Symbolic Forest

Back at the start of the month, I published a list of facts which may or may not be true. As we’re well into April now, I thought it was about time I told you what the answers are.

1, sadly, was entirely untrue, and was merely there so that I could make a tenuous pun around “gratin catalogue”.
2 is true. So is 3, at least according to Robert Graves, whose Greek Myths is good on the myths themselves, less reliable on their interpretation.
4 is most definitely not true.
5 is probably not true, but it was an urban myth for many years in the railway enthusiast world.
6 is true, pretty much. The CPC range could show 27 colours, each referred to by a number which represented the colour’s RGB values when written in trinary. They used a 4-bit hardware palette to map between the trinary graphics chip and the binary video memory.
7 is false, even though lots of people would tell you otherwise – see Wikipedia for details.
And 8 must, if you’ve been counting, be true. Although it’s arguable what the oldest part of the Underground is, the oldest underground railway was the Metropolitan Railway – now the Hammersmith & City Line – and it was originally built to Brunel’s broad gauge standard, about 2′ 3″ wider than standard gauge track.

So, there you are. I’ll try to think up more falsehoods next April.

Keyword noise: April Fools Day, factoids, general knowledge, trivia.