More shocking stats

Quite right on both counts. Civil War battlefields tend to be quite noisy, and often the soldiers simply did not notice that their weapon hadn't fired (although the lack of recoil might have told them something...). Just go to a CW reenactment to see what I mean, albeit on a much smaller scale.

 

Someone made a comment earlier about the minefields in the Falklands, and as much as this isn't exactly a shocking fact, I think it still deserves mentioning.

Firstly there are still areas of the Falklands out of bounds due to the mines, not just because they've shifted in the Peat but also in many cases the Argentines did not bother to map them out properly (Or even at all).

Second, a friend of mine who served in the Falklands in the mid 1990s with the RAF said that apparently since the war there'd been a noted decrease in the size and weight of individual penguins, the reason apparently was a crude, accelerated form of natural selection as the lighter penguins did not set off the mines...