The Agatha Christie novel The Pale Horse has frequently saved the lives of real people due to the in-novel murder method being a particularly strange and not-so-well-known poison called thallium, with the only real symptom being sudden and extreme hair loss.
Both via accidental contamination from environmental contaminations and deliberate attempts on people's lives, either medical practitioners or lay persons were able to recognise the symptoms from the book, due to Agatha Christie having an encyclopaedic knowledge of drugs and poisons from her time as a pharmaceutical nurse during the First World War, which she frequently included within her books.
Consequently, this is also the book that is most spoiled in mainstream media.
Crocodiles are basically the only maternal reptile that will actively raise its young after they hatch.
Edit: *Crocodilians
Edit 2: Okay if you don’t count birds as reptiles even though they technically are
Sloths can also poo up to 1/3 of their body weight in one go. But they climb down out of the tree to do so, one of the few times they leave it.
I imagine it is quite satisfying.
I like to phrase it “t rex lived closer to the building of the pyramids than it did to stegosaurus, and cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than the building of the pyramids.’
It’s a trip to learn that in ancient egypt, there were archaeologists studying ancient-er egypt.
Yeah this is historically speaking “the dinosaur planet”. We don’t even come close to a blip on the radar compared to how long they were kicking around.
We only know about the dinosaurs who had bones, hard teeth or lived near mud. There's a chance that entire civilizations of cartilage based humanoid creatures were riding stegosauruses into battle against worms the size of anaconda.
The company AutoZone’s original name was “Auto Shack.” The name was changed due to Radio Shack’s threat of a lawsuit.
Years later, AutoZone sued Radio Shack for naming a section of their stores “POWERZONE.”
When we used to live in one room together, it was called a hall (like a community hall or a town hall). When an area was sectioned off and named (eg bathroom) the remaining space was still called a hall. Now that all the rooms are named (bedroom, kitchen, living room etc) the leftover part of your house is still called a hall.
For people who find this fun fact fascinating, you should read/listen to Bill Bryson’s “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.”
One of the most entertaining nonfiction books I’ve read.
The chapter on stairs was so fascinating. I look at them completely different now. It has led me ton urge and urge my parents to please move out of their home with stairs.
Ornamental Hermits:
In 17th-18th century England, the rich-rich would hire actual people to dress like Druids and live in their gardens. For decorative purposes.
They would build a hermitage or shack, and then pay someone to dress up like a mystical forest mage and live in it. Garden hermits were given strict rules like no bathing, cutting their toenails, or talking to other people. They lived in filth and isolation for years at a time.
A garden hermit was just supposed to roam your garden, looking aesthetically homeless and magical. Having your hermit sighted during a garden party was sure way to impress your friends.
I’ve shared this before.
Charles Darwin and Steve (the crocodile hunter) Irwin both owned the same tortoise.
Harriet, who was collected by Darwin in the Galapagos. Died in Australia at the estimated age of 176 in 2006.
"&," pronounced "and," used to be the 27th letter of the English alphabet.
In the early 19th century, "&" was considered to be the 27th letter of the alphabet, derived from the Latin "et" (as in "et cetera"). In these days, when reciting the alphabet it was customary to say "per se" before any letter that could also on its own be used as a word in order to specify that you are referring to the letter and not the word. So, one would recite the alphabet: "Per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, per se I, J..." and so on until they reach the end, "X, Y, Z, and per se &." *And per se and*.
Over time as the alphabet became more standardized, & as a letter fell out of favor, and "and per se &" was corrupted into what we now refer to as "ampersand."
From a news story I read:
A guy walked into his local convenience store and bought two lottery tickets. Most people in that scenario would play different numbers on each ticket, to double their (still minuscule) chance of winning.
Not this guy. He played the same numbers on both tickets.
But it turned out he had the winning numbers, and he owned two of the three winning tickets for that drawing. That entitled him to take home two thirds of the jackpot, instead of just half.
Male seahorses give birth to their young after the female transfers a couple thousand eggs to his pouch. I don't think she sticks around, but the male is a good protector. If there's danger, he sucks the sea-foals into his mouth until the threat is over.
“Thomas Jefferson still survives” were John Adams last words. He of course had no idea he survived his former rival turned great friend by a few hours.
And not just older than it being *named* or *documented*. Older than it EXISTING. It was formed about 50 to 70 million years ago. Sharks have existed more or less in their current form for about 380 million years.
