken for a small airplane because of its size. 

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One Cell Multi Cell

If you ever wondered if there is a life form that lives as a single cell but also can be a multi cell organism, there is one, it's called Dictyostelium discoideum. 

It is an amoeba (ameba) that lives as a single celled being that consumes bacteria but when there isn't much to eat, individual cells will join together to form a multicellular being (a bit like power rangers when all their robot parts join together). When they are all joined together they can combine their movement to crawl large distances compared to their size. They behave more like a worm or slug than a cellular life form when they are one. 

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Giant Cell

There is a giant single cell life form that lives at the bottom of the ocean called a Xenophyophorea. They are so big that they can be picked up by hand. They use sediments in the ocean to build their shells known as tests. They live by gathering small particles of other life forms like algi the drift down from the ocean above them. 

Some of these single celled life forms can reach the size of 20cm across, about the size of a football. Although they are one cell they usually have more than one nucleus. 

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Black holes

It is believed that all objects with mass can become black holes as long as their radius is reduced to a certain size, even individual particles can become black holes. In a book written by professor Brian Cox it pointed out that if the Earth were compressed into the size of a pepple, a few centimetres across, it would be a black hole. 

The same book pointed out that gravity is the weakest force, a small magnet can pull a metal object away from the Earth, but it has no limits, it keeps increasing with mass and can be focused into a small space and cause a sphere around itself with an escape velocity that is higher than the speed of light. In other words, even light can't escape the gravity of a black hole if it gets too close. They call the space where light can't escape the event horizon. 

Movie Facts

In the book that the movie 'The thing 1982' is based on titled  'who goes there' by John Campbell. There are some key attributes of the alien creature that was not revealed in the movie. 

Firstly, the organism doesn't need to eat or breathe because it can harness cold fusion in its cells, they split water molecules and merge the two hydrogen atoms together to make helium and lots of energy.  

Secondly, Dr Blair believed it has a default form and was likely artificially created to spread an alien civilization around the universe. When they found the creature it had three red eyes and tendrils in its head and Dr Blair came to the conclusion that when it had finish assimilating all the life forms it would return to its default form, unless it needed adaptations to survive. 

Thirdly, the creature is telepathic and as it thawed out in the book, it would mess with the minds of the crew and it knew what they were all going to do. They couldn't hide anything from it. 

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