1 Norway’s Publicly Searchable Tax List
Norway publishes searchable tax lists showing people’s net income, net wealth, and tax paid. You must log in to view someone’s information, and that person can see your name in a search history updated hourly. You can view up to 500 people’s records each month.
2. During droughts in Central Europe, people carved “hunger stones” in rivers to mark the low water level and warn future generations of famine-related hardship if the water fell that far again. One stone in the Elbe River at Děčín, Czech Republic, bears the warning, “If you see me, then weep.” Its oldest readable drought date is 1616.
3. A nearsighted boy got into a fistfight that shattered his glasses and sent glass into his eyes. Russian ophthalmologist Svyatoslav Fyodorov removed the fragments and noticed that the boy’s vision improved markedly as the cuts in his cornea healed. Fyodorov tried to reproduce the effect with precise surgical cuts and introduced radial keratotomy, an early predecessor of LASIK, in 1979.
4. In February 2024, Billy Evans, the partner of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, incorporated a blood-testing startup called Haemanthus. He pitched a device that would scan blood, saliva, and urine for signs of disease, starting with pets before moving to humans. Its prototype reportedly resembled Theranos’ machine, although Haemanthus said it used a different approach. NPR reported that Holmes advised Evans from prison, but Haemanthus denied that she had any involvement.
5. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina forced an estimated 1.5 million people from their homes in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, creating a Gulf Coast diaspora. By 2015, approximately 40% of evacuees, especially those from Louisiana, could not return to their previous homes. New Orleans had 484,674 residents in 2000 and only 230,172 in 2006; the Census Bureau’s 2025 estimate of 362,154 was still below its pre-Katrina population.
6 Driving Time Tracked Cognitive Decline
Driving more than two hours a day has been linked to lower intelligence and memory test scores among middle-aged adults in a UK study. Researchers compared driving habits with cognitive tests and checked participants again after an average of 5.3 years. Longer driving time was associated with greater odds of cognitive decline.
7. During filming of the 1966 Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Shore Leave,” actor William Shatner suggested that Captain Kirk wrestle a real Bengal tiger brought onto the set. Associate producer Robert Justman had already warned against working with a full-grown tiger. When the animal got loose and Shatner saw it up close, he dropped the idea, later saying he backed down “for the good of the show.”
8. Germany charges a 25-cent deposit on eligible single-use drink bottles and cans. Shoppers get a refund when they return the empty containers, with about 135,000 return locations across the country. According to recycling equipment company TOMRA, 98% of eligible containers come back, giving Germany the world’s highest return rate for a deposit scheme.
9. In 2001, conservationists began restoring an eastern migration route for endangered whooping cranes by training captive-raised chicks to follow an ultralight plane. The pilot wore a crane costume, while handlers used disguises and crane puppets to keep the chicks from imprinting on humans. The birds followed the plane about 1,200 miles from Wisconsin to Florida, then flew north on their own the following spring.
10. In some U.S. states, “dead red” laws let motorcyclists proceed through a red light when its sensor fails to detect their bikes. A rider can otherwise wait through a signal cycle without ever getting a green light. Washington requires riders to stop, wait one cycle, and proceed with due care; Pennsylvania also lets drivers of other vehicles treat a malfunctioning red signal like a stop sign.
11 Passenger Pigeons Vanished Despite Billions
Passenger pigeons once numbered an estimated 3 to 5 billion across North America. People caught up to 800 at a time in large nets, while shooting contests used the birds as targets; one competition required 30,000 kills to win. Hunting and deforestation drove a rapid decline in the late 1800s. The last known bird, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.
12. Irish actor Pierce Brosnan lost the James Bond role in a 2-minute phone call with producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson after four films as 007. He was filming After the Sunset in the Bahamas when his agents warned him that negotiations had stopped; days later, the producers called with their decision. Brosnan said the news shocked him, and Daniel Craig took over in 2006’s Casino Royale.
13. After starring in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, American actor Vin Diesel asked Universal Pictures not to make a sequel. He believed the first film could become a classic and feared that turning it into a franchise would ruin that chance. Two decades later, he was playing Dominic Toretto in the series’ ninth film, F9.
