Random Fact Sheet #311 – The Random Revolution: 40 Mind-Expanding Facts

In order for the British Army to legally exist, the British Parliament must pass an act every 5 years. This stems from the Bill of Rights 1689, which forbade a standing army in time of peace without Parliamentary approval.

27. Graça Machel was married to the President of Mozambique until he died in a plane crash. She later married Nelson Mandela while he was President of South Africa. She is the only person in modern history to be the First Lady of two different countries.

28. Marco Polo became Kublai Khan’s diplomat at the age of 21. One of his journeys included a 2-year voyage from China to the Persian Gulf where of 600 men, only 18 survived. Altogether, throughout his life, he traveled almost 15,000 miles or 24,000 km.

29. Acclimatization Societies were voluntary associations in the 19th and 20th centuries who purposely introduced exotic species to new places. They are responsible for massive ecological disasters.

30. Baseball player Lenny Dykstra’s Reputation is so bad that it is legally impossible to libel him.

The Ford Model T, of which Henry Ford famously said “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” was not painted black because it was cheaper, but because black paint dried quicker, speeding up the manufacturing process.

32. One study has found that job seekers are more likely to be hired if they wear glasses to their interview. Several studies have shown that people who wear glasses are typically perceived as more intelligent, more competent, and more industrious than those without spectacles.

33. Prior to making the movie Clerks, Kevin Smith would see how many credit cards he could be approved for, competing for the most active cards against his friends. Those credit cards stayed mostly unused until production of Clerks had begun, and would end up being maxed out for the production.

34. During the final months of World War 2, Japan planned to use the Black Plague as a biological weapon against San Diego, California. The attack was scheduled for September 22, 1945, but Japan surrendered just five weeks before it could happen.

35. The Brothers Grimm, being from a lower class were excluded from university admission and tuition aid due to being poor. After they published their 1st volume of 86 folk tales, they received honorary doctorate degrees from the Universities in Berlin, Marburg, and Wrocław.

Our solar system is the only one appropriately called a solar system because it is centered around Sol. The general name is a planetary system.

37. Mikhail Devyataev was a Soviet fighter pilot who in February 1945 escaped a Nazi concentration camp near Peenemünde with 9 other POWs by taking over the commandant's Heinkel He 111 bomber. The NKVD (Soviet Federal agency) didn’t believe his story and classified him as a criminal, but in 1957 he became a Hero of the Soviet Union.

38. Scientists estimate that around 2.5 billion T. Rex lived over the species’ approximately 127,000 generations. At any given time, around 20,000 individuals walked the earth.

39. In 1965, a Ukrainian farmer dug up the lower jawbone of a mammoth. Further excavations revealed the presence of 4 huts made up of a total of 149 mammoth bones. These 'Mammoth Bone Huts' dating back some 15,000 years were determined to have been some of the oldest shelters ever built by humans.

40. Seagrass can convert 20 times more carbon per acre than land forests.