50 Random Facts List #82

A 2011 study showed that a group of 4-year-olds had a temporary lapse in cognitive function after watching 9 minutes of SpongeBob SquarePants.

27. In 1698, Peter The Great introduced the “Beard Tax” after he visited Western Europe and liked their fashion sense. Anyone with a beard was forced to pay tax for it and in turn given a beard token. If you were stopped by the police without the token they would immediately shave your face on sight.

28. After the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the prime minister of Portugal sent a query to parishes around the country in order to objectively understand what happened. He is now regarded as a forerunner of modern seismological scientists.

29. In 2007, a man named Marcus Glindon in England counterfeited 14 million one pound coins.

30. Kublai Khan, although known as a warlord, promoted education and built over 20,000 public schools during his reign.

Cartoon characters are depicted as wearing gloves as it eliminated the complexity of drawing a well-defined hand back in the days when they had to manually draw a new drawing per frame for numerous frames.

32. The influenza virus that killed 50–100 million people worldwide in 1918 was genetically reconstructed from tissue samples in 2005. The virus is currently held at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

33. A New Jersey man named Francis LeRoy Henning minted hundreds of thousands of counterfeit nickels in the 1950s, some of which still exist in circulation today.

34. Christopher Nolan actually had IMAX cameras strapped to three Spitfire planes for the dogfight scenes in ‘Dunkirk.’ There are only a few dozen airworthy Spitfires left in the world and the three used in the film had no trouble performing complex maneuvers with the cameras mounted on them.

35. In the 18th and the 19th century, squirrels were one of the most popular pets in America.

There is a man named Stephen Davies in England who makes prosthetics for children in his home shed for free.

37. In 1856, a schoolmaster after warning his students not to harm his tamed sparrow, strangled a student after class because the student stepped on it. The schoolmaster was later shot dead by the student's father.

38. The Phantom Time Hypothesis states that 297 years of history (614-911 A.D.) was completely made up and that we actually live in the 1700s.

39. The Yaghan people adapted to their very cold climate by having significantly higher metabolisms than other humans (average body temperatures 1 degree warmer than Europeans). They routinely went bare naked in the frigid cold of the far southern region of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

40. The songwriter behind Meat Loaf's 'Bat Out of Hell' also wrote Bonnie Tyler's 'Total Eclipse of My Heart' and Celine Dion's 'It’s All Coming Back to Me Now'.

When Christopher Walken was 16 he worked as a lion tamer in the circus. He would often perform with a lioness named Sheba.

42. Infinite sets are not all created equal, however. There are actually many different sizes or levels of infinity. Some infinite sets are vastly larger than other infinite sets.

43. Vietnam has their own version of Bigfoot. The creature is called a Batutut and various tribes have claimed to have captured living specimens but without evidence to show. During the Vietnam War, U.S. servicemen reported seeing the creatures which they dubbed "Rock Apes".

44. 1/5th of the world's surface freshwater is contained within a single lake (Lake Baikal) in Siberia.

45. Both Thompson father and son won the Nobel Prize separately for their work on the electron and its wave/particle duality. J.J. Thompson won it in 1906 for showing that the electron is a particle and his son George Paget Thomson won it in 1937 for showing that the electron also behaves like a wave.

Former Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez Patiño was barred from the Olympic team for failing the gender test. Her testes were hidden in her labia.

47. In 2011, when Jeopardy!'s 74-game champion Ken Jennings lost in an exhibition match against IBM's Watson AI program, he wrote under his final response "I for one welcome our new computer overlords".

48. Peoria, Illinois was a test market for new shows in the early 20th century, due to their broad demographic. This gave rise to the phrase "Will it play in Peoria?"

49. The US government can save $400 million a year by using a thinner font.

50. There was no screenplay for Mad Max: Fury Road. Instead director George Miller worked with Brendan McCarthy to produce 3,500 storyboards. McCarthy whose specialty is drawing storyboards and comic book art received a writing credit.