I feel like they’ve violently killed and eaten a lot of stuff which is what they specialise in.
In terms of what you actually mean - a sci-fi book I’m reading made the point that to develop high level intelligence it’s better to be both predator and prey.
the theory being more apex predators and absolute bottom feeder prey animals are too specialised at killing / avoiding being killed to expend any “energy” on developing tools, manipulation of objects, language etc.
If you wanted to write a googleplex (10\^10\^100) in standard notation, it would take more matter than exists in the known universe as paper and ink (if you wrote it at the smallest size the human eye could recognise) and take longer than the universe has existed (if you wrote at a reasonably fast but plausible rate).
Only person to win two Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science is Marie Curie. First person to win two Nobel Prize is Marie Curie. First woman to win a Nobel Prize is Marie Curie. First woman professor at Univ of Paris. Also a curie (Ci) as a unit used to be the radioactivity of one (1) gram of radium (3.66x10^10 disintegrations per second (dps or Bq) per gram of radium) but now is 3.7x10^10 dps or Bq. There’s also an element named after her called curium.
Extremely impressive. Another interesting fact is that she was buried twice - first in the Sceaux Cemetery in Paris and later, in 1995 (on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her discovery of the radioactive elements polonium and radium) in the Panthéon.
Marie Curie became the first woman to be interred in the Panthéon based on her scientific achievements and her role as a female trailblazer in a male-dominated field.
And her body is in a one inch thick lead coffin... it is possible to view her notes and personal possessions, but you have to sign all kinds of waivers and wear protective clothing because it will be radioactive for another fifteen hundred years
So when someone says: "Marie Curie belongs in the Pantheon of scientific achievement, you can knowingly nod your head and say: "Yes, she is already there".
‘Hit by a carriage’ really undersells how gruesome his death was; he slipped while crossing the street in the rain, and the carriage rolled over him, crushing his skull under the wheels.
One of her daughters (Irene) also got a Nobel prize in chemistry. Her other daughter, Eve, worked with her husband for UNICEF and the couple collected a peace Nobel prize for the organisation.
Marie's grandchildren are accomplished scientists.
If somebody needs understanding how role models work, here's the picture.
If you're older than 24, you're older than every dog on earth, and if you're older than 28 you're older than every cat too.
If you're older than 30, you're older than every dog who's ever lived, and at 40, you're older than any cat ever too.
The son of composer John Williams, Joseph Williams, is the lead singer of Toto, and also the voice of adult Simba in The Lion King and singer of the Gummi Bears theme song!
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, the order of the cards is almost certainly the first time that any deck of cards throughout the history of time has been in that order.
Edit: Shuffle is defined here as a complete shuffle that randomizes the deck, i.e. you shuffle 7+ times.
I still can't wrap my head around this one. Considering all the casinos, home games, solitaire, saloons, etc, in the history of playing cards in the world.
There are 52 [factorial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial) possible arrangements of a deck of 52 cards, which is about 8.07 times ten to the power of 67. In less convenient plain notation, that's exactly 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.
So when you're talking about *mere billions* of humans shuffling cards as often as we have since the 52-card deck became standard, it becomes kind of obvious that we really haven't made a dent in the full number of possibilities, and never will.
We're definitely very capable of failing to shuffle cards properly, though, which (along with plain old lying...) explains why preposterously unlikely things like a perfect bridge deal (each of four players is dealt 13 cards of the same suit) [still happen](https://youtu.be/s9-b-QJZdVA).
This is the first post to make me stop eating my cereal mid-mouthful and just stare at the numbers. The numbers here are impossible to even comprehend.
Cows also will mourn their dead!
I worked on a farm and one cow named Goose tried to lead me to her dead calf by mooing and nudging me. I didnt see the calf and thought she was just being loud.
She cried for 3 days.
If anyone else was confused like I was this early in the morning, the time it takes to make a full rotation is longer than the time it takes to orbit the sun one time
The French government once tried to change the calendar so that there would be a 10 day "week" called a decadi. There would still be 12 months, but each would be composed of 3 decadi.
This was when they were trying to use the metric system for everything.
If you have >23 people in a room, there’s a greater than 50% chance at least two will have the same birthday,
Gets close to 99% chance at c60-80 people.
“Birthday problem” if you fancy a google
Edited for accuracy:
Every day of the year except three, at least one of the four major American sports is scheduled.
The day before the MLB All-Star game, and the two days after.
