Lane Loitering

In Great Britain many people don't know it is illegal to loiter in the overtaking lanes. All lanes to the right of the first lane are earmarked for overtaking unless the first lane is closed or the lanes are bifurcating into separate roads. It is listed as one of the stipulations of the Dangerous Driving law. 

Motorists that loiter in the overtaking lanes without overtaking can receive 3 penalty points on their driving licence and receive a £100 fine. 

Grand Tree

The Giant Sequoya redwood tree is so big that it can dwarf over 40 blue whales, the largest animals known to ever exist on Earth. 

The tree is known to weigh close to 6000 tons and the average blue whale usually weighs 150 tons, still impressive considering humans usually weigh less than 100kg, a small fraction of 1 ton. 

According to scholars, the rings on the trees show an age close to biblical times, some where around before the time of Jesus, over 2000 years ago. 

~image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT)

Sources 

Ai estimation by Gemini. 

Let's calculate how many blue whales match the weight of a giant sequoia tree.

First, let's establish the average weights:

 * Blue whale: Blue whales can weigh between 100 to 200 tons (200,000 to 400,000 pounds), with an average often cited around 150 tons (300,000 pounds or 136,000 kg). Some sources state up to 330,000 pounds (150 tons).

 * Giant Sequoia tree: The largest giant sequoia, General Sherman, is estimated to weigh around 6,167 tons (or 2.7 million pounds). Other large sequoias can weigh over 600 tons, and some estimates go up to 1300 tons or even 2105 short tons (1,910 metric tons). We'll use the General Sherman's weight as a prominent example.

Now, let's do the math:

Using the General Sherman tree's weight of 6,167 tons and an average blue whale weight of 150 tons:

6,167 \text{ tons (sequoia)} / 150 \text{ tons (blue whale)} \approx 41.11

So, approximately 41 blue whales would match the weight of a giant sequoia tree like General Sherman.

It's important to note that these are estimates, and the exact weights can vary for individual whales and trees.

~ Website https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/blue-whale?hl=en-GB

Hidden VMU

The DreamCast was so advanced that even the memory cards were games consoles in their own right. Certain games on the Sega would send an 8 bit game to the memory card and you could play a dot matrix side scrolling game similar to that of game boy game. 

~image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT) 

When the Memory card was plugged into the game controller the screen would be used to display game stats. The memory card was refered to as a VMU. It would keep record of your game progress and allow you to play games retro style. 

Heavy Ice Cube

If you froze water that contains the heavy isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium, the ice cube would sink in normal water. This is because it is 10% more dense than normal water. 

~image generated by artificial intelligence(chatGPT) 

Water that is formed of Deuterium hydrogen is often called Heavy water.  Heavy water is also known is Deuterium Oxide. 

We Don't Go Around the Sun

The Planets including Mercury, Venus Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune don't go around the sun. They go around the solar system's center of gravity known as the Barry Centre. Because of Jupiter's mass the Barry center of our solar system is a point beyond the sun's surface. 

~ image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT).  

It's natural to think we're going around the sun but where not. 

Longest Line

The Longest tube line in London is the Central line. It goes from West Ruislip to Epping for about 76 kilometres or 46 miles, a distance that is considerably longer than London itself. The reason it is able to cover that distance is because it doesn't go in a straight line but sort of zig zags across it. 

The Longest Journey time wise would be on the district line because it goes to 80 stops and takes about one and a half hours. 

~ image generated by artificial intelligence (chatGPT) 

The Elizabeth line goes from Reading("reding") to Shienfield in Essex, 100 kilometres or 62 miles. (You would need to change trains at one of the tube stations to get to Shienfield.) It acts like a tube line for part of the journey but is more like a commuter train. It covers the whole journey in less than 1 and a half hours 

British Radio

Here in Britain DAB+ is the latest version of digital Radio and only works on radios that support DAB+. 

According to the DAB+ website, the sound quality of DAB+ is better despite requiring a lower data transmission rate, less than 64kb per second. At the time of writing this post, Britain intends to keep both technologies running. 

According to official documentation DAB+ uses the codec He aac V2, part of the MP4 framework. It has a much higher compression compared to the MP2 codec used by plain DAB. 

The drawback of this technology is the radio itself has to do more work. After extracting a data stream, microprocessor in the radio has to decompress the sound data and turn it back into sound waves. 

~ image generated by artificial intelligence (Gemini)