26 Florence Nightingale’s Hammer Name
Sick Crimean War soldiers first called Florence Nightingale “The Lady with the Hammer” because she broke into locked storage cabinets to access medicine. However, a journalist found the name unladylike and popularized her enduring title, “The Lady with the Lamp,” instead.
27. In the 1960s, ski resorts frequently banned snowboarders for being “too unruly” and “dangerous to skiing culture.” Most resorts didn’t fully accept snowboarding until the late 1980s.
28. In 1932, the “Bonus Army”-a group of WWI veterans-marched to Washington, D.C., demanding their promised wartime bonuses. Under President Hoover’s orders, U.S. troops led by General Douglas MacArthur used tear gas, bayonets, and tanks to disperse them, killing two and injuring many.
29. Richard Nixon was a highly skilled poker player and used his winnings to cover 20% of the cost of his first congressional campaign.
30. Despite their introduction in 1979, laser sights gained widespread popularity only after Arnold Schwarzenegger prominently used one in The Terminator.
31 Powhatan Chieftain’s Deadly Trap
In 1610, Opossunoquonuske, a female chieftain of the Powhatan Confederacy, used “feminine guile” to lure 14 English settlers to a feast, convincing them to leave their weapons on their boat. It was a trap-her warriors ambushed them, killing 13. Only one man survived.
32. In Belgium’s 2003 elections, an unexpected anomaly occurred when one candidate received 4,096 extra votes. Investigators discovered that a cosmic ray had likely struck the computer system, causing a bit flip-a phenomenon where a binary digit changes state, leading to a computational error.
33. Leonard Nimoy based the “Vulcan salute” on a traditional priestly blessing he had seen as a child when his grandfather took him to an Orthodox synagogue.
34. Between 1230 and 1561, many English towns had a street called “Gropecu*t Lane,” named after the prostitution that took place in those areas. Over time, many of these streets were renamed to “Grape Lane.”
35. Warner Bros. wanted to remove the opening credits from the Watchmen script, so Zack Snyder secretly filmed them without a script, hoping the studio would let him keep them once they saw the footage. They did.
36 Lobsters Pee to Communicate
Lobsters urinate from their faces and even piss on each other’s faces to communicate social status.
37. The term Heimweh (homesickness) originated in the 17th century to describe Swiss mercenaries’ longing for home. People initially believed it only affected the Swiss, but by the 19th century, they recognized it as a universal condition.
38. In July 1804, Aaron Burr, while serving as U.S. Vice President, killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. He continued his term for another eight months. Hamilton’s shooting in New Jersey and subsequent death in New York complicated the murder charges.
39. The Dionne quintuplets were the first known quintuplets to survive infancy. At age five, the Canadian government made them wards of the Crown and turned them into a profitable tourist attraction. As adults, they sued the Canadian government for exploitation and eventually settled for $4 million.
40. Smooth brain is a real medical disorder called lissencephaly. It is rare and leads to severe developmental issues, including seizures, profound mental and physical disabilities, and a significantly reduced life expectancy. However, treatments have improved over time.
41 World’s Oldest Pie Recipe
The earliest known pie recipe is inscribed on a Sumerian tablet dating back to before 2000 B.C. It describes how to make a chicken pie.
42. In 1878, Vera Zasulich shot and seriously wounded Fyodor Trepov, the notoriously cruel governor of St. Petersburg, after he ordered the flogging of a political prisoner who had refused to remove his hat in his presence. A sympathetic judge and jury, along with a skilled lawyer, led to her acquittal.
43. The tiny island nation of Singapore holds an estimated collective reserve of about US$1.87 trillion, though the actual reserve is believed to be significantly larger.
44. Enzo Ferrari, founder of Ferrari, lived a highly reserved life. He rarely granted interviews, never left his hometown, and stopped attending Grands Prix outside of Italy after the 1950s. He also never flew on an airplane or set foot in an elevator.