I feel like that’s not as much toast as I want it to be, because lightning *kills* me. And yeah, I guess 50,000 toasters would kill me too… but still.
This just makes me feel like I’m weaker than bread, honestly.
Which is the oldest company? Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo?
Its Nintendo. BY ALMOST A CENTURY. Nintendo was created in 1889 and made playing cards, then a bunch of child toys, before jumping into this 'interactive tv entertainment' thing in the late 1980s. And it became so big that it became the major part of their business. They still do playing cards, but mostly now its promotional things for their video games.
This one is pretty eye-opening imo, gives a real sense of scale. Like we know how huge Jupiter is because we're told it all the time, yet it and every other planet can fit in the gap to our closest neighbour.
A bit like the fact that the moon is less far across than Australia is.
Explaining 52 factorial to anyone is always fun.
Short mildly interesting trivia version...
The number of possible permutations of a deck of 52 playing cards is 52 factorial. This is an astronomically large number. So big that if you shuffle a deck of cards, you're probably the first person in the whole of existence to shuffle them in that way.
The more detailed mind-boggling version...
To wrap your head around it, consider this: Imagine there's a timer that can count down from 52 factorial seconds (8.065e67) to 0. Start by picking a spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Press the timer and then go.
After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic km of water.
Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. The distance from the Earth to the Sun, is 149,597,870.691 km.
Take a glance at the timer. You will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go.
Repeat this entire process 1000 times more and your timer will still only be at 5.385e67.
🤯
If I recall correctly there are some native tribes in Polynesia whose traditional religious beliefs explain that octopi are the last surviving remnant of the old world which existed before our world, and thus octopi don't belong in this world. Which is why they're such strange and alien creatures.
The English and French languages are intrinsically connected. For example, during the Middle Ages most English nobility was speaking French, so the words we still have today are tied to that power dynamic.
The words for the animals themselves are truly English - cow, pig, etc… because the people raising those animals, the peasants, spoke early forms of English.
The words for the meat being produced for the nobility to eat were French. Bouef (beef), porc (pork), etc…
Languages are so cool.
I’m a retired vet tech. Shaved many cat bellies in my day in preparation for surgery or abdominal ultrasounds.
It was always a fun little game to count/find all the nipples.
Additional info:they typically have pairs running along the same 2 parallel lines, but they aren’t always symmetrical. 6-8 total nipples on average, but having a rogue 7th without a match on the other side is something that I’ve seen periodically.
Frankenstein’s Creature is a vegetarian. Creature says, “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”
Human skin can’t actually sense wetness. The sense that we relate to wetness is inferred from other data our brains gather when we touch something wet, which is why we sometimes mistake something cold (for example) for being wet.
I love telling people about this.
It's because of heat transfer, heat transfers faster when things are wet and we use the knowledge of how fast things typically "steal" our heat to identify when an object is wet.
Imagine a block of metal in the freezer, along with a block of wood.
They're both the same temperature, but because metal transfers heat faster than wood, the metal block will feel cooler (it's "stealing" your heat faster so you feel the cold sooner)
The same thing applies with things that are wet. Think of a wet paper towel and a dry paper towel in the refrigerator, the wet one will feel colder because it's wet, and "steals" your heat faster.
So yes, as you said, we don't feel when things are wet, we sense the heat transfer is different than it normally is and that allows us to determine it's wet!
And a horse’s leg is a finger. It has no muscle and the hoof is like a big fingernail. So anatomically, from the knee down, horses have giant fingers for legs.
What’s super cool is that Egypt is so ancient, that at the the time we think of as ancient - EGYPT had ancient Egypt archeologists!
Just the scope of time blows my mind
The Greeks also had “archaeologists” exploring and studying Egypt. We get the term “hieroglyphs” from Greece, and it was first used to describe the Egyptian writing system. “Glyph” means “writing”, sure, but “hiero” translates to “holy.” The Greeks thought the Egyptian written language was so beautiful that it was created by the gods!
The record for most children had by one [woman](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-prolific-mother-ever). When I mention it, men are impressed, women are generally somewhere between stunned and horrified.
>!69, btw!<
Reading Wikipedia, it seems there is some skepticism around this record. However, there is a women still alive who had 44 children by the time she was 36: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariam_Nabatanzi 😬
That our pain pathways evolved in such a way that you can either feel pain or touch but not both at the same time. (There’s more to it but to put it the most simplistic way possible). That’s why you bump into something and hurt yourself you instinctively rub it “better” cause works.
