Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for August 25, 2018

I was six when Pinatubo blew; got no recollection whatever of being THAT cold.

Hence, Batman’s use of the Batplane and Batcopter.

Why would you build a bridge in silly units of measure? Then again, I have heard of the antics at MIT. But we’re talking real money here.

At MIT he was known as “Square Root Smoot”! :o]

The bridge was not “designed” around someone whose parents hadn’t been born yet. An MIT fraternity decided to measure how many Smoots long the pre-existing bridge was.

We discovered that about bats as a kid. We’d lay a white sheet on the ground and often at least one of the dozens of bats flittering around at night up there would land there for the grapes we were throwing around and just flop around. Some would, in fact, get going again. Most didn’t. Kids can be cruel. We didn’t realize it then, but it was cruel.

besides the ash, what else gets belched out by burping volcano?

Haw! And they say pollution causes Global Warming!

So, that’s why the Bats hang upside-down!

And lets not forget to post furlongs per fortnight as the speed limit on that bridge.

A light-nanosecond (or a nano-lightsecond) is just under 1 foot in length. For humans, that could be a convenient unit of measure for length. (“I’m 5.9 light-nanoseconds in height.”)

But, we’ve pretty much settled on the meter.

Particulate matter, such as smoke and ash, does block sunlight and keep the temperature down. But that is relatively brief. Greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide and methane, last much longer.

I’ve seen a bat take off from the ground (well, floor) right in front of me.

That bat limitation is pretty much how you evict bats from your house. Screen up the opening they are using to get in an out, then cut a hole in the screen and use some drain pipe extension that curves downward. They get out by climbing through the pipe and dropping out to fly away. Then they have no way to land and fly back up in. Evicted and gotta find a new home.

Uh, NO! The Harvard (Mass Ave) Bridge was NOT “designed” using the body length of Oliver Smoot as a unit of measurement. The bridge was build in the 1880’s and opened in 1890. In 1958, the bridge was measured using Smoot as a ruler as a fraternity prank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot