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.
It’s funny how people forget about that, right? Like, if I want a drink, I just grab a glass and fill it up. But imagine if you were a peasant back in the day – you’d have to lug a bucket all the way to the well, which could be miles away. And then you gotta carry that heavy bucket all the way back!
Cold? Just turn up the thermostat. But if you were a peasant, you’d be shivering your butt off and hoping you had enough firewood. If not, you’d have to chop down a tree, cut it up, carry it home, and then finally build a fire.
Seriously, think about it – those people didn’t have any of our modern conveniences. They didn’t have plumbing, AC, or even Netflix. They just had to survive, and that was a full-time job.
Yeah, you can’t just chop down any tree and expect it to burn right away. That wood’s too green, it’s all wet and wouldn’t catch fire. You gotta let it dry out first, like for weeks, in a place where the air’s dry.
And that’s not even thinking about how most people back then were basically tied to the land and couldn’t just chop down whatever trees they wanted. So they’d be out all fall gathering wood from branches that had fallen down. And they weren’t just keeping it for themselves either, they had to give some to the lord of the land – like, 10% of their firewood. Crazy, right?
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!
You could tell them Bluetooth tech is named after Harald Bluetooth, a Danish king, and the logo is a bind rune with his initials, Hand B.
And get this, the tech that came before it, Frequency-hopping spread spectrum, was invented by actress Hedy Lamar!
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.
By day 10, it’s like everyone’s either dropped out or way ahead, and you only see the stragglers running by every now and then.
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.
That’s wild! Einstein helped fix the problems with the Mark 14 torpedo. The Navy didn’t test them properly during the Depression to save money, which caused a ton of issues.
Think about Einstein hustling for OnlyFans in today’s world.
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!
It’s like those people who got the original ground mounts in vanilla WoW, before they got updated. Remember how they offered new armored versions, and you could trade in your old ones for the shiny new ones? Problem is, the new ones weren’t the same as the old ones and now you can’t get them anymore. Sad about that Ivory Raptor, though.
Man, I had the jet black panther. What a bummer!
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.
So, from what I’ve read, the modern version is basically a whole new thing.
I read this book called “Venice: A New History” by Thomas Madden, and it talks about how the Venetians and Genoans were big on making shipping investments more accessible. They came up with the idea of shares, which let all kinds of people get in on the action. This led to some pretty modern banking ideas, like double-entry bookkeeping and that fractional reserve banking stuff.
Before that, it was all about one person owning the ship and the cargo. They’d load it up, sail to a trading place, trade their stuff, and try to come back with even more. But then shares came along and things changed. You could pay someone to ship your goods and sell them for you, even if it was in a different country. Before shares, that was crazy because the ship owner would be selling their own stuff, and that’s competition. Once the ship became like a company thing, it wasn’t such a big deal anymore. That whole company idea also gave birth to consignment selling.
That whole “general average” thing in maritime law, I think it probably came about because of the shares system.
I might be off base, but that’s how I understand it from what I read about shipping in Renaissance Italy.
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.
Wow, that’s exactly what happened to me. I couldn’t believe how perfectly you put it. It took over two months for mine to go away, and even now I have to take Valium when it comes back. Seriously a lifesaver.
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.
That’s a pretty harsh way to talk about his old car!
You forgot “Junior” in there!
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.
Someone in my family, way back during World War II, did something similar. His friends gave him a funny nickname because of it, but I can’t remember what it was.
Ahab?
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?
Like, that “ye olde shoppe” thing? That old-fashioned “Y” is actually a character called a thorn, which made the “th” sound. People just forgot, started reading it as a “Y”, and now we’re all pretending the whole era sounded different.
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.
Man, I totally forgot about Ingress. I played it all summer on campus when it first came out and there was nobody else around, so I took over everything. Then it got boring since I was the only one playing.
That’s what a secure person would do, right? But there seem to be more and more people who get upset easily these days.
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.
Their F-15s have some awesome paint jobs on them! You should check out their air show and the special liveries they’ve done.
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?
Yep, it’s soot, so obviously tiny particles.
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.
RE: Fact #29 (Sailors Drinking Torpedo Alcohol) – So, they tucked the imports stuff away. Apparently, torpedo juice is made with two parts alcohol and three parts pineapple juice.
RE: Fact #34 (Circles of 24-Hour Sunlight) – 24 hours of sun sounds awesome, but then you remember your sleep schedule is going to be totally messed up!
Those days aren’t too bad. It’s much worse when it’s dark for months and you barely see the sun. Some people even get depressed from it.