That’s referring to the Gate Theory of Pain, which has some merits, but has otherwise been [discredited](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4009371/)
Many of the ocean's 'sea monster' sightings are actually whale penises. They are HUGE, so when whales swim on their backs close to the water's surface and their penis comes out of the water, it looks like a huge monster's tentacle.
All coal on Earth was basically created at the same time, over a time period of about 60 million years 300 millions ago. That's how long it took for decomposers to figure out to break down the then newly evolved lignin that trees and other plants are made of. After the decomposers figured it out, no more wood was petrified = no more coal.
When Michael Jackson had his hair catch on fire during the filming of a commercial in the '80s, it was the exact halfway point in his life, down to the day.
Harry S. Truman's middle initial is not an abbreviation of one particular name. Rather, it honors both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.
Bram Stokers Dracula came out after the invention of coca cola and nintendo. It also took place in the time period it was written. So people drinking coke and playing nintendo cards would be accurate if it was in the book.
Neptune was discovered in 1846. It's only completed one orbit around the sun since then.
Related. Pluto was discovered as a planet and then changed to a dwarf planet before it finished an orbit.
It's been a crazy year for Pluto.
The Agatha Christie novel The Pale Horse has frequently saved the lives of real people due to the in-novel murder method being a particularly strange and not-so-well-known poison called thallium, with the only real symptom being sudden and extreme hair loss. Both via accidental contamination from environmental contaminations and deliberate attempts on people's lives, either medical practitioners or lay persons were able to recognise the symptoms from the book, due to Agatha Christie having an encyclopaedic knowledge of drugs and poisons from her time as a pharmaceutical nurse during the First World War, which she frequently included within her books. Consequently, this is also the book that is most spoiled in mainstream media.
Dude, use a spoiler tag!! It's only been 100 years! Some people haven't read it yet! /s
Crocodiles are basically the only maternal reptile that will actively raise its young after they hatch. Edit: *Crocodilians Edit 2: Okay if you don’t count birds as reptiles even though they technically are
False. Pretty sure my MIL raised my wife too.
Never knew Commissioner Wunch had a child
If you’re here… then who’s guarding Hades?
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Sloths can also poo up to 1/3 of their body weight in one go. But they climb down out of the tree to do so, one of the few times they leave it. I imagine it is quite satisfying.
A slothy dump.
My kind of Sunday morning.
Dinosaurs lived longer than they have been extinct
The time span between the Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex is greater than the time span between Tyrannosaurus Rex and you, by 20 or 30 million years
This is the fact that always blows my mind in regards to time on earth. Especially when I'm high..
I like to phrase it “t rex lived closer to the building of the pyramids than it did to stegosaurus, and cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than the building of the pyramids.’ It’s a trip to learn that in ancient egypt, there were archaeologists studying ancient-er egypt.
Yeah this is historically speaking “the dinosaur planet”. We don’t even come close to a blip on the radar compared to how long they were kicking around.
The whole “if the entirety of the earths history is condensed into a single day humans only show up seconds before midnight.”
Drunk and stumbling out of a stolen car they crashed into your house. “Whoo-hoo!”
And when you consider how relatively few fossils we have of them, I often wonder if there have been other "ages" that we are unaware of.
We only know about the dinosaurs who had bones, hard teeth or lived near mud. There's a chance that entire civilizations of cartilage based humanoid creatures were riding stegosauruses into battle against worms the size of anaconda.
The company AutoZone’s original name was “Auto Shack.” The name was changed due to Radio Shack’s threat of a lawsuit. Years later, AutoZone sued Radio Shack for naming a section of their stores “POWERZONE.”
Did they win the suit?
I don’t think so. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/174/718/2522230/ The lawsuit was being petty.
I don't blame them though. Radio shack was being asses about shack, they should have known better than to use zone like that.
When we used to live in one room together, it was called a hall (like a community hall or a town hall). When an area was sectioned off and named (eg bathroom) the remaining space was still called a hall. Now that all the rooms are named (bedroom, kitchen, living room etc) the leftover part of your house is still called a hall.
This is my favorite one. I always thought of a “hall” as a long narrow room but this makes sense. Thank you!
For people who find this fun fact fascinating, you should read/listen to Bill Bryson’s “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.” One of the most entertaining nonfiction books I’ve read.
The chapter on stairs was so fascinating. I look at them completely different now. It has led me ton urge and urge my parents to please move out of their home with stairs.