14. Under Dutch law, when a motor vehicle hits a cyclist or pedestrian, its owner is generally liable even if the other person helped cause the crash. For someone aged 14 or older, the owner pays at least 50% of the damages unless they can prove an exceptional defense. For a child under 14, the owner generally pays 100%, because drivers must anticipate that children may behave unpredictably.
15. On September 11, 2001, a woman named Beverly Eckert comforted her husband, Sean Rooney, by phone as smoke filled the stairwell near him in the World Trade Center’s South Tower. They talked about the life they had shared until the tower collapsed, and Eckert later became an advocate for families affected by 9/11. Nearly eight years later, she met the president to speak for victims’ families. Six days after that meeting, she died in the crash of Continental Flight 3407 while traveling to Buffalo to mark Rooney’s birthday.
16 Black Hole Disks Form Stars
Under typical conditions, a supermassive black hole that feeds through an accretion disk may only reach roughly 50 billion solar masses. If it grows further, gas in the unstable disk can form stars instead of falling into the black hole. At around that mass, the disk may stop forming, cutting off that route of growth, though the black hole could still grow by swallowing stars or merging with another black hole.
17. In 1964, New Zealand geophysicist Frank Evison commissioned a concrete wall across the Alpine Fault in the South Island’s Maruia valley. Surveying markers in the wall let scientists test whether the fault crept gradually or held still between major earthquakes. The wall has stayed straight without moving a millimeter for about 60 years, supporting the view that the fault shifts several meters at once during earthquakes separated by centuries.
18. In 1939, British major general Bernard Montgomery issued his soldiers in France a circular on preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Senior Church of England and Roman Catholic chaplains objected to its blunt language, and Montgomery nearly lost his command. His superior, British General Alan Brooke, defended him and allowed the circular to stand but warned him against another such mistake.
19. In 4th-century BC Athens, a wealthy Greek courtesan named Phryne stood trial for impiety. According to later accounts, she revealed her body before the jurors while her defender, the orator Hypereides, argued that someone so beautiful could not offend the gods. The jury acquitted her.
20. In 2024, a man named Roger Thiberville died at 91 without heirs and left more than €10 million to Thiberville, a Normandy village of 1,800 people. He had no known connection to the village beyond their shared name, and no one knew of him ever visiting it. He left part of his fortune to his accountant. The village’s share equaled about five times its annual budget. The mayor said the money would pay off debts and could fund projects such as a new fire station.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Khun Sa Offered Australia Heroin
By the 1980s, Burmese drug lord Khun Sa dominated opium production in the Golden Triangle and commanded about 20,000 men. In 1988, he offered to sell his entire heroin crop to the Australian government for A$50 million a year for eight years, a deal that would have taken an estimated half of the world’s heroin supply off the market. Australia rejected the offer. Khun Sa later claimed roughly 31,000 men when he counted troops, reserves, and local militia. He surrendered to Burma’s government in 1996.
22. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes told investors that the company’s machine could run blood tests using just a few drops from a finger prick. Federal prosecutors alleged that, during investor demonstrations, Holmes and Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani set the machine to a “null protocol” so it appeared to run a test when it was not. A jury later convicted Holmes of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud involving investors.
23. When British animator David Firth launched Salad Fingers in 2004, he voiced its unusually soft-spoken title character himself. Firth recorded quietly because he did not want to wake his parents, giving Salad Fingers his hushed voice.
24. British film director Guy Ritchie married American singer Madonna in Scotland in 2000. After Madonna filed for divorce in 2008, he got a settlement reportedly worth £50 million to £60 million, including the value of their London pub and Wiltshire estate. The couple then called reports about the settlement “misleading and inaccurate,” leaving the exact payout unconfirmed.
25. Some people say beets taste like dirt, much as others say cilantro tastes like soap. Beets contain geosmin, a compound that produces an earthy smell, and people differ in how strongly they perceive it. Because smell shapes flavor, that sensitivity can make clean beets taste dirt-like to some people.
RE: Fact #17 (Alpine Fault Wall Stayed Motionless) – Frank’s daughter Margaret once said, “Oh yes, the famous wall! The family joke is that it’s the only thing holding the Alpine Fault together.” RIP Frank.
