#74

one april fools day when i was young my parents told me that there had been a mistake when i was named, and there was already an older boy with my name, so i had to pick a new one. strung me along for a while, i was devastated.

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#75

can anyone work out what it would be?

#76

Well the orbital velocity at the earth’s surface is something like 18000 mph, way beyond any existing gun. And as ninetyeightytwo said there’s air resistance to factor in there too so the initial velocity would be higher than that, much higher, although I have no idea how much.

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#77

Just remembered that my Nan told me Waltzing Matilda was the Australian National anthem and I believed it until I was about 15

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#79

I used to consider a player in Subbuteo who had been flicked off the pitch to be offside.

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#80

I Thought that the place where commentators sit was first invented at Highfield road and that’s why it was called the Coventry box

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#81

I was convinced my Mum’s friend Diana was Lady Diana. For quite a long time.

#82

I thought my cousin wrote sloop john b and that there was a wolf under my bed

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#83

That i could jump out of a plane and stand on something else like a piece of board on the way down until i was a couple metres off the ground and then simply jump off the piece of board to the ground and i’d be perfectly fine. Sadly never got to test my theory.

That me and my two pals who played football near my house could beat Swindon FC (who were bottom of the table at the time)

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#85

thought the future was going to be better

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#86

I think the thing with the second question is whether you could genuinely jump vertically without retaining your forward momentum caused by friction between you and the boat.

#89

That the blue P signs at the side of trunk roads stood for ‘Pee stop’.

#90

I used to think that going to university meant going to outer space.

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#91

Assuming the boat is travelling at constant speed there’s theoretically no friction between you and the boat (in practice there is because of wind resistance). Your momentum is your momentum, not the boat’s and no you can’t lose it.

#92

Used to think the official with the staring pistol was trying to shoot the athletes, and that’s why they were running.

My Mam used to work with someone who used to believe that when you posted a letter it got sucked through a massive network of tubes to the sorting office. Think they were told this by their parents when they were little, but didn’t realise it was nonsense until they mentioned it to someone when they were in their late teens :rofl:

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#93

What has caused your initial momentum if there was no friction between you and the boat?

#94

isn’t there an element of truth to this? I think this is how they used to transport mail between sorting offices in London back in the olden days.

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#95

I realised just a few weeks ago that I had never understood what was being described when people used to talk about “heavy breathers” on the telephone.

In my head there were men who just phoned women and breathed heavily down the phone to intimidate them.

Then suddenly and recently I realised why they were breathing heavily and being amazed that I’d never thought this phenomenon through until now.

#96

It does look like there was a pneumatic tube system in London for sending messages in the 1800s!

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#97

There was friction when the boat was accelerating. When it stops accelerating the friction disappears. This much at least is just basic Newton’s laws of motion.

I haven’t really thought much more on this, but I’m now leaning towards a conservation of angular momentum based argument that would probably make me change my original answer.