Useless Trivia - 1st one to answer gets to ask

You need to have gone to grade school in Michigan to know that.

What event coincides with full moon rise?

 

oic...no wonder i did not know, it happened 20 years after i left the state

 

Sunset

 

Yes .Pretty easy question,but its surprising how many people dont know that.

 

It's one thing to know it. It's another thing to think of it. It's obviously true, once someone mentions it. But it didn't occur to me.

 

Ok, on the astronomical theme:

Name a country whose flag depicts an astronomical impossibility, and describe why it's impossible.

 

Are you talking Turkey?

Its flag shows a star and a crescent moon, but part of the star overlaps the moon. The crescent is merely the lit portion of the sphere, and not the true shape.

 

I thought that you would most likely know that being an avid backpacker.
Ive photographed the moonrise in various parts of the world,and from trial and error I figured out ,to be there at sunset.

 

Oh, SO close, hyo! You got the astronomical part right, but the wrong country. Turkey's flag shows the star in the correct position, outside the implied circle of the moon. I give Turkey credit because although the point of the star overlaps, I consider that "flare" from the star, not the star itself. There are at least a couple countries whose flags have a star, points and all, inside the circle though: Pakistan and Mauritania.

The reason I seem to know the geometry of those flags so well: I used to have a map of the world on the wall of my house when I was maybe 8 years old that showed a lot of flags along the bottom, and it really bothered me that some countries got that wrong, so I made a mental note of those countries that had it right and the ones that had it wrong. Turkey is on my good side as a result.

So anyway... shoot, Hyo!

 

There's the rub: I am a hiker, not a backpacker. I go to hiking lodges or hotels, get in several hours before sundown (they have an early compulsory return time so there's daylight if they have to go out and search for someone) and am generally in the mountains, where the visual horizon is well above the horizontal plane.

However, as I said, I knew it, I just didn't think of it.

 

Continuing with the flag theme, what's the only country whose flag is not either square or rectangular?

 

Hmmm... tricky. My guess is that it's not a round flag, or pentagonal... probably triangular or rectangular with a triangle cut out of one side. Don't know the country though.

 

its triangular and seems to me it was African or middle eastern... Oman maybe??

 

Not Oman, or round or pentagonal, but keep guessing.

 

nepal.

 

name a word in the English language that ends in "-mt".

 

DREAMT

name a computer, that's storage system (tape or disc) would actually increase both in speed and capacity, by simply overclocking the computer's main processor

warning:
this might cause an end to this thread, heh

for clarification : say you have a pc and a 750 gig hard disk. no matter how fast the cpu runs, its still only a 750 gig hard disk.

 

are you talking about overclocking ram?

 

no

the cpu

 

Apparently the flag of Nepal is pentagonal!!! Although it's not the regular equilateral pentagon you're thinking of. It's 2 triangles that are joined, forming a 5-sided shape.