RE: Fact #14 (Dutch Drivers Face Cyclist Liability) – Every driver in the Netherlands carries insurance for this, so it really just comes down to which insurance company is paying. It isn’t a perfect system, but when a car hits a bike, it’s pretty obvious who’s going to end up more hurt.
RE: Fact #36 (Jikji’s Metal Type Predated Gutenberg) – There’s a big difference between printing a book, which was traditionally reserved for the rich and royalty, and printing for the masses. Asian methods were slow and methodical for a long time. Gutenberg’s press was a game changer because it drastically increased the speed of duplication. The issue wasn’t the origin of the process; it was about whoever solved the problem of mass distribution.
RE: Fact #23 (Salad Fingers’ Whisper Spared Parents) – I’ve followed David Firth’s work for a long time and really enjoyed Salad Fingers when it first dropped, though it always annoyed me when people would just giggle at it. I saw it as a deeply sad and disturbing story. I think the later episodes lost the mark a bit by focusing on surrealist gore rather than the human element. He’s at his best when he’s being interesting rather than just morbid, like in his series ‘Drill Bit Head’ or that brilliant short about the man working on the roof.
RE: Fact #29 (Bob Barker’s Rosebud Sioux Citizenship) – It’s kind of strange given that he was reportedly racist and avoided touching Black contestants on his own show. There are even compilations showing him hugging white women while steering clear of any Black contestants.
Just for the record, the last Confederate general to surrender was Stand Watie, who was a Cherokee slaveholder.
RE: Fact #31 (Jim Creighton’s Fatal Baseball Collapse) – “I’m afraid all those guys have retired and, uh… moved on. Actually, your right-fielder has been dead for about 130 years.”
RE: Fact #42 (Ohrnberger’s Car Crash Lateness Excuse) – The story goes: “First one in there was Dante Scarnecchia, my offensive line coach, ” Ohrnberger said. “He goes, ‘How’s it going, speed racer?’ I was like, ‘What’s that?’ He says, ‘Running a little late this morning?’ I was like, ‘Dante, I got into an accident.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. That stuff may fly at IBM if you’re one of those geeks working on the computers and stuff. That stuff doesn’t work here. You be on time from now on.'” Why is this so funny?
RE: Fact #15 (Beverly Eckert’s Fatal Buffalo Flight) – That was the Colgan/Continental 3407 crash.
RE: Fact #39 (Iron Man Faced 30 Rejections) – The X-Men were so huge in the late 80s and 90s that they really overshadowed most other characters. Studios often don’t realize that it’s not about the popularity of the character, but about making a good movie.
RE: Fact #36 (Jikji’s Metal Type Predated Gutenberg) – There’s a major misconception about what Gutenberg actually invented versus what was already common practice. His big contribution wasn’t the printing press itself or the individual type, those existed, but rather the negative matrices used for mass production. By creating a hard metal punch to make a soft metal matrix, he could cast thousands of identical letters that cooled quickly and were ready to use. If a matrix wore out, he could just use the master punch to make another one, ensuring consistency. This sped things up massively. You could set up pages without stopping the press because you had enough identical letters to go around. You could even have multiple workshops producing identical pages simultaneously, and replacing worn-out letters didn’t change the font or shape. He didn’t just make printing popular; he made it possible for it to “become” popular. When you combine that with the simultaneous development of cheap, sturdy paper, you get the birth of ‘industrialized’ printing. That’s why his method changed everything compared to what came before.
RE: Fact #26 (New Jersey, Wisconsin: Noncriminal DUI) – It’s really the people who cause crashes that give everyone else a bad name. If they actually arrested every single person driving drunk in Wisconsin, half the state would end up in jail. /s
It’s not really a joke, though. Statistics show that the typical person who gets a DUI has driven drunk 77 times before they finally get caught.
RE: Fact #36 (Jikji’s Metal Type Predated Gutenberg) – This was actually known in Europe before Gutenberg; even the Romans understood the idea of using a form to replicate text. Other Europeans toyed with the concept of mass-producing books but eventually abandoned it. Gutenberg’s genius was in the engineering. It’s a bit like how we knew about steam engines since Ancient Greece, but it took centuries for someone to turn that knowledge into something practical and reproducible.
RE: Fact #45 (Finnair Hijacker Demanded 24-Hour Privacy) – What did he think the end game was in a situation like that? Did he genuinely expect to keep the money, or was he just hitting a wall of pure frustration?
