Random #272 – 50 Awesome Facts You Got To Know

In 1997 the first Astronaut voted from space. Since then every American Astronaut votes from Space as an absentee voter for the state of Texas (where the Johnson Space Center is located), where they list their address as “low-Earth orbit.”

27. In 1965 the future Canadian Prime Minister John Turner was vacationing in Barbados when he noticed someone struggling in rough surf at the beach. Being a strong swimmer, he instinctively entered the water and unknowingly saved the life of former Canadian PM John Diefenbaker.

28. Malariotherapy is the act of intentionally inflicting a person with malaria as a way of curing them of syphilis. Malaria caused fevers which killed off the syphilis bacteria. After a few bouts of high fever, the bacteria would be eradicated and malaria treated with quinine.

29. Bagpipes were the only musical instrument deemed a weapon of war by the courts because it inspired troops to battle and instilled terror into the enemy.

30. According to a study out of the London School of Economics and Political Science, watching shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” can make you less sympathetic to the plight of the poor.

High doses of ketamine can temporarily switch off the brain. This pause in brain activity may correspond to what ketamine abusers describe as the ‘K-hole’ - a state of oblivion likened to a near-death experience, which is followed by a feeling of great serenity.

32. For two decades, 10 percent of all the electricity consumed in the United States came from thousands of decommissioned Russian nuclear warheads.

33. In 1978 eccentric millionaire Dick Smith made world news by towing an enormous iceberg into Sydney Harbor, offering to cut it into ice cubes, or “dicksicles”. This was actually an elaborate April Fools’ Day prank and the “iceberg” was actually made of shaving cream.

34. The oldest known hominid footprints discovered outside of Africa were in Norfolk, England. They are estimated to be 800,000 years old.

35. The rights to the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was bought from author Roald Dahl and financed by the Quaker Oats Company as a vehicle to introduce its new “Wonka Bars” but the candy didn’t arrive on shelves until years after the film’s release due to factory production problems.

Shirley Temple disliked her namesake drink, as she disliked the idea of cocktails for children. She also found most varieties to be “too sweet” for her tastes. She also sued companies seeking to mass-produce the drink, claiming it diluted her commercial value and invaded her privacy.

37. On average, most healthy individuals release 14-23 farts per day.

38. More than half of all mushrooms consumed in the US are grown in Kennett Square, a small town in Pennsylvania.

39. Josef Mengele, a.k.a the Angel of Death, was a Nazi physician who conducted human experiments on prisoners. He escaped Germany and gained a foreign residence permit in Argentina and returned to Germany to visit his family with a passport just 11 years after Nazi Germany fell.

40. In 2009, 107 million spiders were found in a 4-acre spider web at Baltimore wastewater plant in Maryland, USA equating to 35,000 spiders/m³.

Former NFL player Robert Rozier who killed 7 people on behalf of a cult, went into the witness protection program, did 22 years in prison, got out, became a web developer, and then was sentenced to 25 years to life for passing $2,200 worth of bad checks.

42. “Fancy Ketchup” is an actual legal designation of the highest grade of ketchup.

43. Some schools in China now have uniforms with tracking devices in them. This is done to monitor student attendance. If students try to leave during school hours, an alarm will go off.

44. A teenager in France managed to buy a Playstation 4 for only £8 by weighing the console under the fruit and veg section on a self-checkout machine. He was only caught when he tried doing it again.

45. Ted Williams, the last baseball player to bat .400, was at .39955 at the end of the season. Although due to rounding he would have finished with a .400 average, Williams refused to sit out and played the last two games. He went 6 for 8 in those games and finished the season with a .406 average.

When a peacock shakes his tail, it produces low pitched sound humans can't hear despite the noise is about as loud as a car going past a few meters away.

47. By 1930 doping was so prevalent and accepted in the Tour de France that the organizers felt compelled to inform the cyclists in the official rulebook that drugs would not be provided.

48. Many people could not figure out how to change the clock time on VCRs. The difficulty of setting the correct time became such a national joke that in 1990 that president Bush remarked “By the year 2000, all Americans must be able to set the clocks on their VCRs.”

49. Juana Inés was a 17th-century Mexican nun, a feminist poet, and an autodidact in an age where women were not allowed to study. She learned to read and write Latin by the age of 3, could do accounts by 5, wrote her first poem at 8, and at 13 she was teaching Greek and was writing poems in Nahuatl.

50. You usually can’t smell your house or your own scent because of ‘olfactory adaptation.’ The brain is always looking for new, strange, or changing smells as a sign of possible danger and ignores familiar scents.