26 Drapetomania: A Racist Fabrication
Drapetomania was a falsely proposed mental illness based on the belief that slavery improved the lives of slaves so much that only those suffering from mental illness would want to escape.
27. The 2011 PlayStation Network outage, in which hackers stole the personal information of 77 million users, partly occurred because Sony had removed Linux support from the PlayStation 3.
28. Heat causes errors in qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, so quantum systems are typically kept in refrigerators that maintain temperatures just above absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit).
29. During World War II, U.S. Navy sailors drank “torpedo juice,” a mix of 180-proof grain alcohol fuel from torpedoes and pineapple juice. Even though the Navy tried to make the alcohol undrinkable, sailors found ways to bypass these measures with varying success.
30. Never stand under a Manchineel tree when it’s raining because its toxins are water-soluble. Even standing near it can expose you to airborne toxins. Every part of the Manchineel tree, also known as the “little apple of death,” is poisonous and can be deadly.
31 Madame Tussaud Spared Execution
Marie ‘Madame’ Tussaud owes part of her fame to the French Revolution. Initially slated for execution due to her ties with French nobility, she was spared and went on to create wax casts of notable victims of the revolution, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
32. The James Webb Telescope orbits a Lagrange point, where the gravitational pull from Earth and the Sun (or other celestial bodies) balance each other, allowing the telescope to orbit the spot rather than Earth, providing a unique observational vantage.
33. The actor known as Boris Karloff, famous for playing Frankenstein’s monster (his 82nd role), was actually born William Henry Pratt. He chose a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his well-known, well-connected, aristocratic English family.
34. The Arctic Circle and Antarctic Circle are geographic points where, at least once per year, there is a day of 24 hours of sunlight and a night of 24 hours of darkness.
35. The voice shouting exclamations in the song “She Blinded Me With Science” belongs to an actual scientist, Magnus Pyke. Magnus Pyke authored numerous scientific papers, held a government advisor position in the Ministry of Food, and received an appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
36 The Great Nottingham Cheese Riot
On October 2, 1766, Nottingham’s Goose Fair descended into chaos during the Great Cheese Riot, when locals began looting and rolling hundreds of cheese wheels through the streets. The military intervened, opening fire on the crowd to restore order.
37. Not only do giant pandas defecate approximately 40 times a day and consume their mother’s feces, but they also enjoy rolling in horse manure and rubbing it all over their bodies to stay warm, as they do not hibernate.
38. The Russian Soyuz rocket, in service since 1963 with a 98% success rate, ignites by firing wooden sticks inside the combustion chamber, which works much like lighting giant matches-simple yet incredibly reliable.
39. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi once sponsored a struggling German ice hockey team, promoting his “Green Book” on their jerseys. The team dropped the sponsorship after facing significant backlash.
40. The Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race is an annual ultramarathon where participants run 5,649 laps around a city block in Queens, New York. The fastest recorded finish took just over 40 days.
41 Ulysses S. Grant Sold Firewood
Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th U.S. President, struggled to make a living as a farmer in the 1850s and resorted to selling firewood on street corners in St. Louis.
42. Comet Hyakutake holds the record for the longest known tail of any comet, stretching 3.3 AU (astronomical units) or 307 million miles from its nucleus. We last observed it from Earth in 1996, and it won’t return to the solar system for another 70,000 years.
43. In 1951, over 250 people in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, suffered hallucinations, madness, and illness after eating contaminated bread. The incident, which caused seven deaths, was later attributed to ergot, a fungus found in rye flour.
44. Le Club des Chefs des Chefs, an international organization of chefs serving world leaders, includes members such as the head chef of King Charles III, the White House, and the presidents of India and South Africa.
45. Gayus Tambunan, an Indonesian tax official on trial for corruption, bribed his way out of prison 68 times. In 2010, during one of his escapes, his poorly executed disguise led to his recognition at a tennis match in Bali.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Simulated Cricket Sounds on Radio
In the early days of cricket broadcasts on Australian radio, commentators would simulate the sound of the batsman striking the ball by tapping their pencils near the microphone.
47. In 1698, Peter I of Russia introduced a beard tax to encourage men to adopt European-style grooming. Peter I even tasked a special police force with forcibly shaving those who hadn’t paid the tax.