When someone reaches their breaking point and snaps, there’s rarely any real logic behind what they do.
RE: Fact #38 (Mucutuy Siblings Survived 40 Days) – The craziest part is that they were actually hiding from the search party. People in their village didn’t trust the government, and even when soldiers got close within days, the kids would spot them and hide. Their fear of the government was actually stronger than their fear of the jungle. If I remember right, it was linked to the stepfather and the village’s connections to guerrillas, though the details are a bit fuzzy now.
Their stepfather was abusive, too. They knew their mom had died in the crash and didn’t want to go back to him.
This is exactly why you use professional Search and Rescue teams rather than the military.
RE: Fact #50 (Copper Smelters’ Zero-Dollar Treatment Charges) – So, in theory, if I got my hands on a bunch of low-quality copper ore, could I actually turn a decent profit?
RE: Fact #15 (Beverly Eckert’s Fatal Buffalo Flight) – A woman who made it out of the North Tower died in the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 just two months later.
Hilda Yolanda Mayol She boarded the plane to her native Dominion Republic to escape the trauma of 9/11. She brought her two children with her on the flight. I can only imagine what she thought as AA587 plummeted to the ground.
That crash often gets forgotten because of everything surrounding 9/11, but at the time, a lot of people thought it was another attack.
Exactly! I remember sitting in class in high school when the news came out about another plane crash in New York. Everyone was terrified it was another attack.
RE: Fact #5 (Hurricane Katrina Reshaped New Orleans) – You can still find people from New Orleans living in inland southern cities to this day.
RE: Fact #11 (Passenger Pigeons Vanished Despite Billions) – Part of why they went extinct is that they needed massive populations to breed and find enough food. Once the numbers fell below that critical mass, the flocks couldn’t sustain themselves.
I read somewhere that they may have actually been overpopulated due to agriculture. If things had been in balance they may have survived.
They would basically descend on a forest and strip everything bare. By the late 1800s, there wasn’t nearly enough habitat left to support those kinds of numbers, and those huge flocks were a core part of their survival strategy. Whenever people talk about bringing them back, I just wonder where the forests they need are supposed to come from.
RE: Fact #3 (Shattered Glass Inspired Fyodorov’s Keratotomy) – I could never keep my glasses on during a fight for exactly this reason.
I have been punched while wearing my glasses three times, and each time they just knocked off one ear. I usually just rip them off the rest of the way and charge in like a late 80s zombie, arms out, just hoping to grab the person before I get hit in the face again.
I don’t know, my vision is so bad that I am not sure I could even land a punch without them. I just avoid fistfights, which has worked out pretty well for me.
He might have been nearly blind without them, or he just forgot to take them off in the heat of the moment, or maybe he was just blindsided.
RE: Fact #17 (Alpine Fault Wall Stayed Motionless) – Archaeologists a thousand years from now are going to be so confused when they dig this up.
Speaking of mystery projects, we have an inland lighthouse in Ireland that sits about 40km from the nearest coastline. It was commissioned by a wealthy landowner during the Irish Famine to give local laborers some work to do, but it’s just a lighthouse to nowhere.
It’ll definitely move a millimeter by then! “Heh, amateurs” , neoarchaeologists.
RE: Fact #27 (Lincoln’s Broadsword Reach Stopped Duel) – Yeah, if you’re a 6’4″ professional wrestler living in the age of dysentery, I’m just gonna go ahead and give you the win.
RE: Fact #24 (Guy Ritchie’s Disputed Divorce Payout) – My favorite part of the wiki is where it says ‘Ritchie says that he can speak Hebrew.’ It makes it sound like he just claims to have the skill without anyone being able to verify it.
That’s common enough. If a public figure claims they can do something but never demonstrates it, you can’t really just list them as being fluent.
Look at Melania, who is supposedly fluent in five languages. What’s the actual definition of fluent? Her English doesn’t seem that strong without a teleprompter, so I wonder what level she’d actually be at for each one.
RE: Fact #19 (Phryne’s Body Became Her Defense) – If I remember correctly, the ancient Greeks held a strong belief that a person’s outer appearance reflected their internal character, meaning they assumed good-looking people were inherently good-natured as well.