45. One term at the Signoria, the government of the Republic of Florence, lasted only two months. Rather than holding elections, they randomly selected members from a pool of eligible names. During their term, the priors had to abandon their private businesses and live full-time at city hall.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 Mysterious English Sweating Sickness
The English sweating sickness was a mysterious disease that struck England and parts of Europe in a series of brief epidemics during the 15th and 16th centuries. Symptoms appeared suddenly, and within 24 hours, victims either died or fully recovered.
47. When St. Patrick was 16, Irish pirates captured him and sold him into slavery in Ireland. After six years, he escaped, attended seminary, and became a priest. Despite his past, he chose to return to Ireland, where he eventually spread Christianity.
48. Sumerians and Babylonians used a base-60 mathematical system, making 60 the most important number in Mesopotamian math. Their system was so effective that we still use it today to measure time, angles, and coordinates.
49. Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about two unemployed actors who staged and filmed a full production of Hamlet entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto Online (2013).
50. A British law in the 1950s forbade Jesus from speaking or having his face shown if he was a secondary character. His face remained unseen in Ben-Hur partly due to this law.
RE: Fact #24 (WWII Hawaii Emergency Currency) – I found a super rare version of these at my regular coin shop. Apparently, some guys on the USS Missouri ran a bunch of Hawaii bills through the ship’s post office machine the day Japan surrendered. That means there aren’t many of these bills around with the ship and surrender date stamped on them.
RE: Fact #23 (Tarantino Saves Video Archives) – I hoped he’d buy the place and make it a museum right there.
RE: Fact #14 (Vin Diesel’s Real Name) – Funny, right? Even with a name like Vin Diesel, I never once doubted it was real!
RE: Fact #9 (General Hooker’s Troop Reforms) – Crazy how just bread and dried veggies were considered a big upgrade.
RE: Fact #39 (Dionne Quintuplets’ Exploitation) – Then came IVF and the Octomom.
RE: Fact #21 (Honda Fit 2025 Pricing) – I discovered a Honda Fit hybrid in Jamaica that gets amazing gas mileage—over 40 MPG!
Meh, not that great, huh? My old Honda Fit got 40 MPG on the highway.
My Ford Escape, a regular-sized diesel SUV with a stick shift, got an amazing 53 miles to the gallon in France! No fancy turbo or hybrid stuff, just a standard diesel engine. I even switched the dashboard to miles, not kilometers, and checked the gas mileage myself— I drove almost 800 miles on one tank! My wife’s car back home, about the same size and power, only gets half that— around 26 mpg in town and 32 on the highway. It’s crazy how much worse the fuel economy is here. Seems like someone’s keeping our cars inefficient.
RE: Fact #4 (Heartbreak Feels Like Pain) – Long-term relationships leave a huge imprint on your brain. It takes a ton of rewiring to adjust after a loss. That totally explains why I still feel like my brain’s rebuilding itself years after losing someone important. That article is fascinating.
For someone who’s died, you hold onto the good memories. Those stay good, and when you’re reminded of them, it helps you keep going. You take what time you have. That’s just how it is. They were loved, and they loved you back.
But with an ex who cheated? Every time I think about them, it’s like getting stabbed all over again. All the good memories are ruined because you realize how naive you were, thinking they cared as much as you did. You weren’t loved, you were betrayed and dumped. You’re not alone because things are out of your control; you’re alone because the person you cared about most chose someone else.
My grandma on my dad’s side passed away years ago. She was old, it was her time, and it was sad, but not a big tragedy. Then, about two years later, my aunt and cousins invited me to Thanksgiving, and I was so happy to see her again—until I remembered she’s buried in my dad’s yard.
RE: Fact #25 (Pandas’ Short Fertility Window) – Pandas are endangered, it’s our fault. They were doing great until we messed up their homes and made it hard for them to mix their genes. And hey, lots of other plants and animals are getting help because of panda conservation too. I work at the Panda Base in Chengdu.
RE: Fact #32 (Cosmic Ray Alters Election Vote) – A single-event upset (or SEU, also called a single-event error) happens when a single charged particle hits a sensitive part of a microchip—like in a processor, memory, or transistor. This creates a charge that changes the chip’s state, causing a glitch or a “soft error.” You can find examples of notable SEUs, including those from the Belgium elections, on Wikipedia.
