Fact Cards

7781. Walter Pitts Corrected Russell-American logician Walter Pitts taught himself logic and mathematics and then spent three days in a library in Detroit reading Principia Mathematica. After finishing it, he wrote to logician Bertrand Russell with a list of what he believed were serious errors in the first half of the first volume. Russell was so impressed that he invited Pitts to study with him at Cambridge University. Pitts could not accept, because he was only 12 years old at that time.

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7782. Delos Protected by Emptiness-Delos is a small Greek island near Mykonos, but its importance far outweighs its size. Ancient Greeks treated it as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 1990. In the 2011 census, the island had only 24 residents, and modern Greece imposes strict protection measures that prohibit construction activity.

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7783. Hot Salt Fries Without Oil-Hot salt frying works much like deep frying but cooks food in heated salt instead of oil. Chefs heat coarse salt until it holds intense, even heat, then use it to fry ingredients quickly without submerging them in fat. Even though the food cooks directly against the salt, the finished dish does not come out tasting especially salty.

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7784. Australia’s White-Only Immigration Era-In 1901, Australia adopted the White Australia policy, a set of laws designed to block immigration by people of non-European origin, especially Asians and Pacific Islanders. The policy used tools like the Immigration Restriction Act and dictation tests to keep the country overwhelmingly white while presenting the system as legal administration. By 1961, the policy had helped produce an Australia that was 99.4 percent white at its peak. The government began dismantling the system in the decades that followed and formally ended it in 1973.

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7785. Cadaver Fat Cosmetic Injections-By 2026, plastic surgeons had begun using a product called alloClae, an injectable filler made from purified fat taken from deceased donors. The material comes from tissue banks that collect abdominal fat from people who donated their bodies to science, and surgeons use it to enhance areas like the lips, hips, buttocks, breasts, shoulders, and chest.

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7786. 1G Calls Had No Privacy-In the early 1980s, first-generation, or 1G, cell phones sent calls over unencrypted analog radio signals. That meant the conversation traveled through the air in a form that almost anyone could intercept with a receiver tuned to the right frequency.

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7787. Co-op Ticket Fraud Case-In October 2008, a couple named Michael and Amanda Stacey found a winning £30,000 National Lottery ticket on the floor of a Co-op store in England after another woman named Dorothy McDonagh dropped it. The couple cashed in the prize, spent about half of it paying off debts, and treated the windfall as luck until records helped trace the claim. McDonagh proved she had bought the ticket because she kept the receipt, and a court later ordered the Staceys to repay half the money to her while police froze the rest. In 2009, both received 11-month suspended sentences for fraud.

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7788. McDonald’s Real Estate Machine-McDonald’s did not just grow by selling burgers. The company generates income in part by owning about 70% of its restaurant buildings and 45% of the underlying land, then leasing those properties to franchisees. That structure turns McDonald’s into a powerful landlord as well as a fast-food chain.

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7789. Bear Grylls Survived Freefall-In 1996, British adventurer Bear Grylls was taking part in a routine Special Air Service training jump over Zambia when his parachute failed to inflate at 16,000 feet. Grylls later said he should have cut away the main chute and gone to the reserve, but he thought he still had time to fix the problem. He slammed into the ground on his parachute pack, fracturing three vertebrae and coming dangerously close to a fatal spinal injury. He survived one of the highest freefalls ever lived through without a working parachute, then spent a year in rehabilitation before climbing Mount Everest about 18 months later.

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7790. Einstein Failed Everything But Math-Contrary to popular belief, Albert Einstein was highly skilled at mathematics as a child. The myth comes from the fact that he failed the entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich at age 16, but he did very well in the mathematics and physics sections. His weaker results were in subjects like zoology, botany, and languages, not math.

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37 COMMENTS

  1. Would you mind if I started to post these facts on iFunny? I really think people would love them and I would of course credit and link your website.

    1094
  2. Your page (re)numbering makes it almost impossible to find something on your site. The search option doesn’t seem very helpful.. I tried to search for Harris Rosen or Fact #62 after seeing it on Bored Panda, but had to do a brute force search to find this page…

    1096
  3. I just went through all the facts pages. A few things I’ve noticed:
    1. #451-#470 (pgs 46 & 47) have images that are broken.
    2. #841-#1140 (pgs 85-114) are complete duplicates of earlier pages.

    11
    • Thank you for your valuable feedback. Last night we implemented a new page numbering system for our fact cards. I really messed up with facts #451-#470 which I have fixed now. I have fixed the other problem too.

      10
  4. Just stumbled onto your site via an Imgur post. Cool stuff.

    Re. one of the citations above: “The oldest D20 dice was uncovered in Egypt…”

    One “die,” many “dice.” The headline in the source given had it right; “Ancient d20 die emerges from the ashes of time.”

    Credibility is always enhanced by proper grammar.

    18
  5. I really enjoy your site. I visit it regularly at this period of my life to use up time, while entertaining myself, and increase my awareness of life through the amazing insights into stories behind what we often overlook. It is almost therapeutic I would think! For one thing, I feel grateful not to be one of the warped personalities you often report on, but on the other hand, I feel sorry for the suffering that is really behind so many people you note through our shared history, who have the apparency of many successes, but are in fact imperfect and suffering souls like all of us, on the road to something better we hope eh?

    5
    • History gives us an opportunity to look into the mistake our ancestors made, but also the feats they achieved. The lives they suffered, so that the future generations could have the freedom. I am happy to have been part of such an important part of your life, Stuart.

      6
  6. I’m sure it’s like asking a magician how his tricks are done, but I would love to know the workings of the research you have to go through to find/verify everything I’ve read on your site. To say they are entertaining would be an insult. I read several pages daily. I have found them to be fascinating, educational, informative, and downright important.

    When I was a child and went on long road trips with my parents, my Mom would would bring a box of Trivial Pursuit cards to read and ask questions to pass the time for everyone in the car…My Wife now reads these to our kids on our vacations.

    Do you take fact submissions, or do you rely on your own people to research and present them to your team/site? The only thing I can say about your site, is some click ads could be modified or even done away with. Political opinion polls, etc…I would sooner see and ad for shaving cream that some of those useless and probably biased ads (not you, just the people conducting them) But, I love what you do and am so glad that your site exists!

    1224
    • Thank you Ryan. It’s the readers like you who keep us going. It gives us immense pleasure to know that you love reading facts on our site. We do take submissions. About 10% of our facts come from submissions. You too can submit facts by filling out this form Contact Us. The ads are what keeps the servers running. We don’t take any donations, use patreon or sell merch on our site so ads are how we generate income. Though, we will take your advice to tone down the ads (we can’t really see what kind of ad our readers see as it’s decided by Google).

      7
  7. 1454: She wasn’t found “shortly” after, which might imply that 911 had tried to help and just didn’t arrive in time; she was found HOURS after.

    1182
  8. Each of these pages of facts should have its own page for commenting instead of many fact pages and only one place to comment. I’d also delete my post about each fact having its own page since the aforementioned idea is better, but I can’t.

    1270
  9. I love this website I use it all the time and it allows me to attain info that I have been able to use irl all the time. Keep up the great work!

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  10. Also Rickinator for 610 killing bears is not a good thing due to most species of bears being endangered it is just a fact/statistic

    1115
  11. Your fact card is WRONG! You state Queen Elizabeth II is related to George Washington (which is correct), however, then you all say “Their last living common ancestor is Augustine Warner, Sr. who died in XX.”

    That’s incorrect! i am related to both Col. Augustine Warner, Sr. and George Washington and I’m very much alive as are my family members and 1 uncle and his 2 sons.

    1

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