50 Random Facts List #62

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26Internet café

Internet café

India requires internet café owners to take pictures of all their customers, keep browsing history for one year, and forward all this data to the government.


27. Uranus and Neptune are not "Gas Giants" as is commonly believed, but belong to a separate category of giant planets called "Ice Giants." This is because less than 20% of their mass is made up of hydrogen and helium. True gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are over 90% hydrogen and helium.


28. The guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery actually yell at you when you are disrespectful.


29. The Grizzly bear is the California state animal, but the grizzly bear is extinct in California.


30. The "rule" which says never to end a sentence with a preposition may have been derived from English poet John Dryden's habit of translating his own English verse into Latin. He did so to "check whether his writing was concise and elegant, Latin being considered an elegant and long-lived language with which to compare."


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31Virgin peaks

Virgin peaks

There are still unclimbed mountains on Earth, also referred to as "virgin peaks".


32. A study shows that 47% of French horn players report hearing loss.


33. The movie Angels with Filthy Souls that the character Kevin in Home Alone watches and uses was made for the movie and is not an actual full-length movie.


34. After America's Vanguard TV3 rocket exploded seconds after launch, Russia offered the US aid during a UN meeting under the "Soviet program of technical assistance to backward nations".


35. GSG 9, the elite German police unit completed 1500 missions between 1972-2003, in which they only used their weapons 5 times.


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36Road Runner show

Road Runner show

Chuck Jones had rules when creating the plot in his Road Runner cartoons. One of them read, 'The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote, except by going "meep, meep".


37. Boba Fett was originally going to have white armor. His iconic armor was colored white to match the stormtroopers because his original story arc had him as a specialized super stormtrooper. They currently sell white armored Boba Fett figures.


38. The world's oldest university (University of Al Quaraouiyine in Morocco) still in operation was founded by a Muslim woman (Fatima al-Fihri) in 859 A.D.


39. Prisoners in Belgium have a computer station with a headset and limited access to the internet in their cells. They can also order PPV films (including adult ones), "making the prison run more efficiently".


40. America's oldest farm (Appleton farms) has been operating continuously since 1636.


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41Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa

Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa attempted suicide in 1971 by slashing his throat. He had been unable to secure financing for his films, fired from a 20th Century Fox epic production, and considered by many as old-fashioned. His hardships continued until the mid-1980s when he made the movie Ran, his last masterwork.


42. Thomas Jefferson believed Mastodons still lived somewhere in the West and instructed Lewis and Clark to look for one.


43. Nuclear Semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research which investigates methods to inform earthlings of the far future to avoid nuclear waste sites. Ideas include color-changing cats, an atomic priesthood, and a Rosetta Stone-type message.


44. NHL players can't use the number 0 because the NHL's database software will not allow it.


45. Between 5 and 6 million years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar closed, and the entire Mediterranean Sea evaporated within 1000 years, leaving behind a salty desert.


46Degesch

Degesch

The company that produced Zyklon B for gas chambers during the holocaust, Degesch, is still in business under a different parent company, and still produces the chemical that made up Zyklon B under the name 'Cyanosil'.


47. Charles Curtis, the 31st vice-president of the United States, was of Native American ancestry and was enrolled as a member of the Kaw-Nation. English was his third language after Kansa and French.


48. Architects can design a home or building with a glass structure that lets cool air in the bottom and releases warm air at its top. This is known as a solar chimney and works off similar principles of regular fire chimneys.


49. In the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, there were too many bodies to bury so the corpses were dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. Shortly thereafter the bodies began to wash back onshore and survivors constructed funeral pyres to burn the corpses. The fires burned day and night for weeks.


50. In 2009, the Baltimore Wastewater Treatment plant was found to have a 4-acre spider colony with over 107 million spiders.

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