RE: Fact #30 (Danger of Manchineel Tree Toxins) – I’d think a death tree would be from Australia.
Australia has this tree called the Gympie Gympie, and it’s so painful to touch, people say they wish they were dead!
RE: Fact #32 (James Webb’s Unique Orbit Point) – They’re planning to put a space station at the Lagrange point between Earth and the Moon. It’ll be like a gateway for lunar missions, so they don’t have to lug all the supplies with the astronauts.
That’s how we get Gundams!
RE: Fact #29 (Sailors Drinking Torpedo Alcohol) – I saw on Factrepublic yesterday that those German V1 or V2 rockets had a fuel issue. Apparently, they had to delay launches because the staff drank all the fuel!
The MiG-25 used an alcohol blend for its brakes and electronics. The Soviets struggled to make a mix that was nasty enough to keep people from drinking it, but not deadly if someone was dumb enough to try.
Seriously, they were trying to make booze out of boot polish in Afghanistan? You can’t tell me there’s anything a Russian wouldn’t try to get drunk on.
RE: Fact #4 (Peter Dante’s Career Decline) – Dude could have just cruised on that Sandler movie money forever, but he had to go and be a jerk. Turns out, being a jerk is kinda his thing – he got arrested in 2020 for threatening his neighbor.
Someone I can’t remember said it best: Being Adam Sandler’s friend is the easiest job in Hollywood and he messed it up.
Schneider’s just stuck bragging about being famous for being a clown back in the 90s, but he messed it up by being a jerk.
Comedians who don’t make it just blame whatever’s trendy this week.
He was just playing himself in The Waterboy, haha.
I’ll just pretend he’s still the same Dante from Grandmas Boy. That movie’s probably the best Happy Madison ever made. And, fun fact, no Adam Sandler in it.
Dante was really annoyed by the loud construction noise next door and apparently threatened to hurt his neighbor, his neighbor’s wife and kids.
RE: Fact #30 (Danger of Manchineel Tree Toxins) – The manchineel tree is pretty cool, it can be a big shrub or a tree that grows up to 50 feet tall. It even has little apple-like fruits that look super tempting, but don’t be fooled, they’re actually poisonous!
RE: Fact #27 (PlayStation Hack Exposes Millions) – Crazy, right? The bin Laden assassination happened while the internet was down.
RE: Fact #50 (Whale Farts Create Large Bubbles) – Farts smell different in the bathtub than they do out in the open, don’t you think?
It’s just that your nose gets super sensitive in humid air, so you smell the farts more strongly.
RE: Fact #36 (The Great Nottingham Cheese Riot) – I’ve had days where I’d fight tooth and nail for a good cheese board!
RE: Fact #5 (Japan’s First Female Pilot) – There’s only one female commercial airline pilot in Japan, and she had to learn to fly in the US.
I lived there for a while and it really gets to me. Some of the fancy Japanese universities were totally playing favorites with medicine, really unfair to women applying. It’s so bad, you could even argue that the worst male doctor is still better than the worst female doctor. That’s messed up, right?
I still love a lot about Japan though, don’t get me wrong. It’s a great place, just not perfect.
I lived in Japan for two years. Loved it, thought I’d stay forever. But the racism really got to me after a while. Every foreigner I knew was stuck in a dead-end job, never getting promoted because of who they were.
The worst part was seeing friends marry Japanese people, have kids, then get divorced. The courts always sided with the Japanese spouse, basically cutting the other parent off from their kids.
That’s when I knew I’d never marry a Japanese person. It’s just too risky. I loved my everyday life there, but what’s the point if you can’t work at a Japanese company and you can’t be with someone Japanese? It was heartbreaking, but I’m much happier back home, with a family and a good job.
Honestly, the way women are treated in Japan is messed up. There are tons of stories about how bad it is to be a working mom.
RE: Fact #2 (Student Awarded For Mistreatment) – You wouldn’t believe it, but it happens more than you think. My social studies teacher in middle school had this crazy rule where no one could go to the bathroom during class. So, someone just peed in the corner. Now, looking back, it seems so messed up.
I once had a teacher who wouldn’t let me use the bathroom, so I said I’d pee in the corner, and she finally let me go.
I gotta use the bathroom, so I’m gonna head out for a sec. If you wanna write me up, go ahead, I don’t really care. My parents would probably be happy about it too, haha.
We had a bomb threat and my teacher wouldn’t let me use the bathroom, even though there was a tree way further away that was safer. So I had to pee my pants in front of everyone while we lined up against the fence. They said the grass could catch fire and burn the whole field, but we were closer and if the fire was that bad, we’d all be toast anyway.