RE: Fact #29 (Bob Barker’s Rosebud Sioux Citizenship) – Seeing that the Price is Right host Bob Barker was a registered… oh god, please don’t let it be what I think it is. …member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. Oh, thank god.
He was definitely passionate about animal population control.
RE: Fact #13 (Vin Diesel Opposed Furious Sequels) – He started out prioritizing quality over quantity, but now it’s all about “family.”
RE: Fact #7 (Shatner’s Tiger Wrestling Proposal Collapsed) – I wouldn’t even try to wrestle an angry housecat. They don’t get any easier to handle just because they’re bigger.
One of my grandmother’s cats got out once, and I tried to grab it to bring it back inside. I accidentally caught its tail, and the cat didn’t like that at all. It turned around and latched onto my arm with everything it had. It couldn’t stop me from carrying it back, but it absolutely shredded my arm. It wasn’t fatal, but there was blood everywhere. It’s shocking how easily those claws just glide right through skin.
RE: Fact #14 (Dutch Drivers Face Cyclist Liability) – I see this discussed a lot in international cycling circles, but I feel like it’s made out to be a much bigger deal abroad than it actually is in the Netherlands. We don’t have the same litigious culture as the U.S., and I rarely hear about this being a major issue. I also don’t think drivers avoid hitting cyclists just because of liability. Safety is managed through better infrastructure, strict driving tests, and the fact that almost everyone is a cyclist before they ever get behind the wheel.
RE: Fact #16 (Black Hole Disks Form Stars) – This fact paints a misleading picture of astrophysics. There is no hard rule preventing a black hole from growing past 50 billion solar masses, nor does the accretion disk instantly transform into a bunch of stars once that threshold is crossed.
RE: Fact #44 (Dahmer’s White House Tour Bet) – This is a little less impressive when you realize that in the 1970s, anyone could just show up and wander into the White House on a whim. It used to be treated like a public building rather than a fortress.
RE: Fact #30 (Seagulls Inspired £1 Toastie Insurance) – A seagull once snatched a pastry straight out of my mouth while I was still holding it. It swooped in from behind so fast that its wing slapped me across the face while it grabbed the food mid-bite. I basically got pimpslapped by a bird.
RE: Fact #48 (Tito’s Ninth Child Godfather Tradition) – Tito wasn’t even Serbian; he was Croatian-Slovenian. Picking up a Serbian royal tradition was just a calculated move to keep Yugoslavia together.
RE: Fact #10 (Dead Red Laws Permit Crossing) – This happened to me 25 years ago. I was stuck at a red light that wouldn’t change, and a police car was sitting in the lane going the other way. I waited for him to move, but he just flashed his lights and waved me through. I was so panicked, though.
There was a red light near my work that I drove through every day as a teenager. The sensor was so busted that only a semi-truck could trigger it. Since I worked the closing shift, I was driving home in the dark all the time. Everyone in town knew the light was broken, so if you waited 60 seconds, you just went for it. Except one cop decided to use it to pad his stats. I got ticketed and went to court, where 13 of us showed up on the same day for the exact same thing. The judge already knew about the light and asked everyone there for a ticket from that spot to stand up. He dismissed all the cases and told the cop to use better judgment, adding that he wouldn’t accept any more tickets from that intersection until it was fixed. It took the town another two years to actually repair the light, but it was incredibly satisfying to see that officer get shut down.
RE: Fact #34 (Dog Owners: 42% Walked Weekly) – A lot of people don’t exercise their dogs enough. But every dog is different. My parents’ dog was a shepherd mix who hated going for walks and definitely wasn’t overweight, she just viewed the house as her territory to patrol and didn’t want to leave. My own dogs are the complete opposite; they live for their runs.
Many people live in rough neighborhoods with no sidewalks and too many loose pit bulls. I can’t just head out for a jog like you might in a wealthy area. It’s a whole ordeal to load the dogs into the car and drive somewhere safe, which adds at least an hour to the outing. That’s why walks only happen a few times a week rather than daily.
My dog actually hates walking, but he’ll happily run around outside for hours. We have a big backyard, so it works out just fine.
RE: Fact #42 (Ohrnberger’s Car Crash Lateness Excuse) – That’s straight out of George Costanza’s playbook. Can’t fire me if you can’t reach me. “Believe it or not, but I crashed my car. How hurt could I be?”
