Oddballs

[Paleophyte]

I thought that I'd start a thread for those fascinatingly odd quirks of nature that make you reach for Snopes only to discover that no, this isn't click-bait, it's just reality trolling you again.

To kick things off, let's take a trip to the sleepy little town of Nördlingen, Germany.  Nördlingen is located in Bavaria and many of the buildings glitter faintly.  The town is built within the Ries crater, which ought to tip you off that something suspicious is afoot because while Germany is famous for a great many things, vulcanism isn't one of them.  Especially not the type of vulcanism necessary to produce a 24 km wide caldera.

Gene Shoemaker and Ed Chao visited the area in 1960 and identified coesite in the local rock.  Coesite is an ultra-high pressure polymorph of quartz that forms when we get smacked by an asteroid.  The Ries crater is lined with suevite, a mixture of rock fragments and glass that forms under obscenely high pressures and temperatures produced by meteorite impacts.  The Ries bolide is estimated to have been about 1.5 km in diameter and struck the Earth at about 20 km/s, liberating more energy than all the nuclear weapons that our crazed little species has ever produced by a couple of orders of magnitude. About 270 Gigatonnes, give or take.

The carbon-rich sediments that the asteroid struck were converted into suevite studded with microdiamonds. The Ries crater is estimated to contain some 72,000 tonnes of diamond (144 Billion carats), all too small to be worth anything in the gem market. Built from the local rock, the buildings of Nördlingen are literally crusted in diamond.

[Deesse23]

The Nördlinger Ries is quite popular in Germany. You could just as well have just asked any of us.  ;D

P.S.: Technically, Nördlingen is in Bavaria (literally being a bordertown to BaWü), but culturally it is swabian. Basically most of the bavarian part of the border area along those two states is culturally swabian. The bavarian border is just a bit too far to the west.....in theory.

[Tartarus Sauce]

The Nördlinger Ries is quite popular in Germany. You could just as well have just asked any of us.  ;D

P.S.: Technically, Nördlingen is in Bavaria (literally being a bordertown to BaWü), but culturally it is swabian. Basically most of the bavarian part of the border area along those two states is culturally swabian. The bavarian border is just a bit too far to the west.....in theory.

Explain for the uninitiated the difference betwen Bavarian and Swabian culture. Bavaria is obvioulsy quite well known, but I know nothing about Swabia.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Famous for the number of Swabies who don't go to sea.

[Deesse23]

*German humor ON*
Did you know that scots were expelled from Swabia for being too generous?

Swabia is roughly the part of Germany west of Bavaria up to the Black Forest (but excluding most of it), essentially the south west of Germany. The name stems form a german tribe whom the Romans called "Suebi". (Dutchy of) Swabia was one of the core regions of the early Holy Roman Empire (eastern francian empire), long before Bavaria even existed, yet it soon fell apart politically in the late medieval.

Bavarians:

• love beer
  
• are loud and like to brag
  
• love beer
  
• think they are something special
  
• love beer
  
• dialect sounds like they behave: rude
  
• love beer
  
• host the biggest fest in the world: Oktoberfest

Swabians:

• love wine
  
• are cheap
  
• are nice (unlike Bavarians)
  
• are cheap
  
• working ethos: "Schaffe schaffe, Häusle baue" (work, work , build a little house) = are hard working (have built the tallest church in the world, in Ulm)
  
• are awesome businessmen in general (even by german standards!)
  
• are cheap
  
• are somewhat hillbilly-ish (due to the remote nature of much of their territory)
  
• are cheap
  
• are very tidy, very very tidy, even by german standards!
  
• are very, very cheap (did i mention this already?)
  
• dialect sounds rather cute, they like to (ab)use the diminuitive
  
• host the second biggest fest in the world: Cannstadter Wasn
  
• are very inventive (kings of classic german small-to-medium size companies / hidden champions)
  
• the house of most famous emperors of the high/late medieval (Barbarossa, Frederick II "stupor mundi) originated in Swabia: Staufer
  
• the "Hohenzollern", the kings of Prussia and last emperors of Germany originate from there as well. (dont ask)
  

I would say the Swabias would actually match the german stereotype much better than the Bavarians, correct?

[SYZ]

The Australian echidna and the platypus are the only mammals in the world that lay eggs.

—We Aussies are a pretty special group.     

[Kim]

Ha - I misread the thread title as, Oldballs.  :nar:

[Tartarus Sauce]

*German humor ON*
Did you know that scots were expelled from Swabia for being too generous?

Swabia is roughly the part of Germany west of Bavaria up to the Black Forest (but excluding most of it), essentially the south west of Germany. The name stems form a german tribe whom the Romans called "Suebi". (Dutchy of) Swabia was one of the core regions of the early Holy Roman Empire (eastern francian empire), long before Bavaria even existed, yet it soon fell apart politically in the late medieval.

Bavarians:

• love beer
  
• are loud and like to brag
  
• love beer
  
• think they are something special
  
• love beer
  
• dialect sounds like they behave: rude
  
• love beer
  
• host the biggest fest in the world: Oktoberfest

Swabians:

• love wine
  
• are cheap
  
• are nice (unlike Bavarians)
  
• are cheap
  
• working ethos: "Schaffe schaffe, Häusle baue" (work, work , build a little house) = are hard working (have built the tallest church in the world, in Ulm)
  
• are awesome businessmen in general (even by german standards!)
  
• are cheap
  
• are somewhat hillbilly-ish (due to the remote nature of much of their territory)
  
• are cheap
  
• are very tidy, very very tidy, even by german standards!
  
• are very, very cheap (did i mention this already?)
  
• dialect sounds rather cute, they like to (ab)use the diminuitive
  
• host the second biggest fest in the world: Cannstadter Wasn
  
• are very inventive (kings of classic german small-to-medium size companies / hidden champions)
  
• the house of most famous emperors of the high/late medieval (Barbarossa, Frederick II "stupor mundi) originated in Swabia: Staufer
  
• the "Hohenzollern", the kings of Prussia and last emperors of Germany originate from there as well. (dont ask)
  

I would say the Swabias would actually match the german stereotype much better than the Bavarians, correct?

Parts of it certainly, like the tidiness, inventiveness, and work ethic, but not really the parts about liking wine or being hillbillyish. As for the Bavarians, I get the impression that they're like the Texans of Germany: loud, egotistical, heavily attached to their regional identity, and quite fond of guns.

Which state do you hail from?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Ha - I misread the thread title as, Oldballs.  :nar:

I have the perfect graphic...

[Tartarus Sauce]

As for my own contribution of a wacky "no way that's true" fact, all men have a vaginal scar on their genitals. Well I'm technically being incorrect for the purpose of sensationalism. More precisely, embryos start their development with a non-sex specific genital opening. As the embryo develops into a fetus, this genital opening fuses into labial lips and a vagina for females, while in males, the opening closes shut and grows outward into a penis and testes. So for all men wondering why they've got a weird line running from their shaft, across their ballsack, and out to their taint, this is where it comes from.

[Deesse23]

Which state do you hail from?

The same state Swabia is a part of. Baden Württemberg. Its however completely artificial and was created only after 1945.
The region and culture i am part of is the region of Palatinate. I was born and raised ca. 20km (15mi) from where *coughFriederichTrumpcough* is from.