RE: Fact #21 (First Nuclear Reactor Shutdown) – I heard somewhere that “Scram” stands for “Super-Critical Reactor Axe Man”.
It’s either Safety Control Rod Axe Man or Safety Cut Rope Axe Man, apparently.
That’s what they taught us in Navy Nuke School: “critical,” “supercritical,” and “subcritical” aren’t always bad things.
I thought I’d be kicked out after hitting this button.
RE: Fact #20 (The Tiffany Problem Explained) – You know how Gladiator was all about ancient Rome? They actually thought about showing how Romans had billboards and stuff like that, but they decided that people wouldn’t buy it.
RE: Fact #42 (Comet Hyakutake’s Record Tail) – It was violet, a huge stretch of sky that went on for over 60 degrees.
RE: Fact #2 (Student Awarded For Mistreatment) – So the teacher thought the school had a super strict, no-bathroom break policy, but that wasn’t actually the case. Her lawyer said she thought she couldn’t let kids go to the bathroom during a short class period, so she got a bucket just in case! It’s kind of funny that she even used it herself.
It’s crazy that it’s happening in advisory. You know, that 25-minute “free time” where you can do homework, hang out, or whatever. They usually do announcements during that time too. So, basically, it’s a free period to do your thing, like going to the bathroom, haha.
The new Danielson rubric says you’re in big trouble if you say “free period.” They’ll make you stand in front of everyone during a test pep rally and… well, let’s just say it’s not pretty.
Seriously?
The schools’ favorite term, like always, was probably no exceptions.
Most courts would agree that stopping people from taking care of their basic needs is against the law, no matter what the rules are.
RE: Fact #44 (Chefs Serving World Leaders Group) – Let’s take over the world by poisoning all the leaders at once.
RE: Fact #17 (Elephants Mining Salt Underground) – This cave is where two people got Marburg virus back in the 80s. Scientists tried to figure out what animal carried it. They tested tons of bugs and animals, but nothing came back positive. It was a big mystery. It’s in that book, The Hot Zone.
In 2007, researchers found Marburg in fruit bats in Gabon and Uganda. These were the same kind of bats that go to Kitum Cave, so they’re probably the ones that spread it.
So watch out for bats if you go there, and be careful where you step. They think breathing in bat poop dust can give you the virus.
Bats are a real pain, seriously. They’re like the virus carriers of the world. It’s always bats that start these outbreaks – either they bite someone, or someone bites them.
Bats are crazy good at fighting off viruses, even tons of them, because they’re built differently and have super high body temps. They hang out in huge groups, so if one gets sick, everyone probably does soon after.
But when they meet up with other animals that are super social and move around a lot, but don’t have the same defenses, things can go downhill fast.
Nah, it’s the zombie elephants. Just kidding!
RE: Fact #18 (Shared Losses Under Maritime Law) – That’s pretty wild, right? It’s basically the same idea as how insurance works.
So, back in the 17th century in the Netherlands, financing a trip to the East Indies was a huge deal. If a ship went down, which was pretty common back then, you could lose everything. So, merchants started sharing the cost and the profits to spread the risk across different voyages. That’s how shares got started!
It’s not that crazy when you think about how insurance started, right? Maritime shipping was where it all began and it just kind of expanded from there. You wouldn’t believe how many modern insurance practices came from that, and how much stuff from hundreds of years ago is still used today in marine insurance!
RE: Fact #31 (Madame Tussaud Spared Execution) – Her life was super interesting, you know? It must have been scary to be so close to death and then saved at the last minute. I don’t know, I’d probably find making death masks of those French aristocrats pretty intense.
Especially since she was friends with them.
RE: Fact #21 (First Nuclear Reactor Shutdown) – A guy standing next to a nuclear reactor, holding an axe in one hand, shielding his junk with the other from the radiation.
It’s so old school, it makes me picture a bunch of guys on a sailing ship, shouting “Drop anchor, and don’t forget the control rod for the nuclear reactor! We don’t want it melting down while we’re out drinking rum!”
And scratching his back with the third
RE: Fact #9 (Medieval Peasants’ Extended Holidays) – “Time off” probably meant something totally different back in the medieval days, right?
Time to take a break from the lord’s land, right? Even then, peasants had to work their own fields to have something to eat, not to mention all the other chores around the house. Having a wife and kids was essential back then, you needed all the help you could get.
I seriously doubt they were getting paid.
RE: Fact #40 (3100 Mile Ultramarathon Around Block) – That’s kind of like a race in New York where drivers are always hunting for parking.