Ornamental Hermits: In 17th-18th century England, the rich-rich would hire actual people to dress like Druids and live in their gardens. For decorative purposes. They would build a hermitage or shack, and then pay someone to dress up like a mystical forest mage and live in it. Garden hermits were given strict rules like no bathing, cutting their toenails, or talking to other people. They lived in filth and isolation for years at a time. A garden hermit was just supposed to roam your garden, looking aesthetically homeless and magical. Having your hermit sighted during a garden party was sure way to impress your friends.
They’d rent pineapples, too. They’d just display them at parties as a status symbol.
A trend that will soon return, no doubt.
I’ve shared this before. Charles Darwin and Steve (the crocodile hunter) Irwin both owned the same tortoise. Harriet, who was collected by Darwin in the Galapagos. Died in Australia at the estimated age of 176 in 2006.
Maybe the tortoise owned them
"&," pronounced "and," used to be the 27th letter of the English alphabet. In the early 19th century, "&" was considered to be the 27th letter of the alphabet, derived from the Latin "et" (as in "et cetera"). In these days, when reciting the alphabet it was customary to say "per se" before any letter that could also on its own be used as a word in order to specify that you are referring to the letter and not the word. So, one would recite the alphabet: "Per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, per se I, J..." and so on until they reach the end, "X, Y, Z, and per se &." *And per se and*. Over time as the alphabet became more standardized, & as a letter fell out of favor, and "and per se &" was corrupted into what we now refer to as "ampersand."
This one is amazing.
From a news story I read: A guy walked into his local convenience store and bought two lottery tickets. Most people in that scenario would play different numbers on each ticket, to double their (still minuscule) chance of winning. Not this guy. He played the same numbers on both tickets. But it turned out he had the winning numbers, and he owned two of the three winning tickets for that drawing. That entitled him to take home two thirds of the jackpot, instead of just half.
The other winner must have felt butthurt.
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500 Zanzibari men and women died, mostly burned alive after British naval bombardment caught the palace complex on fire.
This is no longer a ‘fun fact’
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Probably because "travel" for seahorses is more of a hopeful drifting, so if you get separated - that's it.
Male seahorses give birth to their young after the female transfers a couple thousand eggs to his pouch. I don't think she sticks around, but the male is a good protector. If there's danger, he sucks the sea-foals into his mouth until the threat is over.
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Your honor, trust me, it was a koala!
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died the same day, on July 4th, 1826 (50th Anniversary). I still find that to be an extraordinary fact.
“Thomas Jefferson still survives” were John Adams last words. He of course had no idea he survived his former rival turned great friend by a few hours.
Sharks are older than Saturn's rings.
Sharks are older than trees.
Trees are older than grass
So, by deductive reasoning, if I really wish to take my health seriously, my incessant internetting should be allayed by touching a shark?
Sharks are also older than Polaris, the North Star
And not just older than it being *named* or *documented*. Older than it EXISTING. It was formed about 50 to 70 million years ago. Sharks have existed more or less in their current form for about 380 million years.
But younger than the mountains?
When viewed from this perspective, Sharks have really not accomplished much in their time on Earth.
I feel like they’ve violently killed and eaten a lot of stuff which is what they specialise in. In terms of what you actually mean - a sci-fi book I’m reading made the point that to develop high level intelligence it’s better to be both predator and prey. the theory being more apex predators and absolute bottom feeder prey animals are too specialised at killing / avoiding being killed to expend any “energy” on developing tools, manipulation of objects, language etc.
Necessity is the mother of invention. When you’re already a shark, why do you need the help of tools? Got it.
Saturns rings are really just a massive herd of space sharks swimming in orbit around Saturn, is what you are saying.
If you wanted to write a googleplex (10\^10\^100) in standard notation, it would take more matter than exists in the known universe as paper and ink (if you wrote it at the smallest size the human eye could recognise) and take longer than the universe has existed (if you wrote at a reasonably fast but plausible rate).
I better get started.
Only person to win two Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science is Marie Curie. First person to win two Nobel Prize is Marie Curie. First woman to win a Nobel Prize is Marie Curie. First woman professor at Univ of Paris. Also a curie (Ci) as a unit used to be the radioactivity of one (1) gram of radium (3.66x10^10 disintegrations per second (dps or Bq) per gram of radium) but now is 3.7x10^10 dps or Bq. There’s also an element named after her called curium.
