50 Random Facts List #128

The computer program that created the THX "Deep Note" (before a movie screening) was coded to be random. The audio you hear was recorded one time and can never be recreated exactly by that computer again.

27. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, rewrote her novel word for word when she had dementia in her later years, unaware she had already written her most influential work.

28. In 2016, London cab drivers protested Uber by bringing gridlock across central London. This adversely affected their cause as this led to nearly 1000% increase in Uber app installations and a stark decrease in black cabs usage, which hastened their decline.

29. The Bone Wars was a spectacularly dirty, competitive period of fossil hunting, marked by a bitter, destructive rivalry between 2 collectors (Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope) who used nefarious means to outdo each other including spying, bribery, and theft. Both were financially and socially ruined by their attempts to disgrace the other.

30. The tin can was invented in 1810, but the can opener was not invented until 1855. Before the can opener, people used hammer and chisel to open their tin cans.

Despite the title of the 1990 novel and 1993 movie being “Jurassic Park”, most of the dinosaurs depicted in these sources were from the Cretaceous period, not Jurassic.

32. In the 9th century, Chinese alchemists in search of the elixir of life created a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. Ironically, short of a path to immortality, they had discovered gunpowder.

33. Doping Cyclists in the early 90s at the Tour De France used so much EPOs (Erythropoietin) that they had to exercise throughout the night to prevent heart attacks in their sleep.

34. Venus flytraps are native to North and South Carolina, not tropical rainforests.

35. India has more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together.

Rye and oats used to be considered weeds in wheat fields. Because they would get weeded out if they didn't look like wheat, they also evolved to have large seeds. Eventually, their hardiness compared to wheat meant they were grown as food in colder climates.

37. Foreign branding is the process of naming a product to sound exotic. An example is Häagen-Dazs, which was invented in the Bronx.

38. An astronomer named Jamie Lomax was frightened by the jumping spiders on her ceiling, but after she discovered that they were capable of seeing the moon, she said “They can see the moon just like me! I can't kill them now that I know that.”

39. DJ Khaled used his baby son Asahd Tuck Khaled's reactions to the sounds to gauge the quality of songs for the album "Grateful" (the baby vomiting indicated the best quality), and then had the baby legally declared the album's executive producer.

40. Astronauts of Apollo 16 and 17 reported Moondust to be "soft like snow, yet strangely abrasive, with a taste and smell of gunpowder."

The TV host of The Soupy Sales Show was once suspended for asking his young viewers to send him "little green pieces of paper" taken from their parents' wallets.

42. There exists a psychological phenomenon called “cute aggression” where people will react to seeing cute things with violent impulses.

43. GravityLight is an LED light powered by a bag filled with 20 lbs of rocks or earth, attached to a cord, which slowly descends and powers the light for up to 20 minutes and takes only seconds to reset. Intended as a replacement for kerosene lamps in the developing world it has no operating costs.

44. Actress Constance Smith went to jail for stabbing her boyfriend (Paul Rotha) in 1962. She stabbed him again in 1968 and was charged with attempted murder. They married in 1974.

45. The "General Sherman" tree in the Giant Forest is approximately 2200 years old. It would have been a little sapling 200 years before Jesus walked the earth.

In 2011, Staples licensed the name "Dunder Mifflin" from NBC to sell their own paper products under that brand.

47. Virginia Apgar invented the Apgar score, a way to quickly assess the health of a newborn child, and ended up saving countless lives.

48. The name Scotch Tape comes from a racial stereotype that Scottish people are cheap. When a painter was testing the product, he complained that the makers were “Scotch” with the amount of adhesive on the tape.

49. While recording the album "Rumours", the members of Fleetwood Mac said that cocaine was more of a necessity than a pleasure, and seriously considered thanking their drug dealer in the album credits.

50. In 2001, Shrek premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was the first animated film to compete since 1953.