RE: Fact #2 (Student Awarded For Mistreatment) – So you can’t use the bathroom, but you can pee in the closet? That’s weird.
RE: Fact #8 (Counterfeiter Eluded Capture Decade) – That Flintstones episode with the old lady counterfeiter, was that the inspiration?
Wikipedia says the Flintstones episode was based on the movie, which was based on his story. Apparently he made more selling the rights to his story than he ever made as a counterfeiter.
And the judge fined him a dollar! He also got a year and a day in prison.
RE: Fact #12 (Einstein’s Forgotten Invention) – Me too, I watched Jeopardy tonight.
RE: Fact #39 (Gaddafi Sponsored German Hockey) – That’s my local team! They were basically broke and about to go under, so this local guy who had some weird connection to Gaddafi managed to get him to sponsor them. For one game, they wore jerseys with a giant picture of the green book on them. They’re called the Iserlohn Roosters now, back then they were the ECD Iserlohn. Weird seeing them on factrepublic, huh?
RE: Fact #22 (Elizabeth Báthory’s Grisly Legend) – Actual historians say the real number of people killed was probably somewhere between 30 and 300, with the lower number being more likely.
She didn’t actually bathe in blood, that stuff dries too fast for that. I can’t remember the exact podcast, but they said in some old stories that she’d change her clothes right away if even a little bit of blood got on them. She wasn’t trying to drink or bathe in it, she was just morbidly curious.
RE: Fact #38 (Soyuz Rocket’s Matchstick Ignition) – You know, some of that old Soviet stuff, even if it’s a bit rough around the edges, just keeps on going. The last war we’ll fight will probably be with tanks and rifles that are older than your grandpa.
The next big war is gonna be fought with AK-47s for sure. But T-55s? They’re getting wrecked too fast, so I’m not so sure about those.
Old tanks that are still kicking around after 70 years? That’s probably because they’re super reliable, even if they’re a bit basic.
RE: Fact #19 (Carbon Black Extends Tire Lifespan) – Back in the day, having all-black tires on your car was like, “Look at me, I’m rolling in dough!” Before that, everyone just had plain white tires. Then, when carbon tires became the norm, fancy cars started putting white stripes on the sidewalls while keeping the black tread. White walls got really popular, so companies started selling fake whitewall covers that you could just snap onto your tires – like, a quick way to make your car look fancier. My dad told me he used to hear those old, loose covers flapping in the wind on the highway.
Now I get Billy Joel’s song. And why I mostly see whitewall tires on hot rods and show cars. Thanks!
RE: Fact #32 (James Webb’s Unique Orbit Point) – JWT hangs out at L2 because it’s super sensitive to heat and likes to use the Earth’s shadow for cover.
Staying put could mean picking up some space junk though, just like Jupiter’s Trojans. I’m sure the engineers thought of that.
The JWST won’t last forever because it needs to use fuel to stay where it is.
The JWST trip to L2 was a breeze, way smoother than expected! So they’ve got extra fuel – big shoutout to the Europeans for doing such a great job!
There’s a fueling port they used before launch, but now the sun shield’s in the way. They’re not planning to refuel it, but it could theoretically be done by a robot.
RE: Fact #16 (Dislodged Ear Crystals Disorder) – I was cuddling with my wife, and suddenly I felt like I was on a crazy spinning ride. I was about to puke on her!
Then I turned the other way, and it was like the ride instantly reversed, still going super fast.
I fell out of bed, face-first onto the floor, and threw up until the room stopped spinning.
BPPV is the worst.
The Epley Maneuver is a lifesaver! I’m always rushing to my physiotherapist at the first sign of dizziness. Vestibular therapy is the real deal. Turns out dehydration and vibrations are my worst enemies. I get super dizzy in the dentist’s chair because of the head tilt and that vibrating cleaning tool. Pressure is also a trigger. Sometimes I hold my breath while stretching, which increases air pressure in my ears. I’m really careful to breathe while stretching now.
You nailed it.
It was seriously scary, right?
Same here, but mine wasn’t as bad. And I wasn’t getting all touchy-feely with OP’s wife either.
Seriously, I can’t believe I just pulled off that YouTube trick in ten minutes and my vertigo is gone! It had been happening a bunch during my crazy senior year, then it hit while I was driving and it was seriously scary. I still don’t know how I managed to pull into a parking lot when everything was spinning like crazy.
RE: Fact #28 (Quantum Computers Require Extreme Cold) – We’re still a long way off from getting our hands on quantum computers for everyday use.