RE: Fact #43 (Esposito Nearly Declined Gus Fring) – It’s kind of crazy to frame it like he even considered passing on the role. He’s mentioned before how bad his finances were, I seem to remember him saying he was living in his car or close to it. Before Breaking Bad, he wasn’t exactly in a position where he could afford to turn down work in a real production.
RE: Fact #22 (Theranos’ Alleged Null Protocol Deception) – Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo, a corollary to Clark’s 3rd Law.
RE: Fact #32 (Left 4 Dead 2’s Cameos) – I was pleasantly surprised by Cabin in the Woods. Bradley Whitford was definitely the best part for me.
RE: Fact #42 (Ohrnberger’s Car Crash Lateness Excuse) – I love that it didn’t even work. Wasn’t it Tom Brady who got into an accident once and said his first thought was to call Bill and tell him he’d be late?
RE: Fact #22 (Theranos’ Alleged Null Protocol Deception) – As a Medical Laboratory Scientist, it’s been wild watching this case blow up. We often work in windowless hospital basements where people don’t even realize how much expertise is involved. From the beginning, we knew what Theranos was claiming wasn’t possible. While hospital labs can test tiny samples, every single test is a distinct chemical reaction that requires its own reagent and reaction chamber. Even a basic health check involves many different components, and there is no physical way to do all of that on the scale they boasted while maintaining any actual accuracy.
RE: Fact #4 (Haemanthus Startup Echoed Theranos Claims) – Totally safe investment because we all know lightning never strikes the same place twice.
RE: Fact #45 (Finnair Hijacker Demanded 24-Hour Privacy) – For everyone worked up about the seven-year sentence: he was considered not fully criminally responsible during the trial because he was struggling with mental health issues and was intoxicated at the time of the hijacking. Unlike in the U.S., the approach here isn’t to lock ill people away for decades, but to try and get them the help they need.
RE: Fact #49 (Tsar Bomba’s Fallout-Reducing Lead Tamper) – Using a lead tamper cut the yield to about half of the original 100-megaton design. Also, at full yield, the plane that dropped it might not have had enough time to get clear. Even the Soviets weren’t that nonchalant about losing their own people and equipment.
RE: Fact #1 (Norway’s Publicly Searchable Tax List) – The same applies to businesses. You can also pull up car license plates to see registration history and full ownership details.
To add, every car registered before 1980 is searchable, even if it has been scrapped. These plates stay with the vehicle from the initial sale until it is scrapped, and the numbers are never reused. Data from before 1980 is a bit spotty. Archives were digitized in the early 80s, but only for vehicles that were potentially still on the road. The original records still exist, but you have to manually dig through them. People do this occasionally when they want to restore a vintage car.
RE: Fact #31 (Jim Creighton’s Fatal Baseball Collapse) – Early baseball rules were totally wild. You could just hang around and wait for a pitch you liked.
RE: Fact #33 (Cervantes’ Five-Year Captivity In Algiers) – It’s worth adding that before that trip, he spent five years as a marine in the Spanish Navy and was a veteran of the Battle of Lepanto, where he lost the use of his left arm. He had letters of recommendation from his commanders, which actually backfired because his captors assumed he was worth a way higher ransom than his family could pay. And if that wasn’t enough, he might have joined the Navy to escape Spain in the first place because he had an arrest warrant for a duel.
Exactly! And it’s wild that the punishment he received was supposed to be losing a hand.
RE: Fact #24 (Guy Ritchie’s Disputed Divorce Payout) – He directed a somewhat twisted short film with her for BMW Films in a series called The Hire, which I believe was shot shortly after they got married.
RE: Fact #20 (Thiberville Inherited Millions From Namesake) – This reminds me of the story of James Smithson, who is the namesake of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. His will stated that his fortune should establish an institution for knowledge in the city, even though he was a British national who never actually visited the United States during his lifetime. Interestingly, his remains were only moved to the U.S. decades later after his original grave in Italy was demolished.
RE: Fact #9 (Whooping Cranes Followed Costumed Pilots) – I love that when conservationists want to save an endangered species, their solution basically feels like a Looney Tunes episode.