RE: Fact #43 (Singapore’s Massive Reserves) – Singapore’s leadership seems pretty good.
A zero-tolerance approach to corruption really helps things.
A minister got busted, convicted, and tossed in jail for being corrupt. The bribes were peanuts compared to what happens in other places. It’s even funnier considering how much he makes – seriously dumb to throw that away for bribes that weren’t even a third of his yearly salary! We take public service integrity seriously.
RE: Fact #33 (Nimoy’s Vulcan Salute Origin) – Picture yourself in that synagogue, not having a clue some kid in the back was memorizing a hand gesture that would later be super famous.
RE: Fact #27 (Snowboarders Once Banned) – High school history report: Resorts wouldn’t let snowboarders in, saying snowboards weren’t “approved equipment”.
RE: Fact #34 (Gropecu*t Lane’s Name Change) – That level of detail would make a period drama or fantasy show look like a joke—a really edgy, gritty, and explicit joke trying too hard to be Game of Thrones.
A really nasty Tiffany problem.
RE: Fact #37 (Heimweh: Swiss Homesickness) – It’s awesome that they thought only Swiss people could get this for 200 years.
RE: Fact #32 (Cosmic Ray Alters Election Vote) – He totally should’ve won! Even God was on his side!
RE: Fact #34 (Gropecu*t Lane’s Name Change) – Medieval streets were often named for what went on there—like Butcher’s Row, Silver Street, or Fish Street. Prostitution was pretty common in medieval cities; one old London book mentions Love Lane as a place for “ladies of the night”. Then there’s Gropecunt Lane—pretty self-explanatory! Bristol also had Hoorstrete. But Fucking Grove in Bristol was out in the sticks, so maybe sex there was more for fun than business.
RE: Fact #26 (Florence Nightingale’s Hammer Name) – She was really good at keeping track of things. So, when she got sick and was stuck in bed, she crunched the numbers and showed how clean hospitals and proper wound care saved lives.
I saw a documentary about statistics that really got me thinking about this. It wasn’t just the number-crunching; it was how she turned all those boring tables into awesome, easy-to-understand charts. That made the science stuff actually matter to everyday people and politicians, which was huge for social change.
RE: Fact #4 (Heartbreak Feels Like Pain) – Losing someone you love is rough. It can take ages to get over the feeling that they’re just around the corner.
Turns out, the part of your brain that remembers people is also the part that remembers where things are. When someone close to you is gone, it takes a while for your brain to adjust to that new reality. It can feel like your brain is actually broken, making it hard to think clearly.
So, be nice to people who’ve lost someone. It takes way longer to heal than most people realize.
Just be nice to everyone, really. You never know what’s going on in their lives.
“The Grieving Brain” is a great book that explains all this in more detail, if you’re interested.
RE: Fact #33 (Nimoy’s Vulcan Salute Origin) – My JCC teachers used this sign to call us in from the playground when we were kids.
RE: Fact #50 (1950s Law Silenced Jesus) – Turns out, Ben-Hur’s not actually named Ben.
RE: Fact #48 (Sumerians’ Base-60 Legacy) – So, they got to 60 because of how they counted on their fingers. They’d use their left hand, say, and count each finger section with their thumb – that’s three sections per finger, times four fingers, twelve total. After hitting twelve, they’d use a finger on their right hand to keep track, and start counting again on the left. Once they’d used all five fingers on the right, that made sixty, which became their main number.
That’s pretty smart! Like a human calculator.
RE: Fact #49 (Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto) – Saw this movie recently, and it’s pretty good! The pandemic’s impact is definitely felt in the dialogue—you can tell they were struggling. They didn’t seem to know much about online gaming, which is a shame, because this could’ve been huge if a big streamer or Discord server had promoted it. It’s a bit rough around the edges, made by a bunch of misfits, but there are some really sweet and funny parts.
RE: Fact #6 ($25M Stolen via Deepfake) – Cheap webcams and video conferencing software squeezing the image make this totally possible.
Totally, especially if it’s a remote company. Working in IT, I’m always running into people who are still pretty new to computers.