48. The Berlin Airlift (1948-1949) was a massive humanitarian effort during which Allied forces flew over 92 million miles (148,000,000 km, or nearly the distance from Earth to the Sun) to deliver food and supplies to West Berlin after the Soviet Union blockaded the city.
49. British Airways runs a “Flying with Confidence” course to help people overcome their fear of flying, boasting a 98% success rate.
50. Whales sometimes fart, producing bubbles the size of watermelons. Observers have described the smell as a mix of herring breath and rotten salad. Seals are also known for their particularly noisy farts.
RE: Fact #9 (Medieval Peasants’ Extended Holidays) – This is pretty interesting if you’re curious about how much time medieval people actually spent working.
Basically, medieval peasants and craftsmen were their own bosses, so they weren’t forced to “go to work” like we are. They had more control over what they did and how much money they made. But unlike us, they spent a ton of time on things we don’t have to do anymore, or that we just take for granted.
Think about it: we work to make money to buy everything. In medieval times, farming was usually done in seasons, so it wasn’t a constant grind. But everything else – keeping their houses clean, getting food, that kind of stuff – took way more time and effort than farming did. So yeah, you could say medieval peasants were actually busier than us, even though they didn’t have regular jobs.
Thought so.
Need to clean your floor? Just grab a branch and make yourself a broom.
Need to wash your bed blankets? Go down to the well and pull up a bunch of buckets of water, then use your homemade soap to wash them by hand.
RE: Fact #26 (Drapetomania: A Racist Fabrication) – Olmsted, this famous landscape guy, wrote about his travels in the South. He noticed that white servants sometimes ran away, so he joked that maybe the disease they were talking about actually came from white Europeans and got brought to Africa by traders.
Wow, he gave us Central Park, Prospect Park, the grounds of the US Capitol, the campuses of UC Berkeley, Stanford, U of Chicago, and the Buffalo Parks System…. and then there’s this too!
RE: Fact #7 (World’s Most Produced Object) – 13×10^21. This is ridiculous. If you produce 1bilion of transistors every second, you would need more than 400k years to make 13 sextilion.
RE: Fact #7 (World’s Most Produced Object) – Digital integrated circuits such as microprocessors and memory devices contain thousands to billions of integrated MOSFET transistors on each device, providing the basic switching functions required to implement logic gates and data storage. Now think. How many are used in today’s electronics? There are way more than a billion produced each year by multiple different companies.
RE: Fact #3 (Notre Dame Fire Confusion) – That poor guy! He was brand new, working his second shift because his replacement was late. And to make things worse, the fire alarm system was labeled all wonky. It was like trying to find a fire in a maze!
RE: Fact #6 (Hippos Polluting African Rivers) – A bigwig asked me for a fun fact yesterday. I totally blanked and went with something about star-nosed moles instead. Should’ve come up with something cooler!
RE: Fact #40 (3100 Mile Ultramarathon Around Block) – I thought people wouldn’t be into this, but after digging a bit deeper, I think it’s totally a Vince Vaughn movie.
RE: Fact #49 (Course Helps Overcome Flight Fear) – I mean, if it’s just about not being in control, people would be scared of taxis, buses, trains, boats, even being in a car. It’s got to be the size of the potential problem, right? Like, it’s a “everything’s going to go wrong” thing, I guess?
RE: Fact #12 (Einstein’s Forgotten Invention) – It’s funny to me that people argue about how much work Einstein actually did. I love the idea that he was mostly in it for the patent stuff, because it’s just hilarious to imagine someone looking at how much a lawyer would charge and thinking “Forget that, I know Einstein, he used to do this.”
He was broke and needed money to get the physicist Leo Szilard over to America. He was tired of waiting for things to happen the normal way. He figured that since he used to work as a patent clerk, he could license a useful patent and get some cash.
And by the way, Albert Einstein helped fix the navy’s torpedo problems at the start of World War II.
RE: Fact #14 (Oscar Statuettes Made of Plaster) – Shiny metal is cool, but the history behind it is way more interesting. I’ll keep the plaster, Bob. Thanks!