Some companies are already working on building these things. They’ll be pretty basic at first, super expensive, and kinda clunky. But trust me, it’s gonna happen a lot sooner than you think. Remember how our computers used to be as big as a room? Well, that’s where quantum computers are right now, but we’re not starting from nothing.
It’s like something straight outta heaven. Imagine a computer that’s small enough for one room, but can store millions of facts.
RE: Fact #12 (Einstein’s Forgotten Invention) – Albert Einstein was a genius, but his brother, Frank, was a real jerk.
I was about to Google it, then it hit me. Pretty clever.
Frank’s the one who messed this up.
RE: Fact #35 (Real Scientist Featured in Song) – I was a total nerd when I was a kid, and one of my favorite shows was Don’t Ask Me, where scientists answered questions from people watching. One of the scientists, Magnus Pyke, was kind of a hero to me.
RE: Fact #41 (Ulysses S. Grant Sold Firewood) – If you’re young, try working a super crappy job for a bit.
Then, if you end up rich and famous, you can say you came from nothing.
“I had to sell used matchboxes to make ends meet! In a cave!”
RE: Fact #23 (Lise Meitner’s Overlooked Nominations) – What’s she been up to lately?
She’s got an element named after her, that’s pretty cool!
RE: Fact #39 (Gaddafi Sponsored German Hockey) – Turns out, Gaddafi paid for that fancy cricket stadium in Pakistan. The story is that he was pretending to help Pakistan build a nuclear bomb for the whole Muslim world, back when that country’s president was in charge.
RE: Fact #33 (Boris Karloff’s Chosen Identity) – He was mixed race, and back then, people really tried to keep that quiet. You know, like Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh, they pretended they weren’t from non-white backgrounds. Oberon even said her grandma, who was darker skinned, was her maid. Mr Karloff-Pratt was related to Anna from the movie “Anna and the King of Siam.” She was mixed race too. It’s a real shame that people had to hide who they were back then just to get a job.
RE: Fact #8 (Counterfeiter Eluded Capture Decade) – Juettner got the nickname “Mister 880” from the Secret Service because of the file number they gave his case. They were on his tail from 1938 to 1948.
In January 1948, some kids found fake dollar bills and some printing plates in a trashy empty lot near Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street. They didn’t think much of it, but ten days later, one of their dads saw them playing poker with the fake money and told the cops. A detective called the Secret Service, and they were really surprised.
A bunch of Secret Service agents showed up right away to check the bills. They figured out that they were “Eight Eighty’s” work and went to talk to the guy who turned in the fake money. He and his son helped them find the other kids, who had the plates.
Another group of agents tried to figure out how the plates and money ended up in that empty lot. People who lived nearby said there was a fire in a building that overlooked the lot a few weeks before. The firefighters threw a lot of stuff out the window of an apartment on the top floor to put out the fire. The guy who lived in the apartment wasn’t home, but his old dog died from smoke.
The Secret Service went to the apartment and found everything. They found the printing press, a bunch of “Eight Eighty’s” fake dollars, and even some mistakes he’d made while printing. And guess who they found? Mr. Eight Eighty!
Did he pass away?
He was old back then. People don’t usually live to be that old.
Nah, he died in 1955, like 7 years after he got caught.
That’s a sad story. Poor pup.
Turns out the dog was the brains of the operation. Faked its death in the fire and then hightailed it to Mexico.
Nice.
RE: Fact #37 (Giant Pandas’ Odd Defecation Habits) – Many animals eat their mom’s poop, it helps them get the good bacteria in their gut that they need to digest the same food their mom does.
Let’s not do it like that, you know?
RE: Fact #4 (Peter Dante’s Career Decline) – He was seriously hilarious in Grandma’s Boy.
RE: Fact #20 (The Tiffany Problem Explained) – Same here with Greek mythology. You know, Orpheus, Heracles, and then all of a sudden “Jason”!
RE: Fact #3 (Notre Dame Fire Confusion) – What caused the fire?
RE: Fact #22 (Elizabeth Báthory’s Grisly Legend) – Recently a lot of podcasters have said that she was innocent.
This is a example of how podcasters and influencer-historians can get things wrong.
So many people are arguing that Bathory was innocent and that she was just a rich woman who was falsely accused based on stuff they saw online.
Maybe she was falsely accused, I’m not saying she wasn’t. But there’s no proof, just guesses about why someone might want to frame her. That’s not a very exciting podcast story, though.
The bigger issue is people are relying on sources like Wikipedia and Britannica that aren’t written by real historians. The Britannica article that everyone keeps posting was written by someone who only has a degree in English.
Our understanding of history is getting messed up, and we’re getting even worse at telling what sources are reliable.