Just as the title says, what are some of the stranger or more interesting things you've found yourself researching for a story.

The last couple of days, for instance, I've learned how to calculate G forces and also found a table for altitude/earth curvature/Line of Sight. I imagine a few others around here already knew those things, but I found them pretty fascinating.

 

I am constantly researching difficulties of english language, and what people call "shows". I doubt that I will ever entirely understand it. Fanfics are infested with various sayings and references to some things and it makes understanding it difficult. Since english is not my native language, I still have troubles.

Other than that, I just downloaded some books by Stephen Hawking, so I can understand that "imaginary time". I've seen it in some thread yesterday.

 

I know almost everything about the 1934 Arizona Navy that there is to know.

I learned about the history of lie detectors as related to a specific murder case in 1924/25, and almost all of the jailbreaks in those two years from Ohio to California.

There's a bunch of random information about who's legal/not for various sex acts/marriage in any of of the 50 states, coupled with the same information concerning driver's licenses, what states you can buy lottery tickets in, and what states it's legal to ride in the bed of a pickup truck.

I know a ton of trivia about Outlaw Baseball, the relationship between the various Sonoran baseball clubs in the 1910s-1920s, and indepth history for mining towns along the border. You would not BELIEVE how many people were killed at/for baseball games.

I've gone through three university libraries worth of material relating to the Japanese internment camps and the Japanese-Arizona war - the official government documents and reports, not the books.

I am a microfilm expert.

And I spend waaaay more time than I should researching folklore, modern versus middle ages versus ancient ideas of magic and witchcraft, various mythologies and religious documents, and all sorts of esoteric crap.

And etymology.

Other broad topics I've covered are things like mental asylums in California over the past twenty years, disposal of unclaimed bodies from various medical facilities over the past seventy years, custody laws across state lines in complex familial situations, Acadians, Klan movements across the US, glass blowing, and hundreds of recipes so I could figure out local foodstuffs for any one place I decided was necessary to find out about.

 

Had to ask a friend who you do an autopsy on a dead body and handle getting rid of the ribcage and some stuff about what happens to a corpse as it decomposes. For a story, of course... xD

I think I may have weirded him out.

 

-Learning Old English/Mieux Français phrases
-Geography, lots of geography (i.e. how long it takes to drive/fly from pt A to pt B; knowing distances)
-Cultural lodestones (Religion, laws, celebrations, traditions, food, dance, clothing, music, class systems, slang/dialect, talking with natives) to get an authentic feel to a setting
-Buddhist funeral from wake to cremation
-Studied Western Astrology (yes, yes, it's all very unscientific), casting Runes, Tarot readings, Crystal healing, etc just to understand the mechanics/get inspired for Occult-related writing (i.e. Magic)
-Spoke to a Speech Therapist about how having one's tongue taken out would affect one's attempt to verbalize simple words.

I know there's more strange stuff. I'll think on it more.

 

Age of consent laws; stages of pregnancy and early child care; the layout of DisneyWorld in the 90's and what concerts were playing in Florida during the same time period; basics of sailing.

Tectonic events in 1945:

I'm thinking this was actually the end of the Albus vs. Gellert duel.

 

The advantages and disadvantages of Clinker boat building versus Carvel boat building. The history of semaphore telegraphs — and the mathematical relationship between the height of the observer and the apparent horizon. Canal, polder, wind pump, and windmill construction.

Also the interrelationship of sericulture (silk worm cultivation), entomophagy (eating insects), and space travel, but that's for a totally different idea.

 

Links people. Share links!!!

 

You do realize, that there's talk about research?
Meaning combing through tens or even hundreds of various links, looking for sources and even reading paper material?


Also, Wikipedia doesn't really count as research.

 

Would you believe I've seen Wikipedia actually used as a source in Doctoral writings? (I'm a stylereader).

Our styleguide even warns agaisnt its use (Turabian) "Beware, however of online encylopedias, such as Wikipedia, that relay on anonymous contributions . . . . Overall, it is uneven and sometimes wrong. Never cite it as an authoritative source."

Unfreakenbelievable.

EDIT: the size of the highlighted text doesn't do my irritation on this topic justice.

 

Packing coefficients for variously sized coins when heaped haphazardly.

I was trying to get a realistic approximation for the amount of money in Harry's vault. 'Mounds' of Galleons sounds to me like a lot of Galleons.

First I needed to work out the angle of repose of Galleons (if a large number are dropped in a single place they will form into a cone, the angle of repose is how 'steep' that cone would be). As part of my degree we looked at the angle of repose of soil (and that was a riveting module, let me tell you) but the rules of thumb are non-applicable for large regularly shaped particles (coins). That allows you to find a 'volume' for the heap of coins.

In the end I approximated the angle to be 20-30 degrees.

Now that I had the volume I needed to work out how much of that volume was air and how much was gold. This is very hard. The packing coefficient for disks on a plane is 90%. But for randomly dropped coins in a chaotic heap it may be as low as 50%.

Ultimately, I reckoned Harry probably had ~100,000 Galleons, at an absolute minimum. Probably closer to 300,000.

Note: I assumed a Galleon to be around the size of a £2 coin, for minimum height to qualify as a 'heap' to be 0.3m and for the angle of repose to be 35 degrees, as there are 'heaps' plural there must be a minimum of two just piles, I assume a worst case packing of just 40%, which is pretty much impossible.

 

You emigrated to the UK from Asia, didn't you?

And to contribute to this thread, I've researched a lot of names and their etymologies. I love how J.K. Rowling often throws in little hints and bits with the names of her characters, so it was always difficult for me to find a name that'd not set off Mary-Sue alerts and also be witty.

Also, I read a lot on Physics and Biology when I came across one of those magic-science debates. We did the nervous system in Biology in the 11th grade, and we were taught that the nervous system is the seat of fatigue in the human body. I was convinced that I'd found a rational argument for people feeling tired after casting too much magic, and I read up a lot about neurotransmitters and synapses and the lot.

I'm aiming for med school next year, with a deep interest in neuro now. The child in me still hopes that I'll discover the magic in the human brain

 

Steelbadger, not to rain on the parade, but why did you assume that the coins were dropped into heaps haphazardly rather than arranged into heaps? I.e. coins stacked up.

Mostly I end up reading about history and mythology if I'm doing research, with some geography thrown in.

 

For a story once, I spent a Christmas holiday futzing with metric tensors and the like, trying to work out what happens to spacetime when someone pilots a spaceship with an Alcubierre drive through the event horizon of a black hole.

 

A few years ago I was watching something that had to do with zombies on the Internet and saw fingers twitching and moving. One thing led to another and I spent a few days digging into human anatomy in greater detail than is usually covered in high school and discovered that fingers moving on their own are in fact bullshit. It earned me some extra points in Biology class

 

I always thought that the last of the nerve impulses in case the brain isn't dead yet, can cause some movement. Especially if a patient was injected with epinephrine when the ECG flatlined.

 

Well, if the finger is still attached to the rest... but a finger that's been cut off? No way. Even if you put a current through, there aren't any muscles there to respond to stimuli.

 

Well there goes the fantastic plot bunny I had concerning Wormtail's little finger. XD