RE: Fact #12 (Thomson Reuters’ Email Disaster) – I get a kick out of that and usually make things worse by telling people to knock it off.
RE: Fact #16 (Excel Art by Tatsuo Horiuchi) – I helped a business owner who designs aviation fuel systems—he’s been doing it for over 30 years, makes a ton of money, and uses chair PNGs in Excel instead of actual valve diagrams.
RE: Fact #22 (Irish Famine’s Souperism Controversy) – Reverend Edward Nangle, who started the Achill Mission Colony back in the 1830s, is a good example of souperism. During the Famine, he fed the kids in the Colony’s schools, which made them really popular. People accused him of “buying souls” because of this. But souperism wasn’t always so straightforward; lots of non-Catholics gave food without pushing religion. Many Anglicans, even the Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, spoke out against it. Plenty of Anglican soup kitchens didn’t try to convert anyone, and Quakers, who just focused on charity, were never involved.
Quakers always seem to be on the right side of history, don’t they? Like during WWII, they really went out of their way to help Japanese Americans in those internment camps – bringing food, finding them jobs, helping them get settled. I really respect them.
Quakers and Sikhs: Same goal, feed people, no sermons.
RE: Fact #30 (Laser Sights and The Terminator) – Lasers weren’t really around until the early 2000s, so that “took off” claim is a bit much.
So, if they were brand new in ’79, they were probably pretty pricey. If they became popular five years later, that might not have anything to do with a movie; maybe they just got cheaper.
RE: Fact #27 (Snowboarders Once Banned) – Snowboarding’s image is outdated, but honestly, my inner skier still gets annoyed by some snowboarders’ habits. Those lift-line backups they cause can be a real pain.
RE: Fact #30 (Laser Sights and The Terminator) – Man, laser sights just highlight how shaky my hands get. Gotta eat something before heading to the range.
RE: Fact #10 (FBI Ends Solo Interviews) – That’s just terrible policy for any criminal interview.
That’s terrible policy for any interview, really. Best to have another person there, especially if it’s private.
RE: Fact #2 (Trickle-Down’s Horse and Sparrow) – They figured giving all the money to the rich would help the poor, but Hoover didn’t get it. Money goes up, not down. Give it to the poor, and the rich will have it soon enough. At least the poor would get to touch it first – Will Rogers
RE: Fact #22 (Irish Famine’s Souperism Controversy) – Lots of stories got really blown out of proportion over time, but some were actually true. Irish academics say it wasn’t common, and writers made the term famous after the famine.
RE: Fact #9 (General Hooker’s Troop Reforms) – It’s a fact: prostitutes help keep soldiers’ spirits up.
RE: Fact #39 (Dionne Quintuplets’ Exploitation) – The Dionne quintuplets were a huge deal. Like, there’s even a quick joke about them in the movie *My Man Godfrey*. Someone says, “I didn’t know Godfrey had five kids!” and the other person replies, “If a woman in Canada can have five, why can’t Godfrey?”
RE: Fact #12 (Thomson Reuters’ Email Disaster) – Working for a huge company, I get a kick out of this yearly email disaster. It’s always someone accidentally sending a massive group email that explodes into a crazy reply-all chain with everyone getting angrier and angrier.
I work at a mid-sized company and totally bombed when I accidentally hit reply all to our local office—about 200 people. A couple others replied, a few coworkers teased me, and that was it. It’s easy to do, right? BCC is the way to go.
RE: Fact #40 (Smooth Brain Is a Disorder) – Lissencephaly is really, really brutal. Most kids don’t live past 9 or 10, and even then, they don’t have much brain activity.
RE: Fact #11 (Cop’s Death Leads to Lawsuit) – She got $3 million, and he got nothing?
RE: Fact #48 (Sumerians’ Base-60 Legacy) – Base 60 is awesome because it’s divisible by tons of numbers! Think 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and even combinations like 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. Base 10 only works with 1, 2, 5, and 10.
RE: Fact #21 (Honda Fit 2025 Pricing) – Honda Fits are really popular in Thailand. Bummer that all these big trucks are becoming a thing here. Driving small cars was already tough, and now with these massive SUVs and Raptors everywhere, it’s even worse.