RE: Fact #8 (Germany’s Deposit System Recovers 98%) – People in Germany often leave their cans on the side of trash bins so collectors can grab them without having to dig through the garbage.
RE: Fact #27 (Lincoln’s Broadsword Reach Stopped Duel) – Soldiers traveling on horseback, but forced to fight on foot like regular infantry. Just imagine that. Imagine dragoons.
You’re not going to tell me he was radioactive too, are you? A man can only be so cool before it starts feeling unfair to the rest of us.
RE: Fact #34 (Dog Owners: 42% Walked Weekly) – I walk my small dog three times a day. Are people seriously not walking them all week?
RE: Fact #17 (Alpine Fault Wall Stayed Motionless) – I imagine surveying tech has come a long way in 60 years. I’m curious about the process of comparing recent measurements to those from the 60s, specifically how they track down to the millimeter and what the original point of reference was.
There are small steel stubs on the wall used as reference points. It’s a fairly crude setup, so it doesn’t need sub-millimeter precision. Also, concrete is brittle; if the tectonic plate actually shifted, you’d know about it.
RE: Fact #25 (Beets’ Geosmin Explains Earthy Taste) – Oh, is that really a thing? I definitely have that ‘dirt gene’ but I always just assumed they actually tasted like soil.
RE: Fact #30 (Seagulls Inspired £1 Toastie Insurance) – Do you actually have to provide proof that a seagull mugged you for your lunch? I can see people finishing their meal and then heading back to claim they were robbed just to get a free replacement.
RE: Fact #9 (Whooping Cranes Followed Costumed Pilots) – The movie “Fly Away Home” was based on this whole concept.
RE: Fact #28 (RSC’s Million-Pound Chemical-Free Product Challenge) – My job told me not to put chemicals down the sink, so I just shut off the water.
RE: Fact #16 (Black Hole Disks Form Stars) – Funny thing is, I think we’ve already spotted one that’s about twice that size.
RE: Fact #35 (Patagonia’s Imported Beavers Flooded Forests) – It’s ironic because nutria were brought to North America from South America for the exact same reason, and now they’ve gotten totally out of control in places like Oregon. The regions basically just swapped invasive rodents.
RE: Fact #34 (Dog Owners: 42% Walked Weekly) – I’m a certified force-free dog trainer. New studies show that other types of stimulation, especially olfactory enrichment, offer the same mental benefits as a walk. You don’t need to put your dog on a ‘death march’ to tire them out, let them sniff!
RE: Fact #26 (New Jersey, Wisconsin: Noncriminal DUI) – In NJ, even though it’s technically a traffic offense rather than a crime, getting caught is still a massive headache. You’re definitely getting arrested and facing some rough consequences. You’ll likely lose your license, and when you finally get it back, you’re looking at things like mandatory breathalyzers and heavy fines. It just doesn’t show up as a formal felony or misdemeanor on your record.
RE: Fact #46 (Ksar Draa’s Builders Remain Unknown) – The Arctic and Antarctic deserts are actually way larger than the Sahara.
RE: Fact #23 (Salad Fingers’ Whisper Spared Parents) – “It seems….the nettles make the milk drop out….from inside my teat….”
RE: Fact #43 (Esposito Nearly Declined Gus Fring) – When Giancarlo Esposito was first offered the role of Gus Fring, he’d never seen Breaking Bad and wasn’t interested in a guest part. He agreed to do one episode, but after filming, the producers asked him back for two more. What really convinced him was a chat with Vince Gilligan about Gus “hiding in plain sight”, the idea of someone appearing as a polite, successful businessman while hiding an entirely different side. After the second season, he was offered seven episodes for the third season, eventually appearing in 12, and Gus became a central character.
So he was so broke that he was planning to arrange his own murder for the insurance money, yet he was still in a position to turn down paying work? 🤔
RE: Fact #37 (Edison’s Employment Test Defeated Einstein) – Of course it’s hard; it’s a trivia test. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you never bothered to memorize random trivia facts.
RE: Fact #47 (Evan Almighty’s $200 Million Costs) – Regardless of how it turned out, it’s wild that they bet that much on a comedy spin-off when the star who made the first one successful didn’t return. Usually, I’d expect that kind of project to go straight to TV on a low budget.