RE: Fact #23 (Lise Meitner’s Overlooked Nominations) – Lise Meitner and Arnold Sommerfeld both got nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937. They didn’t win though, Clinton Joseph Davisson and George Paget Thomson did, because of their work on electron diffraction. Sommerfeld, like Meitner, had been nominated for a Nobel Prize a ton of times, like 84 times between 1917 and 1951. But he never won either.
RE: Fact #13 (Selena Gomez’s Kidney Named) – Forget about the friend who donated the kidney. That’s pretty cool!
RE: Fact #30 (Danger of Manchineel Tree Toxins) – It’s the Tree That Kills You Instantly. Burning it releases toxins that wreck your lungs and eyes. You could probably nuke it from orbit and it would still find a way to kill you.
RE: Fact #50 (Whale Farts Create Large Bubbles) – I’m going to use “It smells like a whale farted here” anytime someone lets one rip in my house!
RE: Fact #18 (Shared Losses Under Maritime Law) – That source isn’t very helpful for Georgia. The Wikipedia article is much better.
It’s weird to see a legal principle that’s been around for ages described as being from 1890.
RE: Fact #43 (French Town Hallucinations From Bread) – Ergot, a fungus, has this thing called ergotamine in it. Ergotamine has lysergic acid, which is what they use to make LSD. Imagine 250 people tripping out without realizing why. That must have been a real mess!
RE: Fact #16 (Dislodged Ear Crystals Disorder) – Vertigo is the absolute worst. I woke up in the middle of the night, turned over, and bam! My whole world started spinning like crazy. I can’t even describe how bad it was. I stumbled out of bed, fell on the floor, and crawled to the bathroom, throwing up for hours. I was practically crying because it wouldn’t stop. I had no clue what was happening—never felt anything like it before. Then I thought I was having a heart attack!
My wife finally woke up and found me in the bathroom. She took me to the ER. Turns out it was my first panic attack, triggered by the vertigo. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
RE: Fact #43 (French Town Hallucinations From Bread) – Mushrooms are crazy, you never know what’ll happen if you try one – you could die, go on a wild adventure, or maybe find something super tasty!
RE: Fact #27 (PlayStation Hack Exposes Millions) – That whole Sony password thing in 2014 was hilarious, a folder named “Password” with thousands of passwords in it?
RE: Fact #15 (Breastfeeding’s Immune Adjustment) – It’s not 100% certain, but studies seem to show that saliva can go back from the baby’s mouth to the breast during breastfeeding. This might trigger a response in the mom, making her breast milk have more white blood cells and antibodies. That’s another piece of evidence showing that breast milk changes depending on what the baby needs and helps protect them from getting sick.
RE: Fact #11 (Adopted Girls for Marriage) – They both look like they’re thinking, “This is the worst.”
RE: Fact #13 (Selena Gomez’s Kidney Named) – That’s actually a thing transplant patients do! My buddy just got a new kidney and named it John F. Kidney.
RE: Fact #24 (Whales Mistaken for Submarines) – My dad’s coworker, a WW2 Corsair pilot, once mistook a whale for a Japanese submarine and fired on it.
RE: Fact #20 (The Tiffany Problem Explained) – It’s funny how people think everyone talked fancy in the past, like they were all Shakespeare or something. But really, people back then were just as goofy and crude as we are. I mean, think about it, they were writing bad jokes on walls and having insult competitions! It’s like comparing a group of mechanics hanging out to a bunch of fancy scientists, you know?
RE: Fact #1 (P.T. Barnum’s Clever Trick) – Instead of getting mad, people just laughed it off and told their friends who hadn’t seen it yet.
I ran into a wild egret a couple of years ago. It was beautiful, with amazing feathers. I saw it while playing Ingress with some friends.
RE: Fact #5 (Japan’s First Female Pilot) – I wonder how many they have now. They had three more in training. I never knew Japan had F-15s.
RE: Fact #19 (Carbon Black Extends Tire Lifespan) – Isn’t that the stuff that’s causing microplastics and is a big sign of cars polluting the air?
RE: Fact #17 (Elephants Mining Salt Underground) – It’s wild, those elephants remember the way to the salt cave in the dark, takes them hours! And they pass that knowledge down to their babies, too.