The Nissan Versa Note is about the same size, but I think it has a slightly bigger trunk.
I should add, I’m a huge Honda Fit fan – I wanted one, but snagged a great deal on the Note instead. They’re both good cars in that same category.
RE: Fact #33 (Nimoy’s Vulcan Salute Origin) – I figured it was just a V for Vulcan.
RE: Fact #36 (Lobsters Pee to Communicate) – Cool, we’re pretty alike!
RE: Fact #7 (Holyfield’s Fortune Lost) – I feel sorry for him, but man, $106,000 a month broke? I wish that were my problem.
RE: Fact #32 (Cosmic Ray Alters Election Vote) – That’s why we have ECC memory.
RE: Fact #12 (Thomson Reuters’ Email Disaster) – So, this happened back in 2001 when I was at Kodak. We had a new bigwig, and someone thought it’d be a great idea to send their picture to everyone worldwide. Except, this person didn’t get the picture size thing, and sent a massive 16MB picture to every single Kodak employee.
Sixteen megs was huge back then, especially sending it to everyone, even those on dial-up. It crashed our email for three whole days!
Turns out, whoever did it used one of those tools that shrinks the picture *on screen*, but the full-sized picture was still attached to the email. They totally goofed on resizing it.
RE: Fact #49 (Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto) – It’s a wild documentary, filmed entirely in the game. Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane wrote and directed it.
RE: Fact #20 (Deuterium in Water Explained) – That molecule is seriously thick.
RE: Fact #44 (Enzo Ferrari’s Reclusive Life) – He used purple ink and lived at his factory in Maranello.
His house got turned into a factory, but you can still see his old place – it’s pretty basic. He lived a simple life, from what I could tell.
RE: Fact #34 (Gropecu*t Lane’s Name Change) – That’s a bad name; they’ll need to change it again soon when Gen Z figures out what it really means.
RE: Fact #16 (Excel Art by Tatsuo Horiuchi) – I thought he’d colored the cells, but actually, he used the graphing tools.
RE: Fact #46 (Mysterious English Sweating Sickness) – Most people think it was probably some weird hantavirus nobody’s ever seen before. If that’s right, it might have wiped itself out by being too deadly. Diseases that kill their hosts too quickly often die out because they can’t spread. Some COVID versions are less deadly than the original for this very reason—people live longer to spread it.
RE: Fact #2 (Trickle-Down’s Horse and Sparrow) – I get why they put so much work into rebranding that “eat our sh*t” economic idea.
RE: Fact #46 (Mysterious English Sweating Sickness) – Henry VII’s oldest son, Arthur, the Prince of Wales, kicked the bucket from the sweating sickness. He’d married Catherine of Aragon when they were both really young, and went to live in Wales with her. Six months later, they both got sick. Catherine lived, Arthur didn’t. Because Arthur died, Henry VIII became king after their dad died. And Henry VIII even married Arthur’s widow, Catherine.
RE: Fact #13 (MKUltra Files Misfiled) – About 20,000 documents survived Helms’s cleanup because they were accidentally filed with the financial records, and someone found them in ’77 after a FOIA request.
The billing office—they never threw anything out.
RE: Fact #41 (World’s Oldest Pie Recipe) – I dunno why I bothered tracking down the original source, but here it is. I guess I just wanted the real recipe first, then it turned into fact-checking Wikipedia. Their sources are usually sketchy, but this one looks good.
RE: Fact #10 (FBI Ends Solo Interviews) – That Mindhunter scene was awesome. I really miss that show.
RE: Fact #18 (WWII Soldiers and Hard Drugs) – When I was about six, I read about the Rangers in *The Great Raid* and how they used speed to keep going when the Japanese were after them. Around the same time, my great aunt was really sick, and they said her heart wasn’t beating fast enough. So I asked my parents why we couldn’t give her something to speed it up.
RE: Fact #47 (St. Patrick’s Captivity and Return) – No snakes in Ireland since…
RE: Fact #47 (St. Patrick’s Captivity and Return) – He didn’t start Christianity in Ireland, but he was one of the first to write it down.