Random #248 – 50 Interesting Mind-blowing Facts

- Sponsored Links -

26Rags

Rags

Rags was a stray mutt who was found by a U.S. soldier during World War 1. Rags became the mascot of the 1st Infantry Division after he saved hundreds of lives by running messages under fire. When Rags was injured he was sent to a field hospital with an order from Head Quarters "The dog gets attention the same as soldiers."


27. Married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. Men who have marital partners also live longer than men without spouses.


28. The saying "Irish Goodbye," refers to a person ducking out of a party, social gathering, or very bad date without bidding farewell.


29. The baseball Hall of Famer Larry Walker was fixated on the number 3. He wore number 33, was married on November 3 at 3:33 and his phone number had “as many threes as the phone company would allow.” In 1993, he signed a $3 million contract.


30. SS Baychimo was a Swedish built 1,322-ton cargo steam-ship that was left abandoned by its crew in 1931 due to fear of sinking. Surprisingly, Baychimo did not sink but instead drifted around as a ghost ship for nearly 40 years without a crew. She was last seen in 1969.


Latest FactRepublic Video:
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History


31Lady Margaret Beaufort

Lady Margaret Beaufort

Lady Margaret Beaufort, who was married to Edmund Tudor at age 12, gave birth to the future Henry VII at just age 13. A political pawn during the Wars of the Roses, her first marriage took place when she was no older than 3.


32. Chickens have earlobes, and the color of a hen's eggs corresponds to the earlobe color.


33. The key to American victory in the Revolutionary War was the 75-ton “Great Chain” that stretched across the Hudson River to prevent the British from moving inland. It was such an obstacle, they paid Benedict Arnold £20,000 for the plans to the Chain’s main defenses, at Fort West Point


34. Japan has spent $600 million protecting two rocks that are part of the coral reef Okinotorishima because it gives Japan a 200 nautical mile (370.4 km) exclusive economic zone (EEZ) around the atoll.


35. Hypnagogia is the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep during which many hallucinations can occur, including the sensation of being bigger/smaller than yourself, floating, or falling.


- Sponsored Links -

36Cross dominance

Cross dominance

Cross dominance or mixed-handedness is a motor skill manifestation where each hand is better at different activities. Ex: being a lefty when writing but preferring the right hand for throwing a ball, etc.


37. Sir Ian McKellen turned down the role of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter franchise as he felt it would be inappropriate after the previous actor, Richard Harris, called him a 'dreadful actor.'


38. In 1841, during a naval battle between Argentina and Uruguay, the ship from Uruguay ran out of cannonballs. The captain ordered his men to shove the hard balls of cheese they had onboard into the cannons and to fire those. The cheese tore holes in the Argentine ship's sails and killed 2 sailors.


39. Eric Betzig conceived the idea for the world's first super-resolution microscope while being unemployed after quitting his job at Bell Labs due to being frustrated with the scientific community. He built this microscope in his friend's lounge room and went on to win the Nobel Prize.


40. Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System had no real instruction manual. Instead, there was a fake manual with a sticker reading, "Real men don't need instructions". The game also featured dinosaurs, acid-spewing mummies, and robot sentries as enemies.


- Sponsored Links -

41Limewire

Limewire

Limewire developed a subscription-based music-streaming service called ‘Grapevine,’ but industry execs wouldn’t accept the inevitable, and chose to sue them into obsolescence instead. Years later, Spotify arrived.


42. Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, is larger than Mercury and would be classed as a planet if it were orbiting the Sun rather than Jupiter.


43. Back in 2010, a man named Jon McLoone ran 15 million computer simulations of the game Hangman and found out that the most difficult word for that program to guess is "Jazz."


44. The farthest distance that a lost pet dog has found his way home occurred in 1979 when Jimpa, a labrador/boxer cross, turned up at his old home in Pimpinio, Victoria, Australia after walking 3,218 km (2,000 miles) across Australia.


45. In 1972, hours after American politician George Wallace was shot in an assassination attempt, Nixon rushed E. Howard Hunt to the shooter's apartment to plant campaign literature for Democrat George McGovern, hoping to sway McGovern supporters to Nixon. Hunt called it off after the FBI sealed off the apartment.


46Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

A topless, laid-back statue of Abraham Lincoln stands at a federal court in Los Angeles. Sculptor James Lee Hansen explained in 1941 that “from a sculpturing standpoint, it’s better to show the body without any clothes, [so] that’s why I left ’em off.”


47. The record for most generations alive in a single-family was set in 1989 and the number was seven. Augusta Bunge aged 109 years was followed by her daughter aged 89, her grand-daughter, 70, her great-grand-daughter, 52, her great-great-grand-daughter, 33, her great-great-great-granddaughter, 15 and her great-great-great-great-grandson born in 1989.


48. The atmosphere in Titan, Saturn's Moon, is so thick and the gravity so low, that humans could fly through it by flapping "wings" attached to their arms.


49. Ants make up 15 to 20% of the terrestrial animal biomass. In rain forests, as much as 25% of it is ants.


50. Morphogenesis is the math behind a giraffe’s spots or zebra’s stripes. This theory coined by Turing found that these apparently random patterns have a mathematic order.

1
2
- Sponsored Links -

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here