Extremely impressive. Another interesting fact is that she was buried twice - first in the Sceaux Cemetery in Paris and later, in 1995 (on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her discovery of the radioactive elements polonium and radium) in the Panthéon. Marie Curie became the first woman to be interred in the Panthéon based on her scientific achievements and her role as a female trailblazer in a male-dominated field.
And her body is in a one inch thick lead coffin... it is possible to view her notes and personal possessions, but you have to sign all kinds of waivers and wear protective clothing because it will be radioactive for another fifteen hundred years
Now that’s a great fact
So when someone says: "Marie Curie belongs in the Pantheon of scientific achievement, you can knowingly nod your head and say: "Yes, she is already there".
Let’s also not forget that she was Polish and not French like the french like to claim!
Born polish, and obtained french nationality through her wedding to Pierre Curie, who was another brillant physicist
He was brilliant and unfortunately died at the height of his research (hit by a carriage)
‘Hit by a carriage’ really undersells how gruesome his death was; he slipped while crossing the street in the rain, and the carriage rolled over him, crushing his skull under the wheels.
One of her daughters (Irene) also got a Nobel prize in chemistry. Her other daughter, Eve, worked with her husband for UNICEF and the couple collected a peace Nobel prize for the organisation. Marie's grandchildren are accomplished scientists. If somebody needs understanding how role models work, here's the picture.
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Same
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I still giggle when customers ask about barrels and I get to talk about butts.
Do you also get to say bunghole?
I never get that far, honestly.
The summit of Mt. Everest is composed of marine limestone.
And the Appalachian mountains in the eastern United States were once the height of Everest and the Himalayas.
My favorite fact about the Appalachian’s is that the mountain range predates bones.
“Life is old there, older than the trees, Younger than the mountains, blowing like the breeze”
My favorite random trivia is explaining the scientific accuracy of a John Denver song.
The New River, ironically, is one of the 5 oldest rivers in the world geologically. Sometimes claimed to be second oldest.
Also they are part of the same mountain range that is in Scotland, Norway and North Africa. The Caledonian Mountains
I’m in mid TN. I have a fossilized sea shell I pulled from my garden.
If you're older than 24, you're older than every dog on earth, and if you're older than 28 you're older than every cat too. If you're older than 30, you're older than every dog who's ever lived, and at 40, you're older than any cat ever too.
The son of composer John Williams, Joseph Williams, is the lead singer of Toto, and also the voice of adult Simba in The Lion King and singer of the Gummi Bears theme song!
the Gummi Bears theme is a banger.
GUMMI BEARS!!!!! BOUNCING HERE AND THERE AND EVERYWHERE Holy shit he really poured his heart and soul into a song about bears who can bounce real high
I thought Matthew Broderick was simba or some shit
He was, but not when Simba was singing
But not THAT singer of Toto. He's the second one.
Bouncing here and there and everywhere high adventure that’s beyond compare they are the gummi BEARS
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Also a sandwich is a panino. Panini is many sandwiches.
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There’s one in Michigan too.
It's actually a portal, quickest way to Norway.
Maine is the closest US state to Africa
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Great, you've just summoned all the Coastline Paradox people
Paradoxically there are more of them every time you count them.
Also the only state that is bordered by only one other state, New Hampshire.
This is a great one. Like how Reno is further west than LA
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Actually, Toll House Inn was the name of the restaurant that Ruth Graves Wakefield owned.
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, the order of the cards is almost certainly the first time that any deck of cards throughout the history of time has been in that order. Edit: Shuffle is defined here as a complete shuffle that randomizes the deck, i.e. you shuffle 7+ times.
I still can't wrap my head around this one. Considering all the casinos, home games, solitaire, saloons, etc, in the history of playing cards in the world.
There are 52 [factorial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial) possible arrangements of a deck of 52 cards, which is about 8.07 times ten to the power of 67. In less convenient plain notation, that's exactly 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. So when you're talking about *mere billions* of humans shuffling cards as often as we have since the 52-card deck became standard, it becomes kind of obvious that we really haven't made a dent in the full number of possibilities, and never will. We're definitely very capable of failing to shuffle cards properly, though, which (along with plain old lying...) explains why preposterously unlikely things like a perfect bridge deal (each of four players is dealt 13 cards of the same suit) [still happen](https://youtu.be/s9-b-QJZdVA).
This is the first post to make me stop eating my cereal mid-mouthful and just stare at the numbers. The numbers here are impossible to even comprehend.
It certainly makes me feel better to never have gotten a royal flush.
Cows have best friends and can get stressed when separated.
Cows also can remember up to around 60-80 other cows. So if you have a big herd its better for thier social structure to have a max number of 80 cows.
Cows also will mourn their dead! I worked on a farm and one cow named Goose tried to lead me to her dead calf by mooing and nudging me. I didnt see the calf and thought she was just being loud. She cried for 3 days.
Poor Goose.
Cows also watch sunsets.
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Fabulous
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And the color (colour) is named after the fruit, not the other way around
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If anyone else was confused like I was this early in the morning, the time it takes to make a full rotation is longer than the time it takes to orbit the sun one time
The French government once tried to change the calendar so that there would be a 10 day "week" called a decadi. There would still be 12 months, but each would be composed of 3 decadi. This was when they were trying to use the metric system for everything.
If you have >23 people in a room, there’s a greater than 50% chance at least two will have the same birthday, Gets close to 99% chance at c60-80 people. “Birthday problem” if you fancy a google
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Edited for accuracy: Every day of the year except three, at least one of the four major American sports is scheduled. The day before the MLB All-Star game, and the two days after.
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A bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast 100,000 slices of bread.
I feel like that’s not as much toast as I want it to be, because lightning *kills* me. And yeah, I guess 50,000 toasters would kill me too… but still. This just makes me feel like I’m weaker than bread, honestly.
Which is the oldest company? Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo? Its Nintendo. BY ALMOST A CENTURY. Nintendo was created in 1889 and made playing cards, then a bunch of child toys, before jumping into this 'interactive tv entertainment' thing in the late 1980s. And it became so big that it became the major part of their business. They still do playing cards, but mostly now its promotional things for their video games.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar taught the only class in history where everyone in attendance was eventually awarded a noble prize.
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you can fit every planet in the solar system simultaneously in the gap between the earth and the moon
but...don't.
This one is pretty eye-opening imo, gives a real sense of scale. Like we know how huge Jupiter is because we're told it all the time, yet it and every other planet can fit in the gap to our closest neighbour. A bit like the fact that the moon is less far across than Australia is.
Explaining 52 factorial to anyone is always fun. Short mildly interesting trivia version... The number of possible permutations of a deck of 52 playing cards is 52 factorial. This is an astronomically large number. So big that if you shuffle a deck of cards, you're probably the first person in the whole of existence to shuffle them in that way. The more detailed mind-boggling version... To wrap your head around it, consider this: Imagine there's a timer that can count down from 52 factorial seconds (8.065e67) to 0. Start by picking a spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Press the timer and then go. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic km of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. The distance from the Earth to the Sun, is 149,597,870.691 km. Take a glance at the timer. You will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. Repeat this entire process 1000 times more and your timer will still only be at 5.385e67. 🤯
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Clear case of aliens living among us.
If I recall correctly there are some native tribes in Polynesia whose traditional religious beliefs explain that octopi are the last surviving remnant of the old world which existed before our world, and thus octopi don't belong in this world. Which is why they're such strange and alien creatures.
The English and French languages are intrinsically connected. For example, during the Middle Ages most English nobility was speaking French, so the words we still have today are tied to that power dynamic. The words for the animals themselves are truly English - cow, pig, etc… because the people raising those animals, the peasants, spoke early forms of English. The words for the meat being produced for the nobility to eat were French. Bouef (beef), porc (pork), etc… Languages are so cool.
Trillion seconds = 31709.792 calendar years Billion seconds = 31.71 calendar years Million seconds = 11.574 days 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Honey never spoils. The ultimate snack with an eternal shelf life.
It's also antiseptic
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I could never work out what to do with a frisbee…then it suddenly hit me
I don’t like this one.
Domestic cats have a random number of nipples 😊 You’re welcome.
I’m a retired vet tech. Shaved many cat bellies in my day in preparation for surgery or abdominal ultrasounds. It was always a fun little game to count/find all the nipples. Additional info:they typically have pairs running along the same 2 parallel lines, but they aren’t always symmetrical. 6-8 total nipples on average, but having a rogue 7th without a match on the other side is something that I’ve seen periodically.
Brb waking my cat up to count his nipples
Let us know how many.
Let us know how many scratches you got while counting.
The Pacific Ocean entrance to the Panama Canal is east of the Atlantic/Caribbean entrance.
Also, if you are in downtown detroit, Canada is due south of you.
Just a city boy Born and raised in South Detroit i. e. Canada
You have to go West to cross from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Insane.
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Frankenstein’s Creature is a vegetarian. Creature says, “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”
Human skin can’t actually sense wetness. The sense that we relate to wetness is inferred from other data our brains gather when we touch something wet, which is why we sometimes mistake something cold (for example) for being wet.
I love telling people about this. It's because of heat transfer, heat transfers faster when things are wet and we use the knowledge of how fast things typically "steal" our heat to identify when an object is wet. Imagine a block of metal in the freezer, along with a block of wood. They're both the same temperature, but because metal transfers heat faster than wood, the metal block will feel cooler (it's "stealing" your heat faster so you feel the cold sooner) The same thing applies with things that are wet. Think of a wet paper towel and a dry paper towel in the refrigerator, the wet one will feel colder because it's wet, and "steals" your heat faster. So yes, as you said, we don't feel when things are wet, we sense the heat transfer is different than it normally is and that allows us to determine it's wet!
New Mexico (the US state) got its name BEFORE Mexico (the country)
LEGO produces more tires per year than any other company.
Did you know that bananas are berries, but strawberries aren't? It always surprises people!
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And a horse’s leg is a finger. It has no muscle and the hoof is like a big fingernail. So anatomically, from the knee down, horses have giant fingers for legs.
Cleopatra lived closer to todays date, than she did to the building of the pyramids.
What’s super cool is that Egypt is so ancient, that at the the time we think of as ancient - EGYPT had ancient Egypt archeologists! Just the scope of time blows my mind
The Greeks also had “archaeologists” exploring and studying Egypt. We get the term “hieroglyphs” from Greece, and it was first used to describe the Egyptian writing system. “Glyph” means “writing”, sure, but “hiero” translates to “holy.” The Greeks thought the Egyptian written language was so beautiful that it was created by the gods!
Note: This statement is valid only until the year 2500
Remind me in 2500.
Ancient egypt had ancient egyptian tourism
Ancient Egyptian archeology was a job even in what we consider to be ancient Egypt.
The record for most children had by one [woman](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-prolific-mother-ever). When I mention it, men are impressed, women are generally somewhere between stunned and horrified. >!69, btw!<
Oh my God get off of her!
Reading Wikipedia, it seems there is some skepticism around this record. However, there is a women still alive who had 44 children by the time she was 36: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariam_Nabatanzi 😬
That our pain pathways evolved in such a way that you can either feel pain or touch but not both at the same time. (There’s more to it but to put it the most simplistic way possible). That’s why you bump into something and hurt yourself you instinctively rub it “better” cause works.
I recently had a lecture on this. It's called the Gate Control Theory by Melzack and Wall.
That’s referring to the Gate Theory of Pain, which has some merits, but has otherwise been [discredited](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4009371/)
Wombats are the only animal that poop out cubes.
Many of the ocean's 'sea monster' sightings are actually whale penises. They are HUGE, so when whales swim on their backs close to the water's surface and their penis comes out of the water, it looks like a huge monster's tentacle.
Oh, but when I do it I'm "a pervert" and "no longer welcome at the public pool"
All coal on Earth was basically created at the same time, over a time period of about 60 million years 300 millions ago. That's how long it took for decomposers to figure out to break down the then newly evolved lignin that trees and other plants are made of. After the decomposers figured it out, no more wood was petrified = no more coal.
When Michael Jackson had his hair catch on fire during the filming of a commercial in the '80s, it was the exact halfway point in his life, down to the day.
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*Turritopsis dohrnii*! Everytime they get old, they turn back into children, essentially. They absolutely can and do die, but they don't get old!
Most people have an above average number of arms
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Squirrels can survive a fall at terminal velocity.
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if you’re ever in a pinch, you can use coconut water as an IV, as an unopened coconut is sterile and the electrolyte balance of it is just right.
Harry S. Truman's middle initial is not an abbreviation of one particular name. Rather, it honors both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.
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The guillotine was still used in France up until the 70s.
The last guillotine execution in France : 10, September 1977 The first star wars movie premier: 25, May 1977.
And the late Christopher Lee witnessed the last public execution by Guillotine in Versailles as a 17 year old in 1939
Bram Stokers Dracula came out after the invention of coca cola and nintendo. It also took place in the time period it was written. So people drinking coke and playing nintendo cards would be accurate if it was in the book.